There's this whole cult about 'fixing' yourself, and seminars galore by 'successful people' who want you to mimic their behaviors so you can be 'successful' too, so I avoid this groupthink.
What other little sayings do you repeat to yourself or what other mental models do you employ daily?
HEURISTIC #2 What’s the right thing to do here, versus the comfortable one?
HEURISTIC #3 To make a thing inevitable, do as much as you can right now. For instance, to make it inevitable to take a letter to my office the next day, I put it inside my shoes. (Credit: BF Skinner)
HEURISTIC #4 If it’s popular and most people agree with it, walk on. Interesting and unfashionable is where the real fun is - and, likely, the values of tomorrow. (Credit: Peter Thiel, and, again, Nietzsche)
In creative fields nobody knows what they're doing and most time and money is wasted. It's often as important to think about what thing to do as doing the thing. You will most likely provide great value to your company/work a few days of the year (the days where you implement some feature your customer really needs or where you fix some potential or ongoing big production problem) and most days you will provide break-even or negative value. Also see "Impostor syndrome".
Always automate manual or boring processes. Do not think too much about ROI calculations, they don't work because productivity in creative fields is very non-linear. Instant feedback is very important for concentration and morale.
If you're prone to anxiety, saving money and building skills allows you to act without fear of major setbacks. And most of the time it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
- revealed preferences: what people actually spend their time doing is a better indicator of their values than what they say they want.
- people are not internally consistent, nor should we be: logical-minded people can get really frustrated when someone says they believe XYZ, but have other hypocritical or conflicting beliefs or actions. You won’t cajole people into reconciling their beliefs into a cohesive elegant whole—and that includes yourself (hello Rationalists). Live with it.
"Work in your zone of genius [not your zone of competence]."
Simply put, it means to work on problems that:
1. you have a natural inclination towards
2. (and perhaps more importantly) give you energy
For example, I am good at full stack web development because that is the first job I got out of college. If I want to "optimize my career", it would be best to continue down this path and apply for roles that fit my experience. But, unfortunately for me, building web apps is not something that "gives me energy".
One thing that does give me energy is thinking about/playing video games. I've always spent my evenings watching GDC talks or game dev documentaries. After watching Justin's video, I decided to take a shot at making games[0] and it's been a very different experience from making web apps. Even after a full day of coding, I continued to think about how to make the game better!
The key insight is that you get better faster when you work on stuff you have a natural inclination towards, and that gives you energy to work harder on those problems.
The hard part is making the leap to work on these problems, even if the trade-off is super high. For example, should I continue down the FAANG path and have a good life with all those perks as a full stack developer, or do I follow my "zone of genius" and enter the gaming industry which is known for some extreme practices.
Who knows, with the way gaming is shaping up (Roblox, MineCraft, Unity, Fortnite, Meta, etc.) perhaps switching to this gaming industry is actually the more optimal solution :P
I'm always thinking about "Create vs. Consume" => make sure it's at least 50-50, aim for 80-20. Most men I've met on death beds regretted doing nothing.
Do I truly understand a problem space or am I just making a water-cooler level of abstraction? Dig deep, down the bolts, or shut up.
Are the kids happy? is the wife happy? Then I'm happy. People remember you by how you made them feel.
And this last one is controversial, even within me: prayers are not lost to the woods.
C'mon, we're all dying here.
Finishing is a skill (per Derek Yu).
All measuring devices have noise.
Symmetry and continuity impart incredibly strong constraints on systems.
A dollar isn't worth a dollar to everyone.
I am probably overreacting or missing something.
Most of the value can be had by delivering less than 100%.
Many problems cannot be solved, simply changed into other problems.
If my team succeeds then I succeed.
Or, more broadly:
- There is "what happened," and there is "the meaning you assign to what happened," and crucially, _they are not the same thing._
This one lesson underlies virtually every mindfulness and personal development practice in the world.
The groupings of the finest emotions within the 2nd group are immensely helpful... for instance, "successful" and "confident" are in the proud category. And to feel successful, first trust in your own ability, then work for others and when they trust in your abilities too, you are successful.
Respected and valued are in the same subcategory. To feel respected, first value something, and if you can get an employee to value the same thing, then they truly respect you.
