Danger flags
- before a person does something bad, there's often predictable signs that they were going to do it
Choose your companions wisely
- someone who is usually experienced periodically screws up a task
- do not employ people for areas where they are already flagged
but very expensive to constantly maintain this cognitive overhead
- avoid hiring people who get very self-destructive when anxious
- test them with small mission
- Machiavelli: The Prince
its much safer to be respected than loved
preferable to be both if possible
- people promise you the sky (love you) when you are in power and treating them nicely and doing them favors - promises which won't be fulfilled when crisis hits or war breaks out
- if someone truly respects you, some sort of liking and shared understanding tends also to emerge
- It is better to cultivate one very sharp skill than be mediocre at everything with no danger flags
- Grim determination is a good trait to cultivate - follow through to the bitter end
- *Ray Dalio: Principles* - how to live up to your potential
objectively diagnose one's mistake
- cultivate friends who will point out your blind spots
- avoid ego and shortsightedness to uncover mistakes and weaknesses
- Major danger flags - avoid when identified
inability to face pain
- regular justification
- believing self to be an exception
- only taking internal view and not taking external view
in any new endeavor find the base rates of success and failure
- Identify and mitigate against structural problems
first step is to identify them
- single points of failure
- Paul Graham, Keep your identity small
the more labels you have for yourself the dumber they make you
- bravado
- Money usage: people who never had enough money are prone to bribery
- Neglect: lack of vigilance
- Inflammability: ease of in-sighting anger
Limit breaks
- Allocation and Time as a measure of priority
know where you are spending your time
- reduce time on insignificant things
quit lesser pleasures
- arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal
- take the time you have available seriously
- number of decisions per day
- actions per minute
- largest overlooked gains in a field:
Study into seemingly unrelated fields or those lagging prestige
- Perfect practice leads to perfect performance
- Automate where possible
remove recurring not important work
- spend time to sit, think and study your own work
- strive on being better, not perfect
- Decide what not to do and never do it
- Unfinished work decays overtime
- People who are able to answer controversial questions well would do well on other types of questions more often than chance
ability to reasons through and coming to a conclusion
- Search for basic procedure
identify hidden logic
- Codification, doctrine and training
- Strength on weakness/opportunity
- Understand the cost of doing things
reduce scope
- understand 80/20 - 80% of the effort to get the final 20% completed
- Negotiations: define win conditions
- Investing - always focus on earnings
- Be right than get distracted in appearing good
Lingua Franca
- Words in a language limits the ability to express specific ideas
- Control perception to control how the masses operate
- any idea brought to its extreme becomes its exact opposite - calibration is important
- Rhetoric - persuasive language
- Ethics versus morality
external code of conduct versus internal belief system/world view
- guilt versus shame
- Ethos, Pathons, Logos
ethics - appeal to ethics
- passion - appeal to passion
- Logic - appeal to logic
- Paul Graham: when things are hard, people who suspect its non-sense generally keep quiet
References
- *Extreme productivity, Bob Pozen*
- *Book of Five Rings*, Miyamoto Mushashi
- *Anabasis*, Xenophon
- *The Goal*, Goldratt
- *On Killing*, Dave Grossman
- *On Combat*, Dave Grossman
- *TaoDeChing*, Lao Zi