1. Problem solving ability = 2. Generic problem solving ability * 3. Problem space knowledge

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 8 mins (an extra 2 mins for the addendum)

Summary: 1. Problem Solving Ability = 2. Generic problem solving skills * 3. Industry specific knowledge

• A human isn’t born able to walk or talk. Some go on to invent computer programs, build rockets that will go to mars and… most importantly invent wonderful coffee subscriptions that arrive weekly :). 

• I believe humans can systematically build “1. Problem Solving Ability” and become orders of magnitude better than they are today. I believe that I’m orders of magnitude better at building secondary school education resources than I was 7 years ago. 

• However, IMO being good at problem solving in one area doesn’t mean one is good at problem solving in all areas. IMO without industry specific knowledge it’s very difficult to add any value to that industry. 

  • For reference I think I’m good at problem solving in some areas and useless in other areas. I think eg Elon Musk is epic at problem solving in some areas but useless in other areas… and that everyone starts life useless in all areas. 

• Jingle: to be industrious (inventive / solve problems) first you must have industry specific knowledge. 

Your body is limited, your mind is limitless. 

• IMO what your mind can learn is a function of what you already know. Ie the more you know the more you can learn. 

• IMO what your mind can do is a function of what you have done. Ie the more you have done the more you can do. 

• See this blog and this blog. IMO effectively your mind can compound exponentially abilities, your body asymptotes abilities.  

  • Body

• Mind

How to  model the mechanism that gives rise to compounding of your problem solving ability 

• 1. Problem Solving Ability = 2. Generic problem solving skills * 3. Industry specific knowledge

  • 2. Generic problem solving skills

    • Novice = 0x [hours needed 0]

    • Competent = 1x [hours needed 10s]

    • Proficient = 10x [hours needed 100s]

    • Expert = 100x [hours needed 1,000s]

    • Master = 1,000x [hours needed 10,000s]

  • 3. Industry specific knowledge

    • Novice = 0x

    • Competent = 1x

    • Proficient = 10x

    • Expert = 100x

    • Master = 1,000x

• Visualisation

Example - DA (myself, my initials are DA)

• DA on secondary education

  • I have basically no idea about AFL. If someone asked me to help an AFL team I’d have no idea what to do. 

  • I have basically no idea about how to run a high end restaurant (I know how to eat at one but that isn’t the same :) ). If someone asked me to help a high end restaurant I’d have no idea what to do. 

  • I had almost no knowledge of the Secondary Education resource industry when we started Edrolo 7.5 years ago (so very limited ability to help) but since then I’ve been slowly systematically acquiring knowledge and so IMO my ability to help has been increasing. 

• Visualization - How does my ability to add value to secondary education look in my model?

• Timeline - DA’s Problem solving ability

  • Disclaimer: The point of this model is to try show where I think I am vs the baseline of having no problem solving ability, directionality is important not the numbers

  • DA at Birth (0x)

    • “1. Problem Solving Ability” for Secondary Education or anything for that matter ≈ 0x

    • I couldn’t walk or talk let alone know what a book was or maths or anything. 

    • At birth I didn’t know sh1t. Pretty much all I could do was sh1t (my nappie)

  • DA 5 years ago on Secondary Education (10x)

    •  “1. Problem Solving Ability” for Secondary Education ≈ 10x

    • I had decent problem solving ability but had done very minimal upgrading in education so I simply couldn’t get much higher in secondary education

  • DA Problem solving ability today

    • AFL (0x)

      • Despite that I believe I have strong generic problem solving skills, I have zero knowledge about AFL. If I was asked to help an AFL team right now I think I'd be next to useless. For me to help would require learning a lot about AFL. 

    • Secondary Education (10,000 - 100,000x)

      • In the last 5 years I have systematically upgraded my problem solving ability but most importantly I have upgraded my knowledge of Industry knowledge in secondary education through at least 5,000 hrs reading, thinking, talking, writing and building

      • This is taken me to expert/master in both my generic problem solving skills and my industry knowledge

    • Primary Education (500 - 5,000x)

      • IMO some but not all of my secondary education knowledge is applicable to primary education (but almost none of my secondary school knowledge is applicable to AFL) so I think I’d likely be able to add value right now in primary education resources. 

  • DA goal for 5 years in the future for Education (10,000,000x +)

    • In 5 years I’d hope to be 1,000x better than I am today for secondary education solutions. In the coming 5 years I hope to do another 5,000+ hours of secondary education knowledge acquisition and another 5,000+ hours of generic problem solving ability improvement. 

• Deepdive on my problem solving ability in secondary education today (10,000 - 100,000x)

  • So is it possible I’m IMO 1,000 - 5,000x better at Secondary School resource solutions than 5 years ago?!? At first I thought this number was totally ridiculous, how could it be possible to be this much better? Then I thought about the first textbook we made at Edrolo... I’m proud of everything we have made… but IMO everything you do should be the best thing you have done. IMO what we do today is like a Tesla vs a horse (5 years ago). Both will get you from Point A to Point B… that is about all they have in common. 

    • For the first textbook at Edrolo ~5 years ago it took me 3 days to make the ‘recipe’ and that was putting every idea I had in the one book. After 3 days I was out of ideas. 

    • For the current book we’ve been working on the recipe for 12 months and each time we work on the recipe we get more new ideas. Ie working on the recipe is 1. Adding new ideas to the product and 2. Have more new ideas. Basically I don’t think we’ll ever run out of ideas now! 

  • 2. Generic problem solving skills

    • I’d say 5 years ago I was ‘Proficient’. 

    • And honestly I think I have spent close to 10,000 hours doing problem solving in the last 5 years. As an example IMO this blog is one example of problem solving. 

    • I’d say my generic problem solving skills are 10-100x better than before. 

    • On a sad note: I’d say that by the end of secondary school my hours ‘problem solving’ in school would have been <100 hours. IMO this is sub-optimal, I hope edrolo can do something about increasing the number of hours on problem solving in secondary education. 

  • 3. Industry specific knowledge:

    • Five years ago I’d maybe barely done 10s of hours of learning about the secondary school education space. I’ve done minimum 5,000hrs in the last 5 years. That’s 20x hours each week for those wanting to count. I’d say 50% of this time is reading and 50% is talking, thinking, writing & building. 

    • To say I know more about the secondary education space is putting it mildly. I feel like in hindsight I knew nothing 5 years ago. 

    • So I believe I’ve gone from ‘competent’ 5 years ago to ‘expert’ now. I don’t ever plan to stop learning about education. Honestly I think it would be nice if I had spent more time learning about education by the time I was 80 than any other human ever. This sounds to me like a life well spent! Educating myself about education! 

Example - Elon Musk

• Firstly I’m creating another category beyond ‘Master’ for “2. Generic problem solving skills” that Elon inhabits called…. ‘Game Changer’. 

  • IMO Elon is likely the best ‘physics based’ entrepreneur ever. I’d say that Steve Jobs was the best ‘user experience’ based entrepreneur ever. 

  • I think Elon is one of the hardest and smartest working humans ever. IMO Elon ain’t perfect, but fark are his strengths strong! 

• Visualization

• Timeline - Elon Musk’s problem solving

  • Elon 20 years ago 

    • Rockets “1. Problem Solving Ability” ≈ 1x. 

    • Elon was trying to buy and repurpose Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles from Russia. 

  • Elon 10 years ago 

    • Rockets “1. Problem Solving Ability” ≈ 10,000x. 

    • Elon had successfully launched rockets to orbit. While awesome others like NASA had done this before.

  • Elon today

    • Rockets “1. Problem Solving Ability” ≈ 10,000,000x. 

    • Elon landed a rocket vertically for the first time in human history, a major breakthrough for the feasibility of space travel. 

    • Elon is sending humans into space and much more. SpaceX (Elon’s rocket company) is doing things no one else has done before. SpaceX has hit… liftoff? 

• While I think that Elon is the best physics based entrepreneur ever… as far as I know Elon doesn’t know anything about AFL. If he was to be an AFL team coach right now I think he’d be pretty useless. 

• If I, DA, was to be made SpaceX CEO I’d be pretty useless right now. But I also think that right now I could help make a better secondary school resource than Elon musk. While I think Elon has better “2. Generic problem solving skills” than I do, I think I have way more “3. Industry specific knowledge” about secondary education than Elon does so this would overcome my “2. Generic problem solving skills” disadvantage. 

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Addendum

Thoughts on how to improve “2. Generic problem solving skills” and “3. Industry specific knowledge”

• I’m trying to make these blogs shorter, so I’ll do a deeper dive on these areas in the future! 

• One lens for “2. Generic problem solving skills” and “3. Industry specific knowledge” modalities I talk to: 

  • Reading, thinking, talking, writing and building. 

• While I think that any modality can be used to build abilities in anything, I the following is a reasonable approximation: 

• IMO the most valuable modality is ‘writing’. A blog like this is ‘writing’. 

  • ‘Writing’ vs ‘Building’

    • Building = making a lesson for a textbook

    • Writing = writing about making a lesson for a textbook (metacognition)

  • Comment: 

    • I didn’t like English at school and I wasn’t good at it (if that isn’t a reflexive relationship then I don’t know what is). 

    • I now LOVE writing and to me writing and english essays have almost nothing to do with writing a blog like this! 

• If you want an idea of an average week for me: 

  • Reading = 40-60 hours of 1x human speed reading (most of my reading = listening and is done at 5x)

  • Thinking = 1-5 hours a week

  • Talking = 5-20 hours of meetings a week

  • Writing = 5,000 - 20,000 words a week. This is the key change for me vs 5 years ago. 5 years ago I wrote more like 5,000 - 20,000 words every 6 months, not every week. 

  • Building = 1 - 20 hours a week. 

• IMO the most important thing I do to add value to Edrolo is ‘writing’. 

• Honestly I cannot recommend writing highly enough. 

  • Writing = problem solving

  • Writing = thinking

  • Writing = great great fun! 

If you only take away one thing

• IMO problem solving is fun. IMO no one starts with any problem solving skills. IMO one can systematically build problem solving skills. IMO to be great at problem solving you need to upgrade your industry knowledge and your generic problem solving ability.

Optimising for the common good - aka Stage 6 of Kohlberg’s framework

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 5 mins. 

Summary: it’s natural to look after #1, but this natural tendency is often bad for nature (the common good)... and ultimately therefore bad for #1!

Writing from a first world country

• There are many different circumstances in the world

• This blog is written very much from the lens of someone living safely and securely in a first world country; if someone is living in a situation where their basic needs are not guaranteed, there is a completely different take

Me, myself and… ok other people too! 

• School is a single player game. 

• Politics is a team game. 

• Humanity is an everyone game… AKA the common good / greater good. 

• Unfortunately, typically you are not taught to look at the world from an ‘everyone view’ :(. 

Concentric circles - the world is more and more interconnected, more and more the common good matters the most

• For some reason, IMO we are not necessarily taught to always look for the common good at the broadest level

  • Sometimes we think purely selfishly

  • Sometimes we try to be selfless and think of others, but even then we may not be thinking beyond one or two layers

    • Eg. Many parents want to make sure they give their children a better life. This is admirable and can involve a lot of sacrifice and selflessness. Having said this, the optimisation is still for a smaller subset of humanity (in this case, family), not humanity at large

• Large egos look after themselves, small egos look after everyone at large ;)! 

The world is now positive sum, the world used to be zero sum. So many of our stories are zero sum. 

• In hunter gatherer times the output of the world was fixed. The amount of food was independent of human input. 

• So if there were less humans then more of the fixed amount of roaming animals and berries on trees for you! 

• Now output is dependent on humans. It used to be that 90% of humans were farmers, now 1.3% of Australian workers feed everyone in Australia!

People cannot not see 1st order outcomes (things that directly affect them). Typically people don’t see 2nd order outcomes (things that indirectly affect them). 

• People cannot not see 1st order outcome… AKA are good at looking after their direct needs... AKA good at playing single player / team player games. 

• Typically people don’t immediately see or think about 2nd order outcomes… AKA are not good at playing the ‘everyone game’... AKA optimising for the common good. 

• What is right at a 1st order outcome only level for one sub group is often at odds with what is optimal for the common good (everyone) when you include both 1st and 2nd order outcomes. Best. Sentence. Ever! 

• Example: 

  • Today there are more types of jobs than there have ever been. By some counts more than 500,000 jobs vs ~400 jobs 200 years ago. 

  • Today there are more things to do than ever before.

  • There are however more laws (rules) than ever before. So there are actually more things we cannot do than ever before. But these 1st order hindrances allow greater 2nd order superordinate outcomes they stop. 

  • So IMO good laws are ‘positive sum’. I wrote a blog on this called Positive sum principles increase the opportunity set. 

If there is a new law, most people see this as bad

“New law 1st order outcome stops me from doing X”

However, often it is the 2nd order outcomes that are positive

“New law allows 2nd order outcomes Y and Z. the 2nd order outcomes are greater in value than X, which is what the 1st order outcome is stopping. Overall this is positive, so I should like the law”

• So while there is more we cannot do than ever before there is actually net net more new that we can actually do than ever before! 

The common good from a company perspective 

• The common good is the best overall outcome for the following: 

  • The individual

  • The team

  • Management

  • The company

  • Humanity

• Example 1 - internally: someone is under performing and it’s prior to the end of their probation period, what do you do? 

  • Option A: put the person on a Performance Improvement Plan

  • Option B: don’t let the person pass their probation

  • Who is potentially involved:

    • The person

    • The person’s team leaders

      • The above are the people we immediately think of who are within 1-2 concentric circles

    • The person’s team members

    • Other employees at the company

    • The company itself

    • The company’s clients

      • The above are people we may not immediately think of. Some are within 1-2 concentric circles, some are beyond this

  • Performance Improvement Plans and execution are typically very draining for all involved, however this doesn’t mean the outcome isn’t worth it. 

  • When you look at just the person, or just the person and the people involved directly in running the Performance Improvement Plan, you may think it is worth it if you can see the potential

    • The person just needs more direct feedback and guidance to succeed. Structure will help this

    • We can get them to a good place. We know they mean well and have good intentions. Short term pain for the person implementing the plan, but potential long term gain for the team

  • When can the Performance Improvement Process have 2nd order outcomes that outweigh this? 

    • IMO doing the performance improvement process isn’t worth it if it kills the company. You might save one employee but you have a dead company so no one has jobs. 

    • IMO doing the performance improvement process isn’t worth it if it means you lose a star performer. You might save one currently low performer but lose a high performer. 

      • "Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.”

      • So often the best performers get the biggest problems. 

  • If you are not going to kill the company or lose a high performer then IMO you should try to go through the performance improvement process even if it’s very draining! However it can feel really heartless not to want to go through with a performance improvement process if you are only thinking about ‘the individual’. 

• Example 2 - externally: what kind of contracts do you want to have with customers? 

  • Let’s say you sell a subscription product on a yearly contract (ie subscription for 12 months). 

  • Some of your customers come to you and say ‘would you consider a 3 year contract at a discounted price vs rolling 1 year contracts?’ What should you do? 

  • IMO the best overall outcome (common good) is that your product is high value and positive sum for the world. As such you need ideally the best signal for if the product is adding value as possible. One articulation of this is that you want to make it as easy as possible for your clients to leave you if they don’t like your product. 

  • So while it might seem like a good thing for the company to lock in 3 years of revenue. While it might seem good for the client to get a discount. Overall (common good) this might make it so the company focuses on doing ‘3 year deals’ instead of ‘making the product great and explaining why it’s great to customers’. Overall on a 10 year ‘humanity view’ the outcome is worse for both the company and it’s customers… although in the short term it might feel like it’s better for both! 

+++++++++++++

Extra reading for fun - not counted in the 5 mins 

The common good from a non-company perspective

• A good way to convince someone to agree with you is to pick a sub-set they are in (eg tribe) where the optimal solution matches what you want. People see this logic making sense… and normally don’t see the bigger picture (common good). 

  • Then if someone doesn’t agree with your logic they are ‘evil’. But your logic makes sense for a subset not the whole set. 

  • Optimising for a subset is… sub optimal. Optimising for the whole set is… happy! 

• Example - politics

  • Eg you are doing an entry level role at a bakery. The optimal 1st order outcome is to lift the minimum wage. 

  • Eg you are the owner of a bakery. The optimal 1st order outcome is to not lift the minimum wage. 

  • What is the actual best outcome for the common good? This is complicated. (Stupid example Duncan… I’m trying to pick something in politics that isn’t politicised and this right now is the best I got!)

    • I’m a Rawlsian who thinks the ‘veil of ignorance’ makes sense. 

    • DA articulation of the veil (I’m sorry if this is not exactly what Rawls says): 

      • The veil of ignorance says that maximising for the 1st order the amount of opportunity for those at the bottom of society leads to 2nd order outcomes that maximise for society as a whole. 

      • Analogy: the economy is a ‘pie’. Capitalists are good at growing the pie, socialists are good at splitting the pie. Rawls says that if you 1st order optimise for the biggest slice of the pie for those at the bottom then those at the bottom are much more likely to reach their potential (ie less impediments) and that as such 2nd order you have the biggest overall pie size. So, overall even those at the top get a bigger amount of absolute pie… even if their relative percentage of pie might be less. As an example, in this way, taxes done well are positive sum. 

      • Ie there is no trade off if done well, everyone wins from optimising (1st order goal) for the max amount of opportunity for those at the bottom of society. 

      • Inequality as a feature or as a bug? Rawls says done well that inequality is a feature not a bug, that the only inequality you allow is that which increases the amount of opportunity for those at the bottom of society. 

  • What to do with minimum wage then? IMO you want to have a living minimum wage (ie opportunity not blocked due to not enough money to live, IMO the US minimum wage is too low) and then you want to have the maximum number of jobs with living wage+ pay. So basically it’s complicated. 

  • IMO political parties communications often don’t try to show the common good, just optimising the for one sub segment of humanity and dividing people :(. 