On the anger side, disrespected and ridiculed are in the same subcategory, and they are similar, but disrespected is when someone devalues your orders, and ridiculed is when they make fun of your form(body).
On the sad side, isolated and abandoned are grouped, isolated is when you're sad for being taken out of something(a group or a feeling), and abandoned is when you and the rest remain, but a person leaves it.
I've been reprocessing my whole life with finer emotional granularity, and I recommend it, highly so!
- Do something every day that you're afraid of.
- Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.
- It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.
- Be confident, not certain.
- It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
- You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.
- You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude.
(High five if you notice a pattern)
I think if you're faced with a problem the answer to that is having acquired proper integrated intuition through experience, not 'advice' in form of some model. Say if you're a runner, the better you get, the less you have a model like "I put the left foot in front of the right foot and breathe three times" you just learn what to do holistically.
Or if you get better at chess, the less you rely on generic advice like 'the pawn is worth 1 point, the bishop 3", and the more you get a sense of a position that you can't express as some verbal model. The very best players can play 'without thinking'.
We all get an intuition of how things work and "feel", and by decomposing those feelings and intuitions into smaller pieces and rationally considering the likelihoods of those pieces we can improve them. By habitually doing this we can improve the brains natural estimation processes which improves our decision making ability.
Lastly but importantly, the detail that separates the Fermi method from regular reasoning/socratic method/etc is estimation of the uncertainty of various assumptions. This can be used to figure out how to quickly get specific knowledge to drastically improve the estimation with minimal effort/time.
Fermi used that last bit at the first nuclear explosion test to realize that dropping a few pieces of paper and seeing the distance they blew would give him enough info to get an accurate order of magnitude estimate of the yield onsite (3). He got 10 kilotons of tnt vs the official 21.
1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PsEppdvgRisz5xAHG/fermi-esti... 2: https://www.roma1.infn.it/~dagos/history/FermiBayes.pdf 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#Historical_backg...
- play to your strengths, being balanced sounds nice but end up being really unproductive / un-pleasant
- be nice / kind / non-jugemental to people
- spend time on the things you like, as time and practice pile up you will end up skilled in those domain
- go for the things that are of interest to you, not for the trendy ones
- time spend automating tasks is usually time well spent
- taking a break to gather knowledge on something vaguely connected to the thing you are doing is never time lost
- when you have been procrastinating something for most of the day, declare that you will not do it today and that it is okay, it will free your mind to do other things instead of leaving you stuck
- try and do one, single and quantifiable, thing a day. With time they pile up and you end up doing a lot of things
- the mind is good at critisizing something but bad at doing something from scratch: instead of trying to produce perfection, do a rough draft and then improve on it incrementaly
- YAGNI
- Test what you ship and ship what you test
- Either learn a new technology or a new domain. Don't try to learn both at once.
- Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good
- Just keep breathing, that's the key
- Everything is fine
- If a test isn't automated, it's not test
- It's better to do something poorly than not do it at all
When the answer to a question is hazy, just flip the question around.
Question: How do I succeed in my career?
Inversion: How do I completely fail in my career? Now I know exactly what not to do.
Question: How do I manage my team well?
Inversion: How can I manage my team terribly?
Browsing through the top comments though, it seems most here don't know or don't care what a mental model is. Or maybe they just followed OP's lead, which is more like a personal philosophy or a personal code of ethics, rather than a mental model. Ethics is a valuable pursuit in its own right, but I was rather disappointed to come in here expecting some interesting mental models of different technologies, just to be met with a discussion of ethics.
Be intentional about who you spend time with, who you work with, who you serve, and who you listen to. (March 2019, Patrick McKenzie, @patio11)
Dreams don't work unless you do (April 2019, Sara Dietschy)
The failure mode of clever is 'asshole' (John Scalzi, 2010)
Just because you love the mountains doesn't mean they love you. (Lou Whittaker, Rainier mountain guide)
Show me your calendar and I will tell you your priorities. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you where you’re going. (April 2021, https://kk.org/thetechnium/99-additional-bits-of-unsolicited...)
Feedback is nutrition. Everyone goes for the sugar and positive feedback, but you need your greens too. (Oct 2014, Morten Heuing)
There are basic concepts in CBT that really helps, like learning that bad mode is like a wave, you need to learn how to work through it. https://clip.cafe/batman-gotham-knight-2008/are-in-pain-s1 - sorry, just kidding.
Also trying to dig deeper into the reasons that cause your dysfunctionality, I mean the unconscious reasons.
And there are some congnitive distortions that are common, knowing them is very useful.
I don't like self-help books, but after going through a lot of them, I found two that are good: "Feeling Good", and "Rewire _ Change Your Brain to Break Bad Habits, Overcome Addictions, Conquer Self-Destructive Behavior"
This saved me so much time dwelling on yak-shaving and premature optimization.
- Everyday, I work on the things with clear deadlines and consequences for not taking immediate action.
- Plan and schedule those things that are not urgent but important according to priority and criticality.
- Delegate the things that are urgent not not important.
- Remove the things that are not urgent nor important. It's distraction.
What gets us into the newspapers. Don’t fuck that up.
Add an interface. Where you know you need an answer, create the interface and a simple implementation. Come back later when you need it implemented better, now you know where that has to be and it’s already lined up to use the better version. Sometimes simple version is enough and you’ve saved the time.
You don’t need a phd in that. Same as Oscar. Know where to focus learning.
CAP theorem. Often people choose consistency without knowing they have. Or insist on unnecessary availability when consistency is crucial. You’re always choosing so make it conscious and make sure the view is shared.
Specialisation is for insects. Learn D3 and ML and Kafka and PowerPoint and marketing.
“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.” - John Wooden
'The end justifies the means' is the purest statement of evil. Maybe your goal is worth it or maybe it was the 'only' way, but you're still evil and the result is tainted. Make sure you can live with that.
"Kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers, changed computer forever." Scott McNealy eulogy of Sun sounds like the right way to run a business.
May be the most obvious thing to most, but I had this thing where I would sometimes argue or worry about things way into the future, like a month or months into the future.
Maybe it was an advice or maybe I discovered it on my own but I see a lot of things don't happen anyway or just take care of themeselves or don't bother you as much as I thought at the time (also you could never predict pandemics in advance).
The other thing is people say a lot of things and I just say sure and carry on even if it's something I don't fully agree with at the time. It's only when a person repeatedly asks me about it do I start taking it seriously and give it any thought.
I think this small mental model has contributed greatly to my happiness
- Evolution and gradient descent. Systems, including humans and society, evolve to maximize the value functions acting upon them. Whether that's income or getting along with others.
- All linguistically-based mental models are just approximations, and there's countless valid ones. Optimize yourself to use the ones that are the most flexible, and benefit you the most. When you rephrase another person's words, you're setting up the stage for offering them an alternative model in your next sentences.
- Socialization is a scaffold for the self, and closeness is the inclusion of others into our self-concept. You can't fix yourself alone, and the wrong people can easily break you.
- Awareness of something is enough to incorporate it into your information processing. This goes for both metaknowledge and for psychosocial dynamics.
Also, form versus content in general.
A bit of Bayesianism, enough to feel glad when I'm wrong as an opportunity to better update my own understand.
And inspired by Claude Shannon's "surprise is information" insight, trying to notice whenever something surprises me as something that gives me valuable information. Helps a lot with debugging problems, where oftentimes a seemingly irrelevant "well that was weird" ends up being the vital clue toward understanding the system.
#1 Just do it - You are going to die. Life is short. Regret comes from the things you didn't try so just go, do the thing, climb the wall, do the hard thing, don't be comfortable. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
#2 Seek novelty and your own curiosity - Interesting and unfashionable is where the real fun is.
Seems to be an argument between whether you want to double down on strengths or be decent in a lot of areas. I think Scott Adams advice is best here I think you want to combine two or three things you are top 10% at into one thing you are the best at.
Some interesting one liners:
- people are not internally consistent look for revealed perferences by what people actually do
- Finishing is a skill (per Derek Yu).
- I am probably overreacting or missing something. (I'd call this Hanlons Razor)
- "All things are ready, if our minds be so." - Shakespeare
- Praise in public, criticise in private
- Practice Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA Loop)
- Quantity first eventually results in higher quality.
The other model/technique I've used successfully over the years (or, at least, I think it contributed to the successes, but it's difficult to say with certainty) is affirmations, as brought into common discourse probably most effectively and controversially by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame.
