get the conditions right
you can't play professional basketball if you aren't tall, you can't excel at an exam if you don't optimize for the format, you can't win an F1 race if you don't get the car design as per your drivers.
there's one thing that separates the good from the ones that excel, people say they were given god's gifts, people they are lucky, people say they got it easy but what actually happened was that they got the conditions right.
the 'optimal' conditions are created from a combination of all of them - luck, privilege, experience. It's similar to preparation meets opportunity but what we need to understand is that preparation that is optimized for the game excels when met with opportunity.
when I want to accomplish a goal 70% of effort goes towards getting the conditions right and 30% is the grind - leading to a self-improving feedback loop where the hard work is tuned by the conditions and with new found depth I tend 'improve' the conditions.
conditions are hyper parameters that are derived from your KPIs, you find the best KPIs by simply being true to yourself or not pretending to have results.
traditional education teaches about execution in an isolated environment that overwhelms a kid when he enters the real world, with uncontrollable vectors full of real time strategy changes (entering the real world).
the best analogy I can find is via operating systems execution model, a program (P1) needs to execute its instructions and requires resources (R1, R2). To guarantee successful execution P1 is kept in a waiting buffer until its is able to acquire R1 and R2 only then its allowed to execute. Every program needs to get the conditions right before execution is allowed for maximum chances of success.
our world is more nuanced that an operating system, me and you don't control the machine from ground up - neither can we possibly understand all the vectors at play. With enough exploration we can identify the ones that affect us from achieving goals and narrow them down with in-depth understanding.
there's a lot of content out there that focuses on 'optimization' for accomplishment, this the most dangerous template that people my generation have been trapped with - "achieve X with Y" readymade plans sold that claim to help the target audience (0.1% of them are good). Sprinkle a little bit of hope and it becomes the perfect business model for a country where aspirations surpasses gut to take risks.
I am not trying to optimize for anything but promote opposite, in-depth understanding leading to hard work in the right direction. I am not promoting domain expertise/specialization either but development of an understanding of what you want.
Results(conditions, work required by conditions)
Results are a function of conditions and work required by the conditions, you can always grind with hard work but will yield the desired result when you get the conditions as per what you want.
when you identify conditions for a goal you don't just accomplish a task, you start to create systems that yield results. Known conditions help you adapt to changes in environment. Adaptation is the key to results, its possible when you identify the vectors in execution env.
a machine learning model optimizing the learning rate to lower total error