Will Larson

Will anyone remember what we decided in six months? Because I think people stress out about a lot of decisions, but I increasingly believe most decisions people stress out about just aren't that important.

Good values have to be honest... The second one is applicability. You have to have value that you can actually figure out how to apply to your work... Three is I think the last thing for a good value is this idea of reversibility.

You can write a lot more if you write what you want to write. And so this is one of the reasons I don't write for financial gain and I don't write very much on a schedule.

Reality is never wrong. Your model is always wrong if it's in conflict with reality. But that conflict, that gap is really interesting and that's where you can learn.

The first rule of strategy is that if you write it down, then you can improve it. If it's not written down, it's hard to say if this PM is just not a good PM or if they're trying to apply the strategy that they've misunderstood.

I think that we often treat engineers a little bit like children instead of giving them the responsibilities and ability to actually thrive as adults. And so like, 'Oh, the engineers won't want to do that work.' Well, that's actually not good for the engineers to be sheltered from what is important.

If we aren't comfortable holding engineers accountable because we just want to retain all the engineers, then we can't put them in senior roles. And so I think we're actually seeing a bit of a shift where we can actually hold them accountable, which means we can put them in senior roles.

EM/PM pairs are peers and they generally have the same performance rating. And there's exceptions here... but generally hard situations are not situations where one person is obviously terrible.

The goal of good strategy is not to appease everyone. The goal of good strategy is to dictate how we invest the limited capacities we have or the limited capabilities we have into the problems we care about.

Often good strategy is so boring. It's hard to talk about. For example, on the engineering side of thing, a common strategy that's really good but very boring is we only use the tools we have today.

The biggest risk to content creation of any sort is quitting soon because you get burned out. The biggest risk is not that you grow too slow initially.

The biggest thing that I found is finding things to write about that also directly relate to what I'm working on. And this is where I can do something that helps me at work and helps me write at the same time.

You just have to get comfortable measuring something that's not perfect, but you can actually measure and reporting on it and then the measure that's imperfect as people ask questions, that's an opportunity to educate people.

My experience is if you really deeply understand what everyone wants, there's usually a compromised solution that gives everyone exactly what they want. That doesn't take more time. You just have to be willing to dig deeper into it.