# Career Principles and Strategic Plan To add: * Ray Dalio principles * Naval Principles ## Biggest Themes 1. **Prioritize the Most Important Thing, fast iterations, feedback, and deep reflection** * You work in an ever evolving field, with ever evolving problems. Being able to rapidly take in new information, prioritize the most important thing, identify bottlenecks and derisk, operate in a way that yields signal & feedback, and iterate forward; this will allow you to be incredibly effective. 2. **Make decisions that *derisk*** 3. **Surround yourself with independent thinkers, bring others along with you.** 4. Your greatest skill isn’t needing to know it all now, but to be able to learn what you need rapidly. This requires constantly reassessing and reprioritizing! ## Principles 1. **The Most Important Thing** * > Build a foundation at Kover that establishes my values, fosters trust, enables success, and provides me with autonomy. Give yourself to this role. Put your energy and effort into truly doing the best possible job that you can. 2. **What is my Why?** * Have a skill set so strong and sought after that I can truly chose to do what I want, whether that be work for myself as a consultant, as a CTO, as lead R&D engineer, an educator or investor. Have maximal autonomy, freedom, ceiling, and flexibility. 3. **Be Guided based on the Problem at Hand** * Let the problem at hand guide your actions and prioritizations. 4. **Embrace Accountability** 5. **Regular Reflection and Questioning** * Am I working on the most important thing? What am I doing well? What am I doing poorly? 6. **Diagnose the Patterns that effect you. Act to resolve them.** 7. **Balance Explore vs. Exploit** 8. **Be cognizant of the tension between Designer self and Worker self** 9. **Be someone who *ships*** 10. **Alignment: You will function optimally when your actions and goals are aligned** 11. **Your Journey**: In this world, there is *no one* who is better suited to tackle *your journey* than *you are*. 12. **Be a craftsman** 14. **Always remember the 80/20 principle** 15. **Time is most valuable resource** 16. **Identify bottle necks, support with evidence, publicly articulate, remove bottle neck, determine if it was a success, learn, iterate.** 17. **What are my constraints? What is the problem to solve? Question all assumptions.** ## Tactics #### Most Important Thing when starting at a new company > Build a foundation at Kover that establishes my values, fosters trust, enables success, and provides me with autonomy. - What directly impacts that goal? 1. Asking hard questions, having a firm recommendation while including others, working in public, being humble, continually reassessing what we need to do 2. Having good ideas that continually derisk 3. Having a deep understanding of hard topics 4. Being able to learn quickly ### Product, Technical, ML Tactics 1. [Machine Learning in Startups](Machine%20Learning%20in%20Startups.md) 2. [Startups MOC](Startups%20MOC.md) 3. ### Personal Tactics 1. Ruthlessly prioritize the **[The Most Important Thing](The%20Most%20Important%20Thing.md)** 1. If an action can't be tied to the most important thing, you really should reconsider if it needs to be done. 2. Prioritize things that are pressing for work right now. This will ensure alignment and maximal productivity, making you better and creating a positive feedback loop. 3. The first part of your day should be spent in deep work on most important thing 99% of the time. 4. See *Essentialism* 2. *Balance* **exploring** and **exploiting** tasks 1. Time box exploring tasks. Always remember the idea of a the designer self vs. worker self. The worker is myopic and will always be greedy for more time. The designer must effectively reason if more time makes sense and should be allowed. 2. "Designer Nate" allocates time to "Worker Nate" 3. Exploring tasks should have some type of write up required. For an exploring task, the more time spent, the more effort that should be put into a write up/reflection. This is because if you spent time on this exploring task, you want to capitalize on what you learned. You don't want to forget it and have to spend this time again in the future. So an obsidian note (effectively linked) should be created for these types of task. This should go into the reflection bucket of time tracking 4. To limit *rabbit holing*, have a good mechanism in notion to fully brain dump and leave your thoughts, workspace, etc, in one place so you can get back up to speed quickly. This should ensure that you are able to let the thought go 5. Remember, this is a pattern that heavily impacts you. It means that you aren't as productive as you could, not as effective, and don't actually learn about some of the ins and outs of the business or projects you are working on. 6. You are not trying to become a mathematics PhD! If that is what you want, go back to school. Otherwise, focus on your true most important thing. 7. Really prioritize great resources. This will help make the most of your explore time. 3. Identify and address bottlenecks (80/20) * You can't do everything, so prioritize the areas to focus on that provide the greatest ROI. 4. Limit Logistics * The most important thing(s) should always be prioritized first. 5. Remember, you were hired to be a generalist who can operate in a dynamic environment, learn quickly, communicate effectively, and solve hard problems on the fly. Not to be a math PhD. 6. Your goals (and the Most Important Thing) should guide your time. 7. Interesting Ideas and thoughts should go in [Incoming Ideas MOC](Incoming%20Ideas%20MOC.md) 8. Put yourself in a position where your niche is optimized. The more you deeply understand their problem 9. Keep desktop and office workspace organized. 10. Have an idea inbox that is regularly organized and cleaned up. 11. Have a daily shutdown process. This can take 30 minutes. It will (in the long run) be worth it. 12. Warning! Don’t let trying to have a phd math level understanding prevent you from achieving your goals of making Kover a success 13. Picking things to work on where if it's a success *it matters*. ## What did Unsupervised do wrong? 1. They did not have enough clarity on their goals. They were too vague, too broad. This made it very hard for them to be wrong. The problem though was that it prevented them collecting very useful information. They didn't form falsifiable hypotheses. --- Date: 20220109 Links to: Tags: References: * [Reflection doc in notion](https://www.notion.so/Reflection-Base-80806dfddc9d456498f49252adb95708)