Principles

This repository is a work-in-progress effort to document some of the principles that guide my life and work at this point.

Big Picture

Principles are half-way between virtues and actions. They are more tangible than general virtues (ανδρεια - courage in the face of uncertainty, σοφια - the wisdom of choosing the right action in a given situation, etc.). However, they are much more brittle and subject to more change and adjustment as circumstances change.

Obvious influences

• Ray Dalio. Principles, Life and Work
• Nassim Taleb. Antifragile, Skin in the Game

Work

Entrepreneurship

• Focus on the process.
  • The outcome is mostly out of your hands.
  • Strive for excellent execution in each part.
  • Balance speed, cost and fragility.
• Don't get caught up in operations, be prepared for opportunities.
• Be gentle to yourself.

Strategy, from playing Go

• Competition and your opponent is there to bring forth your best self.
• Always assume your opponent makes her best move and plan for it.
  • Know how to punish/exploit slow moves.
  • If your opponent plays optimally, the best you can get is a balanced position.
    • So embrace and expect balance.
• Ask "what's the largest move on the board?".
• Playing it safe is too slow.
  • Be aware of your weaknesses.
  • Be prepared to either shore up your weaknesses or sacrifice.
• Big picture success can only be achieved by skill in the details.
  • But getting lost in details is not getting you anywhere.
• Learn to hold multiple possible future worlds in your head.
  • Get comfortable with uncertainty.
• If you need to make many slow moves only to live, your opponent is getting free moves.

Business decisions

• Don't focus exclusively on measurable metrics - pay attention to the qualitative details.
• Build simple, heuristic models (financial or otherwise), but don't rely on them too heavily.

Management & Mentoring

• Make as few decisions yourself as possible, encourage and empower the team to make decisions.
• Don't micromanage, mentor.
• Listen and look out for any sparks of excitement and enthusiasm in your team members.
  • The (long term) cost of denying team members to work on things they are excited about can be prohibitive.
  • Work hard to find alignment between individual and organisational goals and challenges.
  • Provide realistic ways for team members to work on important, non-urgent, personally meaningful projects consistently.

Software craftmanship

• Readability is much more important than performance.
• Every engineering trade-off has to be considered within the broader context of the lifetime of the organisation and the experience and size of the team involved.
• Allow technical debt and domain drift deliberatly and sparingly.