“Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know” – Rousseau
“I can laser focus on all these items being great” – Todd Graves
“Not trying to be all things to all people is so important because if you try to be all things to all people, you’re not anything to anybody.” – Todd Graves
Limit the amount of details to perfect and then make every detail perfect—focus means quality and speed.
When you are focused, you can easily invert and act on them fast (like Steve Jobs).revisit
Also think about what the counterparty is focused on.
As implied in Buffett’s emphasis on essentiality, make something critical—survival over livelihood (inspired by 盛田昭夫)revisit
When you’re focused on few variables and they turn out to be wrong ones: disaster (e.g., Canadian dollar’s dependency on Alberta oil production). Make sure you are focused on the right variables.
Next:
Related:
- 5-1b1b1a1a Pareto principle (or law of the vital few) - 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes
- On focus
- 2-1a0c1d The One Commandment is about focus - Focus on a single moral innovation
- 2-1b3a1 Narrow it down so you can have a chance to build your own moat
- 5-1b4 Be prepared to deal with short-term nonsenses, but know what you’re focused on in the long-run and stay optimistic
- 5-2b0b Most books about thinking focus on being more rational when the fundamental problem is not knowing what problems to exercise judgement
- 7-1a1a3 If you know that others can solve certain problems, let them. Only work on important problems worth focusing on.
- Keep it simple
- On measure
- Do what’s your best at
- The smaller the group the better because the larger groups search for consensus (e.g., see Naval) and the larger it is the worse the quality of feedback—I think this partly explains Amara’s lawrevisit
- 1-1a5b2.1 Be very mindful of where you ‘experiment’; one of the most important decisions you can make is who you get feedbacks from (as well as ask questions of)
- 2-1a0a1 Don’t waste time unnecessarily complicating things
- 3-1c3c3b Wealth = Measurement (work with a small group) + Leverage (develop new techniques and its value is multiplied by all the people who use it)
- 3-1c3c4.2 “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect”
- 4-1a3b Go to specific places to get specific feedbacks
- RUL3 - Live in the future and build what seems interesting
- Wisdom is about prevention—’hire well, manage little’ lets you focus on what matters
- Problems >>> Opinions
- 2-1a7a5 Build day by day unless anything fundamental (‘the core’) changed. Superficial-uncontrollable criteria (e.g., share price) matter less.
- 3-1a3a Start with problems instead of opinions. The latter usually comes with confirmation bias.
- 3-1c1d You must build your own media distribution to avoid distortion for yourself and others
- Maybe you should follow only 10
15 rules—similar to how you should have only 1015 positions, or thinkers, or projects concurrently- 2-1b2e ‘Algorithms’ & ‘Replication’ - Share your problem-situation as clearly possible, so that others can make decisions without you on your behalf (i.e., multiply)
- 3-1c2d Human knowledge is hierarchically structured. It’s a list but also about how things on the list relate to one another. The sum of what we know is greater than all things put together.
- 4-1a4b2b0 Your algo is your principles
- 9-4c2 ‘Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.’ ‘Design to express algorithms, and only incidentally tell machines how to execute them.’