Updated as of 31 Dec 22

After I left EDB in July, I thought about some of the principles I want to carry on trying, and thought of the following principles. These are my current guesses of my True North:

  1. Build more in public: Write and share more, about projects, motivations, strategy, tactics, which are not confidential. => Default Share & Show.
  • this is meant to serve three purposes at the same time:
    • Holding me accountable
    • Documenting work and thoughts in public
    • “Content marketing” by default
  1. Fight & argue less. Clarify if necessary, explain why once: but no need to convince or be right all the time. => Stop arguing.
  • this is meant to stop me from digressing into wasting time. Like this comic from XKCD.
  • Also, this is meant to stop me from going into rabbit-hole “discussions” that are often unproductive online, because people aren’t going to change their minds with an online debate!
  1. 5-3-1: 5 topics, 3 projects, 1 daily thing at a time. 1 time-bound project at a time (as of 31 Dec 22)
  • This is meant to stop me from spreading too thin over too many things, by imposing a constraint

  1. Always Compound Learning! Compound learning by 1% daily. Over a year, 1^365 = 1, 1.01^365 = 37.78, 0.99^365 = 0.025. But more importantly, over two years, 1.01^730 = 1,426, & three years, 1.01^1095=53,939 times the original! Even if you compound by just 0.1% daily, 1 yr = 1.44x, 2 yr = 2.07x, 3 yr = 2.98x.

    • This is meant to remind myself to keep compounding my learning, and to not give up.

  2. Whatever you build, use it. From Dream Machine:> One thing (Bob Taylor) definitely liked and put into practice was a style of research that could be paraphrased as, “Don’t just invent the future; go live in it.” … But whatever you build, use it. In fact, get everybody in PARC to use it. Get them pounding on the technology every day, writing reports, writing programs, sending E-mail–anything and everything, so they can see for themselves what the problems and the possibilities are. And then use what they learn to build better technology.

  • This is meant to remind myself to dogfood my own work.
  1. (LGBT)^R = (Listen, Guess, Build, Test)^Repeat.
  • This is meant to remind myself about the design process.
  1. Dharma ⨅ Design ⨅ Digital. My area of interest, which I want to build in.
  2. Habits & Systems > Big Goals. Big goals are not enough. What shapes yourself will be your habits, routines, and systems. One big thing that is holding me back from writing more regularly, for example, is that I currently don’t have a smooth writing-publishing workflow. Everything right now is quite manual: I write in Obsidian in Markdown, and currently import into WordPress via a Markdown importer plug-in, before publishing on my Inquivision blog. It is a lot of -click- -click- -click- -drag- -click- etc.Hence I am currently exploring trying out Cryogen and possibly a Jekyll theme, pushed to Github pages. I wrote this using an Obsidian-to-Wordpress plugin. We will see how that works out!

What are your personal principles?