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Curated MENTAL MODELS

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"Inventing is a combination of brains and material. The more brains you use, the less material you need." - Charles Kettering

🌀 MANTRAS
- ENJOY the STRUGGLE
- AMOR FATI: Love of Fate whatever that may be. The Obstacle is the way
- Every situation is what you make of it.
  So make the most of it.
- Start wherever you are right now &
  Do what you can with what you have.
- Existence has a rhythm of going between chaos and order.
  Focus intensely when you need to but have fun with it
- Decided that you want it more than you fear it

📖 WORDS TO LIVE BY

"Weniger, Aber Besser" ("Less, But Better")
    - Dieter Rams
"Strive not to be a person of success,
 but a person of value." 
    - Einstein
"Before you can change the world around you,
 you must learn to change the worlds within you."
    - Merlin
"Wisdom is knowing I am nothing,
 Love is knowing I am everything,
 and between the two my life moves"
    - Nisargadatta Maharaj
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
 To change something,
 build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
    - Bucky Fuller
"If you are depressed, you are living in the past.
 If you are anxious, you are living in the future.
 If you are at peace, you are living in the present."
    - Lao Tzu
"If you want 1 year of prosperity, grow grain.
 If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees.
 If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people."
    - Chinese Proverb
"Let go your earthly tether.
 Enter the void.
 Empty and become wind."
    - Laghima

🌳 ANTIFRAGILE

  • Responses to variability and stress come from the outside. If something is fragile and it’s exposed to stress, there’s nothing built in to help fend off that stressor
  • Less is usually more with antifragility. To become anti-fragile, it pays to be small. With smallness comes increased agility and flexibility during volatile and chaotic times. If I were navigating a foggy sea filled with hidden icebergs, I’d rather be a passenger on a small, but maneuverable jet boat than a giant, but sluggish ocean liner.
  • Responses to variability and stress are built into the antifragile
    • build systems that respond to variability internally
  • Antifragile things have built-in redundancies. This point stuck out to me the most. Unlike fragile systems/organizations/people, antifragile things don’t make efficiency the primary goal. For the antifragile, thriving in randomness is the goal, which often requires being “inefficient” through layering redundancies
    • “Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens — usually.”
  • Nature and tradition do a good job of creating antifragility
    • look to nature for examples
  • Intentionally inject stress in your life
    • short term acute stressors
    • sufficient recovery between stressors to rebuild stronger than before
  • Add redundancies in your life: savings / worst case scenario planning
  • Barbell Strategy: A dual strategy, a combination of two extremes, one safe and one speculative
    • embracing both extreme risk aversion on one side and extreme risk taking on the other while shunning everything in the middle
  • Never take advice from someone who doesn’t have “skin in the game.”
    • If the person dispensing the advice or making the prediction has nothing to lose from being wrong, don’t listen to them. Pay more attention to people who have accepted risk and responsibility for their words.
  • Via Negativa
    • try to prove hypothesis wrong much like the scientific method
    • try to disqualify hypothesis many ways before saying that there is some correlation
    • “the first step towards antifragility consists in first decreasing downside.”
    • Instead of focusing your time on adding things to your life to make it better, focus first on subtracting habits, practices, things, people that fragilize you. A few examples: get rid of debt, quit smoking, stop hanging around toxic friends, eliminate unhealthy foods.
  • Keep your options open
    • increase optionality: more savings, more skills

🌀 DEEP WORK

  • Deep Work Helps You Quickly Learn Hard Things

    • Deliberate Practice
      1. your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master
      2. you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive

  • Deep Work Helps You Produce at an Elite Level

    • mastery of subject and focused intensity
    • batching

  • Eudaimonia Machine: Gallery (inspire) >> Salon (form ideas) >> Library (resources) >> Office (shallows) >> Chambers (deep)

  • Scheduling

    • Monastic: radically minimize shallow work in your life
    • Bimodal: Schedule long stretches of time for isolation and deep work (days or weeks)
    • Rhythmic: Schedule time everyday to do deep work (make it habitual) (can’t get as deep)
    • Journalistic: Whenever you can switch into deep work (very hard to switch like this)

  • Make Grand Gestures

  • Hub & Spoke Model ~ Barbell Strategy + Bell Labs example: Theory + Execution

  • 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) - Christensen

    1. Focus on the Wildly Important
    2. Act on the Lead Measures (lag measures are too late + lead measure for deep work: time spent in deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal)
    3. Keep a compelling Scoreboard (track hours of deep work in a prominent place - autotracked?)
    4. Create a Cadence of Accountability (regular progress reports - autogenerated?)

