Common sense is rarely formalized, but it governs nearly every choice we make. It is the story passed at the kitchen table, the advice given on a job, the reflex that tells you not to enter a dark alley alone. Its strength lies in speed and familiarity. The tension arises when we mistake it for universal truth. What is “obvious” in one family, culture, or industry may be absurd in another. If you take it as absolute, you become rigid. If you dismiss it entirely, you lose the practical wisdom that only lived experience provides.
Principle
Common sense is accumulated pattern recognition distilled into stories. It is humanity's compression algorithm. It is how humans shrink reality down to something we can actually carry and act on.
Application
To practice this craft, move slowly through your days with an eye for repetition. When you see a pattern return, do not try to hold the whole tangle of events. Look instead for the single detail that tipped the outcome. Shape that into a short sentence, plain enough to be handed to someone else without further explanation.
Test it in conversation. If it lives easily on the tongue and makes sense to others, keep it. If it feels clumsy, pare it down. Over years you will gather a small kit of such sentences. They are not laws, but working tools, grips you can reach for in uncertain moments.
This is the discipline: to carve clarity out of confusion and to pass it on. In a world dense with noise and despair, the ability to compress experience into something light and usable is not only practical, it is a way to keep moving with steadiness.
Limit / Cost
Common sense is slow to update. Stories linger long after conditions change. Be careful when the environment shifts faster than the stories do.