Career
Getting access, getting paid, and deciding what to do next.
Self-Belief Is the Willingness to Walk Into What You Don't Know
Hard goals are hard because the path to them isn't documented. Self-belief is the willingness to walk into problems you don't yet know how to solve, and you build it with reps.
Talk Is the Enemy of Greatness
Talking about great work feels like doing it, and that feeling is the trap. Here are the levels between talk and real work, and the questions worth asking to find out whether your time goes to the actions that move your highest goal.
Don't Live a Balanced Life If You Have Extreme Goals
Meaningful outputs require meaningful inputs. If your goal is extreme, most of the advice you hear about balance was written for someone with a different goal.
Extraordinary Outputs Require Extreme Inputs
If your goal is extraordinary, the advice to live a balanced life was not written for you. Why starting late on financial independence takes an extreme input, and how to sustain it.
Campbell's law
The more a quantitative indicator is used for social decision-making, the more it will be corrupted — and the more it will distort the process it was meant to monitor. Donald Campbell stated it in 1979, about social programs.
Ikigai
A Japanese word for what makes life feel worth living. The four-circle diagram attached to it in the West — passion, mission, vocation, profession — is not Japanese and has nothing to do with the original concept.
Intrinsic and instrumental value
Something has instrumental value if it is worth having for what it gets you, and intrinsic value if it is worth having for itself. The distinction is Aristotle's and it is the question underneath almost every complaint about a life that is going well.
Price's law
Derek de Solla Price's claim that half the output of a group comes from the square root of the number of contributors — so of a hundred people, ten produce half the work. The pattern is real; the square-root form is much weaker evidentially than it is usually presented as being.
Regret minimization
Choosing by asking which option you would regret more at eighty, rather than by comparing expected outcomes now. Jeff Bezos gave the phrase its currency; the move is much older and is a way of correcting for a bias in the present.
Sturgeon's law
Ninety percent of everything is crud. Theodore Sturgeon said it in the 1950s defending science fiction, and the defense is the point: the ninety percent is not special to any field, so judging a field by its average is judging nothing.
The deferred life plan
Organizing life in two stages — do the unwanted thing now, live afterward — where the second stage is indefinitely postponed because its trigger condition keeps moving. Randy Komisar named the pattern in 2000.
Urgent and important
A two-way split of work by urgency and by importance, on the observation that the two come apart constantly and that urgency wins by default. The grid is folklore; the distinction underneath it is not.