Smart decision making and persistent work is the X and Y axis of achievement.

Decision making (which broadly includes subjects like efficiency, policy, systems, problem solving, and design thinking) is the heart of efficiency gains for large organizations (not necessarily individuals, although there really shouldn't be a separation between the two).

Generally speaking, decision making falls into 2 categories - prioritization and policy. Prioritization is deciding what best to do out of the given options, and while policy (systems building) is building ecosystems that enable activity or work output.

2nd order thinking is the necessary requirement for policy/systems building. However, there's a lot more skills needed to enact good policy decisions, so this is just scratching the surface on the subject.

The Peter Principle

Books or articles on "planning backwards." Gantt charts get used a lot in, for example, construction. You need certain things to precede certain other things. You set a goal and end date and then start asking "What has to happen just before that? And just before that?" It is the reverse of asking "So, then what?"

Many people have recommended and I agree, Thinking in Systems is a great primer.

Here's an excerpt from the intro of that book:

> So, what is a system? A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.

> The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.

> Think for a moment about the implications of that idea:

> • Political leaders don’t cause recessions or economic booms. Ups and downs are inherent in the structure of the market economy.

> • Competitors rarely cause a company to lose market share. They may be there to scoop up the advantage, but the losing company creates its losses at least in part through its own business policies.

> • The oil-exporting nations are not solely responsible for oil price rises. Their actions alone could not trigger global price rises and economic chaos if the oil consumption, pricing, and investment policies of the oil-importing nations had not built economies that are vulnerable to supply interruptions.

> • The flu virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to flourish within you.

> • Drug addiction is not the failing of an individual and no one person, no matter how tough, no matter how loving, can cure a drug addict—not even the addict. It is only through understanding addiction as part of a larger set of influences and societal issues that one can begin to address it.

Once you start to understand the principle, you'll see systems everywhere. Good case studies in business are studies of systems. Annual reports are windows into the systems companies build to run effectively.

Everything is a system, really. Losing weight is no longer an extended act of willpower, it's building a system into your schedule and habits that produces the outcome of less weight (well, to be fair it's a bit of both). Writing a book is a series of behaviors sustained over time, induced through scheduling.

A lot of traits of people are systems induced, and instead of blaming a culture for a negative trait, a system (usually just looking at income level) can explain a lot of it. For example - why do Chinese people copy western IP so much? Before getting into "it's part of chinese culture", which is a slippery slope, consider how much can be explained by systems - just look at the national income average and compare education levels to see how little skilled labor they actually have to work with, and how much economic growth the country needs.

In Thinking Fast and Slow, there's a great little section that talks about professors wanting to write a book and budgeting 2 years, only later to find out that the it took anyone in the history of the school 8-10 years to write of a book of similar scope. They indeed ended up taking 10 years to write the book. There's a system hidden in there too.

The key is not just sticking to things, but also having enough taste to know when to drop a problem.

Agreed. In my original comment, I was trying to imply that those exceptional people did (ad you say) have enough "taste" to know when to stop, but I don't think I made that aspect clear.

The crystallographer I was talking about definitely failed more often than not, but I was always struck by his ability to keep floating reasonable ideas after the rest of us had reached what we thought was an intellectual cul-de-sac.

If you have ever read the transcript of Richard Feynman's speech "There's plenty of room at the bottom" [1] you get the same feeling--here's an incredibly bright person who can't seem to stop when he's told that "x is impossible."

I love this part of Feynman's speech: "The reason the electron microscope is so poor is that the f- value of the lenses is only 1 part to 1,000; you don't have a big enough numerical aperture. And I know that there are theorems which prove that it is impossible, with axially symmetrical stationary field lenses, to produce an f-value any bigger than so and so; and therefore the resolving power at the present time is at its theoretical maximum. But in every theorem there are assumptions. Why must the field be axially symmetrical? Why must the field be stationary? Can't we have pulsed electron beams in fields moving up along with the electrons? Must the field be symmetrical? I put this out as a challenge: Is there no way to make the electron microscope more powerful?"

[1] https://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html

Most problems come with a slew of constraints we take for granted, and then a set of constraints we consciously impose on the solution because we think it helps. Most reasonably bright people try lifting those conscious constraints, but rarely touch the less apparent ones.

I think that more neatly explains what you both are going for with "gives up too soon" (not identifying all constraints), "hammering away" (also investigating non-obvious constraints), yet "have enough taste to stop" (there are no more constraints to lift).

I've been encountering this effect in rapid succession in the last couple of years as a new parent.

First few weeks: Everything is new and you have no firm assumptions other than what you've observed from the outside of other families, so you try to build a new model on how your child behaves, how you should react and the routines needed to function as a family.

A month in and every other month going forward for the next year: Everything you think you know about your child has changed, and all (most) assumptions about what works when comforting, putting to sleep, and feeding goes out the window and you start over building a new model.

Of course everything doesn't change, but this scenario of developmental changes has really ingrained the idea in me how easy it is to make assumptions (deliberately and not) that you assume are static truths. It has made me go back and reexamine everything from old wives tales I learned through osmosis as a child through my politics through technical decisions in my work.

Whether you consider Jobs, Musk, Wozniak, Brin, Page, etc creators/innovators or something, I think a lot if not most successful ventures has come from reevaluating assumed truths, ranging from the market, state of technology, or paradigms. I'm not saying you should throw out everything old, but merely that learning from history should be a scheduled process, not a one-off.

Sorry for the unwarranted rant, but your comment just resonated with my own experiences.

Anyone have any thoughts on achieving this or resources. I recall some dual n back game posted from a website called gwern that supposedly helps speed up your recall time or how many items you can recall.

Also, being right about something, but at the wrong time. That's the worst failure mode of all IMO.

Whilst I admire determination, enthusiasm and persistence; if none of the ideas had come to fruition or contributed anything meaningful, it could have been misconstrued as gish gallop. It probably requires second-order thinking just to manage such a scenario, which is not uncommon.

Quitting a hopeless avenue of exploration frees you up to pursue greater chances of success elsewhere. It all depends on context.