• Example - mothers

  • In general mothers are some of the best people rolling around. IMO my mother has done more to make me into the I am person today than anyone else. Towards me, she is selfless in the extreme. 

  • Mothers were also the main ones doing toilet paper hoarding in early COVID. 

  • Mothers were optimising for ‘their family’. Not for the outcomes of eg all Australians. This was… natural!

Addendum… to make sure I don’t seem dumb: Linking the concentric circles of common good to Kholberg’s moral development framework. 

• I wrote a blog about credibility. Kholberg was a profession at Harvard. This ‘credibility’ means that if you don’t understand Kholberg’s framework it’s because you don’t get it not because it doesn’t make sense. Haha. 

• So I’m using this credibility to ‘bolster’ the random thoughts I make here :). 

• Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development - harvard professor

• One way of articulating Kholberg's stages is what 'group' / 'subset' are you considering when making a decision? 

  • eg what might be optimal for you individually is worse for the broader group. If you realise this you are then are comfortable to propose a different course of action.

• So IMO one rearticulation of the stages is a set of concentric circles:

• Where stage 6 is considering everyone. 

• IMO a Kantian universal ethic is where you say 'if i was to be able to pretend to be everyone in society what is the overall best principle to apply here'. ie the average best principle to optimise wellbeing for all. not what is the best 1st order outcome for you as unfortunately IMO much political voting is :(. 

• The 'veil of ignorance' was John Rawls' idea for how to structure an economy. IMO this is a ‘stage 6’ approach to thinking about how to structure an economy.

Enjoyable Job = 1. No bad + 2. Good

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 3 mins

Summary: 

• “Success without fulfilment is the ultimate failure” - Tony Robbins

  • Success = often defined as financial success

  • Fulfilment = often defined as having meaning 

• “Success with fulfilment that is done unenjoyably is a tragedy.” - DA

• For myself: Job Enjoyability = Enough money (no money will make you sad, lots of money won’t make you happy) + Meaning + No deficiency Areas + All growth needs met :). 

Deficiency Areas vs Growth Needs

• We can talk about 3x main groupings of happiness:

  • Unhappy

  • Neutral (ie not happy, but not unhappy either)

  • Happy

• Some things are adding upside ie. making happies.

• Some things are removing downside ie. eliminating unhappies. 

  • Removing downside usually sets you back to neutral. 

• Deficiency area = if present you will be unhappy. However if not present you will neutral ie not unhappy or happy

• Growth needs = if not present you will be neutral ie not unhappy or happy

• Enjoyable job = 1. No deficiency areas + 2. Growth needs met

  • Unenjoyable job = 1. Some deficiency areas + 2. Growth needs met

  • Unenjoyable job = 1. No deficiency areas + 2. Growth needs not met

  • Enjoyable job = 1. No deficiency areas + 2. Growth needs met

• Jingle: I don’t just want a job that is good. I want one that isn’t bad either ;)!

Details of Deficiency Areas & Growth Needs

• Deficiency Areas

  • Financial stress = eg is the business viable or eg have you bitten off too much personal debt. 

  • Time pressure = constant worry about being behind where you should be

  • Key person risk = if you lose one person do you eg not get the project done on time?

  • Draining people = working with draining people is the pits

• Growth Needs

  • Meaning = a connection to how what you are doing is making the world better

  • Energising (ideally inspiring) people 

  • Self actualisation = you have the space to level yourself up and apply these new abilities in your work. Some jobs have very set boundaries of what you can and can’t do. 

  • Transcendence = you directly helping others self actualise. 

    • Transcendence is helping people you physically work with vs Meaning is helping humanity at large. 

• Comment

  • For myself: Job Enjoyability = Enough money (no money will make you say, lots of money won’t make you happy) + Meaning + No deficiency Areas + All growth needs met :). 

  • Rearticulation: Good job = Success (enough money) + Fulfilment (meaning) + you enjoy it (no deficiency areas + growth needs met)

You make progress in the areas you consciously try to make progress in - AKA hope is not a strategy

• I’m not hoping to have a good job. I’m systematically trying to build a great job for myself and others. I... hope that each year I systematically get better at this. 

• 22 year old Duncan’s job strategy was “work hard and stick your hand up for all opportunity”. 

• Slowly I’ve been able to understand more about myself and the world and develop frameworks through which I can figure out what areas to focus on. 

  • When I’ve realised that ‘Key Person Risk’ is stopping me from enjoying then I’ve been able to systematically address it.

  • In the early days of Edrolo 7 years ago I was all ‘focus on progress for the business’. Now I have some of my focus on ‘transcendence (aka assisting others to self actualise). It gives me such joy. 

• Unescapables

  • Sometimes you might be in a situation where Deficiency Areas are not a choice. 

    • Eg. if you start a new business that you’ve put all your personal capital into, you will of course have financial stress for at least the initial stage 

  • So in some cases, the Deficiency Area is part and parcel of a job for a period, and you accept this, and do what you can to shift this. 

• Corporate jobs prior to Edrolo

  • Firstly I’m grateful for all opportunities that have been afforded to me. 

  • If I look back I’d say that I had ‘little to no’ Deficiency Areas but also ‘little to no’ Growth Needs met. 

  • I got bored very quickly. 

• Edrolo

  • I’d say that for 7.5 years I’ve had Definiciny Areas at medium+

  • But also that I’ve had Growth Needs at medium+

  • Edrolo has been life with the volume at 200%. Never a boring moment... but also rarely a calm moment :(. 

  • IMO my Growth Needs are more than met... but also I have Deficiency Areas galore! I'd like to bask in a warm glow from Edrolo, not get burned from being too close to the fire. 

  • IMO the core focus for me at Edrolo is getting Deficiency Areas to be <small on average. IMO it’s fine to have a Deficiency area at Medium / Large every now and then, not ideal to have one or more Deficiency Areas are Medium / Large for 7 years in a row! 

If you only take away one thing:

• You want financial success with fulfilment done enjoyably :). 

• OR you want no Deficiency Areas plus Growth Needs met. 

• It doesn’t matter how many dealmakers (Growth Needs) a job has, just one dealbreaker (Deficiency Area) can make it unenjoyable :(. 

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Addendum: this is an adaptation of Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a management tool & and 4 management mistakes

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 5 mins

Summary: 

• Providing feedback (management) can be complex . One way I talk about feedback is that there are 4 key areas and you want to consciously provide feedback in all 4 areas: 

  • A1: constructive feedback about work done - removing existing downside

  • A2: positive feedback about work done - trying to create more existing upside

  • A3: showing ways to break new ground - new upgrades someone can add to themselves (self actualise) or upgrades they can add to others (transcendence) 

  • A4: celebrating when someone has added new upgrades to themselves (self actualise) or added upgrades to others (transcendence) 

• I find that early employees can:

  • Mainly do “A1: constructive feedback about work done - removing existing downside” and not celebrate something being done well. 

  • Or minaly do “A2: positive feedback about work done - trying to create more existing upside” and be scared to point out bad work.

  • Or only focus on giving feedback on work done (A1 & A2) and not proactively help others add new upside (A3 & A4). 

• Jingle (this is some of my finest work ;P)

  • “The purpose of a friend is to make you better than you would otherwise be.” Socrates. 

  • Or is a much more catchy way… good friends remove downside, reinforce good things you do, add new upside and celebrate after you have added upside. Wanna be friends? 

What is Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs?

• Example 1:

• Example 2

• Comment: 

  • Later in life Maslow added ‘transcendence’ at the top which I articulate as ‘helping others ascend the hierarchy’. 

DA’s modification of Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs for management: 

• Deficiency needs (will be unhappy it not addressed… but if these are addressed then someone is not happy, the are just ‘not unhappy’)

  • L1: Physiological needs = someone is paid enough. 

    • If someone feels their pay is unreasonable it will seriously grate… and make life not great! 

  • L2: Safety needs = basic hygiene. 

    • You have to be on time for a meeting, you need to send weekly reports on time, it’s not optional to try hard, it’s not optional to believe in yourself, etc etc. 

    • “You get exactly the behaviour you allow.” Some behaviour is not acceptable… as such IMO even tolerating it just a little bit is unacceptable!

  • L3: Social / Belonging needs = IMO you don’t need to be best friends with coworkers but, at a minimum, it’s best to be friendly. 

    • Take an interest in others. 

    • A good team is more than the sum of its parts. 

    • Good ‘friends’ / coworkers help you when you are down and tell you when you are a bit too big for your boots. 

    • Effectively we are all here to help each other, the vast majority of workplaces are ‘positive sum games’ meaning if we support each other when down and eg point out blind spots and ego distortions we all win. 

    • Done well this starts to feel like you are part of a ‘team’. IMO, done well, you know you are better for being part of the team AND the team is better for you being part of it! 

  • L4: Esteem = you celebrate the achievements of yourself and others publicly

    • Hopefully you are proud of your output, IMO it’s important to be able to publicly express this. 

    • Hopefully others think you have added value, IMO it’s important they let you know this. 

    • Types of games: 

      • Negative sum

      • Zero sum

      • Positive sum

      • Comment: 

        • Since the Industrial Revolution, IMO, the world is more and more ‘positive sum’. 

        • IMO the vast majority of jobs today are  ‘multi player positive sum games’. 

        • However, sport is normally zero sum, secondary education is normally zero sum, hunter gatherer times were zero sum. People can often be laden with a ‘default zero sum mindset’ which can be counter productive to forming a great team! 

    • IMO celebration done well is positive sum - it inspires others to grow and shows you to appreciate and care about others. 

      • Eg ‘The report you sent really clarified the features of the product which helped the sales team boost subscriptions, thanks so much for getting it done on time and in such great detail!’

        • This highlights celebration of a reflection of not only a job well done but articulates what made it done well and reinforces the expectations on the employee.

    • IMO celebration done poorly is negative sum - the only reason to do something is to get a badge, you are not trying to help make the world better but to get as many badges as possible. 

      • EG ‘Great job on the report’

        • This highlights celebration done poorly. Sure, maybe the report was great but the employee has no idea what made it great. Was it just because it was done on time? Or more? 

    • Here you also need to point out poor quality work. L3 is more ‘you sent the report on time’ and L4 is more ‘was the report quality?’. IMO need both. 

    • After all… it’s not called ‘maslows’ hierarchy of wants’... it’s called ‘maslow’s hierarchy of needs’. 

• Growth needs 

  • L5: Self actualization = levelling up what one is capable of. IMO your body is limited, your mind is limitless. Expanding the capabilities of your mind is… good ;) 

    • I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘intelligence’. I think ‘intelligence’ is actually accumulated knowledge, skills and innovation ability. See this blog and this blog.

    • Helping someone see they can add an upgrade to themselves is some of the most rewarding stuff I’m aware of. 

    • Trying to add an upgrade to yourself is some of the most fun stuff I’m aware of. 

    • Do you know what I like? Rewarding fun!

  • L6: Transcendence = levelling up what others are capable of. 

    • Helping others see that they can level up others!

    • Hopefully one of the people they see they can help is YOU! So one part of transcendence is ‘helping others help you’. 

    • You are not just in a ‘positive sum multiplayer game’ here, you have hit lift off! 

    • Transcending = lifting off! 

• Comment: 

  • Ideally you have all levels addressed. Ideally you help others address all levels. 

  • If the bottom levels are the basics, and the top levels are beautiful… I want to be basic… ally beautiful! 

  • “Those who look for beauty find it.” Bill Cunningham. 

  • “Those who look for ugliness find it.” DA 

  • I plan on trying to find and create as much beauty in this world as possible… sounds pretty basic! 

We all players, we are all coaches - 4 types of player and coach mistakes I see

• A good employee (player and coach) is consciously working to have all levels of the Maslow's Hierarchy met for themselves. 

• A good employee (player and coach) is consciously working to help others have all levels of  Maslow's Hierarchy met. 

• Problem types: 

  • Type 1 Problem: Only provides constructive feedback on deficiency needs

  • Type 2 Problem: Only provides positive feedback on deficiency needs

  • Type 3 Problem: Does not show how someone can do growth needs for themselves

  • Type 4 Problem: Does not celebrate with others when someone has levelled up on growth needs 

• In visual form

• You want all quadrants to be looked after!

Strategic Thinking Stages: the world isn’t black and white; learning to think in 3D multicolour surround sound

By Duncan Anderson and Alistair Harkness. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 7 mins

Summary: The best solutions are a result of recognising how the best parts of different ideas can apply to different areas. To do this, we need to recognise that all ideas aren’t either good or bad. The peaks in life are painted by the colours between black and white.

“I care not what you think, I care how you think.”

• Most of the secondary education system by necessity has a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer as you need to grade people on a standardised exam. However, for many of the most important questions in life there is often no black and white ‘right / wrong’ answer. Eg (probably THE most important question) how to make the best coffee? How to spend your sunday? What does it mean to live a good life? What is the common good? How do I do a good job at work...

• Most politicians say there is a ‘right policy’ and a ‘wrong policy’. However most of the time IMO this is far too simplistic. Eg what is the right education policy? I don’t think it’s possible to know. Eg what is the optimum minimum wage? I don’t think it’s possible to know. 

• Unfortunately IMO we are indoctrinated into a binary right / wrong or good / bad level of thinking. IMO the world is normally far more complex than this so thinking at a right / wrong black and white level is often counterproductive. 

• IMO almost everything helps some, but hinders some. Almost everything works somewhere, almost nothing works everywhere. 

• Jingle: thinking things are either right or wrong… is wrong not right! 

  • Indoctrination = world is binary right / wrong or black / white

  • In-dunc-trination = world is complicated, grey and great. While the devil might be in the detail, be an angel and come help us figure out the complications! 

Strategic Thinking Stages… AKA strategically thinking about thinking

• The Stages / Levels: 

  • L1: Idea 1 is good / bad or right / wrong (black and white)

  • L2: Idea 1 is eg 75% good : 25% bad (shades of grey)

  • L3: Idea 1 in Area A is 75% good : 25% bad… but in Area B is 25% good : 75% bad (multi colour)

  • L4: (3D multi colour) 

    • Comparing and contrasting ideas for an area. 

    • for Area A, Idea 1 is 75% good: 25% bad but Idea 2 is 50% good : 50% bad. 

  • L5: combining the best bits of 2 ideas in one area for a better overall outcome. Ie by combining Idea 1 and Idea 2 intelligently you can get the best of both ideas and avoid much of the bad. (3D multi colour with sound)

  • L6: combining 3+ ideas together for a positive sum outcome (3D multi colour with surround sound)

• Comment

  • IMO when responding to an idea ‘low level thinkers’ will respond with ‘it’s good or bad’ when eg they should be ‘it’s 75% good : 25% bad in Area A’ as an example. 

  • When people can start to ‘metatag’ ideas in this way I find a far more productive and energising conversation can happen. Metacognition is the ultimate skill :) 

++++++++++++++++

Details and examples

Straw man vs steel man arguments

• Straw man = having the impression of refuting an argument, meanwhile the proper idea of argument under discussion was not addressed or properly refuted

• Straw man DA explanation = 

  • You have identified a problem space and are trying to build a solution that gives a better outcome than currently exists.

  • For this example let’s say the problem space has 2 areas and 2 ideas for each area. 

    • Aside: most areas are complex and you should be trying to layer together 2-5x ideas (more than that is too complicated, 1 is normally over simplified to the point of being counter productive)

  • A straw man argument is picking one idea and in one area of the problem space where the idea is 25% good : 75% bad and then extrapolating this ‘bad spot’ to say the entire solution is poor and we shouldn’t go ahead with it (eg build a product). 

• Steel man = earnestly attempting to understanding the underlying reasons for an argument and then considering its merits with an open mind and (if arguing against it) arguing against the underlying reasons rather than handpicking examples

• Comment: 

  • IMO the point that the idea is bad for that particular area of the problem space is a valid point. 

  • IMO the point that the entire solution is therefore invalid because of one area being problematic is an invalid point. 

  • This is reasoning at a “L2: Idea 1 is eg 75% good : 25% bad” when one should be reasoning at L3+. 

  • “People who lack the cognitive skills required to perform a task typically also lack the metacognitive skills required to assess their performance. Incompetent people are at a double disadvantage, since they are not only incompetent but also likely unaware of it.” (Behavioral Scientist, April 13, 2020)

    • If people aren’t aware of strategic thinking stages then:

      • They often don’t realise they are thinking at Stage 1 when Stage 4 is optimal. 

      • They often think that someone pushing back on their “L1: Idea 1 is good / bad or right / wrong (black and white)” is ‘evil / stupid’ when in fact they need to level up their strategic thinking. 

  • In my opinion you should be trying to think in the following: 

    • How are there 2+ areas to this problem space?

    • How are there 2+ ideas for each area of the problem space?

    • If I can’t articulate these then I’m likely not seeing the bigger picture and as such conceivably having a counter productive conversation. 

    • AKA I’m likely looking at the world as black and white when its a 3D multi colour wonderland! 

• Model: 

  • L1 strategic thinking leads to choosing a single idea for all areas of the problem space which will generally be suboptimal for most areas

• L6 strategic thinking leads to choosing the best ideas for the appropriate areas within the problem space, so that all areas are optimised

Examples - everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere

• Example 1 Education: Direct Instruction vs Enquiry Based Learning

  • Direct Instruction = start with what = is a term for the explicit teaching of a skill-set using lectures or demonstrations of the material to students

  • Inquiry Based Learning = start with why = is a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios. It contrasts with traditional education (Direct Instruction), which generally relies on the teacher presenting facts and his or her knowledge about the subject. 

  • There is a debate in education circles about what the best approach is. 

  • IMO “adherence too closely to any one doctrine is usually dangerous”. 

  • Proponents of Direct Instruction will point out one area that Direct Instruction works and one area that Inquiry Based Learning doesn’t and conclude ‘Direct Instruction good, Inquiry Based Learning bad.” 

