Chapter 9. Paying Attention to Practices

One of the values of a profession (or a craft, for that matter) is that it defines a set of practices that you can follow, practices that will reliably increase your success rate.

To be most valuable, a professional practice should

  • Be something you can always do, rather than having to decide whether to do it. Practices that you have to consider before you do them can be valuable too, but that is not our focus here.
  • Be significant. A practice that does little for you is better left out of the recommended set, as a large number of practices will dilute the impact of any particular one.
  • Require little or no extra work. We want to be greedy here; we want all of the good stuff without any of the bad, and without ...

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