Cedric Chin

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Cedric Chin

Word slinger, bug fixer, and operator.

The Dangers of Treating Ideas from Finance as Generalised Self Help

Can we take ideas from finance and apply them to the rest of our lives? I've been acting as it is. The truth isn't that simple.

A Better Way To Allocate Your Career Time

How do you evaluate if a career activity is worth doing? By looking at its component tasks, and calculating the information rate of each step.

Time Allocation as Capital Allocation

What if we treated time management as a bet allocation problem? Say that we have a finite number of hours, which we might spend on a variety of career activities. How do we figure out what to spend our time on, instead of merely thinking about time management as how to tackle our todo lists?

Career Moat Patterns: Tie a Good Thing to a Better Thing

Career moats are inspired by Warren Buffett's conception of a business's 'economic moat'. Here we take a look at a particular type of economic moat, to see what we can take from it when applied to an individual career.

How to Ask Questions (So Your Boss Doesn't Hate You)

"There is no such thing as a stupid question" is a laudable aphorism. In practice, it's often also wrong.

Paying Attention to Stories for Skill Extraction

In which we examine a logical extension of the idea that humans are built to learn from stories. If we're so attuned to stories, can we use this to acquire better career skills, and at a faster pace?

Organisational Politics: Beware the Simple Story

If our brains are built to generate and process narrative, then how can we use this insight to grapple with company politics?

An Update on Perceptual Exposure as Learning Technique

Perceptual exposure is a learning technique that uses the brain's ability to pattern match against deep perceptual cues.

Peak

A book summary of a 2016 book called Peak which summarised three decades of research into the nature and development of expertise.

Lessons Learnt From Reading 51 Books in 2018

I tried reading a book a week last year. Here's what I learnt, what I found surprising, and what I'm taking forwards.