  • Then… proponents of Inquiry Based Learning will point out one area that Inquiry Based Learning works and one area that Direct Instruction doesn’t and conclude ‘Direct Instruction bad, Inquiry Based Learning good.” 

  • IMO this is “L1: Idea 1 is good / bad or right / wrong” and a counterproductive oversimplification of the world. 

  • I think that both Direct Instruction AND Inquiry Based Learning have pros and cons and should be layered together in an intelligent way for better outcomes. 

  • Here is an example of what I consider “L6: combining 3+ ideas together for a positive sum outcome” thinking. 

    • For the purposes of this example let’s assume the definitions mean the following: 

      • Didactic instruction = Direct instruction

      • Coaching = Enquiry based learning (this isn’t exactly right but enough to hopefully highlight the idea I’m going at here)

      • Socratic questions = Socratic method

    • From the indomitable Mortimer Adler.

• Example 2 The economy: Supply side economics vs Demand side economics

  • Demand side economics = to make the economy grow the government should play a big role eg with simulus plans, build infrastructure, etc.

  • Supply side economics = to make the economy grow the government should play a small role eg get out of the way and cut red tape allowing individuals to innovate easier (eg new businesses start or more spending to occur).

  • IMO this is too simple a debate but unfortunately you’ll often hear one side of politics saying “Supply side economics is good and Demand side economics is bad” and the other side saying the opposite. Ie a “L1: Idea 1 is good / bad or right / wrong (black and white)” thinking. 

  • IMO the world is much more complex than this. 

    • IMO good government regulation = good. Bad government regulation = bad. 

    • IMO good government spending = helpful. Bad government spending = waste of money. 

  • One tangible example that isn't necessarily a view I hold. 

    • Perhaps the government should lower taxes for companies (effectively giving companies more money) while increasing the minimum wage (effectively making costs higher for companies) and maybe this is an overall better balance than what happens now. 

If you only take away one thing

• The world is really really complex… and that typically makes the world endlessly fascinating with often no clear ‘right / wrong’ way of improving it. 

• Unfortunately much of the secondary education system and the media around politics paints the world as ‘black or white’ OR ‘right / wrong’.

• I believe this is normally an oversimplification with thinking at a “L1: Idea 1 is good / bad or right / wrong” and is the right way to get yourself into the wrong place!

We all have blind spots and ego distortions… To others, our blind spots and ego distortions are often... blindingly obvious!

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 5 mins

Summary: 

• IMO we all have blind spots and ego distortions. Finding out about them is IMO one key strategy to not living a bad life. 

• IMO you should do formalised feedback at work every 6 months. I often believe the simpler and more flexible the better (if you are doing a job that has not been done before you can’t really know how to do it and as such have a high confidence development plan). 

• How I find feedback feels: 

  • Relative strengths - feedback is energising

  • Relative weaknesses - feedback is draining

  • Blind spots and ego distortions - feedback is shocking! 

Before you ask someone to remove the twig from their eye try removing the log from yours 

• To you, your blind spots and ego distortions are not visible. 

• To others they are often blindingly obvious. 

• Unfortunately these two normally make unhappy bedfellows. 

  • You blissfully going along unaware of doing this counterproductive thing / missing something

  • Others thinking ‘are you serious, why is Duncan doing this!’

• Please don’t assume that others see what you see. In fact, my default is to assume that others don’t see what you see!

The only way to not have new blind spots and ego distortions is to not grow in any way 

• When someone gives you feedback, they are giving a gift. It might be a gift you weren’t expecting, but it is still a gift to help you grow. A gift = an upgrade opportunity (see this blog). 

• IMO if you grow in anyway you’ll:

  • Build new relative strength(s)

  • Build new relative weakness(s)

  • Build new blind spot(s) and ego distortion(s)

• IMO these come as a parcel. IMO it’s almost impossible to get one without the others. 

• “Every strength is a weakness and every weakness is a strength.” 

• What I find normally happens: New Unit of Ability = 1. New strength + 2. New weakness + 3. New blind spot and ego distortions

• IMO the trick is to grow new ability AND find out and ameliorate weaknesses, blind spots and ego distortions.

• I find when cultivating a new ability the new strength is often known (ie 1st order outcome is clear) but that the accompanying new weakness, blind spot and ego distortion is unknown (2nd order outcome is unclear). Boo! 

Knowledge is power… to build cool things and get yourself into trouble! 

• The higher knowledge you have the higher your ability to build abstractions that make logical internal sense but ultimately do not reflect reality - ie that create blind spots and ego distortions.

• If you don’t scale your methods for finding blind spots and ego distortions as you scale your knowledge / abilities IMO you end up being ‘strong weak’... but it’s actually ‘understood strong unknown weak’. This is a bad cocktail! 

• I’ve written about this from another lens in ‘getting high on your own supply / eating your own bullsh1t’. 

How to find blind spots and ego distortions:

• Method 1: do 6 monthly feedback with 3-5x people who work closely with you and have the following sections: 

  • Relative strengths

  • Relative weaknesses

  • Blind spots and ego distortions - just being prepared for this is half of the solution IMO. Knowing you have and will likely always have new blind spots and ego distortions and that you want others to help you find them is IMO half the battle! 

• Method 2: diverse reading (blog coming)

  • You can point out past blind spots and ego distortions you had. 

    • “I’m more proud of the things we didn’t do than the things we did do.” Steve Jobs. 

    • “I’m more proud of the blind spots and ego distortions that I’ve found I used to have than the new abilities I have cultivated.” Duncan Anderson! 

  • You can point out how this new strength / knowledge you have could cause problems! Everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere. 

  • Effectively seek out alternative viewpoints / schools of thought. IMO if you can’t outline an internally consistent alternative approach to your approach, you have blind spot / ego distortion. 

    • One key way to add value to a different viewpoint is to point out a blind spot / ego distortion (ie missing piece) that when added changes the synthesis.

    • F. Scott Fitzgerald - “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

• Method 3: building personas and then trying to see how they view the world. 

  • Some fav ones I have: 

    • How would 10 years ago Duncan have approached this and what problems would that have created? 

    • What would 80 year old nursing home Duncan think about this decision? I can miss the big picture but asking this helps me see the bigger picture! 

    • What would mum think? 

    • Where is the overton window on this? Are you off in the fringe and as such will others think this really strange. 

  • If we are talking about teachers:

    • Out of area

    • Traditional

    • High working traditional

    • Innovator 

  • Students:

    • Not motivated

    • Tries but does not succeed

    • Tries and succeeds 

If you look for and have others help you find blind spots and ego distortions you can turn growing your knowledge / abilities from ‘good bad’ to ‘good minimal bad’. If that isn’t catchy then nothing is! 

• Growing without personally consciously looking for blind spots and ego distortions and without having others help point them out to you.

• Growing with personally consciously looking for blind spots and ego distortions and with having others help point them out to you. 

Reportability vs Responsibility: people often think they want a new job, but what they want is more responsibility

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 3 mins

Summary: Leveling up your capacity to take on responsibility allows you to: constantly take on new growth areas, potentially prevent you from getting bored in your role and ultimately lead to building a better life for yourself

Overview: 

• IMO one cannot be given a good life, but one can try to build a good life. 

  • *aside: I do think we can try to create the conditions where one can build a good life and that we should eg have a strong social safety net. 

• IMO one path to a good life is taking on responsibility to try and build a good life. 

• Over time hopefully the responsibility one can shoulder increases. 

  • I’ve found that shouldering responsibility is not a burden. 

  • That shouldering responsibility is one path to meaning. 

  • IMO responsibility * making the world better => meaning. 

• Are you ready for the best sentence ever: a life without meaning is… meaningless. 

• One key route for ‘responsibility’ is needing to figure out what you should be doing at your job. Ie part of the ‘job description’ is undefined. 

• Often the most important ‘professional development’ goal I have for people is to increase the ‘amount of responsibility’ they can take. 

• Often the strategy I have for organisation structure is to increase the number of ‘high responsibility’ roles. 

• Jingle: IMO increasing the amount of responsibility one can shoulder, is one key ability one should foster. 

Analogy: responsibility levels 

Some of the different frameworks mentioned in the table above linked to ‘higher responsibility’

• Kegan developmental framework

• Kohlberg’s theory of moral development

• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

How chasing perfection and being a perfectionist don’t align

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 4 mins

Are these two ideas in opposition? 

• Idea 1: "We have a great deal of ground to cover. We’re going to do things a lot differently than they’ve been done here before … [We’re] going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because, in the process, we will catch excellence.” - Ken Kocienda

• Idea 2: “Be An Imperfectionist: Perfectionists spend too much time on little differences at the margins at the expense of the important things.” Ray Dalio

• Comment: 

  • IMO they are actually two slides of the same coin. IMO you want to try chase perfection AND be an imperfectionist. 

  • IMO you want to aim to be epic, but to know you can always improve, and that you’ll constantly have to change your focus; meaning you leave many things severely ‘imperfect’. 

  • *aside: IMO this is a rearticulation of "perfectionism vs sufficiency". 

Perhaps in pictorial format

• What people think 'trying to reach perfection' looks like. AKA a fixed mindset.

• What growth mindset people think improving looks like

• I feel that learning is not continual growth in one area, but growth in consecutive areas that look like little ‘s-curves’. 

  • I.e As you gain higher abilities in one area you unlock a new area of growth where you start a new S curve

• However, IMO even the above graph isn’t right. Normally subsequent ‘growth areas’ have a multiplier effects on top of prior areas. Ie learning in each new area also makes previous areas more valuable.

• An example of consecutive ‘s-curves’ for ‘written communication’

  • S-Curve 1: using words alone

  • S-Curve 2: incorporating quotes

  • S-Curve 3: using analogies

  • S-Curve 4: using equations, eg pain + reflection = progress

  • S-Curve 5: using taxonomies, eg L1: remember, L2: understand, L3: apply, L4: analyse, L5: evaluate, L6: create

  • S-Curve 6: using visual models like the a 2x2 or the ones further up this blog. 

  • Etc etc. 

• Aside: so much of the fun is finding new s-curves to surf. Super gnarly bro! 

So in some respects IMO the best way to improve is to be a curious imperfectionist who strives for perfection but actually wants excellence and is constantly exploring new things. (IMO that sentence is convoluted and actually says the same thing twice… it’s looking orthogonally at itself. Ha!)

• IMO one trick is to aim to constantly improve and to not be restless that your ability is not good enough at the same time. 

  • Try to constantly improve and to be at peace. 

  • Try to constantly improve and not be unsatisfied, to be satisfied. 

  • Jingle 1: To be content with not being content if you will ;)! 

• Try to constantly improve and in area 1... and then to find out about a new area, area 2 -  know that while you can still improve in area 1 it can be more effective to put your effort into area 2… this is because you will unlock a new opportunity set (area 2) but also ind doing this you will improve your ability in area 1 at the same time  (multiplier effect). 

• Example - Edrolo textbook questions

  • Area 1 = Y11/12 exam style questions which are aligned with VCAA

  • Area 2 = Y7-10 questions optimized for best learning and are not bound to any constraints

  • We can still get a lot better at Area 1, but by focusing in Area 2 where we have less restraints we are able to find more ingredients that have the potential to increase our understanding and allow us to make higher quality VCAA exam style questions in the future 

• Jingle 2: To be a work in progress, to always want to be a work in progress, to like being a work in progress. 

• IMO it’s possible for the world to only ever get more interesting. 

  • IMO one way for this to happen is to constantly learn (level up) in new areas. 

  • IMO, typically the more you know about something the more interesting it is (see ‘experience points’ blog). 

• IMO the more areas you know about the broader the solution sets you can conceive. 

  • So the more areas you have knowledge in the more interesting the world is AND the better the solutions you can come up with to help improve the world… so a multiplier effect on the multiplier effect? 

  • IMO, done well, knowledge and ability compound. IMO it’s possible for your mind to be eg 100x better at coming up with solutions than it is today. 

I said I was going to do short blog, but one more...

• Dreyfus taxonomy:

• IMO time needed to level up is typically not linear - time needed to get to each level of understanding in an area: 

  • Novice = 1 hour

  • Competent = 10 hours

  • Proficient = 100 hours

  • Expert = 1,000 hours

  • Master = 10,000

• I often find that it’s best to switch to a new area around ‘proficient’ as 1. You get higher ROI in learning a new area and 2. Often the way to further improve in an existing area is to compare and contrast it with a new area (aka orthogonal learning vs direct learning).

• Typically I have 2-3x ‘active focus areas’ where I’m trying to level up. 

  • For reference at the moment this is design, media bias and US presidential elections.

Conversation conventions - thoughts on how not to derail meetings

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 3 mins

We are taught about maths, we are made to write essays, we learn about chemical reactions… but we aren’t taught about quality verbal communications... 

• You’ll likely do a lot of verbal communicating in your life, your life will likely be better if you can communicate better. 

• An extraordinary amount of most companies is ‘verbal communication’. IMO if the company can verbally communicate well, it’s likely the company can do well.  

• People will often talk about how ‘culture is key’ for a company and they’ll actively work on culture. IMO verbal communication is upstream of culture. IMO if you can’t verbally communicate well you can’t have a culture! 

• IMO one should actively work on one's verbal communication skills. 

• IMO one should actively work on the verbal communication skills of people inside a company. 

• IMO verbal and written communication are likely the single biggest multiplier skills for almost every company. So improving at verbal and written communication is improving almost everything at a company!?! I think it so.  

Conventions for when convening 

• Stay on the point

  • This is from Ray Dalio and Principles

• If the conversation is talking about ‘Point A’ don’t respond with something about ‘Point B’. 

• Close out ‘Point A’ before moving on. 

• If someone raises ‘Point B’ then thank them for this and say that we’ll consider ‘Point B’ after we have finished discussing ‘Point A’. 

• Pick the right level: micro vs macro

  • When discussing you might need to be high level or in the detail. Normally if you are in a group meeting with people outside of your direct team you don’t want to be in the micro detail. If you work in the micro detail every day then it can be super tempting to go to that level. 

  • Picking the right level to be at is core to being able to have a discussion. 

• Optimise for a ‘conversation rally’: ideally say one thing in one minute. 

  • Saying one point in one minute = hitting one ball back in a way that can then be returned. 

  • Do not say 3 things in 5 minutes = hitting back 3 balls at different times that can’t be returned easily. 

    • Try not to start on one point, then tangent onto another and then another and then stop randomly with other participants now confused. Ie hit back 3x balls which cannot therefore be returned and therefore you aren’t optimising for developing an idea through a conversation rally. 

  • If people say one point in one minute then others typically do not need to ‘interrupt’ to be heard. The longer some speaks normally the higher the chance of interruption and then conversation can just devolve into a series of interruptions with no points followed until conclusion. 

  • This is a point (pun intended) for another day but the more participants in a discussion the greater the need for someone to run the metastructure of the discussion to have forward movement and eg stay on point. 

• Optimise for allowing alternative points of view

  • Try to provoke thought, not say how something categorically is. Ie “messaging confidence < message confidence”

  • Allow yourself enough rope to change your mind gracefully, allow others enough rope to change their mind gracefully.

  • Categories of messaging: 

    • Negative sum = debate

    • Zero sum = discussion

    • Positive sum = discourse

  • Comment: 

    • IMO positive sum discourse messaging is one of the key areas I find to having quality meetings. IMO one key to positive sum discourse is ‘optimising for allowing alternative points of view’.

    • A good discourse is one of the most energising best things I know of. A draining debate is one of the worst things I know of. 

• No direct brain => mouth connection

  • What not to do: say the first thing that comes to mind

  • What to do: 

    • At minimum consider two options in your head and then pick the one you want to do

    • Often i’ll write down 2-5x words to remind what i want to say and then look at it as I’m speaking to not get off topic

    • Make sure you are making space for all people to be part of the discussion. 

• Intellectual flexibility with bending towards reality

  • Try as hard to see why your point could be wrong as why it could be right. No ‘picking a side’ and ‘rooting, not thinking’.

  • “When the facts change, I change my point of view. What do you do?” Keynes

  • Try hard to understand the different user segments and how they would see your proposal. What’s optimal for one segment isn’t necessarily optimal for the greater good (max number of users). 

  • Will do ‘angels advocate’. Ie try to see how you can break a thesis in a positive sum way. If you can’t break a thesis then normally go ahead. 

Post game analysis: 

• After a meeting i’ll often try to review myself and 1 other person’s ‘meeting performance’. 

• I’ll often use some of the above conventions as ways to try and provide feedback.

Credibility vs Ability: try to be constantly cultivating both

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 4 mins

Summary: 

• Ability = what you can do

• Credibility = what others think you can do

• On my very first day of full time work when I was 22 I was told: ‘It’s not good enough to do a good job [ability], you have to have others know you are doing a good job [credibility].’

  • At university how well you do are your grades. No time needs to be spent on credibility. 

  • At work your performance is not so simple. There are typically no set measures of performance like an exam or assignment. As such IMO you can’t spend no time on credibility and expect others to know what your abilities are. 

    • *aside: if you are doing something that has not been done before it’s normally not possible to have set measures of ‘performance’ like tests, assignments, static rubrics, etc. 

• 1. Ability * 2. Credibility = 3. Outcome

  • As almost all jobs are multiplayer games, what you can get done is a function of ‘what others think you can do’ AKA credibility. 

  • In a multiplayer game having high ability but low credibility it will seriously hamper what you can get done. 

• They tell you to constantly work on yourself (ability), IMO you should also constantly work on others' understanding of your ability (credibility). 

Credibility vs Ability vs Liability vs No-ability vs Civility 

• No-ability: 1. High Ability * 2. Low Credibility = 3. Low Outcome

• So much of outcomes are about mindset. 

  • Henry Ford — 'Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.’

