Quoting benkuhn.net:

people’s biggest bottleneck eventually becomes their ability to get leverage—i.e., to find and execute work that has a big impact-per-hour multiplier.

I think of finding high-leverage work as having two interrelated components:

• Agency: i.e. some combination of the initiative/proactiveness to try to make things happen, and relentlessness and resourcefulness to make sure you’ll succeed. • Taste: you need a good intuition for what things will and won’t work well to try. Taste is important both “in the large” (picking important problems) and “in the small” (picking approaches to solving those problems that will work well); I usually see people first become great at the latter, then the former.

One of the easiest ways to get more leverage is to take a goal you’re already trying to accomplish, and figure out a better way to accomplish the same thing.

Obviously, whoever’s supervising your project will make an attempt to point you at the most effective way of achieving the goal that they can think of. But finding the most effective way of doing something takes a lot of time and attention, they probably have a lot of other things to do, and they also have much less detailed context than you, so they’re liable to miss things!

A counterintuitive fact about the highest-leverage projects is that they’re often not obviously high-leverage to most people in advance (because if they were, they would already have been done a long time ago). That means people are often skeptical of the value of pursuing them.

people often underestimate the value of work related to metrics, instrumentation, or generally looking at data, because you can’t predict what specific things you would learn or what specific impact you’d have as a result. Because of that, many teams consistently under-invest in looking at data.

instead of asking people for approval to go do something, you can just tell them what you intend to do (implicitly giving them space to object or course-correct if they feel strongly).

some of your self-driven high-impact project attempts will probably fail, because you misjudged their impact or difficulty. Because of this, you should think of them as bets that might or might not pay off, and—at least until you’ve proven your ability to make good bets over fairly long time horizons—it’s best to keep these as part of a portfolio with low-risk projects as well, to avoid the situation where you bite off a single high-risk project, it doesn’t pan out, and people lose trust in your ability to pick your own projects.

A common trait of high-agency people is that they take accountability for achieving a goal, not just doing some work.

People who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once.

My concept handle for being in mode 2 is “making success inevitable,” because “inevitable” is the bar where other people can stop spending substantial fractions of mental energy on worrying about the project.

it’s quite rare for different people’s “zone of best taste” to overlap very much. Instead, the quality of most people’s taste is highly idiosyncratic and area-specific

a lot of people underestimate their own taste, because they expect having good taste to feel like being very smart or competent or good at things. Unfortunately, I am here to tell you that, at least if you are similar to me, you will never feel smart, competent, or good at things; instead, you will just start feeling more and more like everyone else mysteriously sucks at them.

what does it seem like everyone else is mysteriously bad at? That’s probably a sign that you have good taste there.

where does it seem like the most people are being the least competent?

One way of thinking about taste is that it’s about the quality of your predictive models and search heuristics. If I design the experiment this way, what will I find? If I design the tool this way, how easy will it be to use? If I write the doc this way, how much will it resonate with people?

Doing enough search and prediction to come up with great ideas takes time. The first domain that I got some degree of taste in was software design, and I remember a pretty clear phase transition where I gained the ability to improve my designs by thinking harder about them.

Whenever you’re debating what to do, explicitly ask yourself “what do I predict will happen if I choose option A?” and try to unroll the trajectory. Even if you think you’re already intuitively predicting the results of your choices, I’ve found it helps surprisingly much to be explicit—one of my manager role models asks me this (“what do you think will happen?”) every time I ask him for advice and it’s kind of silly how often it helps me realize something new. (For bonus points, revisit your predictions afterwards.)

Things that I’ve found benefit from a lot of thinking time:

• What to work on. Changing your prioritization is often the single biggest lever for improving your leverage! • “Design” broadly construed—whether that’s experiment design, system design, org design, process design, outlining blog posts, etc. • How projects could have gone better and what I should learn from them—see below.

If taste is about the quality of your predictive models and search heuristics, it’s important to wring out every possible update to these from the data that you get.

For that reason, many of the most effective people I’ve worked with also do the most metacognition, i.e., reflecting on their own (and their team’s) work and thought processes, and figuring out how to improve them.