  • Embrace Boredom

    • Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.
    • Work Like Teddy Roosevelt - Dashes of intensity with artificial deadlines

  • The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts

  • Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself

  • Put more thought into your leisure time

  • Schedule Every Minute of Your Day

  • Quantify the Depth of Every Activity: How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?

  • Finish Your Work by Five Thirty

  • Become Hard to Reach

    • Tip #1: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work
    • Tip #2: Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails
      • what is the project represented by this message?
      • what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?
    • Tip #3: Don’t Respond
      • ambiguous / hard to generate a reasonable response
      • not a question / proposal that interests you
      • nothing really good would happen if you did respond & nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t

  • Bias your time toward depth

🚀 ACCELERATED LEARNING

  1. DECONSTRUCTION: find the pieces
  2. SELECTION: 80 / 20
  3. SEQUENCING: lead dominoes?
  4. STAKES: accountability

  • the extremes inform the mean but not vice versa

    • designing tools for elderly
    • extreme teenage girl dead lifter >> focus on school sprint coach Barry Ross

  • What you study is more important than how you study

  • 01 is the method effective?

    • have you narrowed down material to highest frequency?

  • 02 is the method sustainable?

    • schedule and subject matter you can stick with or at least put up with until fluency?
    • daily? or weekly ?
    • fun material to practice on?

  • efficiency is doing things right

  • effectiveness is doing the right things

  • speed determines it's value

    • how fast you learn something is important to ROI
    • the longer it takes to develop the less likely it is to launch

  • declarative Knowledge >> facts:

  • procedural Knowledge >> actions: judo / riding a bike / driving a car

    • creative knowledge?
    • procedure on how to create new things???

  • 01 DiSSS

    • D: DECONSTRUCTION
      • what are the minimal learnable units?
      • the lego blocks I should start with?
      • exploration = outliers doing? not doing?
      • BEST TOOL = interviewing
    • S: SELECTION
      • 20% blocks to get 80% outcome ? to focus
      • 20% blocks to get 80% failures ? to avoid
    • S: SEQUENCING
      • in what order should I learn the blocks ?
      • habit stacking ?
    • S: STAKES
      • how to create real consequences and guarantee I follow the program ?
      • prepay to precommit
      • 3 person learning teams:
        • two students one teacher
        • two teachers one student >> better

  • 02 CaFE

    • C: COMPRESSION
      • important 20% in 1pager
      • 1pager for prescription (theory)
      • 1pager for practice (action)
    • F: FREQUENCY
      • how frequently should I practice ?
      • can I cram?
      • what should my schedule look like ?
      • growing pains I can predict? plateaus? sticking points?
      • Minimum Effective Dose for volume ?
      • phelps visualizations morning and night >> single focus
      • batch ? or every day?
      • habitual ?
    • E: ENCODING
      • how to anchor new material to what I already know for rapid recall
      • recall != recognition
      • mnemonic devices
        • method of loci
        • major system
        • obtuse images
        • chunking
      • sleep hygiene
        • before sleep to make sure gets stored into long term memory
        • right after waking to make sure you still remember

  • pain = information >> knowledge that leads to action that leads to change that makes your life better

  • How would it look like if it were easy

    • living?
    • businesses?
    • something I do for fun?

🔭 SCIENTIFIC METHOD

1. CHARACTERIZATIONS (formulate a question): observations, definitions, measurements of subject of inquiry
2. HYPOTHESIS: theoretical, hypothetical explanations of observations & measurements
3. PREDICTIONS: reasoning including logical deduction from the hypothesis or theory
4. EXPERIMENTS: tests of all the above
5. ANALYSIS: determine what test results show & deciding on next actions to take

📚 REFERENCES

LEARN

CRAFT-MUSE

CARFT-DESIGN

CRAFT-CODE

CRAFT-TECH

SIMPLIFY

TOOLS :: The Knowledge: How to Rebuild the World From Scratch :: New Scientist :: Nature :: Aeon :: Hacker News :: Wired :: the Verge :: Gizmodo :: Io9 :: TechVibes :: MIT Tech Review :: MIT news :: Javascript Jabber :: Full Stack Radio :: Software Engineering Radio :: Developer Tea :: AI Topics in the News :: Diamandis: Abundance Insider :: Diamandis: Tech Blog :: Velocity :: Communitech :: Make: We are all Makers :: HackerRank :: Highline: Blog

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