Craft
Doing things; Doing things well
Craft
David Lynch: “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”
Roger's Bacon • Ideas Are Alive and You Are Dead
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.
If you work on anything worthwhile, sooner or later people will care about it and will want you to send progress updates. These could be quarterly investor updates, weekly updates to your boss, emails to adjacent teams, etc. Here are tips on how to do this well.
Understand your role, and with each update add to the body of evidence that you’re a goo
If you plan to do something for a long time, plan to do it well
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
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
Don't Fall Into the Trap of Taking the Wrong Lessons from Others' Success
Sarah Tavelopen.substack.com
Many such cases