Film, startups, politics, chess, poker, comedy, sports, and games are similar. There are horizontal frameworks at the highest levels of competency in each field.
I read many business books in my twenties— more than was necessary to understand the patterns that work and the anti-patterns that don’t. Each business is different. The largest tech companies (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta) all have different organizational structures, tech cultures, and personalities that reign. Yet, they all work.
Valve, a top gaming company, has a massive open floor plan and desks with wheels on them so people can more easily collaborate. This would be a huge faux pas at a company like Amazon, where escalations to management are formalized, or at Apple, where secrecy is paramount to product launches.
Horizontal Frameworks
Each sector has patterns and anti-patterns. Deliberate practice is a horizontal pattern to achieve success. Read Born Standing Up by Steve Martin to understand what it takes to become a top comedian. Watch episode 100 of the Day9 Daily to understand what it takes to become a professional Starcraft player.
Spoiler alert: seemingly infinite reps in different settings, with different crowds, and taking risks in every opening, middle, and end game while playing at different temperatures and chair heights against top competitors over and over and over again lead to success: iteration and deliberate practice. Resilience is a horizontal pattern.
To be a competent generalist, you must have profound knowledge in at least one area. The frameworks you learn going deep in one place are horizontal frameworks that can be applied elsewhere.
Same Framework but Different Industry
Advice from the most successful people in entirely different fields are shockingly similar. Spielberg, Phil Knight, and Steve Jobs had a similar management framework– hire smart people who care about the mission, tell them the problems, and trust them to find the best solutions. Directing, shoes, and technology are somehow the same.
Another popular horizontal framework among builders is meritocracy. Meritocracy means wanting something done as well as possible. Do you want a crappy product/service, a mediocre product/service, or a great product/service? Of course, meritocracy wins.
Horizontal frameworks apply to soft skills as well. We can learn a new area quickly by reapplying knowledge and patterns from areas where our understanding is deep. This reapplication makes me bullish on humanity achieving AGI within our lifetime.
It’s not magic when you understand that this is how our brains work. It’s simply reapplying frameworks to new verticals. Test the framework, understand use cases, create new frameworks, apply others, and configure existing frameworks for the vertical. The process of creating frameworks based upon first principles and infrastructure lock-in is always a similar pattern.
Axioms
To apply the correct horizontal frameworks, we need the proper axioms. Axioms are the fundamental assumptions of things we know to be true. An example of a horizontal axiom that applies to all areas is that incentives drive people. The laws of physics are another.
An axiom when running a political race could be that you need to get more legally counted votes than your opponent to win. But depending on the race, you may need the majority of votes, not just a plurality. To accomplish your goal of winning, you’d next consider what incentivizes someone to vote and what levers you can pull to get them to vote for you. When problem-solving, start with the axioms and apply frameworks on top.
With the correct axioms, horizontal frameworks can be configured and applied. This is what our brains do when we learn a new discipline.
I’m currently upgrading my pickleball skills. There are similar frameworks to tennis, but most are slightly modified, e.g., similar to tennis, you want to be on the same plane/height as the ball during your swing, but you don’t want to do micro steps or large wind-ups like in tennis as there is less time to get to the ball and less time to react to the next shot.
First Principles Ender Blog
Seeking Truth
Our culture often treats our perceived axioms and frameworks as religious idols to not be touched. This needs to change.
The most common reason people are wrong is that they have false axioms. The second most common is having the wrong frameworks. It takes training to think in axioms.
Axioms and frameworks are meant to be debated and discussed. With the proper axioms and frameworks, there’s no such thing as an intractable problem. Our perceived axioms aren’t us. Our frameworks aren’t us. They’re ideas meant to be challenged.