35 published lessons with this tag.
The ability to direct and sustain attention underlies every other cognitive capability.
Strong feelings about an observation usually mean it touches something important.
Deep engagement with fewer sources extracts more signal than shallow engagement with many. Depth builds the perceptual structures that make signal detection possible. Breadth, pursued without depth, produces the illusion of being informed while degrading your capacity to understand anything.
Strong emotional responses to information often indicate manipulation, not importance. Your triggers are not a relevance filter — they are a vulnerability map.
Instead of blocking noise, create systems that actively surface what matters.
A log of predictions and outcomes shows you exactly where your perception is off.
Writing out the steps of your thinking exposes gaps invisible from inside your head. Internal reasoning feels continuous — externalized reasoning reveals the jumps, the missing warrants, the unstated assumptions. The reasoning chain you think you have is not the reasoning chain you actually have until you write it down.
A mental model you cannot draw is a mental model you cannot examine. The models that govern your decisions most powerfully are the ones you have never made visible — and therefore never inspected, never tested, and never improved.
Everything that follows builds on your ability to create inspect and improve schemas.
Every category you create determines what you group together and what you separate.
Sometimes you need to classify the same items along multiple independent dimensions.
The best category systems adapt as you learn more about what you are organizing.
Some relationships have direction — A causes B is different from B causes A.
Not all connections are equally strong — quantifying strength improves your model.
Identifying what must come before what prevents attempting things out of sequence.
Knowing what enables what reveals where small actions create large effects.
When two ideas contradict each other, both cannot be fully true in the same sense — the tension between them is informative, not a problem to suppress.
Ideas supported by multiple independent lines of evidence are more reliable.
Connecting abstract principles to concrete examples makes them usable.
Tracing a chain of causes and effects reveals the full mechanism behind an outcome.
When A affects B and B affects A you have a system that can amplify or stabilize itself.
What is not connected to anything else is either irrelevant or disconnected by mistake.
When you draw all the relationships between elements the system structure becomes visible.
Connections that exist today may not have existed yesterday or may not exist tomorrow.
If A relates to B and B relates to C there may be an implied relationship between A and C.
Multiple paths between important nodes make a system more robust.
When everything must flow through a single connection that connection is a critical vulnerability.
Agents for recurring decision types like buy-versus-build or accept-versus-decline.
Sometimes deciding fast is more important than deciding optimally.
No process works perfectly every time — error correction must be built in from the start.
Design your systems to fail partially rather than completely.
Recurring errors point to structural problems not personal failures.
When one agent finishes and another starts the relevant context must transfer cleanly.
When retiring an agent update everything that depended on it.
An agent that fails to fire when it should leaves you exposed to undetected problems — the silence feels like safety, but it is blindness.