  • “Growth mindset = you belief you can improve” vs “Fixed mindset = you are born smart / dumb”

  • “Learned help yourselfness = you can do things that you have never been done before” vs “Learned helplessness = can only do something you have not done before if someone shows how to do it”

    • *aside: there is always a pioneer, to do something new someone has to be first. 

• In a multiplayer game, you need others to think the project / initiative / investment / etc can work out. This is partially determined by your credibility. 

• If your abilities are high but your credibility in the mind of your peers is low then often they will not be on board to try. 

• This likely means your outcomes will be below what your ability. Unfortunately your ‘low credibility’ is ‘no-ability’ :(. ‘Low credibility’ could lead to ‘sub-ability’ as you are substituted out of the role! 

• Liability: 1. Low Ability * 2. High Credibility = 3. Low Outcome

• Sometimes someone is given credence for high credibility because eg of their role title. 

• So they’ll start a project and their team will be on board… but then a bad outcome occurs because of low ability. 

• This leads to the team lead being a ‘liability’. 

• So, in effect what you can get done is the high water mark of your ability and credibility. 

• If you don’t lead a team, what work you will be considered for is a function of your ‘credibility’. Want high opportunity? Have high credibility. 

• Civility: Ability = Credibility

  • If you have high ability but low credibility then you’ll want to launch projects that the team won’t be onboard with and you’ll get annoyed, aka no civility. 

  • If you have high credibility but low ability then you’ll start projects you shouldn’t and have bad outcomes and annoyed people, aka no civility. 

IMO you should be always consciously cultivating credibility… indeed at work you have no choice as IMO people are consciously or subconsciously always adding or subtracting credibility from you

• I wrote a blog about strategies for building credibility here. 

• A few further thoughts: 

  • Building credibility = fostering loyal opposition

  • Building credibility = failing openly

  • Building credibility = being a team player = Team Player = 1. Loyal Opposition + 2. Disagree but commit + 3. Think of themselves and the collective + 4. Understand that collective happiness is needed for individual happiness + 5. Has a Team Leader

  • Building credibility = being a team leader

• But more than this, IMO you need to constantly communicate what you are doing and why. 

  • IMO you should be writing about strategy / progress / what we have learned / what we should stop doing / etc each week. 

    • Done well this serves the dual purpose of ‘figuring out what to do’ and ‘building credibility’. 

• Jingle: you might think that consciously building credibility makes you feel like a phoney… but IMO you won’t find it very funny if what you can get done is significantly less than your ability! 

  • “Credibility > Ability” = Liability

  • “Credibility < Ability” = No-ability

  • “Credibility = Ability” = Civility

  • IMO best to try and make sure your “Credibility = Ability”

If you only take one thing away

• I used to try really hard to improve my abilities. I used to try really hard to do a good job (quality output). But in hindsight I don’t think I was trying similarly hard to build credibility. 

• IMO, each week, one should be able to: 

  • Articulate if one has improved (grown abilities)

  • Articulate if one has done a good job

  • … and articulate if one has grown credibility. 

• If you can’t clearly articulate if you have grown credibility then it’s like you haven’t. 

Metacognition - the ultimate skill

By Duncan Anderson and Sheldon Kendrick. To see all blogs click here.

Summary reading time: 4 mins

Total blog reading time: 17 mins

Summary: metacognition is your ability to upgrade yourself. IMO this is the most important skill as being good at metacognition means you can be good at anything. IMO people are normally taught how to do a task well (procedural learning), not how to improve at tasks well (conceptual learning). IMO one can systematically upgrade one's ability to upgrade, IMO one can systematically upgrade other’s ability to upgrade. Read on for strategies to maximise metacognition. 

“People who lack the cognitive skills required to perform a task typically also lack the metacognitive skills required to assess their performance. Incompetent people are at a double disadvantage, since they are not only incompetent but also likely unaware of it.” (Behavioral Scientist, April 13, 2020)

• Metacognition = awareness of one’s own thought processes

  • “You do not learn from your mistakes, you learn from reflecting on your mistakes.”

• Metacognition = your ability to reflect on your thought processes. 

  • Being able to reflect means you are able to understand, review and thereby improve your thought processes. 

• Metacognition = being able to improve your thought processes through awareness of your thought processes.

• Metacognition = the skill of being able to upgrade yourself. 

• This is a mega (not meta) oversimplification -  there are two categories of people:

  • 1. No metacognition skills = cannot reflect on their thoughts and thereby cannot upgrade themselves. 

  • 2. Have metacognition skills = can reflect on their thoughts and thereby can upgrade themselves.

Reflection vs Metacognition - aka reviewing vs building a repeatable system where you stand on the shoulders of others / yourself

• From Sheldon: 

  • One way to inaccurately sum up this blog would be to say “be sure to spend time reflecting” but there is more to metacognition than that.

  • I would say that metacognition is a particular type of reflection, where you are reflecting on your thoughts, feelings, processes rather than on specific actions

    • You could reflect on a basketball game and think “I should have passed instead of taking that shot…”, but metacognition would be thinking “why did I choose to take that shot in the moment and how can I avoid similar mistakes in future?”

    • Thus metacognition gives the ability to upgrade yourself more broadly, as opposed to reflecting on one specific action.

  • Reflection relativities: 

    • L0: No reflection whatsoever

    • L1: “That was good/bad”

    • L2: “That was good/bad because of these actions”

    • L3: (Good reflection) “That was good/bad because of these actions and here’s what I would do if I had my time again”

    • L4: (Metacognition) “What were the thoughts/feelings/processes that led me to that course of action?” Build a repeatable system for how to approach it in future

Reflection vs Metacognition - aka reviewing vs building a repeatable system where you stand on the shoulders of others / yourself

• From Sheldon: 

  • I say this because one way to inaccurately sum up this blog would be to say “be sure to spend time reflecting” but there is more to metacognition than that.

  • I would say that metacognition is a particular type of reflection, where you are reflecting on your thoughts, feelings, processes rather than on specific actions

    • You could reflect on a basketball game and think “I should have passed instead of taking that shot…”, but metacognition would be thinking “why did I choose to take that shot in the moment and how can I avoid similar mistakes in future?”

    • Thus metacognition gives the ability to upgrade yourself more broadly, as opposed to reflecting on one specific action.

  • Reflection relativities: 

    • L0: No reflection whatsoever

    • L1: “That was good/bad”

    • L2: “That was good/bad because of these actions”

    • L3: (Good reflection) “That was good/bad because of these actions and here’s what I would do if I had my time again”

    • L4: (Metacognition) “What were the thoughts/feelings/processes that led me to that course of action?” Build a repeatable system for how to approach it in future

Metacognition magnitudes

• In one respect metacognition is your ability to review your work and figure out how to upgrade it.

• Levels

  • L1: cannot use another's classification system (eg rubric to mark an exam)

    • Simple example

• Complicated example

• L2: can accurately use another's classification system to rate eg 3 of 5 marks but cannot give actionable information to yourself or another on how to upgrade to 5 of 5 marks (poor teacher)

• L3: L2 + can give actionable information on how to upgrade from one approach (average teacher)

• L4: L3 + can give actionable information on how to upgrade from multiple approaches (good teacher). Eg can explain how to improve the answer but also write another correct answer that is using a different example or structured differently and then compare and contrast. 

• L5: can upgrade others to be able to use this classification system for to rate themselves

• L6: can make your own system to analyse the quality of work

• L7: L6 + can accurately grade work on your custom system

• L8: L7 + can give actionable feedback on this system to improve to yourself and others. 

• L9: can build others who can make their own classification systems AKA can build others who can upgrade their own metacognition skills. 

  • At this point someone is ‘free’. 

  • Visualisation of someone’s growth once they can upgrade their own metacognition skills.

• IMO your body is limited. IMO your mind is limitless. 

  • Jingle: IMO the sooner someone realises their mind can be limitless… the sooner it becomes limitless.

+++++++++++++++++

Details

“Freedom of speech is the master value, because it is the value through which we upgrade all other values.” Sam Harris

“Metacognition is the master skill, because it is the skill through which we upgrade all other skills.” Duncan Anderson 

• Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes. The future does not repeat the past… But it does rhyme. 

• You spend time learning new ideas. You spend time learning from others' mistakes. You should spend time learning from your mistakes. 

• Metacognition = reviewing others and yourself and explaining how to improve in an actionable fashion. Eg making a recipe, the criteria for a good recipe and calibrating yourself vs reality. 

• What would you do differently if you had your time again? IMO if the answer isn't ‘everything’ then you are not being properly vulnerable. 

  • When I review my work I try to see how I’d change everything…

    • .... somethings I’d only do 10% differently. 

    • … other things 100% differently. 

    • … I try to have nothing that I’d do 0% differently! IMO this is getting high on your own supply. 

  • I love the discipline of trying to see how to do everything differently! 

    • Trying to justify why you were wrong is giving yourself the gift of improving. 

    • Trying to justify why you were right is imprisoning yourself in mediocrity. 

  • IMO (almost) everything can be improved always. 

• Metacognition = the most important skill, as it is the skill of getting better. 

  • If you are the best at getting better you can be good at anything… including new things. New high value things that currently don’t exist. 

  • You can invent things. 

  • You can help upgrade others. 

  • Without metacognition skills you need to pick the right uni degree, or get the right job. IMO with metacognition skills life is about building your own ‘uni degree’ (professional development), life is about building your own job. 

  • Without metacognition skills IMO life is about being in the right place at the right time. With metacognition skills any time and place can be the right time and place. 

  • IMO if you have strong metacognition skills then if you don’t have a good life it’s on you. It’s not others' fault. 

  • IMO everyone can have strong metacognitive skills… but IMO no one is born with metacognitive skills… you can’t walk or talk!

  • IMO strong metacognition skills = learned help yourself-ness. IMO weak metacognition skills = learned helplessness. 

  • Bad outcome * strong metacognition skills = upgrade yourself = growth mindset = learned help yourself-ness = post traumatic growth

  • Bad outcome * weak metacognition skills = don’t upgrade yourself = fixed mindset = label yourself as ‘bad at something’ =  learned help yourself-ness = post traumatic stress

IMO what is one of the goals of the secondary education system? To build metacognition skills in students

• IMO procedural learning is teaching memorisation of others ‘if/then’ statements. 

• IMO conceptual learning is helping students create ‘if/then’ statements. 

• IMO we can shift the way content is taught in secondary schools to be ‘conceptual understanding’ and hence massively improve the metacognition skills students leave secondary school with. 

Examples of metacognition

• At Edrolo and OwlTail (two companies I co-founded) we try to have meta explanations ahead of time and after time for much of what we do. 

• I think you should try to be able to rate your performance in all key areas. Here is a MECE for you:

  • The work you do

  • Meetings you do

  • Verbal communication

  • Written communication

• Example 1: doing work - making a textbook. 

  • For instance if we are making a textbook we try to do the following: 

    • 1. Create a recipe for what the content should be. A recipe is a meta explanation of how we would like to make content that is used as the macro guide for making the content. 

    • 2. We try to create quality measures for each component of the recipe. 

    • 3. When making content we want the author to write down how they think they are going on quality (eg quantitatively rate against a framework and qualitatively explain what they think quality is) 

    • 4. For important parts of the recipe we have the content reviewed by a non-author who writes their view on quality (eg quantitatively rate against a framework and qualitatively explain what they think quality is) 

    • 5. Then we compare the ratings and see what we can learn. 

  • “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” Lincoln

    • When making a lesson for a textbook at Edrolo we might have a split like the following: 

      • Metacognition: 20% of total time with the author planning what to write for the lesson based on the recipe (ie in a systematic fashion)

      • Metacognition: 10% of total time with a reviewer reviewing the plan for a lesson against a system

      • Doing: 40% of total time with the author writing the lesson

      • Metacognition: 10% of total time with the author reviewing  the content they have created against a system (recipe + quality measure for recipe)

      • Metacognition: 10% of total time with a review reviewing  the content the author created against a system (recipe + quality measure for recipe)

      • Doing: 10% of the total time implementing the upgrades found from reviewing

    • In this example 50% of the time is spend doing and 50% planning and reflecting on doing (aka metacognition). 

    • IMO if you don’t spend time trying to get better you will not  get better. Hope is not a strategy. Hoping to get better is not a strategy. If you spend 100% of your time doing (execution) then you will likely not be getting better. 

    • IMO it can feel like reflecting on execution is ‘wasting’ time as you are not getting anything done… but I’ve found that it’s actually ‘creating time’ as you improve at speed and quality through reflection (metacognition) and hence improve how much output you get done thereby buying back time. 

  • IMO if you cannot explain what you are doing you do not understand what you are doing. 

  • IMO if you cannot explain why something is good or bad then examples of what is good or bad then you don’t know if it is good or bad. 

  • “If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.” Einstein

    • You need to be able to explain it clearly and simply. 

  • Metacognition = the process of explaining how you think

  • Metacognition = the process of explaining how what you have done can be improved

  • Metacognition = the process of explaining how what others have done can be improved

• Example 2: meetings: eg sales call, investor call, internal meeting

  • For important meeting I try to: 

    • 1. Make a plan before the meeting (metacognition)

    • 2. Write during the meeting things that go well and things that don’t (metacognition)

    • 3. Review after the meeting with others how things went (metacognition AKA Post Game Analysis)

  • For a sales meeting:

    • I try to build ahead of time what will lead to a ‘yes’. I typically try to define this as the ‘minimum sufficiency to get a yes’. 

    • Example yes sufficiency equation = 1. Convey 2x+ deal maker jobs to be done +2. Identify and handle any objections

    • Then after the call I rate how the call went with someone else then compare to eg if the school buys the textbook and why. I LOVE trying to calibrate whether my perception aligns with reality. 

• Example 3: verbal communication

  • Believe it or not you speak to people a lot. If you can get better at speaking to people then your interactions with others improve. So IMO one should spend time trying to improve at discussions. 

  • I speak in a podcast with my friend James here. 

  • After each podcast is live James and I listen to the podcast and then try to deconstruct how we can improve and give each other feedback using Voxer. 

  • I’ve honestly found this giving feedback to be the best part of doing the podcast. 

  • Slowly we get better at finding ways to help each other improve. Slowly I’m becoming more aware of how I speak in a discussion and being able to actively choose how to speak vs 'unconscious blurting of verbal diarrhea’ ;). 

• Example 4: written communication

  • Believe it or not you do a lot of written communication. 

  • If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others. No journey is long with good company. 

  • IMO if you want to make a big difference to the world the more people you can work with the better. 

  • As such, IMO learning how to play a multiplayer game well is very important. I’ve found one key component of playing a multiplayer game is written communication. 

  • These blogs are an example of me practicing written communication. Here is my process: 

    • 1. Write V1 of blog. 

    • 2. Leave it a week and then update to V2 (metacognition)

    • 3. Give the blog to another to provide feedback on how to improve (metacognition)

    • 4. Send the blog to people I work with and ask them to respond with a key thought or 2

    • 5. Discuss as a team

  • I hope my writing skills are improving… and that my skills to improve my writing and others writing (metacognition) are improving. 

  • One thing I try to develop is multiple forms of communication like visual models, equations, taxonomies, analogies, humour etc. 

Some of my fav questions for building metacognition in myself and others

• Are you able to please explain to me what you think the line for sufficiency of what a good job is? (vs here is what I think doing a good job is)

• Can you please explain what is just above sufficiency and why? (vs here is an example of doing better than sufficiency)

• Can you please explain to me what you think is just below sufficiency and why? (vs here is an example of doing worse than sufficiency)

• Do you think your performance is inline, above or below sufficiency and why? (vs I think you have done below / inline / above sufficiency)

• What is the key thing you think you did well and why? (vs I think the key think you did well is)

• What is the key thing you'd do differently if you had your time again and what would make it better? (vs I think the key thing you can improve is)

• If you were to write a blog about what you did what would the blog be about and why? (vs are you please able to write a blog about…)

• Comment:

  • IMO good coaches / managers / peers / friends don't tell others how to improve. IMO good coaches help others find ways for themselves to improve. 

  • IE don't give someone a fish (show how to improve), teach someone to fish (build metacognition skills in others).

  • IMO try not to show people how to do well, try to show people how to improve well. 

If you only take away one thing

• Metacognition might seem like a difficult thing to do… and I’m not saying that it is easy but boy is it fun! 

• IMO being able to improve yourself and others is one seriously rewarding activity in life. 

• I’ve found that a path to improved metacognition is simply reviewing your and others work and trying to explain if it is good / bad and then how to improve it…

• … in case it isn’t clear these blogs are attempts to improve myself and others… AKA these blogs are building metacognition skills. 

• Honestly, the best path I’ve found to improve metacognition skills is blogging like this once a week. If I had one piece of advice to 10 years ago Duncan it would be ‘write a blog a week on anything that interests you’. 

A tangent: Doing well in a field = 1. Knowledge in field * 2. Metacognition skills

• 1. Knowledge in a field (an adaptation of the Dunning-Kruger effect)

  • In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

  • Dunning Kruger in visual form: 

• I love this quote: “Ignorance more often begets confidence than knowledge.” —Charles Darwin

• 2. Metacognition skills

  • Visualisation 1

• To do well in a field you need to have strong knowledge AND strong metacognitive skills

  • It doesn't matter how much you know, it matters how much you know you know!

  • It doesn't matter how much you think, it matters how well you think about thinking!

Habits - accumulated momentum

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 4 mins

Summary: Momentum is an incredibly powerful tool... just as inertia is an incredibly powerful force. For me, in many respects, habits are ‘accumulated momentum’. 

First you make your habits, then your habits make you. 

• If I want to build a ‘habit’ I just start doing. Typically I find it super hard to do the ‘habit’ at the beginning but then it gets to the point where the ‘habit’ is super hard not to do. 

• What is hard on the beginning, is not just easy in the end, it's on autopilot. It’s hard not to do the habit! In Psychology this is called ‘automaticity’. 