Pick your battles (invaluable when raising children!)
Be kind (also to yourself)
* Don't lie to the person in the mirror. Accept your shortcomings as they are.
* Having few good work partners is better than a dozen work friends.
* Trust is non-negotiable & irreparable.
* Always have a plan B if you want to complete something.
* Always remember Plan B shouldn't become your Plan A by default - stay ambitious.
* No question is a bad question - (sometimes questioning the status quo makes a big dent)
Also, something I always cherish from my advisor (translated from his native Japanese):
"You relish your sucess when your mind is paired with immense hardwork, dogged determination, indomitable grit and the acceptance of possible failure at each step of the way. Achievements are divine but it makes us better humans to understand the journey, not the destination"
Most people are average at their jobs. If they were really good at them, they’d have better jobs.
EV = Probability of Outcome x Value of Outcome
Cost = $ or time/labour/effort
EV of next best opportunity (choice) forgone
"Success is the best form of revenge". Having never felt like I really fit in anywhere (except maybe at art school) throughout life, having people say I'd amount to nothing, people laughing at my shared thoughts/perspectives, being told what I'm doing is the wrong way, that my take on something is stupid even if I spent time researching and/or combined held knowledge/experience, finding out others think I'm weird for my takes and/or for being quiet... this comes across as angsty but it's been my reality for the last 32 years, and it's never fun or a good feeling to face. But boy does it feel good to have surpassed those low held bars and the high ones I've set for myself. Additionally, it feels good to say "I told you so" without ever saying it. Never seek revenge, just better yourself. It's more worthwhile.
"Never chase". Whether it's money, someone you're interested in, and especially assets, among other things. If you're chasing, it's either too late or wasn't meant to be.
"Do things from the heart and with a clear mind, never for luxury or money". If it feels right, is something you have interest or passion in, and reasoning says it's good to pursue, do it. Benefits will follow, whether that's money or otherwise.
"Anything is possible, but nothing is perfect". Paradoxical, but a reminder to self that you can achieve more than you limit yourself to, but also a reminder that perfection is impossible.
"Be kind, but not a pushover". "Be too nice and people will take you for a dummy". Manners, kindness, being polite, etc are important imo, but people will take advantage of that until you put your foot down.
1) "All things are ready, if our minds be so." - Shakespeare
2. Holon para ta moria (ὁλον παρα τα μορια). From Aristotle's Metaphysics. The whole is something beyond the parts. Commonly mistranslated as "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts" -- which misses the point completely. Mathematical understanding and metaphor is only one type of thinking, one way to understand a complete system. Valuable, for sure, but incomplete. The whole system -- e.g. a human, a team, an entrepreneurial opportunity with all its moving parts -- in its full expression and action, is beyond mathematics. Only your whole human mind can hope to comprehend it.
3) Companies tend to die -- but people tend to survive. People matter infinitely more. The most valuable thing of all is human relationships.
Written white on black on my desktop background. It's kind of funny, how sometimes random stuff you see on the web sticks to your head. I think it was one of those procrastination links on Hacker News which somehow brought me to this weird video [1] about how to "Climb the wall of awful". I was a hobby climber before and it somehow made sense to me at that time.
Another thing I like to say to myself is "Just do it" at moments when I read Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter and come back to Hacker News for another round. [2]
I also use "assume good intent." This is similar to Hanlon’s Razor referenced elsewhere in this thread, it's a bit simpler though. Most people are trying their best. The modern world is extremely complicated. The result of "assume good intent" is that you have a bit more patience and empathy when working with others.
"'done' is better than perfect"
It's easy to get caught in a trap of trying to "perfect" something. If it's good enough to call done, you can always improve it later if necessary. You do need to have some clear definitions for what "done" means for you though.
"make it work, make it pretty, make it fast"
This is adjacent to the first saying. I sometimes find myself trying to optimise something prematurely. This is a good reminder to wait until the [unit of work] is "complete" before I try to optimise it.
Easy things feel fast, hard things feel slow, but in the long run you'll get more from doing the hard thing.
In the context of language learning, they were comparing apps like Duolingo to WaniKani (for learning kanji). In summary, your brain can sucker you into thinking it's learning something, when in reality you're not being challenged at all. Doing 100 multiple choice in a day can FEEL like you're learning a lot in a short amount of time, but picking an answer when it's in front of you doesn't test your recall. Being forced to recall 10 kanji from memory over 10 days will help you learn them more reliably.
