The burdens of optimization
Optimizing is everywhere.
Brendan Stec's Essays
Essays on what I'm learning in business and life
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Latest episodes
How to throw away a bad idea
This week, I threw away 5 months of work on a project after realizing I was going in the wrong direction.
Step 1: Swallow the frog
Happy Sunday readers!
Achievable vs. realistic goals
Later doesn't mean never
Closer to co-intelligence
I operate with AI tools (e.g.
Past regrets
Past Regrets
Business vs. sports competition
What some analogies miss about how to compete
Thanks to AI, politeness matters more than ever
Doing the hard thing is becoming special
An escape from a bad team
Lessons on team performance, exponential AI, strategy and more
Disagreements of Taste and Disagreements of Position
Lessons on navigating conflict
The growth tension model
A new model for impostor syndrome
Searching for signals
My favorite books on systems thinking, human behavior, and quantitative topics
An introduction to signals
Improve your thinking by recognizing life's recurring patterns
A simple signal to stick to your goals
And avoid downward drift
The parable of the comb-over
How to avoid failing gradually
You should stop blindly copying other people
This week's signal: "cargo culting"
From crutches to solutions
Identifying cycles of dependency and addiction
Five actors move to Hollywood
Lessons in luck and reputation from a challenging career
What's holding you back? A simple signal.
Introducing the limiting factor. Plus, Lisa Allen's story and the Theory of Constraints.
Why so many top-down decisions fail
Policy resistance | Making more robust decisions | Systems thinking