You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.

If you want to be the best tennis player in the world, you may start out trying and soon find out that it’s hopeless—that other people blow right by you. However, if you want to become the best plumbing contractor in Bemidji, that is probably doable by two-thirds of you. It takes a will. It takes the intelligence. But after a while, you’d gradually know all about the plumbing business in Bemidji and master the art. That is an attainable objective, given enough discipline. And people who could never win a chess tournament or stand in center court in a respectable tennis tournament can rise quite high in life by slowly developing a circle of competence—which results partly from what they were born with and partly from what they slowly develop through work.

1. Inversion: Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant. Instead of asking, “How can I help my company?” you should ask, “What’s hurting my company the most and how can I avoid it?” Identify obvious failure points, and steer clear of them.

2. Doublespeak: People often say the opposite of what they mean, especially in political language. It allows people to lie while looking like they’re telling the truth. As George Orwell famously wrote in 1984, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

3. Theory of Constraints: A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counterintuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you’ll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead.

4. Preference Falsification: People lie about their true opinions and conform to socially acceptable preferences instead. In private they’ll say one thing. In public, they’ll say another.

5. Faustian Bargain: A man once sold his soul to a demon in exchange for knowledge. At first, it seemed like a smart trade. But the man lost in the long-run. Tragically, what the man lost was more valuable than what he earned. In short, he won the battle but lost the war.

6. Mimetic Theory of Desire: Humans are like sheep. We don’t know what we want, so we imitate each other. Instead of creating our own desires, we desire the same things as other people. The entire advertising industry built on this idea.

7. Mimetic Theory of Conflict: People who are similar are more likely to fight than people who are different. That’s why Civil Wars and family feuds create the worst conflicts. The closer two people are and the more equality between them, the greater the potential for conflict.

8. Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable.

9. Competition is for Losers: Avoid competition. Stop copying what everybody else is doing. If you work at a for-profit company, work on problems that would not otherwise be solved. If you’re at a non-profit, fix unpopular problems. Life is easier when you don’t compete. (Hint: don’t start another bottled water company).

10. Secrets are Hidden in Plain Sight: Most people think of secrets as Easter eggs. They assume that if a secret is important, it’s necessarily going to be hard to find. The best ideas can come from things that are so well-known that they aren’t well-seen.

11. The Never-Ending Now: The structure of our social media feeds blinds us to history, as it causes us to live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption. The structure of the Internet pulls people away from age-old wisdom.

12. Demand Curves Slope Down: The harder something is to do, the fewer people will do it. For example, raise the price of a product and fewer people will buy it. Lower the price and more people will buy it. Economics 101.

13. Look for Things That Don’t Make Sense: The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing. When it is, your model of the world is wrong. So, things that don’t make sense are a learning opportunity. Big opportunities won’t make sense until it’s too late to profit from them.

14. The Wisdom of Paradox: Logic is the key to scientific truths, but paradoxes are the key to psychological ones. When it comes to the human condition, the deepest truths are often counter-intuitive. When you find two opposites that are both true, start exploring.

15. Law of Shitty Click-Through Rates: Most marketing strategies have a short window of success, as click-through rates decrease as tactics mature. For example, the first banner-ad has a click-through rate of more than 70%. Now we avoid them with ad-blockers.

16. Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax — even though they are the same thing.

17. Opportunity Cost: By reading this tweet, you are choosing not to read something else. Everything we do is like this. Doing one thing requires giving up another. Whenever you explicitly choose to do one thing, you implicitly choose not to do another thing.

18. Overton Window: You can control thought without limiting speech. You can do it by defining the limits of acceptable thought while allowing for lively debate within these barriers. For example, Fox News and MSNBC set limits on what political thoughts they consider acceptable, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re both fairly conventional. The political spectrum stretches far beyond the ideas they entertain, but ideas outside their limits are shunned.

19. Planck’s Principle: Science doesn’t progress because people change their views. Rather, each new generation of scientists has different views. As old generations pass away, new ideas are accepted and the scientific consensus changes.