I think this lesson extends to almost any domain. You can fall into a trap thinking "I understand how to do X in theory, but actually doing it will take so much longer. It would be a waste of time for me to do something I already understand how to do." But in almost every case where you've thought that, once you dig in and actually do the thing, you will hit roadblocks that you have to work around, you'll feel discouraged and confused about why it wasn't straight forward, you'll commit things to memory because you're forced to, and when it's all said and done you will have a much deeper understanding than if you had optimized that task out.
The most easy to see example of this is in physical traits such as muscle mass, speed etc. Strengthening one trait invariably is the cause of weakening another. The same principle can be observed in organization, mental processes and so forth.
Another idea I use is to mentally time travel and try to visualize how context-sensitive my decision/design/process is. Decisions that require a "superior" (or even accurate for that matter) understanding of the context I'd frown upon. Even if they are not mistaken and biased, to me, they promote a dynamic of continued survival through non-obvious and increasingly complex actions, rather than forcing a simple and obvious environment.
Another is engineering with a bias for optimizing recovery first then reliability (sort of a minimax).
So for example combined I would rather have a way to recover from broken code and produce a teaching moment than I'd try to prevent a developer from merging said code in the first place.
I'd try to exercise a process to recover all data from backups in a timeline that the company would survive first rather than dedicate resources first for redundancy and leave said scenario for later due to its low probability.
Take all of this in a "while there is value on the other thing, I value this more" wrap.
I like models that would force the space to be simpler and more obvious.
- Praise in public, criticise in private
- You could leave life right now
- Fix yourself first
- Be honest
If I could distill my approach to life into one sentence it is this.
Also when buying something: sometimes I feel like under a spell, really wanting to make a purchase. Then I just sleep on it. Usually the day after the spell is gone, and I can better understand if I really want to buy that something or not.
When doing something new: I'm the kind of person that - when learning to draw - spends more time looking at the perfect paper and pencils than actually drawing. I'm sure some of you can relate. I enjoy this process, but the truth is that to learn to draw you don't need anything else than any piece of paper and any working pen/pencil. So, learn to recognise when you go too far off track and go back to actually learning how to draw. There will be a time to hunt for the perfect paper. If you don't want to go back drawing, maybe you didn't want it that much to begin with.
When spending money: spending money on things (objects) is almost always less worth than it feels. Unless it's a tool that you use (e.g. a DIY tool, or a kitchen knife, etc). Spending money on experiences (traveling, concerts, etc) and learning (books, courses, etc) is almost always more worth than it feels. Especially, as an introvert, there is something inside of me that tends to dodge "experiences".
To be happy: I learned this recently from the Dalai Lama. You should learn the difference between happiness and pleasure/desire, and prioritise the former. E.g. when looking for a job how ethical a company is and how good you'd fit is more important than the salary, job title, and prestige of a company.
I think Warren Buffett calls this "Circle of competence" He tries to stay in that circle and avoids things outside the circle but also working on making the competent circle bigger.
1: Don't seek the easy path; grow your strength/knowledge/etc. to seek the harder one. (credit: Bruce Lee)
2: Don't be lazy; prepare.
3: Before I say this, do I intend to improve the situation? If not, don't say it.
4: Conflict is opportunity and a moment for deep connection.
5: Acquire the perspective to appreciate even the things I don't like.
On the other hand, I must live in the present. Thinking about the future makes me stressed, and thinking about the past makes me angry.
So I experience the present while working on the future I desire.
- Giving to your future self. When I'm too tired to start something, I'll prepare my workspace and "ingredients" for the next day, a bit like a cook's mise en place.
- A position of "fuck you". Free time and disposable income give you independence of thought and action. Peace of mind is the best thing money can buy.
- Money as time. Measuring spending in "time at the office" makes you question what's really worth your money.
- Evolution through mutation. Progress comes from experimentation. Try new things. Better risk an occasional bad meal than eat chicken nuggets for the rest of your life.
In other words, try to avoid circumstances that can kill you or severely harm you, even if the risk is small.
