“Superthinking,” by Gabriel Weinberg
Spend Your Time Wisely
“In the business world, there is a mental model that draws on Polaris for inspiration, called north star, which refers to the guiding vision of a company. For example, DuckDuckGo’s north star is “to raise the standard of trust online.” If you know your north star, you can point your actions toward your desired long-term future. Without a north star, you can be easily “lost at sea,” susceptible to the unintended consequences of short-termism (see Chapter 2).”
“This is called compound interest, referring to the fact that your interest payments are growing over time, or compounding. Previous interest earned is added to the total amount each cycle, making a bigger base from which the next interest cycle is calculated.”
Two front war– “If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”
Multitasking– “You can fully perform only one high-concentration activity at a time. Your brain just isn’t capable of simultaneously focusing on two high-concentration activities at once. If you attempt this, you will be forced to context-switch between the two activities.”
“Focusing on one high-concentration activity at a time can also help you produce dramatically better results. That’s because the best results rely on creative solutions, which often come from concentrating intently on one thing. Startup investor Paul Graham calls it the top idea in your mind in his 2010 essay of the same name:”
“Author Cal Newport refers to the type of thinking that leads to breakthrough solutions as deep work. He advocates for dedicating long, uninterrupted periods of time to making progress on your most important problem.”
“Thiel’s solution encourages deep work by strictly limiting multitasking. Of course, if you limit yourself to one activity at a time, it is critical that this top idea in your mind is an important one.”
“Parkinson presents an example of a budget committee considering an atomic reactor and a bike shed, offering that “the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.” The committee members are reluctant to deeply discuss all of the complicated aspects of the atomic reactor decision because it is challenging and esoteric. By contrast, everyone wants to weigh in with their opinion on the bike shed decision because it is easy and familiar relative to the reactor, even though it is also relatively unimportant. This phenomenon has become known as bike-shedding. You must try not to let yourself get sucked into these types of debates, because they rob you of time that can be spent on important issues.”
“Luckily, there is an extremely powerful mental model from economics to guide you: opportunity cost. Every choice you make has a cost: the value of the best alternative opportunity you didn’t choose. As a rule, you want to choose the option with the lowest opportunity cost.”
“Your opportunity cost for starting this business is defined as the sum of all the explicit and implicit costs, based on an alternative future where you stayed at your job, continued earning your salary, and allocated what would have been your startup capital to other investments. What would your return be on path A versus on path B?”
“Similarly, in negotiations there is another application of opportunity cost called BATNA, which stands for best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If you have a job offer, your BATNA is the best alternative job offer you have in hand, including your current job. You shouldn’t accept an offer worse than your BATNA, because you can always take this better alternative offer (which could be the status quo).”
“The mechanical advantage gained by a lever, also known as leverage, serves as the basis of a mental model applicable across a wide variety of situations. The concept can be useful in any situation where applying force or effort in a particular area can produce outsized results, relative to similar applications of force or effort elsewhere.”
“As applied to individuals, certain activities or actions have much greater leverage than others, and spending time or money on these high-leverage activities will produce the greatest effects. Therefore, you should take time to continually identify high-leverage activities. It’s getting more bang for your buck.”
“The Pareto principle can help you find high-leverage activities. It states that in many situations, 80 percent of the results come from approximately 20 percent of the effort.”
“This particular 80/20 arrangement of outcomes is known as a power law distribution, where relatively few occurrences account for a significantly outsized proportion of the total.”
“For example, if you want to improve the effectiveness of a web page, focus on the headline and leading image, often referred to as the “hero section.” This is the first thing visitors will see, and the only thing many of them will read. The hero section is also what will be shared on social media. Small changes to this section—use of a catchier turn of phrase or a more engaging image—are simple, but have potential for a large effect.”
“After you determine the 80/20 and address the low-hanging fruit, each additional hour of work will unfortunately produce less and less impactful results. In economics, this model is called the law of diminishing returns. It is the tendency for continued effort to diminish in effectiveness after a certain level of result has been achieved.”
“One reason why people procrastinate so much is present bias, which is the tendency to overvalue near-term rewards in the present over making incremental progress on long-term goals (see short-termism in Chapter 2). It’s really easy to find reasons on any given day to skip going to the gym (too much work, bad sleep, feeling sick/sore, etc.), but if you do this too often, you’ll never reach your long-term fitness goals.”
