This week's Commonplace post is about how I come up with new topics to write about ... and how you can steal that process for investigating career/life questions you want answered.
commoncog.com/blog/follow-yo
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How I come up with things to write about:
1. I have questions.
2. I investigate those questions.
3. I write up the answers.
(I also don't use a second brain, because I'm an idiot that way).
I ... suspect that I have 2-3 good years before I run out of questions!
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I think one question I get often is “how do you find books to construct reading programs around”, but the answer is really simple — you let your questions guide you.
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Some questions I’m currently investigating:
- why are most big companies in Asia conglomerates?
- what’s the current best thinking on luck vs skill?
- how does Charlie Munger use analogical thinking, and why is it so effective?
- what does skill in wicked domains look like?
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(And these are all the more general ones, really — I have more business questions that are too inside-baseball to discuss.)
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I'm especially interested in your thoughts on Charlie Munger's analogical thinking. These nerds would be too: @StoryoftheC @rajlego
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On skill + wicked domains, me and interviewed . 1st question we asked was about the ideal training for knowledge workers. Andy gave some insight into the difficulties for evaluating skill in wicked domains.
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Analogical thinking is effective because it is how the brain works. An analogy is a model that you can pattern match the rest of the world to. If the analogy is good you can pattern match a lot of the world to it and you suddenly have a powerful easy to communicate model.
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This is why people will reuse their best analogies as often as they can. The mind is associative so once you have associated something with your analogy/model it is suddenly grouped with everything you have ever associated with that model.
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