Means no riding bicycles, taking medicines with horrific side effects (unless I'm actively dying), surgeries (unless absolutely needed), skydiving, helicopters, and walking next to traffic.
This means that I avoid committing to important decisions until I've at least had a chance to sleep on them. The next day I normally have a lot more clarity and confidence in the decision when it's right, or what is wrong when it isn't.
I also don't stress if I can't find the answer to a problem. I try to keep the problem at the front of my mind but don't pressure myself to activally solve it. Very often, this results in what feels like an epiphiny, a shower thought, or the answer will come to me in a dream. Activally working to find those solutions would be difficult and success would be hit and miss, it's low stress and gives me space to work on something else in the meantime.
1. Good things cost money; if you use something daily/frequently then get the best tool money could buy. Corollary: Don't cheap out on tools when you hire a good craftsperson.
2. Optimise for time, not money. One is finite, other is not.
3. Money is means to lead a good life; don't continue to accumulate money just for the sake of it.
4. Resilience is a skill that can be developed. Seek risk, fail often to develop resilience.
5. Doing >> Talking a.k.a. "Talk is cheap show me the code."
6. Creation, by definition, requires breaking (or disregard) the rules.
7. Entropy always increases. You need to spend energy to just keep things in order.I found that most of the time, a bug is the result of a misunderstanding. Once I've ruled out the most obvious things that could go wrong, I assume that every line of code is a lie.
Doing x + y => print x, print y and print x + y (oh oh here is an overflow) Sending a parameter to a function => print arguments before the call and within the call (oh oh somebody is messing with memory and I'm reading garbage)
This helps catching silent failures which causes problems down the line.
Less in the self-help context, more in the process context, one I often appreciate for its simplicity is this:
There are two models of reality that I find to be the most useful ones, especially when writing programs. The first is functions, and the second is sequences of states. - Leslie Lamport
If you have a habit of seeing yourself as capable of more than you typically (or ever) do, you’re likely to continue at that lower level of performance because you can take comfort in your elevated self image. By believing that your best isn’t a hypothetical, but just an observation of what you’re doing, you have to accept the lower performance or actually try harder and achieve what you believe you can.
This mindset helps me both push myself in all areas, and be more humble as well.
If you are in the wrong environment success might be meassured by your salary, your job title, the car you are driving or other silly things like that.
For me success is only meassured by my own standards, namely: am I working on things that I like working on? Am I able to do them the way I want? Am I making the world a better place by doing so? Am I getting better at what I am doing?
If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
That‘s very broad, but some examples: Keep the number of distributed PRs low. e.g. merge a PR that adds an aws policy via terraform early, so you can absolutely stop thinking about it. Finish easy, fast tasks first so you reduce the amount of things you need to think about. Actively decide against working on a semi-urgent task now/today, focus on it tomorrow morning or if your current task is fully done.
This is especially relevant because most places will go to extraordinary lengths to confirm their priors for the default choice, but 90% of the time they probably are choosing correctly even without good analysis! So to reverse it, changes to the default need to be low risk or have amazing upside.
One issue is what to say and not say, to solve this the three gates[0] are what I try (and admittedly fail miserably) to implement, though not in their original form.
I generally try for "Is it true", "Is it useful", "Is it kind" - in that order of precedence if they can not all be met.
[0] Is it true, is it necessary, is it kind.
2. create following the rules
3. break the rules
This is more on thinking about current social / ethical topics. I know it might not be helpful for many, but I find I try to stop and think about it whenever I'm shaping my opinions.
Breathe, ~5 seconds in, ~5 seconds out. James Nestor style.
1. Do I really need to do this or alternatively you can ask will this activity create value (for you, your family, your company, your customers).
2. Who is likely to be benefit from an action (this helps to filter the news).
3. Is this event worth getting upset over (helps with people who have kids who will mess up a lot).
Mental model exercises I wrote a few months ago:
https://newsletter.decisionschool.org/p/decision-making-bias...
1. Regret minimisation framework.
3. Interesting and novel things happen at the edges; stay close to it and don't spend much time in the comfort zone.
2. Don't optimise for happiness; look for novelty, and contentment.For better or worse, tomorrow could be a good or bad surprise. If life sucks today, something great might happen out of the blue tomorrow so don't give up! If times are good, live for the moment because something might go to shit tomorrow.
