Explicit knowledge (Ricky Weekly #24)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
It’s rainy in SF and I left my umbrella at the food truck park. I went to the lost and found two days later and they had it. Yay!
Thing on my mind:
I was talking to a friend who read a book on negotiation about how he began to think more deliberately about “power position” or “frame control” in meetings, and it reminded me of another time when my friends got really excited about The Charisma Myth and How to Win Friends & Influence People. When I ended up reading those books, I thought the points were very obvious and actually felt weird to have them so explicitly spelled out in a book, so I didn’t understand the hype. Later I realized that it’s because I’m relatively good at interpersonal relationships so I have the luxury of not needing the lessons to be so explicit.
The area where I do need help is thinking more rationally and rigorously. I’m reading Thinking in Bets right now and it’s similar to a lot of the other books I’ve read to try to shore up my relative weakness, especially in the Silicon Valley where we worship Elon Musk and Marcus Aurelius. From books and blog posts, I’ve operationalized various techniques to make sure that I’m a strong “System 2” thinker over the years but I still have a long way to go. I just thought it’s interesting to point out when you don’t need things to be explicit and when you do. So next time if someone articulates to you specific frameworks they use to think through certain things, it probably means it’s something they’ve had to be more deliberate about.
To make my thinking rigorously easier, I’m looking to be better organized digitally. My computer’s file system is a mess and my cloud documents are everywhere because search’s been pretty good. Ideas like Tiago Forte’s Second Brain and Notion pages that map out your brain are interesting to me. My friend Peter has an on-going log of product principles that he’s derived over time. Another friend Yosh writes notes for books he’s read and constantly re-visits them. If he has an idea he wants to really remember, he adds it to his Anki. I already have a lot of systems so I need to make sure that I can keep up with whatever I come up with. If you have suggestions on how to think about any part of this, let me know.
Piece of content I recommend:
My Brother’s Secret by Kathy Pao (via NextShark)
This to me is a more accurate representation of the Asian America I’m familiar with compared to the model minority myth. The scenes she described of the fights in her family sound like scenes from my life. Overall a great read and probably took a lot for her to share it.
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My latest essay is called “Single-serving friends”