The Code

We live in a culture that worships velocity. Move fast, ship fast, decide fast. The implicit assumption is that speed and quality are orthogonal — you sacrifice one for the other when necessary.

I no longer believe this. In most domains that matter, speed is the enemy of depth, and depth is where value compounds.

The thinkers who shaped how I see the world — Munger, Feynman, Darwin — were defined not by how fast they produced output, but by how deeply they processed input. Darwin took twenty years between his first insights on natural selection and On the Origin of Species. He was not slow. He was thorough.

The practice: Before acting on an important decision, I ask myself: What would I think about this if I had a month to decide instead of a day? The answer is almost always different. The difference is almost always valuable.

Every framework I use is a lie. A simplification. A reduction of irreducible complexity into something a human brain can actually process.

I’ve stopped being embarrassed by this.

The alternative — refusing to use models because they’re imperfect — is not intellectual rigor. It’s paralysis dressed up as sophistication. The person who says “it’s more complex than that” without offering a better model has contributed nothing.

What I try to do instead: Use models explicitly and consciously. Name the model I’m using. Note its failure modes. Keep a graveyard of models I’ve discarded and why.

The discipline is not to find the true model. The discipline is to know which model you’re using, when to switch, and when to distrust the map entirely.

I used to optimize for answers. For conclusions. For the satisfying sense of having figured something out.

I’ve come to believe this is a trap. The moment you have a confident answer, you stop looking. And most confident answers — in domains that actually matter — are premature.

The better practice is to cultivate questions worth living with. Not rhetorical questions. Not questions designed to score points. Questions that genuinely unsettle you. Questions that make existing knowledge feel suddenly provisional.

These are the questions worth writing down. Worth revisiting. Worth building an entire intellectual project around.

The test I apply: If I could answer this question fully in an afternoon, it’s probably not worth keeping. The questions worth keeping are the ones that get more complicated the more I learn.