Context and Frameworks

Perhaps as a longer version of the disclaimer, and something I just try to be cognizant of on the internet generally, is this:

Everyone who is reading this is someone different.

...and that means we have a certain responsibility to be aware of very direct statements or advice that may or may not be applicable to really anyone but ourselves.

Heck, even the advice I'd give now to myself might be different than to myself a decade ago, or last year.

So especially with an index like this, it's merely my stuff and while I'll share it and reference it and tell people to read specific things, the overall truth is that everything has to be tailored slightly, nothing will be a perfect fit or perfectly applicable and that's fine. Take the stuff you want. Ignore the stuff that you want to ignore.

What I'm trying to avoid is outright saying any sort of 'you should do this' advice and instead give you a 'you should figure out your problem like this' advice - we call this a framework, a guideline for taking inputs and getting outputs that suit your specific context(s).

On the whole, I don't think we can ever really give that first kind of advice, yet it's the most commonly phrased type we find. "you should do this, it worked for me" is almost entirely useless since you aren't me.

Frameworks are harder to distill but more robust in practice, so it's a much more durable form of wisdom.

The first type is way lazier, which is why certain posts will be 100% "here's what I do" and you have to glean your own morals from it. It's a way of getting down a lot of content and offloading the actual brain work to readers, assuming said readers are thinking about it non-blindly. Maybe someday I'll have the time or insight to distill those mere example things into smarter framework things.

I am awfully good at designing the things around me, and the reasons why they're the most efficient or effective version of whatever it is, but always be aware of the context and reasoning, the priorities and choices made - a lot of them will be different than yours.

Good luck!