It's Called a Premortem–and It's the Most Productive Thing You'll Do All Year

chive_bot

owenversteeg

This being HN, I thought it would be an engineering premortem: assume your XYZ has died; what killed it and what do we do now?

Engineering premortems have saved me so much time over the years and these days I find Claude is fairly helpful at thinking of causes. I find the most effective strategy is to focus on the common blunders and ignore the elaborate what-if scenarios, keep it short. You can easily spend way too much time figuring out an elaborate issue but most failures are for obvious or common reasons.

Also, in a non-engineering way, valuable for other risks in life. Anytime you do something new, hard, or dangerous. Safety, baking, relationships, home improvement, life changes, et cetera. If this (shower drain/baguette/workout routine/startup idea) failed, what killed it and what do I do now? Figure out the common risks, Google if you have to, and you'll do things differently.

"[What] we do is to identify the main stupidities that do bright people in and then organize your patterns for thinking and developments, so you don’t stumble into those stupidities" - Buffett & Munger

hinkley

I wonder to what extent these blunt the Cassandra Effect.

Incipient

I do get that certain rituals/habits make people typically more successful, however what works for a billionaire I'd hazard is significantly different to what works for someone striking out on their first business/plan.

paulryanrogers

[flagged]

dang

"Please don't fulminate."

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

karaterobot

Feels like you're bringing more into this than what's in the article. Your criticism doesn't illuminate much for me in that context.

jinushaun

Yeah. It’s literally an article about New Year’s resolutions. Calling resolutions “pre-mortem” doesn’t change what they are. lol.

There’s also more to resolutions than lose weight and/or quit smoking. I spend January planning out my entire year. There are only 52 weekends and they get filled up quickly

fastball

Everyone chooses how they want their life to shape up before it ends.

kulahan

I think if most people actively chose how to shape their lives (as opposed to just floating through whatever may come their way), the world would look pretty different.

nejsjsjsbsb

There is a bootstrap shortage. But any individual should have bootstraps.

Aleksdev

I’ve heard somewhere that 85% of billionaires are first generation billionaires meaning they made their own money. I’m sure while they were making money they also had similar struggles to you and I.

I think if you work harder, faster, smarter and have some luck you will succeed no matter what and have some extra time to reflect on your life also.

threeseed

It's about 80% of millionaires and billionaires.

Which sounds much more reasonable when you consider that many small businesses owners will be millionaires but not enough to be considered super wealthy. No evidence that billionaires are mostly self-made.

roenxi

Which billionaires are being complained about that aren't self made? I suppose MacKenzie Scott-types, but I'd be happy to class them as self-made in that she wasn't born into billions. And I don't think anyone especially objects to her.

jcparkyn

> I think if you [...] and have some luck you will succeed no matter what

Ignoring the politics of it, this wording is pretty funny to me.

vtashkov

Or maybe if people stop trying to build socialism they could live much better? I for sure know that all the countries that attempted to "get rid of the billionaires", "stop the corrupt capitalism", "put the power to the people" lived vastly worse than people in the capitalist world and especially USA. Or maybe there is another reason that the emigration is ALWAYS in the direction of the capitalist countries, and the more capitalist the country is and them more billionaires it has, more people try to go there. If that was not the case Trump wouldn't have wanted to deport people, they would have gone themselves.

threeseed

It's always strange to me people arguing against income equality.

Even though we have plenty of evidence and research that it makes society better for everyone.

And there is zero evidence that the more billionaires a country has the better it is.

vtashkov

there is ZERO evidence on that! we have plenty of evidence of the opposite - you can immediately go and live in a country with equality and no billionaires - Cuba, for example, but no - you prefer to stay in the USA and downvote me - who lived through the socialism and saw what absolute HELL is when people like you are in charge.

QuercusMax

The capitalist powers have used the CIA and other groups to ruthlessly interfere with socialist countries. There must be some reason they're afraid.

vtashkov

It is not their wealth and quality of life they were afraid of, I can assure you of that! Or you believe that KGB didn't interfere in the capitalist countries even more? But hey, I can show you even today, in EU, couple of cases of using chemical weapons against people by the FSB(KGB) and a few blown warehouses with weapons. Can you show me a murder or attempt murder by CIA in Cuba, North Korea, China that happened in the last, let's say not 5 years, but 30? Or maybe they interfered because socialist countries waged a war against capitalism as they openly admit? Or maybe you are caring their war now.