• “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”. (Will Durant, paraphrasing Aristotle)

• Jingle: make something go from hard to do to hard not to do. 

• I’ve tried to set up my life to have activities I do being on ‘autopilot’. Eg exercise, writing, work, relaxing, etc. The idea is that I don’t have to spend effort on getting myself to do the activity (eg exercise, writing, working, relaxing) but instead concentrate on doing them enjoyably / high quality / etc (vs just even doing them).

• The more menial activities you’re able to do on ‘autopilot’, the less risk there is of experiencing decision fatigue because of these. You free up mental resources for other, higher value tasks.

IMO habits perhaps the wrong word... it's not a ‘habit’ but ‘accumulated momentum’ :) 

• From effort required to start habit to effort required to stop habit.

• Example 1 for DA: exercise

  • Doing exercise used to be such a drag, much mental effort required to do the activity. 

  • Part of the problem I had was the time I set aside to exercise was after work and there were often quality excuses for not doing this, eg I have to get this piece of work done for tomorrow, eg I need to catch up with a friend etc. 

  • Now I exercise before work where any work needed to be done is done by the end of the day and I have the whole day ahead of me. Also, I don’t have catch ups with friends at 6am in the morning :). 

  • Seriously doing exercise is now autopilot, no mental effort required, it’s totally lovely. I look forward to it, I feel good about getting up to do it, doing it, after it, I get to listen to podcasts and audiobooks. Exercising is now mentally energising vs large effort needed (draining) in the past. Lovely! 

• Example 2 for DA: blogging / writing (AKA what you are reading now)

  • IMO writing is thinking. IMO writing is problem solving. IMO writing is a high quality discussion with yourself. 

  • IMO you’d make time to have a high quality discussion with someone once a week, why don’t you make time having a high quality discussion with yourself? To me, in many respects writing is having a date (relationship) with myself.

  • IMO meditation is many things (eg practicing getting to calm, moving from thinking mode to sensing mode, a form of relaxation, etc etc). For me meditation is a core part of attempting to have quality mental headspace (mental health).

  • You could argue that writing is the opposite of meditation – where meditation is about clearing your mind and achieving mental stillness, writing is a way to organise and articulate your thoughts in a logical way.

  • For me writing > meditation. It’s making space to think through something for yourself. To make a little theorem that you can use to hopefully upgrade your and others lives. 

    • So meditation = relaxation, calm, not being tense…

    • And writing = upgrading? 

    • IMO it’s not ‘or’ but ‘and’. 10 years ago Duncan used to be all work and no meditation or writing etc. I honestly feel like I’m in a relationship with writing. I have a date with writing each Sunday morning (when I write these blogs). I seriously look forward to writing now…

  • … initially I was like ‘where do I have time to write’? I just decided to write on Sunday and said that done well it would be relaxing, energising and fun. Initially it was super duper hard to do. But slowly it’s become easier to now where it’s hard not to write. I rarely drink on Saturday night now as ‘I don’t want to be a shi1t date for myself’ when I write on Sunday morning. 

  • *aside: IMO mental health comes with much embedded negative connotations, if you are seeing a nutritionist you are not necessarily overweight, but if you are seeing a counsellor you have mental health issues. IMO ‘mental health / headspace’ ranges from really bad ⇔ epically good. IMO consciously cultivating a quality mental headspace is core to a good life. To me part of quality mental headspace is working well, exercising well, writing well, quality relationships… but also relaxing well (“for machines down time is a bug, for humans it’s a feature”)... and much more! 

If you only take away one thing

• I’ve found that what is hard to do in the beginning is not just effortless to do in the end… it’s hard not to do. 

• I’ve found that I can get most parts of my life to run on autopilot so that I don’t need to devote energy to ‘doing tasks’ but to ‘doing tasks well’. 

• Want to not be a human doing, but a human being? Just start... doing… the path to being starts with doing ;P

Entrepreneurship vs Leadership: for good outcomes you need both Entrepreneurship AND Leadership

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Summary

• 1. Outcome = 2. Entrepreneurship * 3. Leadership

  • Entrepreneurship = the right strategy

  • Leadership =

    • Know were strategy is vs Overton Window

    • Can shift the Overton Window

    • If strategy is quality and inside of Overton Window can inspire people to be onboard with the strategy 

      • Jingle 1: Managers tell people what to do. Leaders inspire people to do. 

    • Actively tries to ‘not get high on their own supply’ through thinking like a scientist and having Loyal Opposition = tell you if strategy is bad, tell you where Overton Window is vs where you think it is.

      • Jingle 2: Managers teach a healthy respect for authority. Leaders teach a healthy disrespect for authority. 

      • IMO well functioning companies and countries have both a healthy respect and disrespect for authority :). 

• IMO to have a great outcome for a company, country, sports team, etc you need BOTH great Entrepreneurship AND great Leadership. 

Examples (DA’s 10,000 foot 2c)

• Elon Musk - epic entrepreneur, limited leader. 

  • IMO Elon is the best entrepreneur ever. But he ain’t the best leader ever IMO. 

  • If he didn’t have such epic missions for SpaceX and Tesla and wasn’t such an epic engineer then people wouldn’t be around (ie wasn’t IMO epic at ‘entrepreneurship’). IMO they are around in spite of his ‘leadership’, not because of it. 

• Steve Jobs - epic entrepreneur, limited leader. 

  • Again epic on product… but not always the nicest person to be around. 

  • In some respects the better one is at ‘strategy’ the more one can get away with average leadership? Jobs was known for yelling at and berating people. People often refer to him as ‘inspiring’ but that many people didn’t last long. Having said this there were people who stuck around for decades. 

• Sundar Pichai (current CEO of Google) - great entrepreneur, great leader

  • Building Chrome from scratch is pretty friggin amazing. 

  • Really nice guy and able to get large teams working well together. This opposes vs someone like Andy Rubin who was by all accounts very abrasive (inventor of Android)

• Steve Ballmer (former Microsoft CEO) - average entrepreneur, average leader

  • Average at product. Zune, Nokia purchase, etc. 

  • Average leader… I do just love this click too much. 

• Satya Nadella (current Microsoft CEO) - solid entrepreneur, great leader

  • Really solid entrepreneur building eg Microsoft Azure.

  • Epic leader. The renaissance of Microsoft from strategy and culture under him is IMO epic. And just listen to him speak. 

• Lee Kuan Yew (first Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990) - epic entrepreneur, epic leader

  • Built Singapore from 3rd world country to now having the ~equal highest income per capita in ~2 generations. 

  • Entrepreneurship - IMO he’s my prototype of a ‘pragmatist’ (vs ideologue). Do what works. 

  • Leadership - honestly it’s not often you catch me watching political speeches about south east asia from the 70s… but watching Lee Kuan Yew is Lee-dership Kuan-owledge Ac-Yew-sition :). 

  • *aside: read everything LKY has written! This book is a great place to start. 

• Angela Merkl (I’ve been trying to stay away from modern politics  as it’s just a hot button topic). 

  • Entrepreneurship - time will tell if some of the ideas work… but I like most of them! 

  • Leadership - but IMO she is an epic leader. She has been able to get the German public (not all) on board with more immigation, bailing out other EU countries and more. Max respect Merks! 

Overall model for ‘outcomes’ - “1. Outcome = 2. Entrepreneurship * 3. Leadership”

• Entrepreneurship

  • A. Can make good strategy 

• Leadership

  • B. Know where strategy is vs Overton Window (ie acceptability)

  • C. If strategy is good but is outside of Overton Window then can shift Overton Window 

  • D. If strategy is good and is inside the Overton Window then can inspire people to be behind the strategy (ie to want to do a good job). This is making a good story for the strategy (see ‘Story = Reality Distortion Field’. You need long term and short term)

  • E. Actively tries to ‘not get high on their own supply’ through thinking like a scientist and having Loyal Opposition

    • This is to 1. Tell you if your idea is wrong, 2. Stress test and improve the idea and 3. If you don’t have this, people don’t get behind something (ie will disagree and commit, they need the opportunity to disagree). 

    • We all need external input, we will all be wrong from time to time. IMO unless we fight not to, we will eventually ‘get high on our own supply’. 

    • People will and should disagree with what you think from time to time. If they don’t tell you they do you and them a disservice. 

      • Your co-workers owe you their view, they betray you if they sacrifice this to your opinion. 

    • If people don’t tell you if they have a different point of view then something is wrong. It’s you or them! 

    • If you never hear any dissenting points of view then something is definitely wrong… and it is you! 

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Details

What is the Overton Window? 

• Politics example from Wait But Why

• Smoking example

• iPhone example

  • Before the iphone launch in 2007 the biggest rising phone was the blackberry with a full keyboard. The ‘Overton Window’ was that a phone needed a keyboard. That a phone could have only a touch screen was seen as ‘controversial’ / ‘fringe’. 

  • Steve Ballmer the Microsoft CEO at the time of the iPhone’s launch ““There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item.”

  • iPhones were wildly more expensive than the Nokia’s people bought, had crap battery life etc, but people bought them! 

• Textbooks example - Edrolo should consider making them with 100% in house resourcing vs external authors as was the existing way

  • Doing in house resourcing was initially heretical. And frankly it only really came about after we found it very difficult to work with external authors in a collaborative way (ie hard to collaborate when they are working on authoring in the night times after their full time teaching job). 

  • Collaboration done well = … good. 

  • Collaboration much easier if all work the same hours in the same place! 

• DA thoughts about Overton Window and product (perhaps this should be it’s own blog)? 

  • Internal view - eg inside your company

    • It doesn’t matter how good your strategy is if it’s not ‘acceptable’ for your team / company / country. If your strategy falls outside the current Overton Window then people will not be on board. 

    • You must be able to move the ‘Overton Window’ internally through ‘Leadership’. 

    • How do I think you move the Overton Window? Communicate, communicate, communicate. 

      • IMO you need to constantly present at company all hands, you need to send company wide blogs, you need to send team only blogs, you need to have discussions one on one and in small teams. 

      • IMO the biggest component of Leadership is constant communication. 

  • External view - eg for your customers

    • “Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.”

• Individual purchase (iPhone) vs team purchase (textbook) AKA ‘building utopian vision’ vs ‘optimal first step’. 

  • An iPhone is bought by an individual. They can make purchase decisions that work only for themselves. 

    • Often the optimal strategy is to focus on the ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopters’. 

    • What is ‘acceptable / mainstream’ for an innovator is likely ‘fringe / insane’ for a laggard. 

    • If you are selling to individuals often the best strategy is to build your ‘utopian vision’ this gets ‘innovators’ on board who then shift the Overton Window for everyone else. 

    • This is taking ‘10 steps of change in one hit’. 

  • A textbook is bought for all teachers in that subject. So the purchase decision needs to work for everyone, not just one segment of teachers (eg innovators, or late majority)

    • If you have some teachers ‘not onboard’ then the product will not be bought. 

    • IMO for a textbook you want to = optimal first step. 

    • This is taking ‘1 step of change each year, so that in 10 years you have taken 10 steps. Not taking 10 steps in 1 year’.

• IMO often:

  • Selling to individuals = best strategy is utopian destination product (ie 10 steps in one go)

  • Selling to teams = best strategy is what is the optimal first step (ie 1 step in one go)

• One product strategy I have for selling to teams = 1. Have no scorched earth (ie do not abandon any of the use cases for the different teacher users segments) + 2. Changes to existing ‘Jobs To Be Done’ (JTBD) are one step from current usage (this is typically inside the overton window) + 3. You can do new JTBD that eg replace an existing JTBD but best not to ‘replace’, do in addition. 

• *aside: this probably deserves it’s own blog. Haha! 

How to shift the Overton Window... IS ALSO stress testing and calibrating your Strategy… IS ALSO Leadership

• One articulation I have for strategy: Strategy = a collection of evolving theorems (or Earned Secrets)

  • IMO theorems help more than they hinder. 

  • IMO theorems work somewhere but not everywhere. 

  • IMO strategy is a collection of intelligently layered together theorems that work in a positive sum fashion. 

• IMO strategy is constantly evolving. Strategy is never done. IMO thinking that strategy can be done is dumb. IMO constantly evolving strategy is lots of fun! 

• IMO you build, evolve and get feedback on strategy by: 

  • Present strategy at company all-hands meetings

  • Write blogs on strategy constantly - eg weekly or fortnightly (IMO this is not something you do once for a year etc)

  • Have meetings on strategy constantly - eg weekly or fortnightly

  • Have others write about strategy constantly - eg weekly or fortnightly

  • Have informal chats with people every day or two about little components of strategy

  • Share external readings on strategy and discuss constantly - eg weekly or fortnightly

• Comment

  • IMO the process of building and evolving strategy IS the same as moving the Overton Window. 

  • If you just send eg one big email a year with ‘new strategy’ people might have no context, not get it, the strategy is outside of the overton window, etc etc.

How much you can shift the Overton Window is related to how much credibility you have

• See ‘Cultivating Credibility’ blog. 

• IMO one avenue to cultivate credibility is communicating with others. 

If you only take away one thing

• IMO to have a great outcome for a company, country, sports team, etc you need BOTH great Entrepreneurship AND great Leadership. 

• If you want to go fast, go by yourself. 

• If you want to go far, go with others. 

• No journey is long with good company. 

• If you want good company… and a good company ;) then constantly work on cultivating your strategy (entrepreneurship) and leadership (communication) skills. 

• Peace, love… and theorem evolution! 

Brain upgrading: there is no such thing as intelligence

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Summary: 

• What people think of as intelligence is actually accumulated knowledge, skills and innovation ability.

  • What you can learn is a function of what you know. The more you know the faster you learn! (see explanation below)

  • What you can do (skills and innovation ability) is a function of what you have done. The more you have done the more you can do! 

• Your body is limited, your mind is limitless. 

• IMO your accumulated skills, knowledge and innovation ability (AKA intelligence) should compound exponentially over your life. 

  • No one is born able to walk or talk. 

  • Some people upgrade themselves to invent computer coding (Ada Lovelace), understand the motion of the heavenly bodies (Newton) or build rockets to take humanity to Mars (Musk) - growth mindset

  • Others believe they are born ‘not good at maths’ - fixed mindset

• Jingle: IMO your mind is your ultimate possession. Treat it right and i'll treat you to a good life. 

  • Matthewing your mind… don’t mind if I do!

Reading time: 8 mins

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Details

Growth mindset = your abilities are a product of cultivation

Fixed mindset = you are born good / bad at something. 

The Matthew Effect in education and what this tells us about geniuses:

• What is the Matthew effect?

• Some children come to school having read 20 books, Other students are given a book at the start of school and hold it upside down (ie have read zero book prior to starting school). 

  • Which student do you think gets told they are ‘smart’? 

• The students with a starting point of 20 books improve at a faster rate than the students who have read none, over the duration of primary school this compounds and the distance in reading between the students grows exponentially larger

• IMO what people consider ‘genius’ is explained by the Matthew Effect.

  •  Typically “geniuses” had an early start on a particular ‘skill’ (eg music = Mozart, golf = Tiger Woods, physics = Elon Musk, coding = Bill Gates) that puts a child apart from eg other 4 year olds. 

  • Then this child receives positive feedback that puts in place a positive feedback loop that means they improve further and further compounding exponentially away. 

  • What was a small gap at 4 years old then turns into a bigger and bigger gap to the point where someone has ‘other worldly abilities’ vs normal. 

  • They were not born this way, they compounded this way! 

• Intelligence = built not born. 

• Intelligence = accumulated knowledge, skills and innovation ability. 

• Intelligence = compounds. 

The dumbest words in the english language: smart and intelligent? 

• IMO ‘smart’ has deep fixed mindset connotations. 

  • IMO someone is not smart or dumb. 

  • Dumb = novice = someone is yet to cultivate themeslves. 

  • Smart = expert = has cultivated themselves to have high ability.

• Jo Boaler (Stanford Education Professor): The biggest problem with maths education today is that people (teachers / students / parents) think that someone is either good or bad at maths. Ie maths in the west has a deep embedded fixed mindset culture. 

• We need the culture to shift from asking “How intelligent someone is?” to asking “ how much upgrading one has done to one's brain?” 

  • IMO the traditional meaning of smart / intelligent implies that one cannot upgrade one’s brain. 

    • I.e Intelligence = Ability they were born with

  • IMO we need to shift the meaning to Intelligence = built not born. 

    • In some respects ‘Intelligence = knowledge, skill and innovation ability you have cultivated’. 

• As per other blogs I’m trying not to use the words intelligent, smart, dumb, genius! This I like to think is ‘smart’. 

Intelligence is a skill itself - AKA there is no such thing as intelligence by the traditional definition. 

• Intelligence can take on many meaings depending on what lens you take, IMO intelligence is perceived by large in society incorrectly - here is how I think the perception is wrong and where it should shift to

  • Intelligence ≠ IQ Test

    • If there was a test for intelligence do you not think people would use it? 

    • If you could have an IQ test see if someone was intelligent, hiring staff would be pretty easy right? 

  • Intelligence ≠ Ability to learn something (theorem) and apply it in the exact circumstance you learned it. 

    • Intelligence = Ability to learn something (theorem) and apply it in a new circumstance. 

  • Intelligence ≠ how fast you can crunch sums. 

    • Slow ≠ slow (slow is a synonym for ‘dumb’... but more than that how fast you can crunch a sum is seen by some as a measure of ‘intelligence’. IMO being slow or fast at problem solving isn’t what is relevant, it’s the quality of the solution, not the time taken that matters. So being ‘slow’ to come up with a solution doesn’t mean you are ‘dumb’. Or… for some fun word play… slow ≠ slow)

    • Intelligence = can you apply a skill or knowledge in a new circumstance? Not how fast you can apply in an existing trained circumstance. 

  • Intelligence ≠ not the number of theorems from others you have memorised. 

    • Intelligence = the number of new theorems you can create (innovation ability). 

