communication shorthands…

🧭 know your bearings - origin, displacement, acceleration, vector, and measurement

every single project we work on, from a feature to the company as a whole can be thought of as a journey from point A to point B. if you know how you’re doing, it should imply that you’re aware of:

• the origin: where did you start?

• the destination: where are you going? how do you know you’re there?

• vector: what direction you’re moving in?

• speed: how quickly are you moving? is this your max speed?

• acceleration: are we speeding up as we go or are we at max speed?

examples of how the metaphors can flow and be mixed together

scenario 1:

“we’re not on track - and we’re maxed out on speed”

mark describes this as “i can’t move my finger across the keyboard any faster if you want me to just code faster”

but we aren’t moving to the destination fast enough, which means we NEED to be adjust our vector faster (so we spend less time traveling distance that doesn’t get us closer to the destination), get ourselves more time, or adjust our intended destination

scenario 2:

“do we know the vector towards our destination with enough confidence to invest in acceleration?“

• investing in acceleration is a delayed reward function, you expend energy right now to build up more speed long term

• but if your vector is uncertain - you might need to adjust course more frequently

• adjusting course incurs a huge cost to momentum / acceleration - since you have to decelerate to properly adjust

• hence - if you’re not certain your vector is correct, investing in short term speed instead of acceleration is preferential

scenario 3:

“how far off course from our final destination does this checkpoint take us out of the way?”

• there are often locally optimal checkpoints or side-quests that are beneficial for business reasons [big demo / dependency handoff]

• some of them represent a lateral vector - aka they’re at a perpendicular vector to the target

• the value of the check point must be weighed against the time and momentum lost in adjusting course

extending the analogy:

• do you have enough resources to get there?

  • physical resources like fuel: you literally cannot get there and we need to all adjust our expectations

  • emotional resources like attention: you need more sleep, you need more time, we need to make up for time for you

• driver or navigator?

  • someone who can drive at the fastest speed might only check the map that they’re going at the right vector once a week - which could take them wayyyy off track but make them a beast at straight well scoped projects

  • someone who is an excellent navigator might instantly notice if the vector is off even by a single degree, but not be able to drive as fast without crashing

👨‍⚖️ the spirit or the letter… [cc integrity]

another way of asking this question is: if you were in a room with god and someone put a shotgun to your head and asked you this question, how would you answer knowing god would pull the trigger if deep down you felt like you were lying

an engineer or CRO can ask another engineer “how confident do you think we will have a working product A by time X?”

an appropriate answer to the spirit of what the engineer means is different from an appropriate answer to the spirit of what the CRO means.

the spirit and letter are similar w/ the engineer asking - you can give a dozen caveats with wide error bars bc they might understand why you’re not confident on checkpoints A B and C

but if you deliver the same answer to the CRO - knowing that they are going to take your deadline with happy-ears and make business critical decisions on it, you have failed to answer the spirit of their question

signs that you might be answering the letter of a question and not the spirit include starting a sentence with “technically…” or “if you think about it like this…”

signs you are answering the spirit of the question include clarifying questions that start with “what are you trying to do with this information? do you want lower or upper bounds?”

some people cannot answer the spirit of the question under any circumstance. it’s not in their DNA. these might be excellent operators otherwise, but have no ability to talk strategically. that is ok. acknowledge this weakness if you’re one of these people, work around it if you work with these people

⌚️ clock speed / agency / impatience

how often do you start something? how low is your activation energy?

how often do you evaluate if you should adjust course? how often do you actually adjust course?

everyone has an internal clock speed - and it seems to be a relatively immutable trait. it is also scope specific, although pretty correlate across scopes, i.e. if you have a hourly clock speed when you’re programming and frequently try new techniques, you might still have a decade long clock speed on re-evaluating your life and hit a mid-life crisis.

clock speed comes with trade offs - namely people fast clock speeds often have a harder time with patience and deep work.

generally - the majority of your team should have a fast clock speed, faster is better

💾 retrieving or computing?

imagine you’re a fisherman. you may or may have fish. i ask you to make fish stew. sometimes you grab a fish from storage and cook it. sometimes you go out the back and catch a fish and bring it back and cook it. you should probably tell me if you have fish on hand or not. the same is true of thoughts…

• retrieval - if you’ve thought about something before / heard it before, you need to find the thought

  • this is like having a fish in storage. you already put the effort to catch it in. not as fresh

  • metaphor: if you read 35 x 68 = 2,380 from a piece of paper, you can just regurgitate it

  • real life: if you know how long your task is going to take, cus you thought of it at the start, you need you remember the number you calculated at the start

• computing - if you haven’t thought about it before, but can quickly figure it out on the spot following a thought process, you’re computing [need more time, lower confidence, first draft]

  • this is like going back and catching a fish. i’m going to be waiting for longer. it’s more fresh. you don’t have as much time to catch the best fish bc you feel rushed

  • metaphor: if you haven’t read what 35 x 68 is… but know multiplication, you can solve it on the spot but it takes longer

  • real life: if you didn’t think about how long it would take before starting, and you’re asked how long, you might start thinking about what’s left and try to come up with that number on the spot

you can compute more knowledge than retrieve bc you can reason… but computed knowledge has a lower ceiling on the error bars you can put on it since you’re thinking about it for the first time.

sometimes i ask people for a retrieved answer [i.e. how much longer] - but there’s a temptation to say try to compute it, because it’s painful to say “i haven’t thought about it - i can try to figure it out though”.

in those moments, i often want a retrieved answer bc i’m looking for the higher confidence ceiling that retrieved answers come with, since it requires that you’ve thought about it for as long as necessary as opposed to as fast as possible to give something convincing to me.

1. “i haven’t thought about it - i can try to figure it out though”. is a totally valid answer.

2. if i ask “was that computed or retrieved?” - be honest

🤨 i don’t believe you…

i don’t mean that i think you’re a liar - it means whatever you just said is causing cognitive dissonance with my view of the world. i have a near-zero tolerance for cognitive dissonance, so i’m about to try to work with you to reconcile this cognitive dissonance because i have a hard time believing that we have no ability to communicate to each other

i hold a lot of values as binary absolutes - and i have very clear classifiers that categorize certain actions into these binaries.

• people don’t want to be parasites…

  • this might be broken by someone saying “i want to be paid as much as possible for as little work as possible”

• people value integrity…

  • this might be broken by someone claiming to have achieved something i think is impossible

this usually leads to pretty confrontational conversations… i generally don’t let these go. if you’re ok with cognitive dissonance - this is usually where my relationships with people fall apart.