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Comment by cduzz | Hacker News Reader

I would like to propose "Grove's Axiom" which basically states:

If you're failing, pivot to what your replacement will do before you fail.

"In the midst of the doldrums of 1985, Grove posed a hypothetical question to his colleague Gordon Moore: “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Moore answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” To which Grove responded, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?” [1]

[1] https://hbr.org/1996/11/inside-intel

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This reminds me of the advice:

When deciding what to do, imagine that you are not talking to yourself but rather what you would tell someone else to do in your situation.

This simple mental shift apparently removes a lot of cognitive biases and emotional baggage that might be affecting your decision making process.

People ask me for advice and I immediately realize why am I not following it myself? I have had multiple people come back years later and tell me that they would have never done X or achieved Y if it weren't for a discussion we had years earlier.

The analytical knowing mind has to drag all this other stuff around!

(Prompt engineering is a powerful technique with humans as well as LLMs!)

That's a pretty powerful axiom. I wonder how applicable it is to life in general.

Relationship is failing (and you want to save it): what will their next partner do differently? Do it now!

Worried you might be kicked off a sports team: what will the new player do better than you? Practice that!

Imposter syndrome has you worried your boss will fire you: what will the replacement, the "real" person do that you aren't? Start doing that today.

I would be careful applying this one to imposter syndrome. I think of imposter syndrome as a failure to calibrate your expectations of yourself with the reality of what your work requires. Asking yourself what the "real" person would do that you aren't doing seems to me like it would play into that miscalibration. You might be better of asking _someone else_ what your replacement would do.

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