A friend and I spent some time walking and talking. We identified a few ideas.
Cut-over dates
Cut over dates help people scope the life time of a part to a generation. It is often much easier to design a new part for the next generation instead of trying to squeeze it amongst a whole bunch of other garbage.
Keep teams small
It’s hard to, there’s almost more to do. But keeping teems small. With a small team you can only do zero to one. Larger teams can do one to one-hundred.
We should repeatedly be trying to do zero-to-one with small teams. Then we hand off to a separate team to scale.
You will run into trouble if you try to do zero-to-one and scale with the same team, or worse, with the same product.
You get old when you don’t want to be young anymore
We assume a certain set of things belongs to a youth that is inaccessible.
This can come at two levels:
- The individual
- The group
In-accessibility of the individual is the class of actions you think you cannot take in isolation — curiosity, grinding, sacrifice.
In-accessibility of the group is the set of actions that would be good for the group, but the channels and precedents do not exist to communicate and coordinate that need.
We must combat both.
You get jaded when you stop trying to change things
Always ask what can change and what can get better. Change is uncomfortable, so it’s important not to get too comfortable. We don’t want to leave our comfort, but leaving our bubble is what leads to exciting things and climbing mountains.
Write down how you do things
We over estimate our memory. Writing things down helps us distill the important lessons, this is the process of learning.
When we try to write things down it makes us realize we don’t actually understand something — this is what forces us to learn.