This appears to be about designing a life, but I'm convinced it applies to designing anything. It humbly puts to rest the idea that good design originates from a big, confident, immovable vision and argues a good design unfolds from feedback as you iterate from one small vision, informed by as much as information you can gather, to another.
How has your grand design of SN changed over the past 3 years?
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153 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b OP 6 Aug
SN never had a grand design. It started as “pay to post/comment and get paid when people ‘vote’.” Everything else is change/unfolding.
When people ask what my vision for SN is even today, my answer is what I don’t want it to be, which isn’t much of a boundary or vision at all.
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Interesting. Not having a grand design does give you the ability to be more adaptable but do you find it hinders you in terms of figuring out what to work on and when?
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“Knowing” what to work on is different than knowing what’s right to work on.
Ime The most dangerous bias we experience is working on things that are fun to build but don’t yield a lot of value.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby 6 Aug
Great point. I was a big proponent of “the one thing” when I had my business. What’s the one thing I can work on that makes everything else easier. It was generally recruiting talent.
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I’d guess I share that one thing, but I struggle with it in part due the dangerous bias.
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112 sats \ 1 reply \ @Atreus 6 Aug
Mozart says he conceived of musical pieces as a single whole in one great moment of insight, then only copied into writing what he'd heard in his head.
I don't believe him for a second.
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Yeah sounds a lot like the smart kids I knew in college who tried as hard as they could to make it look like they weren't trying.
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Absolutely, this principle is universal. For design, personal life, and society in general. It actually stems from purest math:
The more variables you have to deal with, the more flexible you have to be. So to arrive to a solution you have to fix a small set of parameters as a starting point, which by being small will thus leave the degrees of freedom needed, to be solved through iteration. Actual physical simulations are programmed this way. It's the most basic math principle, so it must apply to all aspects of reality and life. And it does.
A common example is the three body problem.
This is the reason engineering is my religion.
I believe @south_korea_ln can confirm the above paragraph too.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 6 Aug
Good read. Thanks. The first I heard of this guy was from an Elvis Mercury post. I made a note to keep up with his substack, but the note got lost.
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I subscribed recently. His writing is hard to stop reading which is as good as it gets.
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No doubt, article has very deep information about to design anything in your life. IMO love whatever your are doing. Enjoy the process. Because happiness is only thing what you require to live stress-free.
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Seems like you leapfrog from good ideas to better ones. Leapfrog and build as you go.
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The biggest mistake I see fellow living lifers make, whether founders1 or randoms trying to actualize anything, is ignoring context, feedback, and data because it encroaches on a fixed vision or dream that was mostly constructed in their heads, free of context, where the only force acting on it is a self-soothing, self-important, self. The surest sign I know a person is NGMI to the top of self-actualization mountain is they can't take feedback2. They'll never expose their dream to reality because they imagine they can't afford for it to change when it needs to die a million times and evolve into something else, something that can survive outside of their heads.

Footnotes

  1. Confusingly often even the ones with prior successes somehow still manage to do this just in a much more spectacular and expensive way, not realizing they succeeded the first time because they were surfing a nice stretch of reality as it unfolded and they're an excellent surfer.
  2. Not taking feedback comes in many forms. Sometimes, it's refusing to hear it, insisting it's wrong. Other times, it's agreeing with all of it at face value, accepting it when it's wrong. In either case, there's a lack of feedback diversity, and they never gather enough diverse feedback to know what's true.
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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 6 Aug
I was listening to WBD with the authors of Resistance Money. They described the process of co writing the book chapter by chapter. They would each ruthlessly pick apart each other's writing, often discarding hours of work until they were all happy with the chapter. They analogized the method as a multi sig.
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I think it’s tough to balance between investing all you got into your idea and remaining emotionally detached from it so that you can incorporate feedback to evolve it. It can be hard to subdue our ego
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A good article!
However my views about designing a life are not the same. I believe that life is such a phenomenon where you just can try to design or control the events and outcomes but when it comes to designing a life, it's not a building or a website where inputs are gonna give you definite output. I keep it simple, "let it design itself".
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11 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 6 Aug
I keep it simple, "let it design itself".
That’s basically what the author is arguing while respecting his desires are part of life too.
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Yes. I'm reading it again. It's quite intriguing!
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Very impressive. We should apply it. Definitely going to apply in my life.
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stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.