I would add “identify bottlenecks”. I discuss this a bit here and it’s also the topic of The Goal, the only business novel I’ve read. To summarize, in situations where completing a task requires taking a sequential series of steps, e.g. producing good thoughts, you’re often rate-limited by the slowest step, so effort put into speeding up other faster steps is mostly wasted.
For example, I’ve actually seen something like the following play out in a software context. There’s a team working on a project. Completing the project involves two high-level phases—coding and not coding.
Writing the code is parallelizable across team members and takes X hours per person. All the other stuff—actually running all the tests, deploying the code, etc. takes Y hours per person—where X<Y. The team manager becomes frustrated that the project’s taking too long and proposes adding more people to speed it up. However, even if adding more people cuts down coding time by the optimal amount, i.e. per person coding time goes from something (hand-wavy) like X to NX/(N+1) where N is the original number of people involved, the actual time to completion of the project will still be bottlenecked by Y!
But what does this have to do with being a “highly effective mind”? I think there’s a similar dynamic at play with the ideas to crystallized theories/principles/heuristics pipeline. If someone has a lot of ideas but takes a long time to crystallize them, they’re’re better off practicing at crystallizing ideas than trying to have even more ideas. On the flip side, if they can crystallize ideas quickly but take a long time to come up with them, they could benefit from practice that emphasizes generating a lot of ideas quickly.
The above may seem obvious, but I think the useful part is using the frame of “identify bottlenecks” to figure out when different advice applies, even if the actual advice being applied is standard.
I would add “identify bottlenecks”. I discuss this a bit here and it’s also the topic of The Goal, the only business novel I’ve read. To summarize, in situations where completing a task requires taking a sequential series of steps, e.g. producing good thoughts, you’re often rate-limited by the slowest step, so effort put into speeding up other faster steps is mostly wasted.
For example, I’ve actually seen something like the following play out in a software context. There’s a team working on a project. Completing the project involves two high-level phases—coding and not coding.
Writing the code is parallelizable across team members and takes X hours per person. All the other stuff—actually running all the tests, deploying the code, etc. takes Y hours per person—where X<Y. The team manager becomes frustrated that the project’s taking too long and proposes adding more people to speed it up. However, even if adding more people cuts down coding time by the optimal amount, i.e. per person coding time goes from something (hand-wavy) like X to NX/(N+1) where N is the original number of people involved, the actual time to completion of the project will still be bottlenecked by Y!
But what does this have to do with being a “highly effective mind”? I think there’s a similar dynamic at play with the ideas to crystallized theories/principles/heuristics pipeline. If someone has a lot of ideas but takes a long time to crystallize them, they’re’re better off practicing at crystallizing ideas than trying to have even more ideas. On the flip side, if they can crystallize ideas quickly but take a long time to come up with them, they could benefit from practice that emphasizes generating a lot of ideas quickly.
The above may seem obvious, but I think the useful part is using the frame of “identify bottlenecks” to figure out when different advice applies, even if the actual advice being applied is standard.