Systems, leverage and winning at life

By Satvik Beri

Systems, Leverage andWinning at Life

“My philosophy is that losers have goals and

winners have systems.”

- Scott Adams

Introduction

Why systems?

→ They help you gain leverage on limited resources.

→ Better communicate your solutions.

→ Solve problems optimally.

Systems are a critical part ofinstrumental rationality (winning at life).

BUT WHAT IS A SYSTEM?

First we have to understand what ABSTRACTION is.

→ Understanding the idea and discarding what is irrelevant

(i.e. events).

  Example: Finding a job and negotiating salary.You can take each interview ad-hoc…or develop an explicit system that lets you improve much faster and reduce your need to improvise.

System for creating habits

Go to the gym 3x/wk

Tuesday

Thursday

Monday

Floss teethevery night.

MondayTuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

SO… WHAT IS A SYSTEM?

A system is a solution to a set of problems at a

higher level of abstraction in order to gain

leverage on scarce resources.

THREE EXAMPLES OF RESOURCES:

→ Working Memory

→ Willpower

→ Communication

DEFAULT SYSTEMS (NEARLY) EVERYONE SHOULD TRY

Efficient Habit Training

• Willpower is used in almost every behavioral change

• Spending less willpower means higher success rates, faster

personal growth

Efficient Habit Training• What habit do you want to achieve? Going to the gym

• Goal Factor: why do you want this habit? Is there an easier way to achieve

the outcome? More physical energy & less pain

• Tiny Habits: find the smallest version of the habit. Wear gym clothes &

walk out the door

• If-then trigger: trigger the habit to a specific condition. If I get out of bed,

then I’ll put on my gym clothes

• Add triggers for common objections. If I’m too tired to go the gym, I’ll go to the gym

anyway.

• Minimize the effort needed: make the trigger as simple as possible. Keep

gym clothes next to the bed before I go to sleep

• Incentivize: use Beeminder, stickK, or social pressure. Tell friends I’m going

to gym every day, suffer social embarrassment if I fail.

• Offline habit training: practice the habit 5-10 times when you’re wide

awake & have plenty of willpower. Practice getting up, putting on gym

clothes & walking out the door, then repeat

Why Optimize Working Memory?Mental performance degrades with each item you have in your

working memory.

Only holding thoughts relevant to the task at hand effectively

makes you smarter.

WRITE THINGS DOWN.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3077110/. “There is clear and compelling evidence of one unit being maintained in focal attention and no direct evidence for more than one item of information extended over time.”

How to Optimize Working Memory?

Write everything down-Evernote or Remember the Milk

Keep a calendar

Think on paper

Create Successful Plans

Most mid to long term plans fail. When we think

there’s an 80% chance of success, actual success

rates are closer to 30%.

A better heuristic for predicting a plan will succeed

lets you improve plans until they’re successful

Pre-hindsightImagine that 6 months have passed and your plan has failed. Are you

surprised?

If not, why? What caused the plan to fail?

Fix the plan to account for that failure, and repeat.

Anecdotally, this seems to be tremendously successful.

ANALYZE AND SYSTEMATIZE

…Events that consume a lot of one of the three resources.

I call them Resource-Eaters

APPLYING SYSTEMS

CommunicationSimilar logic applies to communication. Explicit systems can be

shared without having to teach all of the underlying principles. For

example, Alexei’s system for searching for jobs.

Shared systems also let you delegate many tasks you could previously

only do yourself.

Teaching rationality techniques

at workshops instead of individuals

FURTHER OPTIMIZATION

⁃ To optimize your working memory: find thoughts

that pop into your head multiple times during the day.

• Do you repeatedly remind yourself to leave work early when you have a dentist

appointment?

• When programming, do you spend a lot of energy remembering syntax and methods

relevant to your code?

• Do you keep reminding yourself to buy milk on your way home?

If so, you can free up a lot of your short term memory.

Keeping these thoughts in your head over and over

again is effectively making you dumber!

Find a way to write them down and keep them in front of

you, on paper or a device. Then let them go.

⁃ To optimize willpower: find behaviors that you

endorse but have to struggle to fulfill, for example:

You want to avoid eating sugar but end up grabbing a chocolate bar every

now and then.

Set up a method for achieving those behaviors that

doesn’t require a lot of effort, such as:

Spiking all the chocolate near you with extremely hot peppers (assuming you

don’t enjoy spicy chocolate).

After a few unfortunate bites, you’ll find it easier to

avoid the chocolate than to eat it, and you’ll have more

willpower for important tasks.

 ⁃ To optimize communication: simply framing a problem as a

special case of a general instance gives you more leverage on your

insights.

Alexei’s negotiation system means that anytime he finds something that

works while negotiating, he can immediately write it down and apply it to

all future negotiations, instead of as a specific case for one company. If

you find yourself talking about a specific topic with more than one person

a week, it’s probably something you should write down.

I’ve given career advice to several people, so the fact that Ben Kuhn

wrote it down and shared it on his blog added a lot of value-given the

response, it would have taken me at least 30 hours to communicate

that information through individual conversations.http://www.benkuhn.net/satvik

Other Resources

Beeminder https://www.beeminder.com/

bubbl.us https://bubbl.us/

Bullet Journal http://bulletjournal.com/

Checkvist https://checkvist.com/

Lift https://lift.do/

StickK http://www.stickk.com/

WorkFlowy https://workflowy.com/

Beeminder https://www.beeminder.com/

bubbl.us https://bubbl.us/

Bullet Journal http://bulletjournal.com/

Checkvist https://checkvist.com/

Lift https://lift.do/

StickK http://www.stickk.com/

WorkFlowy https://workflowy.com/