Craft
Doing things; Doing things well
Craft
A poem Rockefeller used to recite in the office:
A wise old owl lived in an oak,
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that old... See more
Morgan Houselx.comSay less, hear more.
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
.png)
Be ambitious about the process, not just the outcome. (To use my own hobby as an example, when I bake, I put on some good music, I take my time, I eat too much batter. That way, if the recipe implodes–like when I accidentally mixed up powdered sugar and flour–the whole thing isn’t a wash.)
Let more than one thing hold your ambition, or meaning.... See more
Let more than one thing hold your ambition, or meaning.... See more
Anne Helen Petersen • This Will Change the Way You Think About Ambition
Well-crafted things are laborious endeavors. A lot of the inputs and thought put into it will likely never be seen or understood. It might seem like a waste. The process improves not just the thing being crafted, but the crafter as well.
Christopher Alexander has an observation about problem solving that I like: you should always be focusing on solving the part that has the fewest degrees of freedom.
phokarlssonx.com
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
If you plan to do something for a long time, plan to do it well
Managerial Technology focuses on decisions as the output. For example, I build a report with a KPI that shows the yield of how I am turning raw materials into finished goods. I want to hit my target KPI based on my engineering standards.
This has been a primary focus of analytics and business intelligence for the past... See more
logistics > strategy
operations > management
doing > thinking