Pritesh

I had a conversation with Chris once about why good product thinkers are like good novelists. In both cases, didacticism is the enemy. Designing consumer internet products requires viewing humans as we really are, not how we wish we were.

The luxury of knowing is rarer than you think, and we probably underestimate just how much that impacts our day to day lives and the lives of those closest to us who aren’t so lucky.

Taste starts with noticing.

Understanding is a cognitive function through which humans gather information from their environment in order to make sense of it and create a context in which they can interact with it. With a good understanding of the environment, humans are able to avoid dangers and take advantage of opportunities for food, reproduction, and shelter.

Robert Greene notes that the “Master” is observing not just “the moves of the pieces on the chessboard but the entire game, involving the psychologies of the players, their strategies in real time, their past experiences influencing the present, the comfort of the chairs they are sitting in, how their energies affect each other — in a word,... See more

Plus, most ambitious ideas seem wrong at first. If a new idea was obviously good, someone else would have already done it.

I know that if you are not unusually hard-working or competitive or smart, you can still distinguish yourself. Be unusual in some other noticeable, likable way—unusually honest, brave, generous, curious, or pleasant. All of these attributes are composed of discrete behaviors that can be learned through practice.