Skills: How to work on hard Things

work on hard problems

• Use creativity to solve problems

  • invest your creativity, skills and efforts into solve big problems and want free markets pay for it
  • If the work doesn't require creativity, delegate it, automate it or leave it

• Focus on the matters

  • 不是生活中的每一个问题都要解决，和问题共处是人生常态

How To Do difficult Things

• Difficult problems

  • problems that are not a function of raw work hours, but rather require dealing with ambiguity

  • you have to put a lot of skill or thinking into it

  • hard work is just a lot of human-hours

• Effective strategies

  • reduce the cognitive costs of decision making to solve the problem through collapsing a high dim problem space into a low dim of hard work

    • focus on decisions where pretty much anything you can do works
    • prioritize decisions that quickly lead to good outcomes
    • delegate to external sources of decision making

  • 减少选择性

    • 优先级选择
    • Part of optionality is being willing to make changes
    • "One of the difficult things about making decisions is it reduces opportunity in the short term, but that's the only thing that really creates great opportunity in the long term. If you don't make decisions, you try to live too much in a liminal opportunity space, you might be just missing very big opportunities and not creating what the really big opportunities are"

  • skill acquisition

    • access to a subject expert and know how to guide you through

• reference

  • Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work
  • How to do hard things
  • How To Do Hard Things
  • Practical Guide to Solving Hard Problems
  • Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness

Check - Constantly ask yourself what you're trying to do

• Always pick the simplest solution that solves your immediate problem, then change it when it is needed

  • keep is agile and adaptable; iterate faster

• Constantly ask yourself what's the problem you're trying to solve

  • After we implement the simple solution, we have a much better understanding of our problem

  • be sure that you understand the problem deeply, and that you at least have an idea of how would you know that the problem is solved

  • Connect Goals to a purpose

• propose a course of action

  • start small and start now
  • write down your potential obstacles, execuses, or fears, as well as how you will navigate them
  • celebrate your wins on each step

• remind yourself: what I was trying to do ?

• ask the question: does doing this solve my problem?

  • doing this should transform your problem into your imaginary solved problem
  • it's important to have an idea of how does the solved problem looks like

• Do I need to do this?

  • All actions should be needed for solving the problem
  • Any action that is not obviously needed, should be discarded

• reference

  • A principled way to solve problems

reference

• Practical Guide to Solving Hard Problems
• How to Solve It-A New Aspect of Mathematical Method