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12 articlesEnergy-level Playbook
There are four levels of energy: zombie, robot, human and rock star. Zombies had better not work or do little chore work. Robots do preset work. Humans do exploratory work. Rock stars can do anything and the best job for them is creative jobs.
Energy Level Playbook
Energy levels can be divided into four categories: Zombie, Robot, Mortal, and Transcendent. What can you do in each of these states? Zombie: Don't work or do mindless tasks; Robot: Do preset tasks; Mortal: Engage in exploratory work; Transcendent: Innovate.
Scarcity: How We Fall into Poverty and Busyness
How to break free from the trap of being busy and poor: drive yourself to do important things; conserve cognitive bandwidth; start acting when resources and bandwidth are abundant, applying cognitive bandwidth to what truly matters; transform fragmented but necessary reminders into one-time actions; maintain slack to handle unforeseen events; plan tasks reasonably and proceed in stages.
Chen Zhiwu: The Three Dimensions of Wealth Creation Ability
Depth: The things that can be produced in a unit of time; Breadth: The expansion or innovation of the market's geographical scope across regions and countries, creating new industries such as consumer goods, industrial varieties, and spatial expansion; Length: Time dimension - financial securities.
What are the basic competitive strategies?
There are three types of competitive strategies: Cost Leadership Strategy - having lower costs than competitors; Differentiation Strategy - highlighting the differences between your products and those of competitors; Focus Strategy - providing specific services to a particular group of customers.
How to Determine if There Are Low-Hanging Fruits in the Market?
The effective market price is entirely determined by the balance of supply and demand. If you want to achieve excess returns, do not choose an efficient market, as demand can quickly find supply. Inefficient markets have prices but no market; unless you have complete control over the supply and can negotiate freely. The better low-hanging fruits are the insufficient equilibria in efficient markets.
Internet Trends 2018
How does enterprise software achieve success? Build amazing products. Leverage virality to grow adoption at low costs. Harvest individual users for enterprise go-to-market. Build an enterprise-grade platform and ecosystem. Keep low-cost customer acquisition and a strong business model.
What Can You Discuss in a Soft Skills Interview?
Without the ability to express oneself at the same skill level, job opportunities can be taken away. The essence of an interview revolves around three questions: Can you do it or not; Do you want to do it or not; Are you a good fit or not. The five discussion points in an interview are: Adversity; Influence; Technical proficiency; Fit; Achievements. How to prepare for these five discussion points: Engage with more people, accumulate experiences, learn more technical skills, and be good at research.
Cognitive biases
Cognitive bias codex refers to procedures of the brain such as what should be remembered from memories. For things without enough information, brains imagine things to fill in characteristics. When there is too much information, we are drawn to notice something has changed.
Web App Delivery Optimization
There are two golden rules for web app delivery optimization. One is to minimize latency and the other is to minimize payload. We also have some advice for applying protocol-specific optimizations.
How Does the Economic Machine Work?
In the economic growth curve, productivity rises steadily, and moderate "credit" helps improve productivity. Under the control of the central bank, the short-term debt cycle generally lasts 5-8 years, but when people borrow without repaying, it leads to long-term debt accelerating beyond income, forming a long-term debt cycle. When the debt burden becomes too heavy and reaches the peak of long-term debt, the economy enters a deleveraging period.
What kind of things are worth doing?
To keep up with the times, we need to cultivate our own good habits and effective "systems." Good habits lead to skills; while skills can be replicated, a good "system" is hard to develop. How can we cultivate a good system? By building a worldview that serves the people; utilizing various effective methodologies; and creating our own reuse and positive feedback systems.
About Tian Pan
I'm Tian Pan, an engineer-founder focused on agentic engineering — building autonomous AI systems and scaling engineering teams. I write practical guides on system design, technical leadership, and shipping with AI agents. Previously an early engineer at Uber, Brex, and IoTeX.
