Some thoughts on writing An Essay by Dan Luu danluu.com Besides being unlikely to work for you even if someone is able to describe what makes their writing tick, most advice is written by people who don't understand how their writing works. This may be difficult to see for writing if you haven't spent a lot of time analyzing writing, but it's easy to see this is true if you've taken a bunch of dance classes or had sports instruction that isn't from a very good coach. If you watch, for example, the median dance instructor and listen to their instructions, you'll see that their instructions are quite different from what they actually do. People who listen and follow instructions instead of attempting to copy what the instructor is doing will end up doing the thing completely wrong. Most writing advice similarly fails to capture what's important. The superficial aspects of what someone else is doingThings that increase popularity that I generally don't do writinglearningexpertise
Individuals matter An Article by Dan Luu danluu.com One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't matter. Individuals matter. On Talent teamworkplanningwork
What to learn An Essay by Dan Luu danluu.com While being an extremely broad generalist can work, it's gotten much harder to "know a bit of everything" and be effective because there's more of everything over time (in terms of both breadth and depth). ...If you watch an anime or a TV series "about" fighting, people often improve by increasing the number of techniques they know because that's an easy thing to depict but, in real life, getting better at techniques you already know is often more effective than having a portfolio of hundreds of "moves". I've personally found this to be true in a variety of disciplines. Managing Oneself learningskill
95%-ile isn't that good An Article by Dan Luu danluu.com Reaching 95Mistakes at the top Waste as little effort as possible on low competence talent
Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale An Article by Brandon Dorn www.viget.com Here I describe an approach for defining new information architectures for large organizational websites managed by many stakeholder groups. Broadly speaking, there are four general phases to the approach: Auditing. Begin by immersing yourself in existing content and encourage stakeholders to adopt a critical, audience-minded perspective of their content. Diagramming. Work with stakeholders to develop new conceptual categories that better serve audiences and organizational direction. Elaborating. Think through content in detail and test new categories against specific instances and edge cases. Producing. Prepare content teams for production using a shared database of new sitemap pages and editorial considerations that you’ve developed incrementally. Half of design is facilitation The Ladder of AbstractionA Pattern Language decisionsorganizationpatternsanalytics
Half of design is facilitation At least half of the work of design is not design, because design isn’t just "making things"—it’s making things with other people, many of whom usually aren’t designers. This is true any time you’re working with others from a domain outside of your own. Communicating ideas, marshaling stakeholder consensus, soliciting and incorporating feedback, and redefining problems that weren’t fully known at the start are all the non-design work of design, what we might generally call "facilitation." designcommunication