20. Bike-Shed Effect: A group of people working on a project will fight over the most trivial ideas. They’ll ignore what’s complicated. They’ll focus too much on easy-to-understand ideas at the expense of important, but hard to talk about ideas. For example, instead of approving plans for a complicated spaceship, the team would argue over the color of the astronaut’s uniforms.

21. Table Selection: This idea comes from poker, where you’re advised to choose your opponents carefully. That means you shouldn’t compete against the best people. You don’t need to get good at doing difficult things if you get good at avoiding difficult things. If you want to win, pick an easy table and nail your execution.

22. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. One hospital took too long to admit patients so a penalty was given for 4+ hour wait times. In response, ambulance drivers were asked to slow down so they could shorten wait times.

23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

24. Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

25. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available. People don’t want to look like they’re lazy, so they find extra tasks to tackle, even if they’re trivial. If you have six months to complete a project, it will take six months to complete. Set deadlines accordingly.

26. The Second Law of Thermodynamics: The world tends towards disorder. That’s why your room becomes messier and messier over time. It’s also why an engine converts only ~35% of its energy into useful work. Time moves towards increasing one direction: increasing entropy.

27. The Paradox of Specificity: Focus isn’t as constraining as it seems. In the age of the Internet, when everybody has Google search and personalized social media feeds, differentiation is free marketing. The more specific your goal, the more opportunities you’ll create for yourself. Narrowing your aperture can expand your horizons.

28. Emergence: When things interact, they often birth new, unpredictable forms. Therefore, the sum total of a system is more than its competent parts. As a system evolves, its structure can transform — just like how water becomes cold water until it turns into ice.

29. Occam’s Razor: If there are multiple explanations for why something happened and they are equally persuasive, assume the simplest one is true. In the search for truth, remove unnecessary assumptions. Trust the lowest-complexity answer.

30. Hickam’s Dictum: The opposite of Occam’s Razor. In a complex system, problems usually have more than one cause. For example, in medicine, people can have many diseases at the same time.

31. Hormesis: A low dose of something can have the opposite effect of a high dose. A little bit of stress wakes you up, but a lot of stress is bad for you. Lifting weights for 30 minutes per day is good for you, but lifting weights for 6 hours per day will destroy your muscles. Stress yourself, but not too much.

32. Robustness Principle: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. It’s a design guideline for software and a good rule for life: Hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold others to.

33. Legibility: We are blind to what we cannot measure. Not everything that counts can be measured, and not everything that can be measured counts. But people manage what they can measure, so society repeats the same mistakes.

34. Horseshoe Theory: Extreme opposites tend to look the same. For example, a far-right movement and a far-left movement can be equally violent or desire a similar outcome. People on both sides are more similar to each other than they are to people in the center.

35. Availability Cascade: A self-reinforcing cycle that creates collective beliefs. An idea will gain traction once it enters the mainstream, which triggers a chain reaction, which causes lots of people to adopt it not because it’s true but because it’s popular.

36. Creativity Begins at the Edge: Change starts away from the spotlight. Then, it moves towards the center. That’s why the most interesting ideas at a conference never come from the main stage. They come from the hallways and the bar after sunset

37. The Copernican Principle: The more we learn about astronomy, the less it seems that earth is special. It’s a small part of the universe, and each human is a small part of the earth. We are all spinning through the solar system — nowhere near the beginning or end of time.

38. Personal Monopoly: Corporations reward conformity, but the Internet rewards people who are unique. If you work in a creative field, strive to be the only person who does what you do. Find your own style, then run with it. Create intellectual real estate for yourself.

39. The Paradox of Consensus: Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect was found guilty by every judge, they were deemed innocent. Too much agreement implied a systemic error in the judicial process. Unanimous agreement sometimes leads to bad decisions.

40. Penny Problem Gap: Economists assume demand is linear, but people’s behavior totally changes once an action costs money. If the inventors of the Internet had known about it, spam wouldn’t be such a problem. If sending an email cost you $0.001, there’d be way less spam.