    • Intelligence = the number existing theorems you can adapt to new circumstances (innovation ability).

    • Intelligence = the number of existing theorems you can combine together in novel ways (innovation ability).

  • IMO the value of knowledge and skills is what new things you can do with them. Not that you can apply them in the exact circumstance you were taught them in (ie rote learning, AKA procedural understanding, AKA memorising someone else’s if/then statement). 

    • How could a test with one right answer ever test if you can apply that knowledge in all circumstances?

    • How can one question on a concept every test if you can apply that concept in more than that specific question? 

    • Procedural understanding = can apply in the exact circumstances you have seen in the past.

    • Conceptual understanding = can apply in new circumstances in the future you have never seen before. 

• Essentially I think intelligence is your ability to draw on all your knowledge to synthesize new solutions to new new scenarios that you come across

  • If you are unable to synthesize new solutions then you have no hope but to be reliant on the if/else statements of others

  • Example

    • This is the difference between a doctor giving a diagnosis of a known disease based on known inputs (symptoms) and a post-doctorate finding a breakthrough in a viable coronavirus vaccine

Alright, this is getting off track. Haha! Sounds like me! 

How much you can learn is a function of how much you know? Ie does everything compound? 

• Example: reading an article - qualitative explanation

  • Let’s say that ‘Person 1’ likes sport and ‘Person 2’ doesn’t like sport. 

  • Both ‘Person 1’ and ‘Person 2’ read an article on sport. 

  • In the same time with the same article: 

    • More facts: Person 1 will find more facts than Person 2 (eg 5 vs 3) as they know what to look for because of prior sports knowledge. 

    • Each fact is more valuable: each fact will mean more to Person 1 than Person 2 as the value of facts is based on how many other facts you can join each fact onto. Eg fact value: “fact 1 joined onto 3 other facts” > “fact 1 joined onto 1 other fact”

    • Each fact is remembered longer: the more valuable a fact the longer you remember. 

• So effectively knowledge compounds. The more you know the more you learn from each incremental unit of learning. AKA the Matthew Effect.

• IMO the same compounding effect applies for acquiring skills and innovation ability. 

  • Using physical tools as an analogy to explain skills 

    • Quote: “If all you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.” 

      • Imagine you are trying to build a house and all you have is your hands, some sticks and mud. 

      • Now imagine you have all the modern day tools and can go to a hardware store. 

      • It’s not fair, the person with tools and access to a hardware will be able to build a skyscraper. The former a sand castle. 

    • This is very similar to comparing two people in a workplace, one who has is adept in many skills and the other who is a novice

      • You are both humans, but one of you has systematically accumulated skills, and the other one hasn’t. 

      • One is not born better than the other, one has built themselves to have capabilities greater than the other. 

  • Let’s say knowledge = ingredients, skills = tools (like a knife, oven, etc) and innovation ability = recipes. 

    • You can see the innovation others have done by looking at the recipes they have created. 

    • Then you start to do small innovation by simply changing one step of their recipe. 

    • Then you do medium innovation by joining together 2 recipes in a novel way. 

    • Then you do large innovation by starting to make your own tools, join together 3+ recipes for 80% of the solution and make up some new steps to get to 100%. 

    • IMO anyone can innovate just like anyone can learn to talk. 

  • In life you want to try systematically accumulate as many tools (skills) as you can and keep them stocked in your shed (prior knowledge), as well as seek for out many different supply lines to hardware you need (knowledge) so you can spend your time building the Burj Khalifa (breaking new ground innovation) and not pottering around with sand castles (repeating if/then statements)

• So yes, to me done well upgrades have increasing value per unit of time, ie compound exponentially over time. 

  • 1 hour of upgrades 10 years ago = 1 unit of improvement. 

  • 1 hour of upgrades now = 10 units of improvement. 

• IMO the best people have cultivated their minds to be 100x+ more capable than ‘average’. 

  • I think someone like Elon is 1,000,000x as innovative as the ‘average’ person. 

  • But I also think that everyone could be as innovative as Elon. 

  • To do what Elon does you have to do what Elon does. IMO he’s be at hardcore upgrades for 4 decades. 

  • It might seem like a lot of work, and it is a lot of work…

  • ...I’d just change one word however…

  • It’s a lot of fun / reward / meaning / energising / positive sum-ness!  

  • IMO your mind is your ultimate possession. Want to have fun / reward / meaning / energising / positive sum-ness? IMO spend time consciously upgrading your brain! 

If you only take away one thing: 

• IMO you are not born good or bad at anything. 

• IMO intelligence = how much cultivating you have done to that point. 

• IMO intelligence can compound exponentially. This means that you might have 10x the capabilities you had 10 years ago… so all else equal you might add 10x the value to the world… and as such should be paid 10x as much? 

• The best things in life are selfless and selfish! 

Cultivating credibility: positive vs negative sentiment override

By D Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Summary: 

• Credibility = reputation = trust = belief in yourself = others belief in you. 

• IMO whether you are conscious about it you are constantly cultivating or killing credibility… in effect we are all creatures of credibility!

• The more credibility you or your business has the more you can get done. The easier everything is. The less credibility, the harder everything is. 

• Jingle: IMO one should constantly consciously be trying to cultivate credibility. 

Positive vs negative sentiment override - aka your reputation (credibility)

• Negative sentiment override: 3:1 negative:positive track record means that others automatically think ideas you have are bad, aka you have a reputation for doing a bad job. 

• Neutral sentiment override: 1:1 negative:positive track record means that others don’t think your ideas are normally good or bad. You don’t really have a reputation. 

• Positive sentiment override: 1:3 negative:positive track record means that others automatically think ideas you have are solid, aka you have a reputation for doing a good job. 

• Game changer sentiment override: 1:5+ negative:positive track record means that others don’t just think your ideas are good, but if your idea is opposing someone else’s view they automatically think ‘i’m likely missing something’ not ‘the game changer must be wrong’. aka you have a reputation for being on a different plane. 

IMO it is not good enough to do a good job, you have to have others know you do a good job. 

• "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

• IMO you want to have a minimum of ‘positive sentiment override’ reputation for yourself and / or your company. Doing this makes everything easier. IMO do this by working in your circle of competence and proactively posting about how you are going AND consciously expanding your circle of competence each year. 

Reading time: 10 mins

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Details:

Positive sentiment override

• From nobel prize winning economist Danny Kanheman: positive sentiment override is the point where positive events mean you override a negative event with positive sentiment. Kahneman says the average of this point is 3:1. 

• Person lens: 

  • for example if you have 4 interactions with a person and 3 are positive and 1 negative, you don’t mind the negative interaction. The 3 positives mean you have ‘positive sentiment override’ for the 1 negative. However if you have 2 positive for 2 negative then you will start to care about the negative interactions and not have positive sentiment towards this person.

• Job lens: 

  • if you work for 4 hours, and 3 hours are positive but 1 hour negative you don’t mind about the 1 negative, you have positive sentiment override and likely think ‘this is a good job’. However if in the 4 hours you had 2 hours positive and 2 hours negative then you might think ‘this is not a good job’. 

• Company lens: 

  • if you buy a product from a company such as a textbook and for every 3 things that delight you 1 thing disappoints you, you don’t mind as you have ‘positive sentiment override’. However 2 delights for 2 freights could well make you think of the textbook in a negative light! 

Credibility increments 

• -L1: negative sentiment override / don't trust other / don’t believe in yourself

  • Eg ~1:3 positive:negative. You have a bad track record.

  • Person lens: a person has actively destroyed credibility / trust to the point where others think this person’s recommendations are default wrong. “The imbecile is speaking again”. A person with negative sentiment override speaks and you are looking for why what they say doesn’t make sense. 

  • Job lens: 3 hours negative for every 1 positive means even the 1 positive annoys you as you are dreading the next negative hour which will imminently occur .

  • Company lens: experience with the companies products has been so bad that if a salesperson from the company calls about a new product you actively block speaking to them. 

  • Comment: your reputation is bad, it precedes you to the point of closing the door as you approach. 

• L0: neutral sentiment no override (i’m particularly proud of how convoluted that is)

  • Eg you’ve never met this person before, or the first time buying a product from a company. Or you have interacted with the person or company before but have had 1:1 negative:positive outcomes. 

  • Person lens: You don’t overlook bad outcomes (positive sentiment override) or assume outcomes will be negative (negative sentiment override). If someone speaks / puts forward a proposal you see is ‘neutrally’ (or with your personal set of context (biases) and blind spots and ego distortions). 

  • Job lens: you don't’ dislike or like this job. You don’t necessarily go the extra mile for the company or push yourself to level up because ‘this is a job, not a vocation’. 

  • Company lens: you use the product, but you don’t recommend it to anyone and if another product came along you’d readily consider switching. 

  • Comment: you don’t have a reputation, it’s not bad or good. When you approach you need to knock on doors and explain who you are and what it is you do. 

• L1: positive sentiment override / trust other / believe in yourself

  • Eg ~3:1 positive:negative. You have to have a track record here… and it’s a good one. 

  • Person lens: due to past positive track record others think highly of you. When you come up with a new proposal, others stop what they are doing and make time to listen to you. Instead of closing doors as you come (negative sentiment override) they open the doors and welcome you in. 

  • Job lens: you look forward to going to work on average. Yes there are always bad / draining periods, but they are worth it. 

  • Company lens: you launch a new product and send an email to existing customers about it. They see the email in their inbox and actively open it to read what you are doing. 

  • Comment: IMO this is the minimum you want for yourself, your job, the company you work. Doing a product outside your ‘circle of competence’ is often a way to try to build something great but execute not great and thereby have ‘neutral / negative’ response. 

• L2: game changer (Lee Kuan Yew, FDR, JK Rowling, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk)

  • Eg 5:1+ positive:negative. Long and positive track record. IMO no one is born a ‘game-changer’. No one is born able to talk or walk. IMO almost anyone can level themselves up into a ‘game changer’. Visionary is a word people use, but IMO this comes with much embedded fixed mindset. 

  • Person lens: you put forward a new proposal that is against an existing view someone has. 

    • Negative sentiment override outcome: see this person has no idea what is going on, another event of ‘negative’. 

    • Neutral sentiment no override outcome: hmmm, I don’t get why this person is saying this, not good. 

    • Positive sentiment override: I don’t agree but everyone misses the mark from time to time, they are still a good operator and someone we want around. 

    • Visionary: hmmm, they have a different point of view to me, maybe I need to re-examine my synthesis. AKA Your ability to change people’s minds is strong. 

    • Comment: 

      • You can dig your way out of ‘negative sentiment override’. But it takes work. 

      • If you have positive sentiment override credibility you can move way faster with people as you need to worry less about your ‘messaging’ and more about ‘progress’. 

  • Job lens: this negative event is an opportunity to grow, not a reason to question whether I should be looking for a new job. IMO for a job to be a game changer most of the levelling up required is by the person doing the job (as opposed to the ‘company’). IMO many jobs can be made into game changers (an increasingly higher percentage). 

  • Company lens: you launch a new product people line up to get it (eg ne harry potter book, eg iphone, eg tesla). 

  • Comment: when you approach, people don’t just open their doors and greet you, they organise a town meeting and try to get as many people to come to listen to what you have to say. 

Credibility cultivation categories

• L0: Reactive

  • "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" If you do something good but no one sees it did you do anything good? 

  • It’s not enough to do a good job, you need to have others know you do a good job. 

  • Ways to build credibility reactively: 

    • Eg 1: you had solid sales numbers for the year that can be seen in a report at the end of the year. So someone can see after the fact you did a solid job. 

    • Eg 2: you were involved in the team who made the first iPhone. The product did amazing, you were on the team, so therefore you must be good. 

• L1: Reports

  • You are sending regular updates (eg weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly) about the progress you are making. 

  • In this you likely have the key metrics that matter (eg KPIs, OKRs), qualitative and quantitative explanations of them and some small free from thoughts about how you are 1. Understanding the problem space more and / or 2. Proposing new solution sets. 

  • You need to demonstrate progress that can be measured after the fact (AKA like in “L0: Reactive”) but you also ‘L1: report’ on upstream improvements. 

• L2: Proactive

  • You do not just deliver good outcomes (e.g. sales numbers for the year, or a product that has strong traction). You don’t just show that along the sales year or product build you are improving your approach, you break new ‘blue ocean’ ground. 

  • One key way to demonstrate you making new ‘blue ocean’ ground is through ad hoc larger blogs / strategy pieces / presentations that are not minor small updates (eg small free form thought) but large conceptual steps forward. 

  • An example of this would be Elon and ‘self driving investor day’. Or Lee Kuan Yew’s national addresses to Singapore. 

• Comment: 

  • IMO it’s best to do all three levels of credibility cultivation. 

How to turn a bad outcome into a positive event. “The only way to fail is to fail to learn.”

• IMO what matters is not the outcome of an event, but the sentiment of the event. 

• Education vs Innovation

  • Education = what happens in most of secondary school and undergraduate university = learning the knowledge others created. 

  • Innovation = creating new knowledge yourself (Earned Secrets).

  • Education = 1. Learn => 2. Do => 3. Succeed

  • Innovation = 1. Do => 2. Fail => 3. Learn => 4. Succeed

  • Comment

    • For the longest time I didn’t realise there was a difference between ‘Education’ and ‘Innovation’. To me they were both ‘new knowledge’. However IMO learning existing knowledge others have created is a world apart from creating new information yourself. 

    • I used to feel that  if I wasn’t gaining knowledge while attempting to innovate at the same rate as when being educated that I was wasting time! 

    • “To innovate you have to be comfortable wasting time.” If you don’t know what to do, you’ll spend a lot of time learning what not to do ;)! 

• Education vs Innovation visualisation (Hat tip to Mikayla for this image)

• IMO it does not matter if you ‘fail’, it matters what you do with ‘failing’. 

• The only way to fail is to fail to learn! [*aside: maybe this should be a blog in it’s own right]. 

• Cultivating vs killing credibility

  • Option 1 - Cultivating: Fail => demonstrate that you recognise you failed => show explanation for why you failed and how it is unlikely you will do it again => credibility built (AKA someone chalks up a positive event to you / the company)

  • Option 2 - Killing: Fail => don’t demonstrate that you recognised you failed => don’t show an explanation for why you failed and thereby are likely to commit the same mistake in the future => killing credibility. 

High credibility allows you to lift the outcomes of those around you. 

• There is a lot of education research around how expectations of others affect outcomes... but it also makes intuitive sense. 

  • Low expectations bad - I don’t expect much of you

  • High expectations good - I expect that you are able to level up from where you are

  • Unrealistically high expectations bad - you need to level up 5x levels immediately

• The zone of acceptable ‘high expectations’ (overton window) is partially determined by your credibility with someone. 

  • The higher the credibility you have with someone 

  • => the higher the reasonable range of expectations you can have with someone

  • => the higher their growth / performance will be

  • Or in visual form: 

• The expectations you are able to inspire in someone else is partially driven by the respect / trust / credibility / reputation of you. The more credible you are the more they want to change. 

• So high credibility doesn’t just allow you to get more done, it inspires others to get more done. 

If you only take away on thing: 

• IMO whether you like it or not, or whether you know it or not, everyone is constantly calibrating the credibility of people and products around them. 

• Credibility is earned. If you have high credibility (eg positive sentiment override+) then everything is much easier than if you low credibility (negative sentiment override). 

• IMO you can and should be consciously cultivating credibility.

Worry is a waste of imagination

By Daniel Tram with minor input by Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 6 mins

“Worry is a waste of imagination” - Walt Disney

I first came across the quote in the blog title when a friend said this to me 5 years ago while I was deep in stressville during a project. Somewhat ironically, this only caused things to get worse as in addition to worrying about the project, I now also was worried about being worried. In the past, my on-again-off-again relationship with worry that would make for a great romantic comedy, however, it’s become a far more healthy relationship now thanks to reframing how I see worry. I used to think that any worrying at all was bad and needed to be stamped out, however I’ve come to realise that having no worries at all isn’t realistic, nor desirable. Seeing worry as a positive thing, as long as it’s channelled in the right way has led me to adjust Walt Disney’s quote to: “Worry is your imagination trying to stop you from wasting an opportunity”

Summary:

• Worrying is applied caring

  • The only way to not worry at all is to not care at all

  • When you care about something you open yourself up to worry

  • … in case you don’t know, caring is good! 

• Worry is a good thing as it can help motivate you to avoid a bad outcome

• Worry is productive when it spurs action

• Worry is counter-productive when you ruminate on the bad outcome and worry about yourself worrying!

• Worrying new language

  • Caring = productive worry = eustress

  • Distress = counter productive worry

• Eustress leads to a utopia, distress leads to a dystopia.

++++++++++++

Worry = applied caring

Our lives have no meaning. 

Nothing like some nihilism to get your attention at the start of the blog :P

But seriously, IMO our lives have no imbued meaning. IMO our lives have the meaning that we give to them. Our lives only have meaning because we care about things. Our family. Our friends. The future of humanity. Even the stories that we read, listen to and watch only matter because the creator managed to make us care about the characters. 

In some respects: Caring => Meaning. 

Jingle: To have a meaningful life, choose what you care about carefully! 

Did you get worried when Captain America was alone and it looked like he was able to be killed by Thanos? That’s because you cared. Did you get a little teary when Mufasa fell to his death? That’s because you cared. Oh, yeah… spoilers (but I mean… if you haven’t watched Avengers Endgame by now then you probably don’t care, and I’m just going to assume everyone has watched Lion King, and if not, please stop reading and go watch it now :) ).

When you care about something, you don’t want bad things to happen and when you don’t want bad things to happen, it’s natural to worry about those bad things happening. 

It is good to worry about your kids getting hurt. It is good to worry about if you’re going to find a way to keep your business afloat so you can pay your employees. It is good to worry about if the educational products that you’re building actually are as effective as you think.

