Craft
Doing things; Doing things well
Craft
notes on the importance of conviction and clarity of purpose to doing great work
Consider this: if “talk to customers” is the biggest secret to product success, then why aren’t more products successful? Why are so many founders unsuccessful? What explains PMs who’ve been talking to customers 5 times a week for years, without ever making products that win?
Good discussion underneath
Learning from catastrophe
technologyreview.comExcerpt:
Take the average modern jetliner, with its 7 million components and 170 miles’ worth of wiring—an immensely complex system in and of itself. There were over 25,000 jetliners in regular service in 2014, according to Downer. Together, they averaged 100,000 flights every single day. Now consider that in 2017, no passenger-carrying commercial jetliner was involved in a fatal accident. Zero. That year, passenger totals reached 4 billion on close to 37 million flights. Yes, it was a record-setting year for the airline industry, safety-wise, but flying remains an almost unfathomably safe and reliable mode of transportation.
Don't Fall Into the Trap of Taking the Wrong Lessons from Others' Success
Sarah Tavelopen.substack.com
Many such cases
Recently I’ve gotten a lot of inbound from new grads asking for career advice, so I wrote down a list of things I wish I’d internalized sooner.
The key thing: being precocious has an expiration date. Threading the note in its entirety: https://t.co/dW7DAcmyng
Timeless advice:
You need to be good, not good for your age
Be wary of personal mission creep, both IRL and online
Prioritize finding friends and collaborators you'd like to have in your life for a long time
Avoid chasing the red herrings of success
Interesting life paths are generally non-repeatable
Keep your standards everything—but especially for your own conduct—high
Own your mistakes
Forgive your parents, and get to know them. Especially if you are the child of immigrants
Embrace commitment in work and personal matters
Mutual obligations are a gift—cherish them and run towards them
Take your work seriously, but yourself less so
Interesting analogy for creating conditions for 10x work:
Limit drag. Reduce interruptions by working in extended periods of focus work.
Maximize thrust. Fill focus time with primarily long-duration tasks.
The reasoning is that the work that is highest impact typically takes a lot of reasoning / requires a lot of implementation detail. Minimizing distractions while doing such work allows you to do more of such work. You get marginally better at doing such work over time.
Demystification versus Understanding
ribbonfarm.com
Excerpts:
To demystify something is to understand it to a level where you no longer feel anxious about your ignorance.
To understand something is to have the same priorities as experts regarding that something.
Expertise is, in a sense, a consensus of priorities.
Expertise also comes with taking many basic things for granted. So when radical changes happen, sometimes it is the naive novice, wrestling with the basics, who ends up innocently asking the right questions.