41. The Invisible Hand: Markets aggregate knowledge. Rising prices signal falling supply or increased demand, which incentivizes an increase in production. The opposite is true for falling prices. Prices are a signal wrapped in an incentive.

42. Base Rate: The average outcome for an event over time. They’re like batting averages for life, and they work best with big sample sizes. For example, if you’re starting a business, avoid the restaurant business where margins are low and competition is high.

43. Circle of Competence: Define the limits of your knowledge. Hint: the limits are smaller than you think. That’s because being an expert in one area doesn’t make you an expert in anything else. Be clear about what you know and don’t know.

44. Convexity: If you want to be lucky, look for opportunities with big upsides and low downsides. In addition to increased optionality, your errors will benefit you more than they harm you. Convex payoffs let you tinker your way to success and innovation.

45. The Go-For-It Window: Large gaps between accelerating technologies and stagnating social norms create lucrative new business opportunities. But they are only available for a short time when people can capitalize on the difference between the real and perceived state of the world. For example, 2007 was the perfect time to launch the iPhone, but Google Glasses launched too early.

46. Via Negativa: When we have a problem, our natural instinct is to add a new habit or purchase a fix. But sometimes, you can improve your life by taking things away. For example, the foods you avoid are more important than the foods you eat.

47. The Medium Is the Message: We pay too much attention to what is being said. But the medium of communication is more impactful. For example, the Internet’s impact on humanity has a bigger influence than anything that’s said on the Internet.

48. Resource Curse: Countries with an abundance of natural resources such as diamonds and fossil fuels tend to have less economic growth and worse development than countries with fewer natural resources.

49. The Paradox of Abundance: The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better. Markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for conscious consumers.

50. The Map Is Not the Territory: Reality will never match the elegance of theory. All models have inconsistencies, but some are still useful. Some maps are useful because they’re inaccurate. If you want to find an edge, look for what the map leaves out.

51. Baker’s Dozen: The key to good hospitality is to delight your guests with an unexpected gift. If you run a hotel, leave a chocolate on the bed. If you run a bakery, give your customers one extra bagel. If you write a tweetstorm, share an extra idea.

Much is made of the relative strength of small insects as compared to that of humans. For example, a leafcutter ant can carry about 50 times its weight; whereas an average human can only carry about half its weight. The standard reasoning goes that an ant scaled to the size of a human would retain this strength-weight advantage, giving a 200-pound ant the ability to lift 10,000 pounds. In actuality, however, an ant scaled to this size would only be able to lift about 50 pounds, assuming it could move at all. The effect of gravity at small scales is miniscule, but the effect increases exponentially with the mass of an object. This underscores the basic lesson of the scaling fallacy—systems act differently at different scales.

• Via Anshul Khare from the book - Universal Principles of Design.

It turned out, though, that Mr. Iger had a fierce will under that gentlemanly exterior. Early on, he began getting up at 4 a.m. to outwork everyone else and he still does. He sets out his exercise clothes the night before, so he doesn’t have to turn on the lights in his closet and thus wake up his wife, Willow Bay, a former Estee Lauder model and broadcaster who is now dean of the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. He leaves out a coffee mug for Ms. Bay and warms up some milk for her coffee before he tackles the VersaClimber.

“I never viewed myself as exceptional,” Mr. Iger says over salmon and a glass of red wine at the Napa Rose restaurant in Disneyland. “And so whenever I got a job, I was relying on hard work more than anything and a level of enthusiasm and optimism. When I went to ABC Sports, everybody there went to Stanford or Dartmouth or Columbia.

“Ithaca College, O.K.? I didn’t have an inferiority complex but I knew I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t wear Gucci shoes. I didn’t wear Brooks Brothers clothes. I couldn’t afford any of that stuff, but I knew I had a work ethic that was prodigious. And what happened early on is people started relying on me because they knew if they asked me to get something done, including Roone Arledge” — the ABC executive — “I would get it done.

“So suddenly I realized, well, wait a minute. I may not be special in certain ways. But when it came to getting things done, I was special. And that’s actually driven me throughout, you know?”

