Chunking

• Use chunking to break down learning into smaller, more manageable tasks.
• Think in first principles by simplifying complex problems into elementary parts. A bicycle is a handlebar, two wheels, gears, and a seat.
• Make early assumptions with a Fermi estimate. Start with quick, back-of-the-envelope guesses before narrowing down to slower, more precise calculations.
• Practice micromastery. Learn to cook a great omelette rather than to be a great cook. Small skills are easy to quantify and fun to share with others.

Consistency

• Make lots of pots. Quick, frequent prototypes weed out the bad ideas that perfectionists never see. Quantity leads to quality.
• Embrace maintenance. Practice old skills to reinforce pathways and prevent skills from decaying.

Feedback

• Feedback is a key component to getting better at anything.
• You make what you measure. Notice how things improve just by measuring them.

Fundamentals

• Focus on the fundamentals. Mistakes and plateaus can often be attributed to failing the basics.
• Find the hole where success leaks. When you’re an amateur, most game-losing mistakes are caused by fundamental blunders. Fixing any any one of these problems can make you immediately, noticeably better.
• Mastering the fundamentals will make you ‘good’ to a level that very few people ever reach.
• Be skeptical of specificity. As training methods become more specific, you should demand more proof that the method is worth your time.
• Avoid bike-shedding. It’s easy to become hyperfocused on mastering a minor area that has little importance to the goal.

Input

• To make delicious food you must eat delicious food.
• Imitate. Assimilate. Innovate. The path to becoming original is to work through the masters, absorb their vocabularies, and recombine them into something new.
• Get massive amounts of comprehensible input. Learn a language by reading novels. Learn to improvise by transcribing jazz.

Incrementalism

• Make a habit of incremental improvements. Compound interest can turn small short-term changes into huge long-term gains.
• Progress is better than perfection.
• Virgil Abloh’s 3% approach: you can create a new design by changing an original by three per cent.

Interleaving

• Focus on progressive, rather than baseline, learning. Understand a blurry, big-picture version first, then slowly sharpen the details.
• Always skim a book before you read it in detail.

Specialization

• For many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. Focus your time on the 20% that gives (or inhibits) most of your results.
• Develop a T-shaped skillset. Spend most of your time practicing a deep specialization. Use the rest of your time to explore new, “unrelated” topics and build context.
• Specialization is relative. A generalist in one domain can be a specialist in another. A typographer isn’t much of a specialist at a type foundry, but they are highly specialized in a bicycle factory. Practice information arbitrage by finding where your specialization is in demand.

Tacit knowledge

• You can’t learn merely by having something explained to you. Learning must be rooted in experience, context, practice, and imitation of masters.
• Play songs to learn scales. Don’t learn scales to play songs.
• Do you want to be good at cooking, or good at watching other people cook? Be honest about how much time you spend studying supplemental, explicit activities.
• You will never “know enough” to start, so start as soon as possible. There will always be another verb to conjugate, another musical scale to memorize on the path to fluency.
• Don’t put knowledge above experience, “like film-buffs who know everything there is to know about films they have not seen.” Don’t replace listening to jazz with memorizing album credits.
• Books, YouTube videos, courses, and podcasts can never solve practical problems. “A practical problem can only be solved by action itself.”

Weak links

• If it’s easy to do, it’s not practice.
• Be a noob. “The more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.”