life-philosophies.md

Philosophies and Principles

• Find the feedback loops
  • Live a little in the future, a lot in the present, a little in the past
    • Predict, act, reflect
    • OODA Loop
  • Can you find a mentor?

• Develop intentional and specific trust relationships

  • Progress occurs at the speed of trust
  • Feedback loops, but for people and information sources

• Eliminate unnecessary choice

  • Prefer the tedium of completeness over relentlessly testing for the termination condition to shortcut the tedium
    • For example, "Touch all of all surfaces" when cleaning, vs "Is this clean enough?"
      • The latter feels like endless compromise and misery, leading to decision fatigue
  • Decision fatigue should be avoided much more aggressively than tedium

• If it's hard, do it often

  • Iterating on difficult activities helps identify how to make them easier

• Consider having simpler problems

  • Reflect on whether fundamentals are, in-fact, choices you've made rather than circumstances to which you're reacting

• Resolve known-unknowns before engaging in discussion

  • Don't be lazy

• Work to articulate unknown-knowns

  • Explicit is better than implicit

• Be curious, not just accepting. Punch through abstractions.

  • Abstractions are for getting things done more effectively, rather than with less understanding

• A place for everything, and everything in its place

• Keep things that go together together

• Prefer progress over perfection

  • Concern should be proportionate to the effort required to reverse a decision

• Take advantage of habit-stacking

• Take the penalty at the time of the infringement

  • Form better habits by dismantling your work: Remove the result of the bad approach then redo with the preferred approach
    • The bad approach may still have produced good results, but that isn't relevant

• Networks, stacks, pipelines and iteration

  • Networks: Situate your goal relative to yourself
  • Stacks: Build towards your goal, clean up after yourself
  • Pipelines: Break tasks down into a sequence of subtasks
    • Offload work to into async contexts where possible
  • Iteration: Execute a complete pipeline worth of subtasks, then repeat

Expert-mode

• Don't tempt fate

• Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to