Actually, Mr. Iger’s book is a primer on how much you can achieve if you keep your ego in check. In an era of brutish and ego-driven leadership in the White House, Silicon Valley and in many other countries around the world, Mr. Iger doesn’t lead with his ego or try to drive the other alphas out of the herd.

“You have to have an ability to subjugate your own ego,” he says. “It serves you well when you’re rising and then even when you have risen, there are going to be times when you just have to put that away.”

Models

• Feedback loop. To understand a situation, I need to look at what is coming in to the situation, but I also have to pay attention to history. If what has happened historically tends to intensify (rich get richer), it’s a positive feedback loop. Positive feedback loops can always be driven both ways. If what has happened historically tends to diminish (thermostat), it’s a negative feedback loop. Thinking in SystemsQuality Software Management: Volume 1, Systems Thinking.

• Finite state machine. The world responds differently to the same inputs at different times. Think about discrete “states”. Inputs move the the world to a new state. (Feedback Loop)

• Program. Sometimes I can make sense of the world as a recipe, a sequence of steps that always apply.

• Subroutine. I can break the recipe into parts and give the parts names. This lets me understand the whole while deferring details. (Succession, Model).

• Recursion. A particularly powerful way of breaking programs into parts is to have a part refer to itself. (Self-reference)

• Input/process/output. Another way to break up a program is first to think of getting the inputs ready, then processing the inputs, then preparing the outputs.

• Test. Another way to break up a program is first to think about what it looks like from the outside, its input/output behavior. This thinking takes the physical form of a test. Tests can also be written after the program already exists. (Succession, Model)

• Model. Another way to break up a problem is to emphasize parts for the moment and ignore other parts. “This is a just a model,” tells me it’s okay to ignore some details for the moment (but not too long). The powerful thing about models for me is that when I’m using one, I don’t have to think from scratch, I can say “what would this model say about the situation?” I’m actually thinking, but I stop being overwhelmed.

• Object. Rather than have a program being a sequence of steps that operates on external data, another way of dividing a program up is to have bits of data and steps live together.

• Pattern. Programs are mighty specific. Sometimes the world rhymes but it doesn’t repeat. A patterns lets me capture the rhyming but leave some details to be worked out later. (Model)

• Fractal. Some things that look infinitely complicated actually result from the same rules working at different scales. (Model) Fractal Geometry of Nature.

• Scarcity/sufficiency. The same people behave completely differently depending on whether they believe resources are scarce or sufficient. The Mountain People. The Forest People.

• Refactoring. From early in programming I was taught design and then implementation. Refactoring, adding design information to existing code, relieved my anxiety about making mistakes. Refactoring. (Succession)

• Scientific method. Make hypotheses (beliefs) explicit and deliberately try to falsify them. The New Organon.

• Net present value. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. Spend later and earn sooner.

• Options. Owning the right to buy (sell) something provides more leverage than owning the thing itself.

• Hero’s journey. I avoid panic in tough situations by stepping back and seeing the situation as part of a story. The Writer’s Journey.

• Gaussian distribution. The tug-of-war between two negative feedback loops results in a clear spike in a histogram of samples with some values a little higher and a little lower.

• Power-law distribution. A pure positive feedback loop results in lots of tiny samples and a few really, really, really large samples. The more samples, the more “really”s (i.e. no Central Limit Theorem).

• Assembly line. Oh, this big job of making can be broken down into a sequence of relatively-autonomous steps. The steps can be parallelized and/or batched for economies of scale. (Succession)

• Just in time manufacturing. Each step in the assembly line produces both things and feedback about the making of the things. Reduce batch sizes to increase the proportion of information to things. (Optimization) Toyota Production System.

• Buffer. A buffer or inventory between steps reduces the variance communicated between steps. This both good if it keeps the second step going and bad if it prevents the first step from improving. The Goal.

• Reversibility. To make progress with large, complicated, unpredictable system, quit killing yourself trying to predict the unpredictable. Instead, make all decisions reversible (even if this seems expensive). (Optimization) Reversibility.

