Identify the specific situations or ‘positions’ in life where you naturally excel, and then consciously steer your life and decisions towards those advantageous circumstances. This strategy ensures you operate from a position of strength, maximizing your chances of success.
To become proficient or master any skill, actively increase the number of learning cycles you engage in, diligently seek out feedback on your performance, and then reflect deeply on that feedback to inform your next iteration. This rapid, iterative process is the key to accelerated learning and mastery.
In an age where machines can answer almost anything, cultivate the skill of asking superior questions, as this becomes the primary competitive advantage. Focus on developing your inquiry skills rather than just memorizing answers.
When encountering new ideas or information, pause and process it through your body’s ‘felt sense’ by noticing how it physically resonates or feels. This taps into an ancient, intuitive way of understanding and reasoning that precedes logical thought.
Actively refine your body’s intuitive signals as an early warning system for potential dangers or issues in various life domains, including investments, relationships, or contractual agreements. Do not ignore these subtle cues, but rather learn to interpret them.
If something feels ‘a little strange’ or ‘a little bit off,’ treat it as ‘very strange’ or ‘really off’ and remove yourself from the situation immediately without waiting to fully assess it. Your intuition provides crucial early warnings that should not be ignored.
Make a strict principle to never make important decisions when you are confused, tired, or stressed, as these states lead to poor judgment. Operating in this ‘stupid zone’ significantly increases the likelihood of making costly mistakes.
Adopt a primary focus on avoiding loss in endeavors like investing or skill development, similar to Buffett’s first rule of investing. Preserving your capital or resources ensures you have the means to continue learning and capitalize on future opportunities.
Adjust the size of your commitments or ‘bets’ in life directly to your level of conviction. Make significant commitments when your conviction is high, and scale back or avoid them entirely when your conviction is low.
Leverage AI tools like ChatGPT not just for answers, but as a thought partner to help you formulate and ask better questions. This approach uses AI to enhance your own critical thinking and inquiry skills.
Evaluate the quality of a question by whether it prompts further questions or, more importantly, increases the number of choices and possibilities available to you. Aim for questions that broaden your perspective and options.
When faced with a ‘How do I X?’ problem, reframe your inquiry to ‘Who knows how to do X?’ This shifts your approach from individual problem-solving to efficiently leveraging external expertise and resources.
Conduct ‘Google experiments’ by typing the beginning of a question into the search bar and observing the auto-suggested completions. This can reveal common inquiries, help you refine your own questions, and understand public interest.
Cultivate a daily habit of learning, striving to go to bed smarter in concrete ways than when you woke up. This commitment to continuous, tangible personal growth is essential for excelling in life.
For organizations, actively seek and implement ways to increase the number of learning cycles that every employee experiences. This strategy fosters continuous improvement, adaptability, and collective intelligence across the entire team.
Actively experiment with different approaches to achieve your goals, especially when current methods are ineffective, and continuously iterate based on the results. Crucially, document and share successful experiments within an organization to accelerate collective learning and prevent wasted effort.
Adopt a mindset where every interaction and action is treated as a mindful experiment with a clear, if sometimes subtle, objective. This approach fosters continuous learning, upgrades your knowledge about the world, and opens you to serendipitous discoveries.
Establish formal, iterative systems to gather, analyze, and implement the results of your experiments, both personally and within organizations. This ensures that valuable insights gained are not lost but are systematically applied to improve future actions.
Embrace an experimental mindset, understanding that true failure is impossible because every experiment, regardless of its immediate outcome, yields valuable learning. This reframes setbacks as essential opportunities for growth and knowledge acquisition.
Actively combat ‘stupidity,’ defined as overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information. This requires vigilance against cognitive biases that lead you to ignore important details or insights, even if they seem obvious.
Recognize that all advice, wisdom, or best practices implicitly contain a warning about potential negative consequences if not followed. Actively combat the human tendency to ignore or dismiss warnings, internalizing wisdom more effectively.
When observing others’ mistakes or misfortunes, instead of assuming it won’t apply to you, ask ‘Under what circumstances might I make the same mistake?’ This fosters self-awareness and proactive prevention of similar errors.