46 published lessons with this tag.
The ability to see clearly without reactive evaluation gives you an enormous advantage in any domain.
Recurring structures appear at every scale of your experience — in individual thoughts, daily habits, quarterly cycles, and life-long trajectories. The same pattern that shapes a single conversation shapes a career.
The same structure often repeats in your work relationships health and thinking.
Patterns in how your patterns form and dissolve — meta-patterns — are especially valuable.
In an information environment designed to overwhelm your cognition, the ability to detect signal is not an optimization — it is a survival skill that determines whether you act on reality or react to noise.
The structures and incentives of an organization determine individual action more than personality does.
An unwritten commitment is an invitation for your future self to renegotiate. Externalized commitments become binding infrastructure — visible, trackable, and resistant to the drift that lives between intention and action.
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.
Your notebooks, tools, and systems are not aids to thinking — they are part of your thinking. When a tool plays the same functional role as a cognitive process, it is a cognitive process.
Some relationships have direction — A causes B is different from B causes A.
Knowing what enables what reveals where small actions create large effects.
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.
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.
The act of mapping relationships generates new insights about the system. You do not map what you already understand — you map in order to understand. The diagram is not a record of finished thinking. It is the medium in which thinking happens.
What is true at one level of abstraction may not be true at another — check which level each claim operates at.
Individual schemas are more powerful when they connect into a unified understanding.
Good integration preserves the diversity of your schemas while connecting them.
Designing agents for your own cognition is applying systems design to the most important system you manage.
When feedback is delayed you may persist with ineffective behavior for too long.
Some loops reinforce themselves — success breeds more success or failure breeds more failure.
Self-correcting loops maintain balance by countering deviations.
Identifying the reinforcing mechanism is the key to breaking a destructive loop.
When a beneficial loop exists invest in making it stronger and faster.
Long delays between action and feedback make the loop harder to learn from.
When the same error happens repeatedly fix the root cause not just the symptom.
Focusing on who caused an error prevents understanding why it happened.
When you run several cognitive agents they need to work together not interfere with each other.
Draw the dependencies between your agents to see the full coordination picture.
Sometimes combined agent behavior produces results none of the individual agents intended.
Trust your agents and systems — but build verification into the process, not as an afterthought.
A rule is a pre-committed decision that prevents you from having to re-decide the same thing every time.
Holding too much yourself creates bottlenecks, burnout, and prevents others (and systems) from developing capability.
True control comes from building systems you trust to operate without your constant oversight.
Every effective delegation multiplies your capacity — the cumulative effect is exponential leverage.
Effective delegation means your results exceed what your personal effort alone could produce.
Automate monitoring wherever possible to reduce overhead while maintaining visibility.
A single measurement tells you where you are; a trend tells you where you are heading.
Improving anything other than the bottleneck is wasted effort.
Each improvement gets harder and smaller — know when further optimization is not worth the cost.
Optimize how agents connect and hand off to each other, not just how each agent performs in isolation.
Optimization is not something you do once — it is an ongoing relationship with your systems.
Every agent is created, deployed, maintained, and eventually retired.
Your full set of active agents is a portfolio that should be balanced and diversified.