• Convex/concave. Distinguish between high-risk/high-reward situations with compounding payoffs and low-risk/low-reward situations with diminishing payoffs. (Optimization, Derivatives) Convexity for Programmers.

• Derivatives. Figure out where things stand now, how things are changing, and how fast that change is changing. Intervene at the appropriate level.

• Metric. From a desired change, derive a measurement that will change if the desired change happens. Beware of “grabbing the speedometer” or “teaching to the test”.

• Optimization. Get from a current situation towards a desired situation in small steps.

• Local maxima. During optimization, be aware of when further progress in small steps is impossible because of diminishing returns. Be prepared to reverse progress for a while to get on a slope with a higher maxima. (Diminishing returns).

• Pareto. Measure and rank potential improvements. One is likely to contain much more potential than all the others combined. Continue until nothing stands out. (Power law distribution, local maxima, optimization).

• Tradeoff. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Move from “this is how we do things” to “more of this means less of that, therefore in this situation we do things thusly”. Also known as “it depends, but on what?”. The Secrets of Consulting.

• Transcendence. If you don’t like the answers offered by today’s tradeoff, change the shape of the curves.

• Negotiation. The process of discovering what you really care about most while helping someone else discover what they care about most. At the end, if there’s an intersection, you have a deal. In any case, both parties learn. (Tradeoff, Transcendence)

• Succession. Don’t choke down the whole salami. Eat one slice at a time. Choose the next slice after finishing the previous slice.

• Indirect approach. When faced with opposition, move so that your goal is ambiguous. (Succession) Strategy.

• Accountability. Offer trustworthiness by accounting for your actions and consumption without blame

• Manipulation. The attempt to induce someone else to make a decision without full freedom or information.

• Authenticity. To be unapologetically and fully yourself. Terrifying at first. Sometimes painful if someone doesn’t like your authentic self. Better than the alternatives. (see also Boundaries)

• Bids. Relationships are built out of a sequence of bids for attention, which can be responded to by turning towards, turning against, or turning away. The balance of towards versus against or away predicts the longevity of the relationship. The Relationship Cure.

• Detachment. Being in this moment, not the future or the past, not the antecedents or the consequences.

• Preferential attachment. The rich get richer. The complex get complexier. Makes no sense some times. Tough. Linked.

• Self-reference. The ultimate programmer trick. Referring to a thing inside itself, as this note does. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

• Operant conditioning. Skinner was a narrow-minded idiot. Incentives are far more nuanced than this. (Feedback Loop, not) Punished By Rewards.

• Maslow’s hierarchy. You have to take care of basic needs like security before belonging and aspiration matter. (Scarcity/sufficiency)

• Emergence. Big, complicated things aren’t designed whole. Optimize, escape local maxima, work at various scales. (Optimization, Local Maximum, Fractal)

• Affordance/mapping. Design interfaces that invite their available actions (affordances) and use consistent mappings from one space to another (left is left and right is right or up is loud and down is quiet). The Design of Everyday Things.

• Paradigm. What we see is colored by what we expect. Deliberately changing what we expect can change what we see. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

• Rewriting. Change the structure without changing the meaning. I learned this with trig identities. (Succession)

• Bayes. Rather than search for certainty, work to reduce uncertainty. I’m only ten years into trying to understand Bayes and I only really can apply it to poker. The Theory That Would Not Die.

• Invalidation. You can’t prove anything about the world true, you can only prove it false. The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

• Variance. You can play well and lose and play badly and win. Don’t keep score by winning and losing. Keep score by playing well and learning to play better. (Detachment)

• Butterfly effect. Small actions can have large effects. If I want to have large effects, look for or create positive feedback loops that amplify my actions.

• Diminishing returns. Be aware of when what were previously fruitful efforts no longer product the same payoff. Switch. (Convex/concave, Feedback loop).

• The Chasm. When communicating an innovation, you can’t get everyone on board at once. Start with the novelty vampires, then the rational risk takers, then the majority (I lose interest before the majority). Crossing the Chasm.

