Process and the documentation of that process must be merged into a single entity or flow to achieve peak efficiency.
Falsifiability
A characteristic of certain statements or beliefs defined as an inherent ability to be proven to be invalid.
Initiation & Catalysis
There exists a direct correlation between getting what you want and initiating actions the actions required to acquire it.
Disorder Bias
System’s tend to minimize their energy and maximize their entropy over time.
Problem First Reasoning
Keep the focus of an organization on solving a real problem. Don’t merry yourself to solutions, technologies, or methods that divert you from that problem.
Incentive Gravity
What is incented happens.
Parkinson’s Law
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Sequencing Principle
The order of actions or elements in a given system will alter observed system dynamics.
Identity Distortion
When someone deeply associates their self-identity with an idea they weaken their rationality filter in regards to that idea. Examples include politics and religion. Overcome via Outcome Dissociation.
Mean Regression
If a transient variable is measured at an extreme, probability suggests it will be less extreme upon a second measurement.
Inversion
The best way to solve a problem is often to invert it. Consider what you don’t want, then determine how to avoid the actions that cause what you don’t want.
Earned Value Capture
The best way to get what you want is to deserve it. Create value in the manner you’d want the person creating what you consume to do.
Narrative Fallacy
Humans cannot resist the temptation to string facts together with stories. We can connect anything together, regardless of real causal linkages. This results in a false sense of understanding.
Emotion Glasses
Our emotions always distort reality. To make prudent decisions aligned with goals one must strive to filter emotions from decision making.
Spectrum Thinking
Almost nothing is black or white. Always consider how something fits on a spectrum, as all of reality is grey.
Outcome Dissociation
Self-worth is not coupled with outcomes or results of your work. [Article]
Intuition Fallacy
You should not trust your intuition in areas you know little about. In these situations you should turn to mentors and books to learn what strategies are successful.
Delegate Weakness
It makes no sense to do things you are not good at. Delegate key functions that you can’t do well to other people. Spend as much of your time as possible in your element.
Emergent Behaviors
Systems are unique because their sums can exhibit unexpected behaviors that are not present in the parts.
Practice Reliability
Be reliable. Unreliability can cancel out the other virtues.
Loss of Freedom
The two ways you can really lose your freedom are loss of time and loss of reaction.
Focusing illusion
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.
Sustainable practices
If your practices aren’t sustainable, you’re not building something good.
Free will is an illusion
Humans are not individuals, but rather di-viduals. Our choices are largely outcomes of biochemical processes. However, the nature of those biochemical process is defined by unique genes and environmental factors. So while you don’t have free will, your actions are still unique and novel. This means that your choices are still novel.
Design Accountability
Humans need accountability systems to fight against entropy. Design your physical environment and social ties in a way that creates consequences and incentives for your behaviors.
The meaninglessness of life
Life is actually meaningless. There is no law of physics requiring that your life is meaningful. Once you accept this truth you can freely create your own meaning in life. The power to accept the void of emptiness and thrive in spite of that awareness is fundamental to success.
Communication Latency
Trust Advantage
The required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of pre-established trust between two parties. Trust as a result increases execution velocity.
Disarm with dispassion
Sometimes you’ll need to deal with people that attempt to rattle you and place you on tilt. Turn this tactic against them by acting without emotional reactions. Once you break tranquility you’ve shown they won.
Prioritize freedom
Efforts should be taken to maintain the ability to allocate your time as you like. Losing this degrades happiness.
Choose to be calm
Anger and emotion do not generate useful solutions to problems. Choose to stay calm in all situations. This is the only way to have power over those situations and to work through them.
Solve problems relentlessly
Once you have identified an impediment between you and your goals, you must not tolerate it. Evaporate it from your path with creativity, grit, and effort.
Pressure = Force / Area
You must reject doing everything so that you can do what you want most well. By doing less, you can create something remarkable. [Model]
It is ultimately your fault
When something goes wrong, do not blame others. Traffic did not make you late. You did not leave enough time to account for traffic. The customer is not dumb. You did a poor job explaining your service. Always find ways to reverse engineer a situation to determine how you could have taken proactive measures to avoid the negative situation.
Pain is a growth hack
Hard things, once encountered, allow you to handle harder things. This is true of both work and relationships. Ask the questions you don’t want to. Do what you are afraid of. Choose the hard path. The way to make a hard path an easy path is to consider it in the rearview.
Emergent Self-Interest
In a functional society the pursuit of self interest generally benefits all. In the long run tricksters are exposed and their short term gains are redistributed. Those that channel the human drive to survive to create global usefulness tend to earn the most reward as a byproduct of these efforts.
Oxygen Mask Rule
You cannot help others if you are living unsustainably. Always place your oxygen mask on your head before you help the person next to you. Otherwise in the long run you won’t be able to use useful to many people at all.
Embody evolution
The inner drive to improve and adapt is the superpower of the human organism. Find environments, people, and work where you feel naturally in line with this fundamental law. Flow with the inner natural inclination of improvement.
Build in reality
You have to be able to make things work in the real world. Ideas don’t matter. You must understand the fundamentals of your creative medium in order to do anything real.
Life is more than solving problems
You have to be going somewhere inspiring. Your solutions to issues have no intrinsic meaning without a broader vector. [Article]
Maximize Rate of Learning
Choose the path of most learning. If you are not learning you must move on.
Own Mistakes
If you mess up, move on. Teach people what you learned and own up to what did not work. Mistakes are often signals to adjust your principles.
Everything is temporary
Ultimately entropy will always win. Everything you are working on will go away. You will die. The few that knew you will also all die. Live vigorously anyway. [Article]
Kill what kills you
If something is not working, don’t keep it alive. Kill it and move on to something else that is more aligned with what you want.
More with less
Make your creations simpler. Make $5 = $5,000. Have fewer friends. Can a book be a tweet?
Find what is true
Be rigorous about finding what is true and what is not. Be very careful to not let old assumptions that are not longer true skew your thinking. Do what is required to build a realistic model of reality.
Time Scarcity
Time is your only real resource. Employ it productively. Invest in enriching experiences. Use it to learn. Never waste it.
Homebrew your principles
Don’t blindly accept the principles of the world around you. Use the good ones as inspiration but then build your own (in your own words) from scratch.
Think in systems
Everything is connected. You must learn to think at the systems level in order to really understand the world.
Learn by doing
The only way to really learn something is to apply it.
Tranquility
Seek to eliminate negative emotion from life. Don’t worry about what you can’t change. Focus on organizing your inner mind and don’t be reactionary.
Usefulness
The degree to which you earn wealth is directly proportional to your usefulness to others. Focus on making valuable things and the rest will follow.
Strive for Coherence
Aim to align all your actions with your beliefs. Root everything you do in a core principle.
Reduce Distractions
Limit the noise of life in order to accomplish anything of note. [Article]