The only way to not worry at all is to not care at all, and if you don’t care at all, it’s hard to effectively improve the world, and if you don’t care at improving the world at all (which includes improving the lives of your friends and family around you), then we’re back at nihilism and a lack of meaning in the world.

IMO, when you care in order to open yourself to upside (feeling happy if things you care about go well) you also open yourself to the possibility of downside (feeling sad if things you care about don’t go well).

• Upside in life comes from caring

• Downside in life comes from caring

Put another way:

• Eliminating all possibility of downside = Not Caring at all

• BUT: Not Caring at all = Eliminating all possibility of upside

I want to maximise the amount I care… but I want to do it in a way where I’m not crushed by counter productive caring. The trick (and I’ve found it really really tricky) is to care carefully. 

The meta-worry quadrants

How to move from ‘Immobilised with worry’ to ‘Focussed on getting stuff done’

The key difference between ‘Immobilised with worry’ and ‘Focussed on getting stuff done’ is that time spent worrying is instead used to take action.

Taking action is not only the key difference between these two states, but it is also the best technique to move from being ‘Immobilised with worry’ to ‘Focussed on getting stuff done’. Taking action is what short-circuits the mental loop of over-thinking because it shifts the focus away from thinking about the future and how it’s going to be bad, and shifts the focus towards what you can do right now to improve the outcome.

Often, the biggest challenge is taking that first step of taking action. The best way to increase the probability that action is taken is to make that first step seem as achievable as possible. The importance of using small steps to prompt action has been written and talked about extensively including here, here and here, and that is for a reason - it works! All large actions need to start somewhere small to get the momentum going. So do something - anything! Just starting takes your mind off the worry, and let you start feeling good about making things better.

If you’re already spending time in the ‘Focussed on getting stuff done’  state and just want to spend more time there, it’s more about building the self-awareness to recognise when you’re ruminating unnecessarily. Meditating can help build this mental clarity, as can periodically taking mental breaks to ‘check-in’ with yourself. Productivity techniques like the 25 minute on/5 minutes off Pomodoro technique can also help focus your effort and reduce excessive mental wondering.

Where you can go wrong with worrying

1. Disproportionately worrying about something more than is warranted. This is usually because: 

   • The consequence of the outcome is perceived as far higher than it is in reality

     • If nobody’s life is in danger or you’re unlikely to face financial ruin, it’s likely you don’t need to worry as much as you are!

     • “Risk - the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome” - Tim Ferris

       • Most consequences actually are reversible!

   • The probability of the outcome is perceived as far higher than it is in reality

     • Just because you see a lot of information about something, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s likely to happen to you (e.g. we should be a lot more worried about car accidents than terrorist attacks)

2. You’re worried about things you can’t control

   • Focussing on something beyond your locus of control, almost by definition, a waste of time - especially if that time could be used productively!

     • If you can’t control part of an outcome, it would make more sense to focus on the part of the outcome that you CAN control - because you can then change something!

   • Taking action can help you understand the boundaries of what you actually can and can’t control

Concluding thoughts

• Worrying is ok! The important thing is to worry in the right way - away that prompts action

• Aiming to get rid of all worry is not only unrealistic for most people, but also undesirable!

Building humans, not robots: how to systematically grow people’s ability to take responsibility.

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 11 mins

Summary: Robots follow rules. Humans create and implement principles (theorems). Build humans, not robots.

I believe you can systematically build conceptual understanding of theorems in others - see strategies below. 

I believe that everyone has the ability to innovate (eg see ‘building earned secrets’). 

Innovation = building little theorems that help you more than they hinder you. 

I believe that you can systematically upgrade your ability to innovate and also do the same in others - see strategies below. 

Jingle: 

• Creating innovation that is good for the world => rewarding fun. 

• Upgrading yourself into someone who can innovate => IMO one path to a good life 

• Upgrading others who into people who can innovate => IMO one path to a good world

+++++++++++++++

Details

A new hire should increase the decision making ability of a business

• In some respects, a business is the amount of decisions it can make

• Hopefully, each hire should :

  • 1. increase the overall number of decisions a business can make, and 

  • 2. increase the amount of people that can make decisions. 

• Another way of saying this is “a business is the amount of responsibility it can shoulder.”

• Decisions = Responsibility = Conceptual Understanding (definitions below).

• So if you grow the amount of Conceptual Understanding in your business, you grow the capacity of your business. 

• IMO try to get good at systematically growing Conceptual Understanding in yourself and others!

Reportability ⇔ Responsibility

• Rule = Reportability = Doesn’t require understanding

  • Is black and white. 

  • There is no interpretation. 

  • Requires zero understanding to implement. 

  • Eg you are a factory worker in a production line doing the same repetitive task. You need to put the piece in place with a certain tolerance in a certain time. 

• Principle = Theorem = Responsibility = Requires understanding

  • Is grey.

  • Requires interpretation. 

  • Requires understanding and judgement to implement. 

  • Eg a teacher. How do I best help this student understand the concept? 

  • Eg a sales person. How do I explain how this textbook best helps this teacher and their students?

  • Eg an author. How do I best write this theory, questions and answers for conceptual understanding of the curriculum? 

  • Each situation is different so you need to ‘understand’ the principle and then custom apply it for each situation. 

• IMO the vast majority of jobs require ‘Responsibility’. How do you build understanding? 

Procedural understanding ⇔ Conceptual understanding

• Procedural learning

  • Only follows the rules

  • Is limited to the particular situation

• Conceptual learning

  • Understands the principles (theorems)

  • Can take the principles (theorems) and apply them in alternate new situations

• IMO the vast majority of jobs require ‘Conceptual understanding’. How do you build understanding?

Learning levels: 

• L1: can execute rules. AKA Procedural Understanding. AKA building a robot. 

• L2: can understand and implement principles (theorems) others created. AKA Conceptual Understanding. AKA a human. 

• L3: can deduce new principles (theorems) for yourself. You have become a self improving human at this point. AKA becoming a self authoring human. AKA can create ‘earned secrets’ (ie you can innovate, make new knowledge (theorems), not just learn knowledge others have created). 

• L4: can build understanding of principles (theorems) in others. You can upgrade others to Conceptual Understanding. AKA quality teacher / coach. 

• L5: you can build others who can deduce new principles (theorems) for themselves. You can build others who can upgrade themselves. AKA build self authoring humans. 

• L6: can build others who can build understanding of principles in others. You can build others who can not only upgrade themselves but upgrade you too. 

  • At this point you have built a company that can exponentially increase the amount of responsibility it can take.  

  • Aka building humans who can make other humans. 

  • At this point you have built a company that can make new theorems anywhere and implement them everywhere. You have created a new knowledge (theorem) factory… haha. Yes I love the melding of the metaphor of a factory (makes standardised widgets at mass scale) with new knowledge / theorems (ie 100% custom never seen before output). 

How does this map onto Kegan’s Theory Of Adult Development (one of my fav development frameworks - see more here)

• Kegan - Harvard developmental psychologist.

• Mapping

  • 3rd Order Socialised Mind => L2: can understand and implement principles (theorems) others created. AKA conceptual understanding.

  • 4th Order: Self-Authoring Mind => L3: can deduce new principles (theorems) for yourself. You have become a self improving human at this point. AKA becoming a self authoring human.

  • The other levels I have put are about upgrading others. AKA being a teacher / coach. While one can upgrade oneself, hopefully one can also help others become eg ‘self authoring’. “We are all players, we are all coaches.”

The capacity of a human body is limited. The capacity of a human mind is limitless.

• The only way to do anything used to be with humans; eg farming, eg making widgets, etc. 

  • It would take a farmer a day to plant 10x crops (physical only)

• Now we can scale repetitive tasks with machines.

  • Together with machinery, it takes a farmer 15x minutes to plant 10x crops (physical + mental)

    • I know nothing about crops so am making this up!

• This means that now basically any human can have unlimited leverage. Figure out something new the world needs then scale with machines! 

  • Eventually as machines improve there will be no repetitive jobs left. IMO this is a good thing as then humans are liberated from repetitive tasks. I don’t know about you but I’m pretty happy I don’t have to till the soil with my bare hands to have food! 

  • Soon enough all “L1: can execute rules. AKA procedural understanding. AKA building a robot” jobs will be replaced by machines. 

• IMO most people only have upgrades done to them by others. They can't do upgrades to themselves or to others. 

• Often school is a place of getting schooled (aka upgrades done to you or procedural understanding), not a place of learning (conceptual understanding) or learning to upgrade yourself (self authoring or innovating). 

• We need to be able to build ourselves and others to minimum L2+ (L2: can understand and implement principles others created. AKA conceptual understanding). 

• Some thoughts on how to do this...

IMO what matters is not what is being taught but how it is being taught. 

• If you are a manager at work are you teaching L1 procedural understanding or are you building L2+ conceptual self upgraders?

• IMO it doesn't matter if you are teaching Year 7 maths, Year 12 English, factory work (eg Toyota pull the line is IMO conceptual understanding)... OR how to build a textbook. IMO try to teach L2+. 

• Some things can be made well through Procedural Understanding - eg a croissant. You can get to 10/10. 

• Some things you can get to 7/10 with Procedural Understanding (rules). Eg making a textbook. But to get to 10/10 everyone authoring needs conceptual understanding (principles). 

• IMO a teacher / manager / peer can guide towards Procedural or Conceptual Understanding. It doesn't matter the subject, year level, or job. 

• IMO a textbook can scaffold towards Procedural or Conceptual Understanding. It doesn't matter the subject, year level, or job. 

• IMO direct instruction, enquiry based learning, problem based learning or socratic discussion can either scaffold towards Procedural or Conceptual Understanding. 

• IMO most people think having a student or direct report or peer get 100% is the goal. Often the path of least resistance to do this is through Procedural Understating. This is only ok if you are doing a job that is ‘robotic’ AKA “L1: can execute rules”. IMO for all other jobs this isn’t enough. You need to know more than how to repeat the exact same task in the exact same context. 

• I believe the goal is to build students or directs or peers or managers who can level themselves up. 

  • Ie get people to L2, then L3, etc etc. 

Some thoughts on how to increase Conceptual Understanding (L3) and hence increase the amount of decisions / responsibility someone can take at work. 

• Strategy 1: Double Blinding

  • ‘You’ know what to do, ‘Person 1’ doesn’t. 

  • Both ‘You’ and ‘Person 1’ do the task independently and then compare what you have done after. 

  • How to build Conceptual Understanding:

    • For any point of difference ‘You’ ask ‘Person 1’ why they did what they did and get ‘Person 1’ to compare and contrast with what ‘You’ did. 

    • Then ‘You’ ask ‘Person 1’ to put forward which proposal they like better and why.

    • Explanation: 

      • This is helping ‘Person 1’ deduce principles (little theorems) and allows you to ask stress testing questions to see if the principles add value. 

      • ‘You’: “L4: can build understanding of principles in others. You can upgrade others to conceptual understanding.”

      • ‘Person 1’: building “L3: can deduce new principles for yourself”

  • How not to build Conceptual Understanding

    • ‘You’ tell ‘Person 1’ what ‘You’ think is better and why. 

    • Explanation: 

      • This is telling someone your principle without seeing if they understand. 

      • IMO this isn’t even helping ‘Person 1’ to “L1: can execute rules. AKA procedural understanding. AKA building a robot.”

• Strategy 2: Compare ‘Person 1’s work to work ‘YOu’ did in the past

  • This is Double Blinding but you have a set of ‘training’ pieces of work where you and others have previously done a task that you can compare the new person to. 

  • After doing the task you need to ask questions in a way that builds their ‘1. Understanding of your principles’ and / or ‘2. Allows them to build their own principles that you can then validate / invalidate’. 

• Strategy 3: Asking someone to rearticulate

  • A problem solving session has been occurring and you have put forward your synthesis. 

  • What not to do: 

    • Does that make sense? (getting a yes / no). 

  • What to do: 

    • 1. Can you please rearticulate the job to be done for the problem space we are discussing?

      • Rearticulate = explain in words and logic that are not a derivation of what you have said. 

    • 2. Can you please rearticulate my synthesis? 

      • Rearticulate = use words and logic that provide a different path to the conclusion. 

• Strategy 4: Put forward 3x options and a recommendation for which one to go with

  • A group discussion has just finished. We need to figure out what to do next. 

  • What to do: 

    • Everyone please have 5 minutes to come up with 3x different options of what we could do and then your recommendation of which one we should go ahead with and why.

    • Then we’ll discuss each person’s options and recommendation as a group in turn. 

    • After this we then put forward which recommendation we like the most from all put forward. 

    • *aside: a decision ultimately has to be made, companies are not democracies, you typically are not going with a vote at the end for the next course of action. “A camel is a horse designed by committee.” 

  • What not to do: 

    • Meeting owner: Ok I think we should do the following. Are you cool with this? 

    • Comment: it doesn’t allow the space for principle (theorem) creation and comparison. 

• Strategy 5: ask ‘Person 1’ 3+ orthogonal questions which aim to explain why or why not they think the new proposal is better

  • This can be mid discussion or at the end of a discussion.

  • Example 1: New proposal vs Prior proposal 

    • What to do: 

      • How is the updated proposal better and why? 

      • How could the updated proposal be worse and why? 

      • What is the key thing that worries you about the proposal? 

      • Overall do you think the updated proposal is above the line of sufficiency to proceed or do you think more work to de-risk should be done and why? 

    • What not to do: 

      • So do you like New proposal more than Prior proposal? 

  • Example 2: Option 1 vs Option 2

    • Same questions as above but on totally different options. 

    • If you are considering two different investment options, some possible questions that help promote conceptual understanding

      • Alright, how can Company A deliver a better outcome than Company B? 

      • How could Company A be worse than Company B? 

      • What are the key variables that you are considering for Company A? 

      • What are the key variables that you are considering for Company B? 

      • Why are you not considering some of the variables for Company B that you are for Company A? 

      • How do you propose to balance the variables for each company together? 

      • Ultimately which company do you prefer and why? 

    • What DA thinks doesn’t make sense: 

      • So should we invest in Company A? 

• Strategy 6: ask someone to define the line of sufficiency for going ahead

  • Sufficiency = the line above which you are comfortable. 

    • Eg quality is above sufficiency - eg the tolerance of a part in production

    • Eg what level of confidence we need to make this decision? Eg as we can reverse this decision easily we need 50% confidence to go ahead vs eg as we can’t reverse this decision easily we need 90% confidence to go ahead. 

  • What to do: 

    • Please define sufficiency for me

    • Please provide an example of just above sufficiency

    • Please provide an example of just below sufficiency

  • What not to do: 

    • I think we should do this, do you agree? 

What is “L4: can build understanding of principles in others. You can upgrade others to conceptual understanding”?

• On the fly you should be able to make up questions that build in yourself and the other person principles (theorems). And then to see where a principle helps vs hinders and where it works and doesn’t!

• This blog is an attempt to try and build “L6: can build others who can build understanding of principles in others.”

How not to eat your own bullsh1t

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 7 mins

Summary: The core foundation to a good life is the closest possible understanding of reality. For your understanding of reality is what everything else is built upon. If you have a poor understanding of reality it’s like your decisions are built on a foundation of quicksand. 

• IMO as humans, unless we actively fight against it, we will default to ‘getting high on our own supply’, ie have a highly distorted view of reality. 

  • Perception ≠ Reality. 

• To not ‘eat your own bullshit’ / ‘get high on your own supply’ IMO you need:

  • 1. To constantly think like a scientist 

    • Scientist thinking = 1. Know some of your facts are wrong and that your opinions can always be updated so are never ‘right’ + 2. Look to falsify + 3. Leaning out of (counter for) Confirmation Bias + 4. Trying to be a Diverse Human (systematically broadening your understanding of human experience through walking a mile in others shoes through eg user testing + books + etc) + 5. You can articulate where your circle of competence ends.

  • 2. Build a Loyal Opposition community around you. 

    • Loyal Opposition = 1. Build their own independent view through thinking like Scientists + 2. Tell you what their independent view is => So that you can both mutually find blind spots and ego distortions and thereby have perception be closer to reality

  • 3. Periodically test your thinking with people who think differently (/users if you’re developing a product)

    • No better how good the intentions of you and your loyal opposition, it’s important to guard against collectively getting high on your own supplies

  • If you can do this well then, Perception ≈ Reality. 

Jingles: 

• Sycophants will eventually make you and your company sick (ie die). 

• You don’t want loyalty (following without questioning), you want Loyal Opposition. 

• Sycophants will make you sick. Loyal Opposition will enable you to build epic sh1t! 

Relative realities - not the multi-verse, the manipula-verse

• L0: Do not think like a Scientist, Do not have a Loyal Opposition community around you. 

  • IMO default is to have perception get further and further away from reality. 

  • If you don’t know much you can’t get yourself into much trouble. But if you think a lot about the world but aren’t constantly calibrating your thoughts to reality then IMO you end up in abstraction. You might know lots but it’s often counterproductive harmful knowledge. 

    • You see the world not how it is but how you want it to be. 

    • You see what you are looking for, not what is actually there. 

    • Richard Feynman. “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

      • Aka. You get high on your own supply.

  • Maybe 25% is an accurate understanding of reality with 75% being a combination of blind spots (ie unknown areas of reality) and ego distortions (known areas of reality that are materially warped).  

• L1: Do think like a Scientist, but do not have a Loyal Opposition community around you. 

  • If you are trying to think like a scientist you'll have some areas accurate and some not. 

  • Maybe 50% accurate perception of reality with 50% being blind spot and ego distortion. 

• L2: Do think like a Scientist, & Do have a Loyal Opposition community around you. 

  • Maybe 75% perception = reality. 

    • “I’d rather be lucky than good”... in a one off event. 

    • In the short term luck matters more than being good (good = 1. Strong understanding of reality * 2. Accumulated skills). But in the long term (10+ years) IMO luck is miniscule vs being good. 

