Ive build close to 100 projects and companies that have generated over 1B in revenue combined with only one other person (the non-tech owner). I dont have a team, I just build alone on all these.
A few notes:
I have programmed for over 30,000 hours. 3x what people say the time is to mastery is
I look at things in a way that i haven’t really ever heard anyone else explain. I’m not sure if it’s unique but it IS the reason. Everything in my mind is a complex web of cause and effect down to the most nuanced level. In my mind it has a visual aspect even. You have causes (knobs and dials you can turn) to produce effects.
Part of meditation is that you can learn an idea more deeply (insight). This same idea sort of applies to what I said above. People miss the magnitude of this cause and effect statement. I’ve told many people and they’re like sure cool. In my mind this statement is like standing next to the tallest mountain. The magnitude and depth is profound. It’s of this magnitude because it means you are in direct control of your own outcomes. Anything you want, is a solvable puzzle. Literally. And the deeper level of insight you feel about this idea the more you are capable of.
Now for the actual process of how to navigate this cause and effect. My mind operates on a value formula. Every single decision, word, line of code, micro decision is basically a tradeoff decision. Not in terms of code performance but in terms of this cause and effect web, of EVERY action in physical reality. I have excellent ability to “project” causes outward and then find the “end result”, and essentially find the fastest path from A->B to get there. And this value formula always optimizes RESULTS over other things many other great programmers optimize for like knowledge. I just have a different style. So basically I'm always analyzing every single tradeoff as if I see “threads” of reality extending from every decision and what path I go down. As a simple example I might learn linear algebra and Bayesian statistics extremely intensely for 7 days to learn or build an algorithm, but then I hit a diminishing return where I will switch to something else knowing i can hire someone later to teach me and fill in gaps.
This is an extremely simple contrived example. In real life, instead of there being 2 variables there would be like 50.