1. Synthesize new ideas constantly

• Avoid passive reading; engage with the material by actively processing and trying to think ahead. Model and generate thought (sprouts and tangential questions) as you go, noting down these thoughts along with the actual material you’d like to preserve.

2. Learn how to learn

• Work on the skill of learning. That is, the ability to learn new things quickly.
• Understand how your brain works and play towards its advantages.
• Rapidly prototype ideas, answer questions that pop up, test concepts against your world model. Build new ideas into long term pieces of the world model with your personal system.

3. Work backward from your goal

• Visualize the final product and consider the process of acheiving a particular goal. Then work backward to where you are now. This helps you build a better idea of the path toward this goal, consider areas of difficulty you may run into (backcasting), and overall cultivate a better idea of how to achieve success.
• This is a common tip I’ve seen across multiple sources (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Personal Systems). Clearly an important idea to implement.

4. Always have a long-term plan

• Know where you’re headed. Having an explicit, long-term plan (also called a personal mission statement as in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) can give a clear mind and global inspiration for your work.
• Update the plan often to keep things in line with your values and goals.

5. Make contigency maps

• Identify steps and concepts required to achieve a particular goal (suggested on a large piece of paper, not necessary)
• Complete those things/learn about concepts that have fewest prerequisites but most dependents

6. Collaborate with others

7. Make mistakes quickly

• Often phrased as “fail early and often”; better to try things quickly, fail, and learn

• When failure occurs, document how and why you failed. Identify what exactly went wrong and what you should’ve done instead to avoid the issue. This makes you familiar with the situation, never to make the same mistake again, and contribute toward generalizing an approach for similar problems.

• A relevant Shakespeare quote:

  “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”

8. Best practices protocols

• Write up best practices and important processes. This helps streamline, document, and make explicit effective routines

9. Document everything

• If you don’t record everything (or most things), you’ll likely forget it.
• Writing down observations and thoughts makes them real, giving you the opportunity to digest the information later and extract value.

10. Keep it simple

• Consider ways to simplify complex systems and processes.
• Simpler often implies better, more reliable, easier to understand and implement → greater impact on the world