## Highlights Once you see that **the quality of any output is made up of multiple dimensions** and that **typically only one or two truly matter**, you are free to spend most of your time and attention on only those dimensions. And not only are you free to, that is what you _must_ do if you want any chance of standing out. In contrast, a guaranteed way to get stuck and bogged down is to try to maximize many dimensions at once. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth88e5kyb9234kjfrgfy7ct)) - 💭 specify dimensions when working on something By taking opinionated stances about which ones do matter, and pouring all your time and attention into them, you have a chance at “winning” the attention game along a dimension that no one else can match. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth89xmr3ykvwqt1kdb15yya)) But…if you _have_ reached those heights, the very attitudes and skills that got you there are likely now holding you back. Here’s why: **\*not everything can or should be high quality\*\*\***.\*\* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8c8jma6hb08v35gga8s62)) First, over time, **you’ll produce less and less**. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8emea9fnk9md59fatdvdy)) Second, **you’ll be limited to individual contributor positions** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8f0d1qv4gwyz5dyc96yq3)) Third, **you’ll be limited in the scale and impact of what you can create** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8g1pca1fh5by8dxjv2t2q)) Fourth, **you’ll be under-compensated and under-appreciated** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8g70f3nbakyf79q60ddef)) Fourth, **you have to get much, much better at receiving feedback**. This is a whole collection of skills within itself: how to ask for specifically the kind of feedback you need, how to ask follow-up questions to discover what people _really_ think, how to convey which kinds of feedback aren’t helpful, how to decide who to get feedback from and in what form, how to document and structure that feedback so it’s helpful, how to implement what you’ve learned without getting discouraged or losing your vision. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8n1gpwfewzr5y08c2eng3)) Quality is no longer about sticking faithfully to a timeless process passed down through the generations. It depends instead on your ability to maintain situational awareness about your environment and adapt your thinking and behavior to match it. The only way to maintain such situational awareness is to constantly test and probe your environment to discover what is happening and why. Such tests have to be low-quality because they have to be fast. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8pd72mknxgh4zxjy5qavj)) The word “fidelity” means “faithfulness,” as in “How faithful should this deliverable be to the ultimate version of what it could be?” Sometimes, the answer may be that whatever you’re creating demands the highest levels of fidelity. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8qkh3x7544x35aq71wfh3)) How can we use this new understanding of fidelity to increase our speed? By giving ourselves permission to reduce the fidelity of whatever we’re creating. To dial it down to the absolute minimum needed to answer only the next, most important question we’re facing. To focus all our attention only on the next bottleneck, and ignore everything else. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8rzt09bajasvarvfb7jcd)) Let’s say you run “AI tests” of 50 tasks on your to-do list, revealing that: - 20 aren’t worth doing at all - 15 can be executed completely by AI without your involvement - 10 need to be restructured and broken into pieces for AI to then complete with your supervision - 5 require your full and undivided attention That would be a tremendously powerful breakdown to have at your disposal. It basically represents a plan for how to tackle a broad spectrum of tasks, which would replace a large amount of cognitive effort you would otherwise have to spend yourself. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8w2s74f8zn96tpzng01bd)) By replacing these intermediate stages with AI, I think our time and attention will get freed up to spend in two places: the _very beginning_ of our creative process – deciding which information to capture as inputs in the first place – and the _very end_ of our creative process – polishing and refining the final product to perfection as only humans can. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8wqa7e84e7a8r3k3r39ry)) you’ve gained a tremendous benefit: you’ve been able to visualize many more (and weirder, more divergent) scenarios and consider more (diverse, unusual) options before committing your precious time and attention to one. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8ypqeqhba2pmmx8wj37e0)) This approach also gets around a lot of the personal baggage and identities that we attach to a certain standard of quality. We won’t be as attached to the work that AI does on our behalf and thus can tolerate a much wider range of fidelity than we would ever accept from ourselves. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hth8z3zva0t6j6xty33dv6fh))