Aaron Swartz: 7 Essays on Getting Better at Life (2012)

Post 7 resonates with me a lot. One thing that it only hints at is how fundamentally different thinking about things from a machine/system perspective is from thinking about things directly.

It's also really ubiquitous across a bunch of disciplines, from Drucker's Management & Gerber's E-Myth & Dalio's Principles in business/org development (not even mentioning the huge field of ops management) to the broader field of systems thinking like Donnelly's Thinking in Systems. Even frameworks like the Scientific Method are a form of this type of thinking, and it's easy to forget that these are all human concepts of trying to bring order to chaos. In the software world you have contemporaries like Larson's An Elegant Puzzle focusing on the management aspect and so so so many classics like GoF/Pragmatic Programmer/Code Complete that focusing on the developer. It's neat that the same ideas apply at different levels of the bigger systems (company, project, individual contributor).

It's also easy to forget that the cogs of many of these machines are people, and this article does a good job of bringing that aspect to the forefront.