Tempo

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

🎨 Impressions

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Frederick Brooks, in his 1975 classic, The Mythical Man Month, noted that “the programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff.”

• The world changes so fast that most of these decisions go towards simply maintaining situation awareness: largely subconscious decisions about what beliefs to add, update or discard, a process that computer scientists call truth maintenance.

• Tom Vanderbilt notes in Traffic, at 30 miles per hour, we are exposed to about 1,320 “items of information” per minute.

• Many of the surprising insights in Bill Tancer’s Click, a book about what web traffic analysts see people doing online, have to do with these when, where, and who questions. Among the six W questions (What, Why, How, When, Where and Who) that are involved in any decision, when today stands supreme as the fundamental one.

• You will notice a bias towards micro-decisions. For bigger, more consequential decisions, we will adopt a framework based on synthesis, design, metaphor and storytelling, rather than selection among predefined options. So rather than treating college as a “which college should I attend, and what major should I pick?” decision, we will treat it as the creative process of continuously retelling and enacting the most compelling College story you can.

• Routine begets efficiency. In Rubbish: The Archeology of Garbage by William Ratjhe and Cullen Murphy, we learn that families that cook the same few recipes over and over generate much less food waste than those that constantly experiment with new recipes and cuisines.

• Not to let the unpleasantness of tasks m islead you into overestimating their magnitude.

• The Arabs on the other hand, were used to alternately making long, elaborate and uninterrupted speeches (a conversational norm known as musayara, “going together,” perhaps better-suited to leisurely encounters among Bedouin tribes in the desert).

• If you normally schedule your time in blocks of one hour, try scheduling a week using just four-hour blocks. Investor Paul Graham calls this the manager time/maker time distinction.║ He suggests that people who build things should manage their time in four-hour blocks, while managers should use one-hour blocks.

• Momentum is the reason behaviors such as the fait accompli, brinkmanship, second-guessing, passive aggression and time-outs have the effects they do.

• Notice how this response refuses to acknowledge the sly framing, questions the motivations of the prosecutor, and reclaims momentum by answering the question with a question. A purely logical and emotionally neutral response such as “I don’t beat my wife” would have appeared weak and defensive, while an overtly aggressive response such as “What the hell kind of question is that?”

• A fait accompli is an irreversible commitment to a course of enactment before a stakeholder has a chance to contribute. When I pull a fait accompli on you, I suddenly close off other options you thought were open.

• Brinkmanship is the calibrated letting go of control of a consequential decision (classically, the decision to pull a nuclear trigger).

• Procrastination occurs when we delay a context switch by adding more momentum to our current mental model, thereby making it harder to displace. Cleaning and organizing your apartment to avoid working on your dissertation is easier than enduring the pain involved in surfacing an incoherent mental model charged with negative emotions into conscious awareness. Procrastination usually takes the form of displacement, which allows us a safe outlet for the emotions we are trying to avoid.

• Second-guessing works by forcing someone to reverse acts of destruction.

• Passive aggression works by fragmenting and dissipating momentum. Your mental model identifies something as relevant, say a fax to a customer that ought to clinch a sale.

• Time-outs are particularly interesting. Mental models don’t include emotions (though they may include beliefs about emotions, like “I am angry”), but their momentum is coupled to emotions (you remember where you were during 9/11 because the emotions gave your throwaway mental model of your surroundings enough momentum for life). Waiting drains emotions from situations and associated mental models, thanks to drag from other mental models and emotionally neutral stimuli.

• Systems that combine defaults (incumbent decision settings) with pre-programmed commitment patterns. If you don’t keep up and over-ride where necessary, you will default to outcomes that you may or may not like.

• Narrative rationality is an approach to decision-making that starts with an observation that is at once trivial and profound: all our choices are among life stories that end with our individual deaths.

• Incidentally, it is no accident that we hit banality with just four questions. Sakichi Toyada, the founder of Toyota, and an industrial engineering pioneer, developed the “Five Whys” heuristic, which is used today in formal root-cause-analysis investigations. The heuristic simply suggests that it usually takes about five why questions before you get to the root cause of a problem.

• Roughly speaking, there are four steps to every decision. First, you perceive a situation. Then you think of possible courses of action. Then you calculate which course is in your best interest. Then you take the action.

• Entropy increases during a heavy lift because in driving towards a forced outcome, you inevitably begin making expedient decisions out of exhaustion, which leads to imperfections and compromises. As writers like to remark, books are never finished, they are merely abandoned.

• The relationship among risk, learning and information seems deceptively simple: every decision is based on what you know (information), and risk assessments associated with what you don’t know. Learning helps you increase usable information and lower risk.

• The three laws of thermodynamics are: You cannot win You cannot break even You cannot quit the game

• Complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman proposed a fourth law that can be stated as the game keeps getting more complicated, and there are always more different ways to play.

• Experts often describe novice behavior as being “by the book.” Their own repertoire of cheap tricks and hacks can be understood, within this metaphor, as scribbled margin notes that improve a calculative-rational tactical manual

• The central idea in OODA is a generalization of Butterfly-Bee: to simply operate at a higher tempo than your opponent. This is a subtle point. A higher tempo is not the same as higher speed, in the sense of a race car overtaking another. To think in terms of tempo means to think in terms of (narrative time) frequencies rather than speed.

• War vs. Battle: “Strategy is about winning the war; tactics are about winning individual battles.”

• Why vs. What: “Tactics is about what to do; strategy is about why you should do it.”

• Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness Explained41 describes a strange creature called the sea squirt that has a primitive brain in its juvenile state. It uses this brain to swim around looking for a rock or a piece of coral to cling to. When it finds one, it “doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it!”

• So apparent creative chaos is fine, so long as it is sufficiently legible and meaningful to you. The externalizations of your mental models only have to be legible and meaningful to others to the extent that you must share meaning with them.

• Taylor’s influence led to some of the worst authoritarian high-modernist debacles of the twentieth century, and as a result his ideas are commonly demonized today. It is important to recognize, however, that his ideas and methods, carefully applied, have proved highly valuable. Interval logic, the idea we encountered in Chapter 2, is a refined descendant of the Taylorist idea of Gantt charts. Where Taylorism goes wrong is when it exceeds its bounds of applicability (and admittedly, Taylor’s presumption that his broader philosophy was objectively “scientific” in some sense was a major contributing factor).

• The governing aesthetic of system-process thinking is what Scott43 calls “authoritarian high modernism.” When system-process complexes fail, it is often due to the same pathology we noted before: overweening, impoverished design crushing an ongoing, organic dance.