#106 Josh Kaufman: Maximizing Our Locus of Control

1. Adjust Risk by Stakes

For high-stakes, irreversible, or destructive decisions, focus on avoiding mistakes; for areas with more latitude, embrace experimentation and mistakes to accelerate learning, knowledge, and growth, which offer compound returns.

2. Practice Daily Logging

Pay attention to your actions and intentions, then write down daily accomplishments, decisions made, and areas where you get stuck or feel uncomfortable, to actively reflect and understand barriers.

3. Reflection Is Learning’s Work

Understand that reflection is the essential “work of learning,” and approach conversations by asking others to share their reflections on experiences rather than just asking for solutions.

4. Be Deliberate in Improvement

Cultivate the habit of learning, experimenting, reflecting, capturing progress, and consciously deciding next steps; this deliberate and intentional approach maximizes improvement per unit of time.

5. Acquire Skill by Making Mistakes

To acquire skills rapidly, learn a little about the topic, then start practicing quickly and making mistakes, as this helps you understand performance, self-correct, and gain skill through practice.

6. Practice Deliberately

Engage in deliberate practice by focusing intently, paying attention to your performance, correcting mistakes in the moment, and explicitly experimenting with small variations to observe different outcomes.

7. Utilize Fast Feedback Loops

Accelerate skill acquisition by creating fast feedback loops, minimizing the time between making a mistake, recognizing it, and making an adjustment or improvement.

8. Debug Sticking Points

When stuck on a decision, actively capture it, review your thought process to understand why, identify missing information, consider who to talk to, or design an experiment to test solutions.

9. Synthesize Diverse Information

To synthesize information effectively, seek input from a wide variety of sources across different domains, as broader input provides more material for interesting insights and connections.

10. Identify Recurring Concepts

After broad exploration, perform a “frequency analysis” by noting ideas, structures, and concepts that appear repeatedly, as these indicate particularly important and valuable knowledge.

11. Prioritize Practical Sources

Focus reading on practical, application-oriented sources that teach “how to think about” a subject, rather than trend pieces or entertainment, to identify enduring techniques and concepts.

12. Solve Problems via Experimentation

When facing a problem you care about, engage in direct exploration and experimentation by collecting and testing different examples, comparing options to discover what works best.

13. Small Experiments Yield Insights

Conduct even a small amount of direct experimentation to gain deeper insights into solving specific problems than relying solely on books, internet searches, or friend recommendations.

14. Balance Info Value & Cost

For high-stakes decisions, collect as much information as possible through research and experimentation, but be mindful of the cost of information (time, attention, energy) and balance it with its value.

15. Budget Time for Decisions

When making important decisions, consciously set a time and energy budget for research and experimentation, aiming to maximize it for things you care deeply about or use often.

16. View Malinvestment as Tuition

Accept that some malinvestment (e.g., buying products that don’t work out) is an inevitable part of research and exploration, viewing it as “tuition” for gathering valuable information in a domain you care about.

17. Allocate Experimentation Budget

For any problem worth solving, allocate an experimentation budget, accepting that some attempts will not work out, as this is an expected part of the process to find what does work.

18. Overcome Threat Lockdown

Recognize “threat lockdown” as a deep-seated physiological defensive response to perceived risk; debug or disable it to engage in exploration, experimentation, and informed risks that won’t cause permanent damage but might lead to breakthroughs.

19. Learn From Every Attempt

Approach challenges with the mindset, “I don’t know if this will work, but I’m going to try it,” because every result provides information, data, and improves your skills and capabilities, making it a win regardless of the immediate outcome.

20. Cultivate Experimental Peer Group

Surround yourself with a trusted peer group that is also experimenting, taking risks, and sharing their data and experiences, as this can expand your view of what’s possible and provide invaluable support.

21. Seek Combinatorial Skill Development

Actively develop diverse skills and experiences, even in unrelated areas, because these capabilities can combine in new and valuable ways, leading to unique advantages.

22. Pursue Interest-Driven Side Projects

Invest time and energy in side projects driven by genuine interest or a desire to push boundaries, as these often yield unexpected and enormous value later on.

23. Define Personal Success

Define success based on working on valued projects with liked people, in a way that supports yourself and your family; if any of these elements are slipping, recognize that change is needed.

24. Use Status Malfunction Check

Before committing to a goal, use the concept of “status malfunction” as a check: evaluate if the enticing option truly improves your life or if it’s an evolutionary lure leading to an undesired outcome.

25. Evaluate Lower-Status Options

Be willing to seriously examine and consider lower-status options, evaluating if they can achieve your goals faster, more directly, less expensively, or with less risk, despite the emotional difficulty of passing up high-status choices.

26. Avoid Comparative Status Traps

Recognize that there will always be someone with more money, followers, or perceived success; avoid falling into comparative status traps by appreciating your absolute quality of life.

27. Redefine Success & Status

Intentionally and deliberately redefine your personal understanding of success and status to align with your values, rather than external comparisons, to improve your emotional experience of life.

28. Distinguish Knowledge & Skill

Understand that knowledge is information and concepts, while skill is the ability to reliably and repeatably perform an action to produce a desired result in the real world.

29. Develop Accurate Mental Models

Cultivate concepts and ideas about how the real world works to enable mental simulation, which helps in understanding situations, anticipating outcomes, and making better decisions.

