I suspect the personal effort involved in creating the file is more valuable than the file itself. Reading someone else's maxims is never going to have the impact on you that it has on them, or that creating your own list would have on you. He says it himself, "It's like putting everything I've learned into my brain's electro-chemical RAM banks." What good is the reminder of things learned to someone who hasn't learned the same things?

One of the maxims my wife and I use for decision-making is to take a step back and consider the big picture... to ask ourselves, "Is this even what we want to do in the first place?" But without having had the experience of almost making a decision that wasn't what we wanted big-picture because of focusing too much on optimizing the details, the maxim wouldn't have the same power.