“A mental model that can help you further combat your present bias is commitment, where you actively commit in some way to your desired future. Commitments can be formal or informal, but they are usually most effective when they have some sort of penalty attached to breaking the commitment.”
“Since many people take the path of least resistance, 401(k) programs also showcase the default effect, the effect stemming from the fact that many people just accept default options. Participation in a 401(k) or in programs such as organ donation or voter registration varies dramatically depending on whether the programs are default opt-in versus default opt-out.”
“You can use the default effect to your personal advantage by making default commitments toward your long-term goals. A simple example is scheduling recurring time right into your calendar, such as an hour a week to look for a new job, deep-clean your living space, or work on a side project. Thereafter, by default your time is allocated to whichever long-term goal you choose. This same technique also works well for scheduling deep work. By putting deep-work blocks of time into your calendar, you can prevent yourself by default from booking this time with meetings since it is already committed.”
“Parkinson’s law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Does that ring true for you? It certainly does for us.”
“Hofstadter’s law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. In other words, things take longer than you expect, even when you consider that they take longer than you expect!”
“Another often-overlooked option is to abandon the project altogether before it is done. Sometimes you need to acknowledge that you are just not on the path to success. Other times you may find that what it would take to get where you originally wanted to go is just not worth the effort anymore. Unfortunately, psychologically, your mind is working hard against you here, and loss aversion is the model that explains why. You are more inclined to avoid losses, to be averse to them, than you are to want to make similar gains.
When it comes to losses in particular, you need to acknowledge that they’ve already happened: you’ve already spent the resources on the project to date. When you allow these irrecoverable costs to cloud your decision making, you are falling victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. The costs of the project so far, including your time spent, have already been sunk. You can’t get them back.”
“Everyday sunk cost fallacy examples can run from less consequential decisions, such as finishing a movie or book that you don’t like, to larger ones, such as investing more money into a failing business or staying in a career or relationship that is turning sour. You need to avoid thinking, We’ve come too far to stop now. Instead, take a realistic look at your chances of success and evaluate from an opportunity cost perspective whether your limited resources are best used continuing what you are doing or persuing another opportunity. You may have made a commitment, but given all you know now, this may be one of those situations where you should break it.”
“In Chapter 1, we discussed postmortems, where you analyze project failures so that you can do better next time. But you don’t have to wait until the end of a project—you can also conduct mid-mortems, and occasionally even pre-mortems, where you predict ahead of time where things could go off track. In Chapter 1, we also discussed the third story, where you look at conflicts from an objective point of view. You need to use the same point of view when evaluating your own projects. If you recognize that you cannot do that, then bring someone else in to help you get out of your own way.”
“In many fields, leaders have agreed on best practices based on what has worked or what has not worked in the past. Architect Christopher Alexander introduced the concept of a design pattern, which is a reusable solution to a design problem.”
“The same is true in our careers: design patterns for startups (how they are commonly financed, managed, etc.), coding (how code is structured, common algorithms, etc.), and biostatistics (common drug trial designs, statistical methods, etc.). The opposite of the well-tested design pattern is the anti-pattern, a seemingly intuitive but actually ineffective “solution” to a common problem that often already has a known, better solution. Most of the mental models in this book are either design patterns or anti-patterns, and learning them can help you avoid common mistakes.”
Algorithms can range from the simple (like a traffic light that changes every two minutes) to the complex (like a traffic a light that changes dynamically based on live sensors) to the highly complex (like an artificial intelligence that manages traffic lights across a whole city at once). Many algorithms operate as black boxes, which means they require very little understanding by the user of how they work. You don’t care how you got the best seats, you just want the best seats! You can think of each algorithm as a box where inputs go in and outputs come out, but outside it is painted black so you can’t tell what is going on inside.
“Another way to speed things up is parallel processing, in which you solve a group of problems in parallel. In a computing context, you’d literally assign different calculations to different processors, such that multiple calculations are done simultaneously, as opposed to in serial, where calculations are done one after another. Amazon doesn’t have just one big warehouse it ships from; it has more than a hundred! In this way it can break up the daily shipping logistics into many sub-problems at different facilities. Parallel processing is an example of a divide and conquer strategy. If you can break a problem into independent pieces and hand these pieces out to different parties to solve, you can accomplish more, faster. Think of when you delegate parts of a project to different people or departments to work on.”
“Another strategy to get to a solution quicker when faced with a hard situation is to reframe the problem.“