Saturday, August 31, 2024

Motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose

Autonomy, mastery, purpose: three forces that motivate us all




Your images are a virus. They are EVERYWHERE on the Internet - Scott Hanselman's Blog




"a great place to work" is where a person can 
  • do useful things, for organization (purpose)
  • that she or he can do really well (mastery)
  • that she or he also likes to do on its own (autonomy)
a sustainable "good feeling" comes from (personal) growth,
meaning learning new useful skills, 
and then being able to use them for creating value




“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

Be the best of whatever you are.

Sunday, August 25, 2024

First Principles: scientific thinking

 First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself by James Clear, author of 

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones: Clear, James: 9780735211292: Amazon.com: Books

reasoning from first principles,
is one of the most effective strategies you can employ for
  • breaking down complicated problems and
  • generating original solutions.
It also might be the single best approach
to learn how to think for yourself.


example: rockets for SpaceX, and batteries for Tesla electric cars:
the cost of materials was much smaller than the cost of final components;
this means that if production process was re-organizes, it is possible to make them much cheaper.

“Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy."
Musk said in an interview.

What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”


A first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further.
Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as
“the first basis from which a thing is known.”

First principles thinking is a fancy way of saying “think like a scientist.”
Scientists don’t assume anything. They start with questions like,
What are we absolutely sure is true? What has been proven?


Rene Descartes, the French philosopher and scientist, embraced this approach
with a method now called Cartesian Doubt in which he would
“systematically doubt everything he could possibly doubt
until he was left with what he saw as purely indubitable truths.”

First principle - Wikipedia
In philosophy and science, a first principle
is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced
from any other proposition or assumption.


Scientific inquiry includes creating a hypothesis through inductive reasoning,
testing it through experiments and statistical analysis,
and adjusting or discarding the hypothesis based on the results.



Saturday, August 3, 2024

book: Reinvention: by Brian Tracy

 Reinvention: How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life: Tracy, Brian: 9780814413463: Amazon.com: Books

"If you knew you couldn't fail, what is the greatest thing you would dare to dream? Is the job you now have the one you've always wanted? Do you work with the kind of people you'd like to work with? As personal success expert Brian Tracy can attest, it's not until you deal with the dissatisfactions of the present that you can move onward and upward to create the wonderful future that is possible for you. And it is possible. In Reinvention, Brian Tracy reveals how every one of us is engineered for success, and with the right focus, can remake ourselves and put an end to the chronic stress, unhappiness, and dissatisfaction we might feel in our careers and lives."

Introduction – Your World in Transition
1 You Are Remarkable
2 Who Are You?
3 What Do You Want?
4 What Are You Worth?
5 How to You Get the Job You Want--In Any Economy
6 How Do You Get Ahead?
7 How Do You Get the Most out of Yourself?
Summary: What Do You Do Now?


We are living in the greatest time in all of human history. There are no limits to what you can accomplish except for the limits that you place on yourself. Your job is to become one of the most productive people in your field. Your goal is to develop the reputation for being the person who, when anyone wants or needs something done, gets the job done.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. Why are you on the payroll? Of all the things you’ve been hired to do, which one is most important?

2. What one skill, if you were absolutely excellent at it, would help you the most in your career?

3. What are some of the activities or tasks in your life that you should delegate, downsize, or eliminate?

4. If you could reinvent yourself today, with no limitations, what would you do differently?

5. What are the most important projects that you should get finished as soon as possible?

6. What are the things that only you can do that, if done well, can make a real difference in your work and personal life?

7. What are you going to start doing, or stop doing, immediately as the result of what you have learned in this book?


THE ABCDE METHOD TO SET PRIORITIES

1. An A item is something that is very important. This is a task that you must do, something that has serious consequences for either doing it or not doing it. Put an A next to the top tasks on your list.

2. A B item is something that you should do but it is not as important as an A item. There are only mild consequences associated with doing it or not doing it. Returning a phone call or checking your e-mail would fall into this category. Put a B next to these items on your list.

3. A C item is something that would be nice to do, but for which there are no consequences at all. Phoning a friend, going for coffee, or chatting with a co-worker are all things that are nice to do but they have absolutely no consequences for your career or your success.

The rule is that you should never do a B item when there is an A item left undone. You should never do a C item when there is a B item left undone. You must be very disciplined about this.

4. A D item is an item that you delegate or outsource to someone else. The rule is that you should delegate everything that you possibly can to free up more time for you to concentrate on your A activities.

5. The letter E stands for eliminate. These are items that are of such low value that you could eliminate them completely and they would make no difference to your success at your job.

The discipline of eliminating low-value tasks can simplify your life and free up more time for you to accomplish those tasks that can have the greatest possible consequences for you.

THE 80/20 RULE

The 80/20 Rule, the Pareto principle, is one of the most important and powerful of all time-management principles. This rule divides all activities into what Pareto called “the vital few” and “the trivial many.” This law says that 20 percent of the things you do, the vital few, will account for fully 80 percent of the value of everything you do.

SINGLE-HANDLING WITH KEY TASKS

Make a list of everything you have to do. Select the most important item on your list, the highest-value use of your time. Then, start work on that most important task and discipline yourself to stay at it until it is 100 percent complete.


Quote

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU