What discipline-specific principles help reframe activities so as to provide useful insights and/or improvement?
What frames do all of you experts use for your own fields? Include any skill/discipline, a useful frame for it, and how the principle reframes.
4 Answers
My personal favorite comes from Richard Feynman: "Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."
I have found many important ramifications based on this simple observation. Here are just a few:
As far as discipline in applying these ideas, I think it is important to start by being curious, but don't stop there. Rather use that curiosity to explore one's own questions or ideas much more deeply. Don't stop with vague and fuzzy notions of understanding bur aim for clear and precise understanding.
Almost everyone has the potential to make meaningful singular discoveries whether they be product innovations, scientific discoveries or personal discoveries by virtue of their own passions, sense of curiosity, and unique life experience if they are able to think sharply and clearly and distill what may seem like a complex problem down to its essence.
I have found many important ramifications based on this simple observation. Here are just a few:
- Problems that many consider boring to work on are generally not inherently boring but merely reflect a real lack of imagination. This lack of imagination mentioned can often create opportunities for those who can see through the fog based in no small part on the fact that competition in these cases is often scarce.
- Scientific, technical and even artistic insights can come from just using a pencil and paper and reflecting on ordinary experiences as simple as looking at the foam of a coffee cup (think chaos theory) or the geometry of the human body (think Leonardo) and being courageous enough to explore one's own curiosity from first principles to its full conclusion.
- One does not need to travel to travel to exotic locations to have experiences that lead to self discovery. Self discovery comes from simply looking more deeply and clearly at one's own experience.
As far as discipline in applying these ideas, I think it is important to start by being curious, but don't stop there. Rather use that curiosity to explore one's own questions or ideas much more deeply. Don't stop with vague and fuzzy notions of understanding bur aim for clear and precise understanding.
Almost everyone has the potential to make meaningful singular discoveries whether they be product innovations, scientific discoveries or personal discoveries by virtue of their own passions, sense of curiosity, and unique life experience if they are able to think sharply and clearly and distill what may seem like a complex problem down to its essence.
I assume the question is asking for principles that are literally applied within the disciplines not proverbs like "measure twice, cut once" (which isn't really a principle in tailoring)
- "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- Knuth, computer science
- "Follow the information" or "what are the primitive random variables?" -- information theory, control theory, statistics
- Procrastination principle: “Most problems confronting a network can be solved later by others… don’t do anything that can be done later by users.” (an idea from a 1984 paper by Clark, David Reed and Jerry Saltzer).
- Never design a law with the worst case in mind -- law/legislation
- Release early and often -- software engineering
- Think aspirin, not vitamins -- marketing
- Start with the simplest problem that you don't know how to solve -- general advice in technical PhDs
- Start with a contradiction: "X but also Y" where X and Y are in conflict: many artistic fields such as script writing (this is a useful method for creating character-driven plots, by defining the central tension that drives a character for example)
Software development:
- 'Do the simplest thing that can possibly work'.
- 'To go fast, do less'. http://asserttrue.blogspo
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