Start Here: Commoncog's Best Posts

Commoncog is a publication about accelerating business expertise.

The way Commoncog approaches this topic is two fold: it is interested in a) a particular model of business expertise and b) methods to accelerate the acquisition of that expertise. Commoncog draws from the best expertise research, but is fundamentally interested in what works, which means the bar for truth in this site is often practice.

You may read an overview of these two topics below:

You may also read some general information about the blog's philosophy here.

What follows are some of Commoncog's best ideas.

Career Moats

My main approach to careers is to identify a career moat, and then use that as a first position from which to build out the rest of one's career.

Career Moats 101 — A brief primer of nearly everything I've written on career moats.

A Personal History of the Career Moat — How I got so obsessed with careers.

Do a Job Market Audit — What to do when your moat is under threat.

The Parable of the Job Promotion and the Market

All That is Rare and Valuable (members only) — What non skills-based career moats look like.

A Fourth Career Moat Pattern (members only) — Skills that don't normally appear in the same person.

Career Thinking

Useful mental tools for your career.

Compensation: How Does Money Affect Retention? — An excerpt from my book on employee retention.

Desire for Mission is a Career Limiting Belief

What's Your Time Preference? — Most careers last 40 years. The interesting bits tend to happen in the last two decades. Adjust expectations accordingly.

You Can't Ignore Business Models In Your Career

Using Business Models to Evaluate Employers

Using Head Fake Questions to Achieve Your Career Goals — How to ask questions to potential employers so that they can't lie to you.

Contra 'Passion is Overrated' — Maybe passion counts for something.

What Bill Gurley Saw — Some careers can be made on the back on a single, powerful idea.

Only The Paranoid Survive — A summary of a legendary book from Andy Grove, the former CEO and Chairman of Intel.

Thinking Better

A recurring theme in the blog is how to get more effective at thinking. Often that goes beyond classical notions of rationality.

Beware What Sounds Insightful — Internet writers optimise for attention, not truth.

Reality Without Frameworks — Don't let frameworks blinker your thinking.

Seek Ideas at the Right Level of Abstraction — We think we're smart when we look at global trends. We often are not.

The Base Rate is a Hell of a Thing — Non-obvious implications of base rate thinking.

How First Principles Thinking Fails, is exactly what it says on the tin, and the follow-up is a post that went viral: The Games People Play With Cash Flow.

The Four Theories of Truth as a Method for Critical Thinking

‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well

Munger's Two Track Analysis — Look at what's rational, and then look at how psychology might distort those incentives.

The Principles Sequence [Series] — A series on a book that changed my life.

Optimise For Usefulness — An early articulation of learning what is most useful from experiences.

Mental Models Are Mostly a Fad

You've probably heard of mental models. I investigated them over a period of five years, and didn't find them particularly useful. I've mostly concluded that they are a fad — a way of saying ‘framework’ without actually using the word ‘framework’.

The Mental Model Fallacy

A Framework for Putting Mental Models to Practice [Series] — originally published in the Farnam Street Learning Community, this series serves as constructive criticism of the whole mental models approach.

The Mental Model FAQ — A summary of everything I've ever written about mental models; read this if you don't have the time to go through the full series.

Dealing with Uncertainty

At the start of the 2020 pandemic I realised that forecasting the near future was too difficult, and began investigating the idea of fast adaptation under uncertainty. These are the results of that investigation.

This is What Uncertainty Feels Like

Much Ado About the OODA Loop and the follow up: Good Synthesis is the Start of Good Sensemaking

There is No Normal — There is only what is happening now.

The Five Sources of Uncertainty

To be read in order: A Narrative About Crypto (members only), What I Learnt from Complexity, and Against Single Narratives in Crypto (members only).

Forecasting

A comprehensive summary of The Good Judgment Project, and what it tells us about our ability to predict the future.

The Forecasting Series [Series] — Everything we know about the limits of human forecasting.

Prediction in the Time of the Coronavirus

Reduce Noise, Not Cognitive Biases — An interesting result that falls out of the GJP is that cognitive bias reduction isn't as effective as noise reduction. Here's what that means, along with same caveats.

How To Reduce Decision Noise — A handful of methods to tamp down on decision noise.

Learning Better

It's very difficult to advance in your career if you do not get good at getting good.

The Tacit Knowledge Series [Series] — Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be described by words alone. The dirty secret of deliberate practice is that you can't do it in a field with little pedagogical development — which means that you can't do it for things like management and company strategy and marketing ... basically, most of the skills that matter in our careers. So what do you do? You look for techniques to help you learn what's already in other people's heads. This is a series about that.

The Problems with Deliberate Practice, to be read together with my summary of Peak (K. Anders Ericsson's 2016 book on DP).

To Get Good, Go After the Metagame — The metagame — where the experts play — is probably where the frontier is; use that as a map of the skill domain.

Get Numb Before You Get Good —Don't bother getting good until you've gotten over the fear of starting.

Action Produces Information — Writing this blog post changed my life.