    • This means that ideally 75% of decisions can be right by being good vs luck. 

  • You have nothing to fear from the truth... but that doesn't mean the truth won't hurt. What will hurt however is ‘driving eg your business into a brick wall when you thought everything was going swimmingly’. IMO default should be that you driving full speed towards a brick wall unless you and others are constantly trying to make sure you are not. 

• Comment

  • IMO a strong understanding of reality is the foundation upon which you can change reality. IMO it’s very difficult to change reality by seeing a distorted version of it. 

  • If you want to change reality (aka improve the world), IMO first understand reality. Otherwise you are typically pushing on a string. 

++++++++++++++++++++

Details

Examples - big things, little things… And everything in between. 

• DA finishes writing a blog and thinks ‘i like it, it makes sense’. DA shows one person who points out key logic flaws which are obvious as soon as they are said. Yes this happens regularly. 

• Did I do a good job presenting? I think I did a solid job. Then I watch myself and someone points out a few things… And I'm like ‘yep, didn't see that until now did I!’

• The Earth is flat. Please watch this documentary ‘Behind The Curve’ on people who believe the Earth is flat. IMO a great example not thinking like scientists and being in an echochamber. 

• User design of a mobile app: well I know how to use this so therefore everyone must know how to use it. DA then shows mobile to 5x people and no one sees the ‘obvious’ feature. 🤦🏻

• Anything, everything… Unfortunately 🙁

IMO knowledge is a two way street, it can really help you out… or get you in trouble. 

• Typically the more you learn the more you think you know. 

  • No knowledge = can’t get into trouble. 

  • Knowledge comes in 3 forms

    • Useful

    • Not useful

    • Counter productive (either flat out wrong but more often ‘the best lies are half truths’. Ie you cobble together a bunch of pieces that are internally consistent but ultimately an abstraction misconstruing reality. The more knowledge you have and the better you are at problem solving the easier it is to build an internally consistent abstraction and delude yourself and others). 

• IMO the problem is that without 1. Thinking like a scientist and 2. Having a community of Loyal Opposition around you, all knowledge appears ‘useful’. 

  • “Those who can get you to believe absurdities can get you to commit atrocities.” Voltaire. 

  • Yes, the more knowledge you have and the better at problem solving you are the greater potential you have to be dangerous to yourself and others. 

  • Know nothing and can't problem solve, IMO can't get in any trouble. 

  • So ignorance isn't just bliss, it's safe? Well maybe safe from harm (is downside) but also ‘safe’ from upside. 

  • The goal is to lift the ceiling without lowering the floor. 

• The more knowledge you have the broader the range outcomes you can have. 

• IMO you end up going one of two ways - towards getting high on your own supply (worse and worse understanding of reality) or towards accurate understanding of reality. 

  • High on your own supply = 1. Do not think like a Scientist + 2. Do not have a Loyal Opposition community around you

    • IMO the tide tends towards getting high on your own supply. Ie the more knowledge you have the easier it is to convince yourself of whatever you want. 

    • This is acquiring knowledge and using it badly.

• High on reality (aka can change reality to be better as have a strong understanding of it) = 1. Do think like a Scientist + 2. Do have a Loyal Opposition community around you

  • So to go towards accurate understanding you need to constantly swim as hard as you can with others helping you against the tide. 

  • This may sound tiring but the other option is to get swept out to sea by the tide… 🙁

  • I've personally found that this challenge is not tiring… But terrific

If you only take away one thing 

• Knowledge is power. 

• But it’s more important to think well than to know lots. 

  • “I care not how much you know, I care how you know.” 

• Knowledge can be used for good or bad. IMO try hard to think like a scientist, try hard to be loyal opposition, try hard to build loyal opposition around you. Have knowledge enlighten you and upgrade the world, don’t have knowledge downgrade you and the world.

Pragmatists vs Ideologues - do what works!

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 4 mins

Summary: IMO the meta goal of businesses is to improve humanity. To do this ‘do what works’. Ie be a pragmatist, not an idealogue. 

• Jingle: be perfectly pragmatic, not reasonably idealistic ;P (yes, this is intended to be logically inconsistent). 

"Everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere." 

"All models are wrong, some are useful."

“Being a true expert involves not only knowing stuff about the world but also knowing the limits of your knowledge and expertise.”

• Pragmatist = does what works

• Idealogue = tries to fit a theory into place. ie not do what works but attempt to get a theory to work. 

IMO this doesn't mean you don't look at the ideas / theories out there, but you don't follow them, you learn from them. 

• They say that managing an economy is blending together many different ideologies in a positive sum way! 

  • Adherence too closely to one doctrine is dangerous! Adherence too closely to one doctrine is just… what the doctor didn’t order!  

• IMO trying to figure out how to improve education is not ‘adaptive learning vs one speed learning’, ‘teacher centered learning vs student centered learning’, ‘direct instruction vs problem based learning vs socratic discussion’, ‘testing vs no testing’. IMO done well it's a diverse meal of many ideas prepared well, in the right amount and tastily put together. AKA a positive sum blend of ‘what works’! 

My checklist to not be an idealogue:

• Does it work? (Have the changes we have made worked (improved things)?)

  • If you have put changes in place you must be able to say if things are better or not? It’s almost always impossible to exactly measure something eg with one number. But at least directionally you should be able to say ‘better / same / worse’ and why. 

  • If you have launched a product / new gov policy / etc and it isn’t improving things then it’s like your product is bad / policy wrong not that the market doesn’t get it. 

• Can I name 3+ theories / ideologies for this problem space? 

  • Economics example: supply side economics, demand side economics, modern monetary theory

  • Education example for maths questions: procedural => conceptual, conceptual => procedural, proceptual, problem based introduction, CRA (concrete, representational, abstract). 

• Where do the 2-3x most relevant theories to the problem space “help vs hinder” and “work vs don’t work”?

• What is the prevailing orthodoxy (ie system used)? 

  • Economics: eg central banks are all mainly targeting inflation and this became the standard orthodoxy in ~1990

  • Education: eg IMO there was a big push for standardised testing starting early 2000s and this is now going the opposite direction. 

++++++++++++++++++++++

From Farnam Street and Lee Kuan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew, the “Father of Modern Singapore”, who took a nation from “Third World to First” in his own lifetime, has a simple idea about using theory and philosophy. Here it is: Does it work?

He isn’t throwing away big ideas or theories, or even discounting them per se. They just have to meet the simple, pragmatic standard.

Does it work?

Try it out the next time you study a philosophy, a value, an approach, a theory, an ideology…it doesn’t matter if the source is a great thinker of antiquity or your grandmother. Has it worked? We’ll call this Lee Kuan Yew’s Rule, to make it easy to remember.

Here’s his discussion of it in The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World:

My life is not guided by philosophy or theories. I get things done and leave others to extract the principles from my successful solutions. I do not work on a theory. Instead, I ask: what will make this work? If, after a series of solutions, I find that a certain approach worked, then I try to find out what was the principle behind the solution. So Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, I am not guided by them…I am interested in what works…Presented with the difficulty or major problem or an assortment of conflicting facts, I review what alternatives I have if my proposed solution does not work. I choose a solution which offers a higher probability of success, but if it fails, I have some other way. Never a dead end.

We were not ideologues. We did not believe in theories as such. A theory is an attractive proposition intellectually. What we faced was a real problem of human beings looking for work, to be paid, to buy their food, their clothes, their homes, and to bring their children up…I had read the theories and maybe half believed in them.

But we were sufficiently practical and pragmatic enough not to be cluttered up and inhibited by theories. If a thing works, let us work it, and that eventually evolved into the kind of economy that we have today. Our test was: does it work? Does it bring benefits to the people?…The prevailing theory then was that multinationals were exploiters of cheap labor and cheap raw materials and would suck a country dry…Nobody else wanted to exploit the labor. So why not, if they want to exploit our labor? They are welcome to it…. We were learning how to do a job from them, which we would never have learnt… We were part of the process that disproved the theory of the development economics school, that this was exploitation. We were in no position to be fussy about high-minded principles.

Pain + Reflection = Progress. Reflection = start by assuming responsibility is 50% yours.

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 9 mins

Summary: When something goes wrong, start by assuming responsibility is 50:50 and then apportion appropriately. IMO almost never is something 0% your responsibility. 

Pain + Reflection = Progress

• Pain + No Reflection = More pain (sad)

• Pain + Reflection = 1. See the original painful event as 'positive' as can learn from it (aka happy) + 2. Don't have pain the future so you have made the future better (aka happy)

• So…

  • Pain + No Reflection = Sad

  • Pain + Reflection = 2x Happy 

Common Pain Sources: (full details below)

• Common pain source 1: misunderstanding

• Common pain source 2: different context meaning someone thinks what another did doesn’t make sense but when full context is provided everything makes sense

• Common pain source 3: misaligned expectations

• Common pain source 4: doing something that should have been discussed before going ahead

• Common pain source 5: lacking fair process

• Common pain source 6: low quality work because someone needs to improve at a skill (the main one of which is ‘problem solving’)

IMO unacceptable reasons for pain

• “You get exactly the behaviour you allow.” Not all behaviour is acceptable, one has to push back on certain areas. 

• Laziness - someone was lazy with a task

• Not being a team player or a team leader

• Not having good intent

• Assuming that someone else didn’t have good intent

Jingle: IMO if you start off assuming that 0% of the responsibility is yours, then... your head is 100% stuck a place it shouldn’t be...

+++++++++++++++++++

Details

Pain = an opportunity to learn / grow. Don't have pain and no gain! If you are going to endure a period of pain then try and learn from it. 

• Ideally gain in all areas :). 

• Jingle: you can learn from building, you can learn from burning. 

Good intentions don’t always lead to good outcomes

• IMO it is not acceptable not to have good intentions. IMO it is not acceptable to assume that ‘just because you had good intentions’ then it’s 0% your responsibility for something not going well. 

• For pain to occur it’s almost always isn’t ‘0% your responsibility’. 

• Let’s assume there are two parties involved: 

  • I believe it is best to start assuming responsibility is 50:50 and then move from there. 

  • The next adjustment is 75:25 

  • Then 90:10

  • Almost nothing is 100:0. 

    • IMO if you start at 100:0 it is much harder to be impartial. 

    • IMO one tends to favour oneself, so try to ‘lean’ against this bias. 

    • “The core foundation of a good life is the closest possible understanding of reality.”  

    • IMO it’s impossible to fully understand yourself and to fully understand how others see you. 

• An external model for y;all: 

• DA’s levels:

  • -L1: assumes it’s 0% their responsibility

  • L0: starts at 50:50 but then doesn’t do proper self reflection analysis 

  • L1: starts at 50:50 and does impartial analysis of all parties

  • L2: ‘L1’ + looks forward to the ‘reflection’ as knows it is an opportunity to grow. Not just ‘zero defensiveness’, done well this is fun! The reflection investigation process is a ‘caring’ mutually positive sum interaction. 

Pain reflection analysis hierarchy

• Firstly, try to look for root causes, not proximate causes. 

• Secondly, build a full understanding of what happened. 

  • “Before you prescribe, diagnose.”

  • If you don’t do this you only have partial information and thereby cannot even grasp the ‘problem space’, so your ‘solutions set’ is stuffed even before you get going. 

  • How to reconstruct: 

    • Step 1: reconstruct a complete timeline of what occurred

    • Step 2: reconstruct what each of the different parties saw in real time (ie likely not the full picture). 

• Thirdly: start investigating possible root pain causes

• Fourthly:

  • Try to figure out where what happened is vs sufficiency (ie below sufficiency? What would have been sufficient?) 

  • Define sufficiency sufficiently (ie where should things have been in a tangible fashion)

  • Put in a plan to have things be at sufficiency going forward (likely this is something for you AND others. Not just others)

Common pain sources

• Common pain source 1: misunderstanding = you think we are talking about an apple, we think we are talking about an orange

  • I have come to believe that perfect communication is impossible. The best you can hope for is 90% common understanding. 

  • A strategy to mitigate misunderstanding: asking the people involved to ‘rearticulate’ 1. the Job To Be Done and 2. the ‘next steps’. 

  • “Understanding occurs at the ear, not the lips.” 

    • I honestly find it incredible how different people can be here. 

    • Systematically building ‘rearticulation checks’ into meetings is 1. Great for lowering misunderstandings but 2. Is a wonderful way to find where your communication isn’t resonating like you intend. You can then learn and hopefully improve your ability to communicate. 

• Common pain source 2: different context = you think someone did something wrong but once you see their context it all makes sense!

  • Different people have different prior knowledge/experience which affects how they perceive information 

  • Considering it is likely you are communicating with someone who has a different background to you it is likely that something is missed along the way

  • IMO you can’t fully understand everyone’s context always… but you can not try to see this when you are doing a ‘pain reflection’. Not doing this means you don’t have a ‘strong understanding of reality’, but instead are operating off partial information. 

• Common pain source 3: misaligned expectations = “happiness = reality - expectations”

  • “Everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere.” 

  • There are always expectations and IMO misaligned expectations = pain at some point, it’s just a matter of time. 

  • I often think of there being ‘project specific expectations’ and ‘role specific expectations’. 

  • ‘Project specific expectations’ is hopefully covered in ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘different context’. 

  • ‘Role specific expectations’ - a couple continuums for you: 

    • 100% certainty ⇔ 100% possibility. Some roles have very high certainty (eg a teacher, doctor) so in a year from today one can have high confidence they will know what they are doing. Some roles have low certainty, meaning what you are doing could be totally different to today (eg some roles at a startup)

    • Low training ⇔ high training. Some roles will have high training (eg an accountant) but others low as what is being done hasn’t been done before and / or you strategically want to leave people to learn by themselves so they build their ability to ‘teach themselves’ (ie increase their ‘learned help yourself-ness’).

  • For example if you expect 80% certainty but the role only gives you 20% and relies on you to take responsibility over the direction of your work and this is something you feel uncomfortable about - this will quickly lead to unhappiness

    • 20% certainty (reality) - 80% certainty (expectation) = - 40% happiness

  • Comment: each person is different, IMO there isn’t one right way to be. Someone needs to fit the expectations of a role else there will be unhappiness. 

• Common pain source 4: doing something that should have been discussed before going ahead

  • Some things should be discussed before changes are made. Not everything can be discussed before changes are made. 

  • I typically think of ‘changes’ in terms of ‘small / medium / large’. 

    • Large = needs to be discussed before the change

    • Medium = FYI only about change (eg through email)

    • Small = just do it. If the change ends up being a bad idea then say so to appropriate people can fix (ie no making even small changes to fix problems and not telling someone. However making small changes to improve things does not require FYI or discussion)

    • Comment

      • Typically, large isn’t the amount of ‘time’ involved in a change, but the amount of ‘new’.

      • The “amount of new” is proportional the amount of risk, as if it hasn’t been done before, we can’t know what will eventuate 

  • What is a small / medium / large? 

    • Well this depends. Basically different people should have different levels of responsibility. 

    • Ideally over time larges go to mediums which go to smalls. Ie people can take on more and more responsibility. 

    • As there is so much variability here this is something I’ve found you can only ‘feel’ out with each person and role over time. My practice is to try and classify the size of everything and then overask until you have calibrated with a person (ie say I think this is a medium, do you think it’s a medium?). 

    • If you get the sizing of the decision wrong, the import thing is to reflect once this is known: pain + reflection = progress 

• Common pain source 5: lacking fair process

  • I love this HBR article on Fair Process. I also wrote about this in “The Decision Dichotomy: how making the right decision can get you a bad outcome”. 

  • Summary: 

    • Good decision * Fair process => Good outcome (people in the company are on board)

    • Good decision * Not fair process => Bad outcome (people in the company are NOT on board)

    • Bad decision * Fair process => Good outcome (people in the company are on board)

    • Bad decision * Not fair process => Bad outcome (people in the company are NOT on board)

    • Jingle: Fair Process > Decision Quality

  • Fair process levels: Fair process = 1. Who is involved + 2. How much processing time

    • 1. Who is involved

      • Involved in the decision

      • A proposal has been put together (which you were not involved in), it is presented to you and you have a chance to put forward any thoughts

      • You are not involved in making the initial proposal AND do not have a chance to provide feedback to the proposal

    • 2. How much processing time

      • Sometimes you should have time for people to think up things they want to include for the proposal. 

      • Sometimes you should provide people time to just process after seeing a proposal so that they can see if there are any thoughts they want included. 

  • Also please note that not everyone will agree on what fair process is. Try to be within the ‘reasonable range’. Not everyone can be part of every decision, doing this will mean the business can make as many decisions as only one person. 

• Common pain source 6: low quality work because someone needs to improve at a skill (the main one of which is ‘problem solving’)

  • What skill to improve? How would have this have given a different outcome? 

    • Can you demonstrate what would have been a better solution explicitly so that the person can see tangibly where to upgrade? 

  • The problem is not a low quality solution, it is a lack of skills. As IMO most things are problem solving so a typical area to improve ‘thinking systematically in models’. 

  • Figuring out the right task to the right person can be hard

    • It is important to give tasks with the appropriate floor, if the task is urgent and has a high floor it needs to be given to someone with the right skillset

    • If a task has a low floor and is not urgent it can be given as a growth tasks

    • Sometimes the skills of the individual may not be clear to them or the person allocating work, occasionally this will be done wrong - it is important to reflect and figure out how to do this better in the future

• IMO unacceptable reasons for pain

  • “You get exactly the behaviour you allow.” Not all behaviour is acceptable, one has to push back on certain areas. 

  • Laziness - someone was lazy with a job

  • Not being a team player or a team leader

  • Not having good intent

  • Assuming that someone else didn’t have good intent

If you just take away one thing: 

• Comms are hard. Overinvest in comms. 

• Assume that you are part of every incident of pain you experience. 

• No one is perfect… not even yourself! 

• Everyone can grow… even yourself!