For those who grew up in the “you can do anything you put your mind to” era.
As self evident as this sounds, Accept your strengths and weaknesses.
If something takes little to no effort, that’s a real good sign that it’s a strength if it takes a lot of effort, it’s probably not :)
Kiss priniciple https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
This really has changed how I approach a lot of things in my everyday life, both inside and outside of work. Simple things like doing a load of washing here and there, and getting it done rather than trying to do a massive amount on the weekend, or washing some dishes as they come up rather than being efficient and washing all of them at the same time. In a work context, I guess it is more about not committing to too much work in a sprint, and ensuring there’s a bit of slack time so that multiple people can work on any items that get stuck, take more time than expected or similar. Developers helping out with testing where needed, ensuring quick code reviews, some extra pair programming and so on.
- Practice Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA Loop)
- Understand the business, the shareholders, the senior stakeholders, and the technology - in that order.
The best revenge is a life well lived.
Good enough is always good enough.
Fortune favors the bold.
The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
law of diminishing returns (the logarithmic curve)
you don't know as much as you think (dunning-kruger effect)
"View it from the balcony" -> To force myself to step back and think of the big picture
If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
All of the above in Lenord Nimoy's voice.
Don't remember where I saw it. This helps me to get started on some of the items from the never ending todo list.
You get to choose only two.
* Feeling guilt indicates something I can be grateful for
* Fear can also be a challenge to learn something new
one of the most common tools/models I use is the Bayesian inference graph. I maintain an informal Bayesian inference graph for tons of things in my everyday experience. update it as I go along. leverage it when it applies. I suspect nearly everybody else does too, even when they do not realize it explicitly.
Selection effects rule everything around me.
Look for useful but anti-correlated pairings.
Credit: Juval Lowy (not sure if he was quoting someone else)
If you really want to increase your productivity optimize for prolonged focus and being in the zone.
Don’t be an asshole.
Don’t pretend I can read minds.
Don’t live in fear.
Don’t spend more than I have.
Don’t hold back.
Our brain is fantastic evaluation and extrapolation machine. Often I find myself judging something on a 1 dimensional scale, where 'good' is at one end and 'bad' at the other.
More often than not that's a gross over simplification, and not helpful as a mental model. The 2 dimensional model, bad vs not bad and good vs not good is, in many cases, a much better fit. (Of course reality has a lot more dimensions usually - you get the gist).
To make an example, Elon Musk is not a genius or an idiot, he is likely both a genius and an idiot.
-- Abraham Lincoln
-- Michael Scott* Progress not perfection. Instead of being paralyzed by indecision, choose the simple tasks that can make incremental progress towards an end goal. Repeated small steps towards a larger goal can get you very far.
* Break large tasks into smaller tasks that are achievable. For me, this mostly takes the form of a daily "to-do" list that I try to complete. Also getting even rough time bounds on how much effort/money/time is involved in each helps prioritize.
* Make sure to include fun/satisfying/interesting things in your day to day life. This might include doing the (perhaps unjustifiable) "fun" thing of learning a new language, learning some math, playing a video game, watching a movie, etc. Burnout happens not because of excessive work but because the work being done feels without end and because hope drains. "Fun" things help counteract that burnout and depression, especially when they're tied to the skill that you're using day to day, because it provides a positive feedback and gives you something to look forward to. It also gives myself permission to slack off because I know I'll be more depressed if I don't.
* When a task seems insurmountable, watch, wait and learn. Sometimes things are impossible because I don't have a skill set or the tools to understand it. Other times it's because they are impossible with the environment/tools at hand, so re-assessing whether it's still impossible when the ecosystem around it has changed is a potential way forward.
* Don't forget "life maintenance" tasks. Cleaning, showering, exercising, maintaining friendships, etc. These all erode my mental health if not actively maintained.
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I just want to specifically address your "play to your strengths" model. I still maintain that to be an effective human being, you pretty much need to know everything (at least to a certain depth) but this doesn't exclude the "T-shaked skills" of learning [0].
Often time the deep knowledge in one domain bleeds into another, allowing avenues into it that other people might not have. For example, electronics is a whole lot easier for me because I have a more solid math and programming background than someone who's learning heuristics on how to construct a circuit (I'm not knocking those heuristics, I'm just saying I have a way into it that helps me).