on scaffolding

The fear of making mistakes is a particularly strong dampener on one’s learning. You can’t learn if you can’t make mistakes. I like the idea that mastery is simply a very intimate understanding of all the possible mistakes one could make.

if project management is the meta of doing work, then managing your psychology is the meta of project management. A moderately-good process maintained over years tends to bear much better fruit than an highly-productive process that one cannot sustain for more than a few weeks or months.

Because we have a limited amount of time and energy, if we want to get good, we have to allocate those resources effectively. And to do that we have to know how not to waste our time polishing turds

I like the idea that mastery is simply a very intimate understanding of all the possible mistakes one could make. Daniel Dennett had a great riff on this– he recommended being a connoisseur of one’s mistakes.

I think it can be tempting as a novice to assume that everything a master produces must be refined in the high-res, high-production-value sense. I think that would be quite definitively wrong. A master has to be capable of producing quality low-res work, experimentally.

if project management is the meta of doing work, then managing your psychology is the meta of project management. A moderately-good process maintained over years tends to bear much better fruit than an highly-productive process that one cannot sustain for more than a few weeks or months.

The purpose of a draft is to function as a kind of scaffolding. It’s a sketch, an outline, a way for the creator to think through their project, to make mistakes cheaply.

Great works are unsettling, disorienting, they confound our expectations. In this definition, it’s almost impossible for a great work to be considered ‘refined’ at the time of its creation, because its elements are alien, they have not yet had time to have been weighed and evaluated.

if there’s some odd way that you particularly enjoy doing things, then you should probably prioritize that over any system that anybody else advises you to do.