How to ship faster
Humans can get ambitious things done ridiculously fast: https://patrickcollison.com/fast
How can I get more things done quickly?
Outline speedrunning
From https://learnhowtolearn.org/how-to-build-extremely-quickly/:
Do “outline speedrunning”: Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect.
Watch Paul Graham write an essay live using exactly this technique: https://byronm.com/13sentences.html
Tracer bullets
From https://wiki.c2.com/?TracerBullets:
a method of software engineering that is likened to firing a machine gun at night. You can either know exactly where you are, where the target is and do the the maths to work out how to point it and hope you’re right… or you can load every other bullet with tracer (which glows in the dark) and then just turn the outgoing line of bullets (which you can now see) onto the target.
Programming-wise, it involves short cycles of development, then delivery and asking the customer if it’s closer or further from what they think the target is… rather than finding out right at the end that you’ve misunderstood something.
I don’t think that tracer bullets are just about making adjustments to requirements. Aren’t they about making invisible things visible - so that you can handle them?
Eliminate low velocity stuff
From https://longform.asmartbear.com/double-your-productivity/:
To average 60 mph you need to travel the whole 60 miles in a single hour. But it’s already been an hour! Even if you went 1000 mph during the second half, it would have taken just over an hour to complete the 60 miles, therefore your average is still less than 60 mph.
It’s amazing how periods of low velocity wash away gains of high velocity. In the puzzle, if you doubled your speed in the second half it would only increase your trip average from 30 to 40 mph. If you quadrupled your speed in the second half, your trip average would still be only 48 mph.
Once you realize that the low-velocity stuff is responsible for most of the drag on your productivity, you realize that the thing to do is eliminate the low velocity stuff.
Other notes about Learning and/or Personal Growth
- 🌿How to be better at making decisions
What can I do before, during, and after making decisions to be better at making them?
- 🌿How I tend to my digital garden
My quests with this digital garden are to publish more and to have fun. Let's explore why I even have a digital garden and how it's going.
- 🌿How to have great taste
Taste is what differentiates the good from the great. So, how can I have better taste? This is my ongoing log of what I have learned.
- đź”—Deliberate practice beats every other form of training, even via transfer learning
Many people are doing deliberate practice wrong in one specific way though. The Brazilians are an example of what happens when you get it right.
- 🌱How do you invent the future?
Innovation happens by combining things we can see and touch today in novel ways. So how can we have more things to see and touch?
- đź”—David Cain: Do Quests, Not Goals
I love this reframing from "goal" to "quest": "goals" feel like pressure, "quests" feel like excitement and adventure!
- 🌿How we make brainstorming work
Brainstorming usually fails. But, I noticed a pattern in the times that it worked exceptionally well. Here's how to make it work.
- 🌿Why I don't compliment people for their talent
When people see somebody they perceive to be really good at something, they often say, “Wow, they are so talented!” I think that’s a bullshit compliment.
- 🌲Why I'm vigorous about giving feedback
Every day, you will find me hunting down a founder's email to send them feedback about my experience with their product. Why?