Think Real Hard

Here’s how to become an expert at anything:

Concepts First: Learning the fundamental principles instead of just the immediate behaviors is the difference between being a cook and being a chef.

It Needs To Be Difficult: If you’re doing it right, you don’t feel like an expert; you feel like a person who has been mildly electrocuted by their own ambitio... See more

If you can break inaccurate mental models, life becomes easier to navigate. But how do you do that? I know two ways.

1. Find people who understand things better than you and read what they have to say. Read with the intention of answering your questions. If you can’t find the answers, email them.


2. Perform experiments. By this I don’t mean do random thing

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Whenever you’re debating what to do, explicitly ask yourself “what do I predict will happen if I choose option A?” and try to unroll the trajectory. Even if you think you’re already intuitively predicting the results of your choices, I’ve found it helps surprisingly much to be explicit—one of my manager role models asks me this (“what do you think ... See more

The thing about smart people is that they tend to think that if they think really hard about something, they might figure it out, when the truth is, in strategy (and life in general), there is never one right answer. Strategy requires making choices about a future that is not yet known. I’m one of those people that tends to over-intellectualize thi... See more