And 5 steps for you to get started — When you take ownership of a project, something changes. You become responsible for everything that happens with the project. Things go wrong? That’s on you. Customers are unhappy? That’s on you. You shipped something that doesn’t solve the problem? That’s on you. Ideally, you have a process that reduces the…

The traditional funnel is a measurement device for, say, number of people converting in your product. But funnels are a lot more universal, and you can use them to answer tough questions in Physics and Chemistry, not just for human behaviour. This post shows you how to use funnels more…

Building frameworks to generate best practices — An interesting shift happens once you realise you’re writing code for humans to read, and not just for machines to execute. One big change is that writing clearly takes priority over correct code.¹ Reading code involves building up a mental model of what each thing should do, and how these…

Learn the rare skills of admirable people — Over the past few years, I’ve noticed certain skills in people I admire, from Paul Graham, Vitalik Buterin, to Ender Wiggin. These are rare skills, responsible for making them who they are. Most normal people, including me, don’t realise it. This makes the skills powerful — not everyone can see…

Have you ever wanted to learn the first principles that underlie combinatronics? You’re going to need some bells. — Here’s the short version. Let’s take ringing bells in a church as an example. A permutation is an ordering of the bells. You’re figuring out the best order to ring your bells, one at a time. A combination is the choice of bells. You’re choosing the bells that you’re going…

Learn why people do the things they do, and how to deal with them — Have you ever had your boss pass their mistakes on to you? Well, Bob the Boss does. At a critical meeting, Bob asks his team for suggestions on how to fix things. Alice shares an interesting idea, and Bob takes it to upper management. However, it ends up making things…

Knowing how to sequence things is powerful — Assuming you didn’t understand someone after you accuse them of spewing nonsense is much harder to recover from. If you’d checked your understanding first, you’d be in a better situation. For most people, sleeping earlier with the same number of hours leads to better sleep. So, netflix binging during the…

A walkthrough for solving technical problems using different lenses — Consider a team of engineers that’s building a feature API for Snapchat. Let’s call them Ovah’s team. They’re facing two big questions: how do they build it, and how long will it take? If they can’t figure out how to build it, the feature is dead already. If they take…

Most people don’t practice taking ideas seriously. I think it’s because most people don’t know how to. I didn’t either, until I stumbled upon an implication. For example, what would it mean to take compounding seriously? Ugh. I can feel your aversion. You’ve already heard so much about compounding, how…