In these actionable ideas posts, I will highlight three ideas that you can convert into action. I’ve found that there are plenty of interesting ideas and thoughts out there, and ways to capture them, but converting them into meaningful action brings them to life.

Actionable idea #1: survivorship bias

Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” is a book that comes up at least 2x a week in conversation, and warrants a revisit every couple of months. If you’re short on time, check out these summaries from James Clear and Farnam Street. One key idea from the book is that survivorship bias will often cloud our judgement – the highest performing realization will always be the most visible. In other words, we see those who’ve survived from making certain decisions and view them as a success, but not those who’ve failed.

Action item: Conduct an audit of decisions you’re looking to make over the next month and identify any survivorship bias in your thinking– what examples and criteria are you overlooking?

Actionable idea #2: prioritization vs possibility

Visualize Value @visualizevalue

Focus.

June 23rd 2020

571 Retweets2,189 Likes

Discovered this incredible twitter account over the weekend, visualize value, that distills powerful ideas into simple, elegant visuals. We often conflate the wealth of possibilities we have as importance and urgency. At the end of the day, we have one thread of attention, that can be applied to the most important thing in our life at this moment. aka priority.

Action item: create a chart like the above, but instead, fill in with your top priorities at the moment. Then, without doing any pro/con, analysis etc. pick the one item that instinctively feels the highest prio to you. See what that visually feels like to see it highlighted amid a sea of other possibilities

Actionable idea #3: Be an athlete

David Perell @david_perell

Treat your craft like an athlete treats their sport. Here's how I improve my writing: ∙ Work with a writing coach ~3x per month. ∙ Read many books and very few articles. ∙ Write for 90 minutes per day. ∙ Mirror my favorite writers. ∙ An editor reviews everything I publish.

June 28th 2020

69 Retweets779 Likes

I’ve long held this belief, so love seeing (one of my favorites) David Perell articulate it as such: treat every skill, craft, anything, that you want to hone and improve, like you’re an athlete. Apply the same mental models of training, coaching, game day, scrimmages, drills, to your craft.

Action item: identify the craft you want to improve on, and identify the training/coaching/game day concepts that are analogous in your field.

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