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Speedy craftsmen

Speed

Looking back on an achievement, I usually wish I'd gotten it done faster. Wishing to have avoided mistakes is a fallacy. I didn't have the information I have now then. So the only thing I could really have done better is move faster.

There is no upside to being slower. Your compiled goals can include staying healthy—or not. But if you've figured out your unique mix of goals, the best thing you can do is to try to reduce as much as possible the time it'll take you to get there.

Curate those goals. Don't make false equivalences. Rewards work in thresholds. You'll probably be better off with one ambitious goal than ten average ones. The fewer goals you have, the more you'll be able to compress their time.

A straightforward way to compress time is to see every minute not spent on your goal as a wasted minute. Because of the way results compound, every additional minute invested is more valuable than the previous one. When you reach your goal, those minutes are the ones you'll wish you had cut.

Peter Thiel has a famous mental framework: "How could you achieve your 10-year plan in the next six months?". There is a broad category of such questions. My favorite one is, "If a bomb were strapped to my head and it would go off if I didn't reach that goal by the end of the next year, what would I do?". Imagine your whole family dying if you don't reach your goal. If you're imaginative enough, you'll think of ways to compress time you hadn't thought of before.

Craftsmanship

Craftsmen care about the little details. It should be the opposite of doing things with speed. But, somehow caring about small details makes you move faster.

Depth increases your bandwidth. Attention to little details will make you obsessed. Your task will take up more space in your mind. There are scaling advantages to obsession. The popular belief is that it's better to take breaks every hour or so. I disagree. If you work for 5 hours straight, you will get 8 hours worth of work done. You download the context and open up a new dimension.

There is a hidden depth in quality. Polished details make a product feel very different. It's unquantifiable, so we tend to dismiss it. But this is how the best products (Tesla, Apple) or the best programming languages (Lisps, Rust, Go) give such a feeling of awesomeness. Eventually, your goal is to do great work. Caring about the small details will get you there faster.

Polishing frees up your brain. Every new item on your stack becomes an open thread that won't close. Details are how you close that thread. If you think your work is perfectly done, you will sleep at night. Otherwise, it will always be there, nagging you in a subconscious part of your brain. Maintenance also becomes much easier. The code is tested, readable, modular and errors are handled.

Obsessing about the trivial will raise your standards. The habit of getting the small things right will make quality automatically improve. What previously required a lot of conscious effort becomes second nature. As with most skills, it will compound, and a thousand small improvements will have a tremendous effect on the quality of your work.

It's obvious, but going the extra mile is often most of the fun. What's less obvious is that this feeling of satisfaction will feed into the other components of craftsmanship. Self-reinforcing the depth, polish and finality you bring to your products, reaping the benefits of excellence.