The reading slowed down a fair bit, even more so the processing of some key snippets. This collection was initially made for July, and lost in the mess of the everyday. When I looked at it this month, rediscovering these reads gave a repeated gift of finding their ideas again.
1 | How to Do Great Work
The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.
The important thing is to find what we can do great work, which fulfils the intersection of the above 3 qualities. Anything else leads to mediocre or incomplete work.
Hard work is a given, but with these 3 conditions fulfilled, it is much easier to put the hard work required to become a master in the field.
2 | How Ricardo Aced Computer Science Using His iPhone
….students immediately process their lecture notes into small, question-based study guides, and then study from these while walking between classes.
There are always pockets of time in our daily routine that we can apply to working towards our goals.
The small bits of 5 minutes found everywhere in the commutes, queuing and waiting add up to a significant amount of time. What magic can happen with this time is used to bolster the time we already spend doing what is valuable?
What else are we going to do, scrolling the endless feed on TikTok?
3 | TBM 205: "Process" vs. Systems & Habits
Team B writes 1-pagers to workshop and shape ideas. They do this all the time, not just when leadership makes an ask. People read carefully and provide thoughtful feedback.
Routines can build excellence, but only with the understanding of what the objective of the routine is, and the capacity to appreciate that.
The analogy in this article highlights the difference between doing for the sake of fulfilling a top-down initiative, and having the bandwidth to reap the benefits of routines. The spirit of the law, not the letter is what matters in building excellence.
4 | Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools
When we resort to having other people build tools for us, the tools they build might never quite perfectly fit our workflows, because they’re not built for our individual minds. When other people build tools for us to use, they either design tools after their own workflows and mental models, or worse, they design it for a mass market of millions of people who all sort-of-but-not-really work and think in similar ways.
I use many tools (technological or otherwise). This, together with reading 7, led me down the rabbit hole of making my own stuff.
The roadmap of a software company can take it down the road away from what you need. Your favourite tool can stop being refreshed. Evernote can undergo a massive spike of pricing.
Make your own stuff. Because they fit you best.
5 | What I Do When I Can’t Sleep
Keeping a list like this trains your brain to look out for things you like. It teaches you to savor and save them, instead of passing over them blindly. But just keeping this list is not enough:
This reading taught me to keep a list of things I enjoy: to develop a taste of excellence and learn how to articulate it. In a world where creation of the mediocre is cheap, judgement to find excellence is even more vital.
This process is effortful, tough, and manual labor. But it creates richer, more vibrant writing. Over time, with practice, it becomes more automatic. Suddenly, you don’t have to reach for your list as much because your list is inside you. You’ve found your voice.
6 | Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration
Often people were brought to Los Alamos because of their expertise in one area, solved the assigned problem, and then were turned loose on additional projects for which their only qualification was a world-class mind. (For security reasons, the scientists normally couldn’t return to their campuses and labs until the war was over.) Hirschfelder was a classic example. A physicist, he was brought to Los Alamos to determine the characteristics of the gun and gunpowder needed to set off the enriched uranium bomb—Little Boy. He and his colleagues finished the job in three weeks. Next, he was made a group leader in the Theoretical Division, where his group was asked to determine what effects would follow the actual explosion of the bomb. He and his team quickly educated themselves by turning to treatises on aerodynamics, air pollution, and the physics of blown sand. Among their conclusions—one their colleagues resisted until they saw the frightening evidence—the blast would produce radioactive fallout.
Putting the right people together means trusting them to get the work done, without the need to scrutinise how to do it. Often the role of the leader is not issue commands like in Real-Time Strategy games, but to remove their obstacle and make sure there are enough resources to get things done, like in city builders games.
7 | Organizing my Drawer with 3D Printing
this is definitely one of my favorite projects in a while. This has changed so much about how I use my drawer when I need to grab something I don't even really need to look anymore. Like, here's my point-of-shoot, here's my phone battery, here's my dry erase marker. Isn't that awesome? I even started thinking about maybe doing this for other disorganized stores in my life, like maybe my kitchen utensil drawer?
Watch this video. This is the one that convinced me of the place of personal 3D printers: To create cheap customised solutions that will exactly fit your requirements.
Some thoughts:
While writing this, there seems to be an emerging theme of modification and tool fluency. While we are in the age of mass productivity, mastery over one’s own system becomes an even greater differentiator between you and yours, against the rest of the world.