How to find your blind spots

This post comes from the experience of several brutal multi-year engineering projects at Google that, in retrospect, I wonder &quot;why didn&#x27;t anyone criticize the idiotic decisions that I was making?!&quot;.<p>Along the way, I was making &quot;good software engineering&quot; decisions but very poor product decisions: specifically, the biggest risk to the project wasn&#x27;t that the code was poor but rather that no one would want the thing that I had set out to build. I find that unless you&#x27;re diligent about incremental validation, time on engineering projects is usually wasted on the scale of years by creating a beautiful castle that no one wants to live in.<p>I now see that my project was a lot more like a little startup: by finding resources about how to make a startup go, I could have saved a lot of trouble. By taking this path, you still end up with a lot of waste (rewriting fast, poor versions of features to be better), but you&#x27;re able to course correct earlier and have a lot better chance at the overall project being a success.

Wish I had time for a longer comment, but this advice rings very true for me. Reflecting back on grad school and the transition to professional life, you have to realize that your role changes every couple of years and that the things that got you to one stage won’t get you to the next. Many people end up stuck in a local maximum (lacking vision) which partly explains the Peter principle.

Thought this was going to be about how to find your actual blind spots, which for anyone who doesn&#x27;t know is draw two dots on a plain background, a couple of inches apart, look at the right dot with your left eye, or vice versa, keeping the other eye closed. Move closer until the other dot disappears. Still amazes me every time.

The issue I have here is that it’s not clear how to identify the mini games to improve.<p>This is an article of where blind spots might be but not about how to find them.<p>One of the suggestions is to find a coach — for instance online videos (not exactly a live coach) — but if you don’t know the mini games you should want to improve , how do you know which coach&#x2F;video to invest in?

Opposite to the author, I&#x27;ve fixated on just a few hobbies which have captured my interest for many years (drawing and Japanese-English translation being the big two). In regards to my hobbies, this assessment is extremely accurate! Had never thought of things in terms of &quot;minigames,&quot; but when I do make appreciable progress, it&#x27;s because I&#x27;ve given myself a new minigame to crush. Unfortunately, I haven&#x27;t cracked the mentor puzzle either, though I&#x27;m sure it would help enormously.

I don&#x27;t think chess is the best example for &#x27;minigames&#x27;. You play a lot of mini games when learning, but the pros are <i>very</i> focussed on the larger strategy. The mini games are executed below their main attention. I think their &#x27;blind spots&#x27;, what GMs call &#x27;blunders&#x27;, are at a level that does not map with our normal reality.<p>It&#x27;s like using fighter pilots as an example of how to be attentive. I don&#x27;t think the most relevant examples ever come from 0.0001% of the population.<p>I guess I can expect the next Ted talk will be &#x27;How to be like Magnus&#x27;. (Maybe Hikaru can be the speaker for more comedic value).<p>This said, I agree, and fitting with the theme, you need to move your head around focus wider to see the things that are hidden right in front of you.

I really like this post thank you for sharing. It led me to your other post on management lessons from your toddler and I&#x27;m really, really digging your ideas and style.

i think the point about adding minigames vs refining the ones you have is very good. ive noticed that with music performance, sometimes its a little counterintuitive though- often a minigame can itself be refined into a few mini-minigames, and that really helps things. its such a constrained discipline i think sometimes its all about making whats already &quot;easy&quot; easier.

as good as this advice is, there in lies crux of human nature. Once one succeds in a task, it provides validation of the method followed, hence no need to &quot;go back&quot; and move on to next taks. At least this is what i have seen ohter people do and so have i. i guess this is what seperates good performer vs mediocore ones.