I came across this writing of mine when reading old entries from my freeflow diary. I think it has some interesting ideas in there.

I wonder if people who are really good at something and who have earned other people’s trust in some expertise managed to get there by “faking it till they made it”. What I mean by that is that they didn’t actually meet the requirements of their expertise at some point, but had the confidence to act as they did, in such a strong way that people around them believed them as well. I wonder if this is, in general, a sufficient way to progress in any profession.

A food for thought.

On the food for thought saying; it’s such a nice way of saying that our mind also needs proper nutrition, packaged as a challenge to tackle with your brain. As a meta, this is also food for thought.

When I say it like this, anything and everything really is food for thought. And once getting there you realize that you’ve gone beyond the scope of this saying. Sayings always leave something up for interpretation, they’re ambiguous. Whereas, abstracting the conversation to a meta-plan where every set of words is food for thought, is correct in a mathematical sense. The math is sound but doesn’t work very well in practice. This is also an instance of “just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should”. Some wise person once said this, it was probably Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs prioritized ruthlessly in his product design. There are a lot of things you can say about Steve Jobs, as a parent, as a coworker, and as a boss. In spite of all of that, you can’t take away from him the brilliance he’s brought to the consumer tech space. And it goes beyond that I believe. His ideology can easily be mapped onto other areas of interest. Diet for example; keep it simple, prioritize ruthlessly. There, the prioritization can be the fact that you only consume the smallest set of foods that make you reach your daily macronutrient goals, and this can be the most important stuff. If you try to do too many things well at the same time, you’ll end up doing nothing. You can’t please everybody, that’s just the way life works. Simplicity always wins. It doesn’t just scale better, but it only works way better in smaller-scale problems.

Decision fatigue.