30. Apply Mental Models for Improvement

Use accurate mental models to understand how things work, then apply them to run experiments, make changes, keep what works, and stop what doesn’t, leading to continuous improvement over time.

31. Understand Business’s Five Parts

Deconstruct any business into its five core parts—value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance—to gain a clear, constrained understanding of its operations and goals.

32. Simple Business Plan Structure

To write a business plan, use five subheads (value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, finance) and sketch out in detail what each process looks like in the business.

33. Understand Self & Others

Continuously work on understanding yourself and others, including concepts like sunk cost and akrasia, to debug your own mind and anticipate how others think and feel.

34. Log Daily for Progress & Evaluation

Use daily logging to acknowledge your accomplishments and how they relate to your goals, providing both a sense of progress and a rich source of data to evaluate processes and decisions for future improvements.

35. Track Time & Energy Daily

Combine a daily review process with making notes during work to accurately track how you spend or invest your time and energy, rather than relying on unreliable memory.

36. Filter Info by Trust & Problem-Solving

Filter information by prioritizing recommendations from trusted sources and reviews that specifically describe how a resource solved a concrete problem, rather than general enjoyment.

37. Overcome Mistake Aversion

Recognize that emotional attachment to avoiding mistakes and waste often leads to excessive conservatism in exploration; overcome this to gain valuable insights.

38. Experience Isn’t Enough

Recognize that mere experience, even over many years, does not guarantee learning; active engagement and reflection are necessary to truly acquire new knowledge and skills.

39. Learn Desired Outcome First

Before practicing a skill, familiarize yourself with what the desired performance or outcome sounds/looks like, enabling immediate self-correction when mistakes are made.

40. Learn Self-Correction Early

Prioritize learning how to acknowledge and correct your own mistakes as an initial step in skill acquisition, enabling faster progress.

41. Seek Objective Coaching

To improve skills, seek out an excellent instructor or coach who can provide objective feedback, noticing fine variations and small mistakes you might miss, and helping you correct them in the moment.

42. Daily Log for Soft Skills

Use a daily log to reflect on your actions, internal understanding of performance, successes, failures, and future intentions, especially for improving soft skills, and review it later for contrast.

43. Contrast Internal & External Feedback

For interpersonal skills, record your internal experience during interactions (e.g., meetings), then contrast it with later external feedback to identify discrepancies and inform future experiments or behavioral changes.

44. Record Yourself for Feedback

For skills like speaking, record yourself to gain an external perspective on your performance, even if uncomfortable, then use this feedback to identify specific areas for improvement and plan targeted changes.

45. Ask for Reflective Insights

When seeking advice, ask people how they thought about a situation, what inputs they considered, their models, and how they anticipated outcomes, rather than just asking what to do, to triangulate on key variables.

46. Acknowledge Ambition’s Challenges

When pursuing ambitious goals, formally acknowledge the inherent fear of the unknown, uncertainty, and risk that comes with investing time and energy into something that might not yield desired results.

47. Acknowledge Fear to Disarm

Instead of letting fear of uncertainty stop you, formally acknowledge the inherent risks and unknowns of ambitious projects; this recognition robs fear of its power and prevents unconstructive suppression.

48. Ground Ambition in Reality

Acknowledge the uncertainty and risk of your ambitions, and that you’ll need to grow to meet challenges; identify potential obstacles and known risks, then plan actions to alleviate them.

49. Acknowledge Risk to Ease Approach

Acknowledging uncertainty and risk doesn’t eliminate them, but it makes ambitious projects feel less stressful and more approachable, transforming a nebulous goal into manageable steps.

50. Drop Omniscience Expectation

Let go of the unrealistic expectation to know exactly what will work before you start, acknowledging that neither you nor anyone else is omniscient, and accept this fundamental aspect of reality.

51. Accept Reality’s Uncertainty

Accept that uncertainty, risk, and the unknown are fundamental, inherent, and unhackable aspects of reality in any endeavor, as this acceptance is the first step to progress.

52. Choose Peers for Risk Tolerance

Be mindful that your peer group significantly influences your risk tolerance; surround yourself with people whose attitudes towards risk align with your desired level of exploration and ambition.

53. Apply Diverse Learning Broadly

Experiment by applying knowledge and skills learned in one seemingly unrelated area to a completely different domain, as this can unlock significant unexpected value.

54. Side Projects Provide Data

Use side projects as opportunities for experimentation and iteration, collecting data to assess what works for you and others, which builds confidence for future investment.

55. Leverage Social Status in Business

Understand that building positive social signals into your business, making customers feel good about themselves, can make your offer significantly more enticing and valuable.

56. Beware Status Malfunction

Recognize “status malfunction” where the lure of status leads to making poor decisions or investments, overlooking significant drawbacks, costs, and trade-offs in pursuit of looking good to others.

57. Recognize Status’s Compliance Influence

Be aware that the pursuit of status, such as corporate titles and promotions, can subtly drive compliance and discourage challenging the status quo, potentially hindering personal growth or organizational change.

58. Self-Educate Universal Concepts

Instead of formal schooling, read and research on your own, focusing on concepts that apply across a wide range of contexts (e.g., from small to large businesses) to gain essential knowledge.