Notices by Logan Dice (logandice@mastodon.social), page 12

Periodically ask yourself: “what are the top five most important problems in my field (and life), and why am I not working on them?”

Since you can only work on one problem at a time, it’s usually sufficient to pick the most important problem, work on that, and ignore everything else.

#startup #business #entrepreneurship

Commit to making decisions, become biased for action.

Decisions are progress. Each one is a step forward. You can’t build on top of “I’ll decide later,” but you can build on top of “Done.”

You have the most information when you’re doing something, not before you’ve done it. Most important decisions are easily reversible anyway, if circumstances change, your decisions can change.

Don't get stuck waiting for the perfect answer. You’re as likely to make a great call today as you are tomorrow.

Leverage = Impact / Time

Prioritize your activities based on return on investment for effort you put in. Use this as a guiding principle to determine where to spend your time.

Keep in mind 80/20 principle, look for things that produce disproportionately high impact .

Try to develop sustainable high-leverage habits, and systematically increase your leverage by:

- Reducing the time it takes to complete tasks.

- Increasing the output of tasks.

- Replacing tasks with more high-leverage ones.

Taking on venture capital means you:

- Are getting a boss you'll work for, without being able to quit, for the next 5+ years.

- Can't control your salary, who gets hired/fired, or even you position as CEO.

- Will be pressured into growing until you can make a 10x return to the investors on sale/IPO, massively increasing your risk. Moderate level of success is incompatible with VC model.

Consider instead bootstrapping a profitable product/service, and using that to fund your future projects.

Feynman technique - a simple and powerful way to rapidly learn and retain new concepts.

1. Write down the name of concept you're trying to learn.

2. Explain it in plain English, as if you were teaching it to a new student.

3. Identify things you couldn't explain well, re-read the source material and research them. Try explaining again until these knowledge gaps are gone.

4. Simplify your explanation, get rid of technical terms and use simple analogies. ELI5.

#learning #rationality

Optimize behaviors, not outcomes.

You can directly control the actions you take, but not the results they lead to.

Reward yourself based on taking the right action, use outcomes as analytics to learn from.

Confusing the two leads to anxiety, frustration, and beating yourself up over things you can't change.

Don't burn your mental energy on things outside of your circle of control, instead - try to spend all of it on taking actionable steps.

#startup #productivity #rationality

Incredibly fascinating interview about education process at Elon Musk's private school. Damn I envy those kids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpHhSoYFnpY

#tech #startup #education

Education process at Elon Musk's private school. Damn I envy those kids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpHhSoYFnpY

#tech #startup #education

I've made a few cool upgrades to Writing Streak during the past several days. Really happy about how it's coming together!

- Bright theme.
- Export rich text or markdown, filter the documents you want to export using search.
- Writing Prompts.
- Hotkeys help.
- Simple writing mode (write using only the 1000 most common words).
- Countless minor tweaks, improvements and bug fixes.

If you haven't tried Writing Streak yet - come check it out:

https://writingstreak.io

#writing #startup

Hey everyone! I've just published a beta of my new app for writers -

https://writingstreak.io

It's a simple tool meant to help writers to develop a daily writing habit, achieve their writing goals, and track their progress.

If you're interested in this sort of thing - it'd be really awesome if you could check it out and let me know what you think. I'm looking for any feedback, first impressions, your thoughts on what could be better.

If you like writing prompts, you should check out my other projects:

- Outline your stories with Nulis:
https://nulis.io

- Publish your fiction with Fiction Hub:
https://fictionhub.io

- Develop a daily writing habit with Writing Streak:
https://writingstreak.io

Discover the best short stories ever written for /r/WritingPrompts
https://writingprompts.startuplab.io/stories
#fiction #stories #writing #prompts

http://scandalousadventures.tumblr.com/post/98924131564/this-line-in-my-textbook-makes-it-almost-worth-the

There's a trending Hacker News thread where people share their favorite #mastodon accounts to follow. Come share yours!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741116

Mine are:

@Chrishallbeck (webcomics artist)

@lumen (writes jokes)

@Gargron (creator of mastodon)

@cwebber
(author of ActivityPub)

@Valentin_NC

@HerraBRE

@markhughes

@chrisBorg

@surma

@nolan

Creator
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619505
#hackernews #tech

My Writing Process
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16617743
#hackernews #tech

Show HN: URL Canary – Get an alert when someone finds your secrets
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619580
#hackernews #tech

Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620423
#hackernews #tech