• Metaphor. Think about one topic by thinking about another. There’s a source topic, a destination topic, a mapping between the two, and the danger of carrying it too far. Saying “abstract thought is metaphorical” is metaphorical–thought is electro-chemical goo. (Model) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

• Moral hazard. Think about what people would do if they were selfish bastards, even if they aren’t. If someone has an incentive, no matter how base, to act badly, either rejigger the incentives or keep your eyes open.

• Exponential depletion. When someone says, “There are 200 years of coal in the ground at current rates of consumption,” alarm bells should shriek. Depending on how fast consumption is growing, that might be 50 years or 30 years or even 10 years. Same goes for startup runway and consumption of any non-renewable resource. What’s in the bank versus compounded consumption rate.

• Graph. If I can translate a complicated problem into a graph, then there are all sorts of operations I can perform on the graph that translate back to the original problem (need to catalog these). (Model)

• Queueing. Divide the world into tasks, stations, and queues (Graph). Think of how the world is divided, and how it could be divided. Think about the distribution of sizes of tasks, arrival of tasks, changing queue size. Measure latency, throughput, and variance.

• Punctuated equilibrium. Change doesn’t happen steadily. Things will look stable then jump to a new “stable”. “It’s been stable” is not an argument that it won’t change. “It’s been growing” is not an argument that it will keep growing forever (Exponential depletion).

• Half life.

Techniques

When I get stuck, these are specific things I do that can unstuck me.

• Implication. Hold your nose and do the math. Set aside “this is what I believe” or “this is what I would prefer”. Apply a model or analogy first, then analyze the results. Boundaries. Be clear about what is my responsibility and what is not my responsibility. “I just got difficult feedback. How much is about me and how much is about the person giving the feedback?” Waiting. Timing matters. If you are waiting for something specific, then waiting is an action. Contrarian. You can’t create more impact than someone else by doing what they do. You either have to be better than they are or you have to do something different. I prefer to do something different. One simple heuristic is if someone says, “Obviously…” I always ask myself what would happen if the opposite were true. The greater the fury behind the “obviously”, the longer I’ll spend considering the counterfactual. Usually this leads to dead ends, but when it doesn’t, you won’t have any competition until it’s too late. Isolation. When faced with a big, complicated, confusing situation (like tracking down a weird bug), first turn it into a small, simpler, still-confusing situation. Binary search is efficient but it’s hard not to try to understand first. Phase shift. If you’re stuck doing A and then B, try doing half of A, the second half of A and the first half of B together, then the second half of B. (Implement-Test)(Implement-Test) becomes (Test-Implement)(Test-Implement). (Requires a cycle as a prereq). Believe the Market. When one of my theories (see above) predicts that people will act in one way but a bunch of reasonable people act in a different way, I ask, “What theory would explain their behavior?” (I also use this on myself when I behave in ways I don’t like.) Thompson Sampling. “A little nonsense/now and then/is relished by/the wisest man”. Put a little investment, occasionally, into even bad ideas, just in case. Reverse causality. When someone says, “This person is senior so they write the meeting summary,” I immediately say, “Maybe they look senior because they write the meeting summaries.” Try writing the summary yourself and see if people treat your like you are senior. What I Learned Writing This I spent hundreds to thousands of hours learning each topic. I use many of these ideas to avoid being overwhelmed in complex or ambiguous situations. I use the ideas to generate more ideas. “Well, if this situation is convex, then that implies we should…” There are more links between the ideas than I suspected. Succession, in particular, is absolutely fundamental. There seems to be a distinction between models and techniques. The techniques are now habits. I don’t have to call them up consciously. To Do For each, could talk about definition, example, limitations, reference, application, personal history (both when first encountered and when useful), example-of, syllabus), connections between. Have deep and shallow “learn more” links. Have illustrations (pictures) as well as examples. I’m missing a “how I use this to think” section, either a concrete example or something more pattern-y: patterns I look for, patterns I avoid, how I apply. I should write up one idea “completely”. What does “complete” mean? To what purpose? For whom? Wait for feedback. Order and group. Wait for suggestions. What is this good for? Wait for readers to tell me how they found it helpful.