Practice as the Bar for Truth — The rigour of this entire blog may be captured in a single sentence: use practice as the bar for truth. Here are some implications.

Expertise is Just Pattern Matching

Everything You Need To Know About Human Memory Retention

How I Do Personal Experiments — Some notes from a few years of experimentation.

Paying Attention to Stories for Skill Extraction — Why it's a good idea to ask more experienced people for stories, as a way to get to their skills.

The Expertise of Evaluating Expertise (members only)

A Map of Expertise Research for the Career-Minded (members only)

Tacit Skill in Wicked Domains (members only) and the follow-ups: A Loose Feedback Loop (members only), and Hold The Lessons of History Loosely (members only)

On Perceptual Learning

I gave perceptual learning a shot, but ultimately concluded that deliberate practice was better for domains with good pedagogical development, and pursuing tacit knowledge (using naturalistic decision-making methods) was better for domains without. You may follow this investigation here:

1. Chicken Sexing and Perceptual Learning as a Path to Expertise
2. Putting Perceptual Learning to Practice
3. An Update on Perceptual Exposure as Learning Technique

Expertise in Business (members only)

In the late 2000s, Naturalistic Decision Making researcher Lia DiBello started studying the expertise of business. She found something remarkable: every great business person shares a common mental model of business. The mental model captures a fundamental set of principles in the domain, is stable across industries and businesses, and seems resistant to change. This is a series of posts about her work.

Expertise in Business [series] — We start with the triad mental model of business, and then look at cognitive agility, both major contributors to the expertise of business.

Every Great Business Person Has the Same Mental Model of Business — A free preview that outlines the triad mental model of business expertise.

Lia DiBello on the Mental Model of Business Expertise — Podcast interview with Lia.

Better Business Thinking

An undercurrent that runs through my writing is my desire to get a deeper understanding of business. This was motivated by my experiences as a business operator, where I didn't understand some of the things I saw.

The Chinese Businessmen Paradox [Series] — I helped build a business from 0 to ~$4.5 million dollars in annual revenue from the end of 2014 to the end of 2017, and in the process dealt with a lot of traditional Chinese businessmen. They were savvy, ruthlessly competitive, and mostly uneducated. This is a series of posts that attempts to make sense of the businessmen I dealt with.

The Consulting Business Model — It turns out you can evaluate a consulting business based on the structure of the firm itself.

Good Synthesis is the Start of Good Sensemaking — This is ostensibly about adaptation in the face of uncertainty, but also contains an explanation of process power as a competitive advantage.

Breaking Out of the SME Loop, a Story

Don't Take Generic Business Advice from VCs

Product Development as Iterated Taste — What we can learn from Amazon's Working Backwards product development process, and what that means when compared to Eric Ries's Lean Startup, Apple's Creative Selection, and Pixar's Braintrust. Follow up: Product Validation Frameworks are Mostly Useless Without Taste

Cash Flow is King — Why free cash flow is the metric traditional Chinese businessmen intuitively focus on. May be read in combination with The Games People Play With Cash Flow.

What the CEO Wants You To Know — A summary of Ram Charan's business principles book.

A Land & Expand Reading Program for B2B Sales (members only) — A post that works at two levels: gives you a reading program for B2B sales, and teaches you to construct a reading program + pick tree vs branch books, from scratch.

Competitive Arbitrage (members only) — The concept that underpins both career moats and business moats.

Emotional Regulation

The central thesis is that for knowledge workers, emotional regulation is a superpower. You can't separate what needs to be done from how you feel about it. Ultimately, this means that you need to pay attention to your emotions in order to be effective.

Enthusiasm Half-Life — Over the long term, enthusiasm for most projects fade with time.

In an Age of Knowledge Work, Emotional Regulation is a Superpower

Don't Beat Yourself Up Over Self-Directed Work

A User Review of the Procrastination Equation

Knowing The Dip Exists is a Heck of an Advantage

A Nuanced Take on Preventing Burnout

Reading Better

The best way to learn is through experience. The next best way to learn is through other people's experiences. Therefore: read books.

The Three Kinds of Non-Fiction Book — A useful categorisation scheme for non-fiction books, and how to read them.

The Land and Expand Strategy for Reading — How to read difficult topics when you don't have that much time.

Follow Your Nose — How to do what I do when writing this blog.

Every Actionable Book is Actually Two Books Inside

In Defence of Reading Goals — It's trendy now to dunk on reading goals. Here's why they aren't a bad idea.

Reading Quickly is Reading a Lot — The best way to read faster is to read everything you can get your hands on in a single topic.

The Ultimate Guide to Reading a Book a Week For Your Career — Everything I know on how to read well.

Personal Brand

Is personal brand a universally useful thing?

Personal Brand as Moat, Personal Brand as Soft Landing

The Gap Between Reputation and Personal Brand — What Estee Lauder's story tells us about the gap between reputation and personal brand.

Obviously Awesome — A summary of April Dunford's incredible book on positioning.

Career Networking and Power (members only)

Originally published 14 April 2021, last updated 14 October 2023.