Comments on _The Choice_ - session #1

I wanted to make an idea tree of this book but I decided to do a substep first: just write out some ideas, not necessarily in a well structured tree. Maybe I'll do a tree later using this work as a reference.

• I think the title of the book refers to the *most important choice*.
• most important choice = the choice to constantly devote time to understand stuff in one's life
• this is the same attitude of BOI/FI
• most people most of the time are living by ideas they don't even try to understand. they accept the status quo as truth.
• this book (or maybe it was another book by Goldratt) talks about how people incorrectly put effort into non-bottlenecks instead of putting effort into bottlenecks, which causes no additional throughput (e.g. company profit). 
• in this book, Goldratt talked about managers who put effort into initiatives that produced some profit gains, which means they were bottlenecks, but those were gains that were small compared to other potential gains from other potential initiatives. that means there are bigger and smaller bottlenecks. and it means that increasing capacity at a bigger bottleneck produces more throughput than compared to increasing capacity at a smaller bottleneck.
• he explains that the worst bottleneck people have is the mentality of not even trying to understand, just accepting the status quo as truth.
• he talked about how people treat the potential small improvements as the only thing that's available. they don't even imagine the existence of potential gigantic improvements.
• and by avoiding even imagining the existence of potential gigantic improvements, people don't find them. you can't find what you don't look for.
• ideas have reach
• In chapter 3, Goldratt's daughter wonders how her father could still think there are huge improvements waiting to be created after having just created a huge improvement. I thought it's because Goldratt knows that his theory was only applied in one area of the company and that he has yet to try to apply it to the rest of the company.
• Inherent simplicity: Goldratt talks about the idea of inherent simplicity, which is that there are no contradictions in reality, and that there are no inherent conflicts between people. 
• Inherent simplicity = benevolent universe premise
• implies that win/lose is always avoidable, win/win always possible
• people who don't know this just accept contradictions/conflicts/compromises as unquestionable truths.
• degrees of freedom
• (just reminding myself of my idea that making rules for oneself is a way to reduce degrees of freedom.)
• Goldratt talks about why adults accept win-lose situations: cuz as children they were presented with a lot of win-lose situations (parents didn't help them find win-win situations instead).
• When reality =/= expectation, consider that an error that deserves effort to fix (an area of potential improvement), such that either reality changes to meet expectation, or expectation changes to meet reality, or both expectation and reality change such that they are equal.
• That error could have huge reach. You don't know at the start. You can only know after enough investigation. Like you may create a general theory of why reality failed to meet expectation in the one particular case, and then you can try to apply that general theory to all other cases of reality not meeting expectation.