Munger's Operating System; Think Different; Startup Engineering #119
Reflecting on a few interesting reads and listens over the past week
Munger’s Operating System
This is a great post from Farnam Street featuring a number of life principles/mental models shared by Charlie Munger.
Here's a quick summary, however, I'd recommend reading the entire post. As we approach a new year, I find it helpful to read these kinds of posts and reflect on what I can change/improve in my day-to-day activities.
To get what you want, deserve what you want. Trust, success, and admiration are earned.
Learn to love and admire the right people, alive or dead.
Acquiring wisdom is a moral duty as well as a practical one.
Attain fluency on the big multidisciplinary ideas of the world and use them regularly.
Learn to think through problems backward as well as forward.
Be reliable. Unreliability can cancel out the other virtues.
Avoid intense ideologies. Always consider the other side as carefully as your own.
Get rid of self-serving bias, envy, resentment, and self-pity.
At the same time, allow for the self-serving bias in others who haven’t removed it.
Avoid being part of a system with perverse incentives.
Work with and under people you admire, and avoid the inverse when at all possible.
Learn to maintain your objectivity, especially when it’s hardest.
Concentrate experience and power into the hands of the right people – the wise learning machines.
You’ll be most successful where you’re most intensely interested.
Learn the all-important concept of assiduity: Sit down and do it until it’s done.
Use setbacks in life as an opportunity to become a bigger and better person. Don’t wallow.
The highest reach of civilization is a seamless system of trust among all parties concerned.
Think Different
I enjoy reading and watching videos of iconic leaders during the time in which they made incredible changes. This video/presentation by Steve Jobs in August 1997 (months after taking over Apple) shows how he took Apple from being a bloated company to a key innovator that would launch some of the most important and valuable products of the next decade. This post by Tom Hormby provides decent context as to what was going on at the time at Apple and the significance of Apple's turnaround.
Startup Engineering
I wish I had come across this paper earlier. It's a fairly insightful read into how one should go about forming an idea and building a business. It was written by Balaji Srinivasan as a part of the Startup Engineering course at Stanford University back in 2013. You can find more of these lecture slides/course materials here if you're interested.
Here are a couple of heuristics that are helpful to keep in mind as you go through the builder's journey.
The Idea State Machine
You'll notice that today's tools have reduced the minimum time and investment required for each stage drastically. Ideas can now take shape and become a business far quickly than what's described below. This makes the value of a 'good idea' higher than ever before.
The Idea Maze
When thinking through an idea or building a product, we often go through the exercise of building a user journey and completing market studies. The idea maze (see below) is an interesting way of plotting all the different platforms/players in your space, mapping the various connections and understanding where opportunities might exist. However, I'd expect that the idea maze today wouldn't be as simple as the one you see below.
The rest of the paper goes through a number of important steps as you build out your idea into a product (e.g. market sizing, market research, wireframing, copywriting and design). I'd pay attention to the specific tools referenced as they have changed but rather focus on the underlying principles and mental models (aka shortcuts) that are largely still applicable.
Great finds! Regular reader and loving it.