I'm just beginning to go through Rationality: From AI to Zombies. I want to make the most of the lessons contained in the sequences. Usually when I read a book I simply take notes on what seems useful at the time, and a lot of it is forgotten a year later. Any thoughts on how best to internalize the lessons from the sequences?

For a while now I've been very interested in learning useful knowledge and acquiring useful skills. Of course there's no shortage of useful knowledge and skills to acquire, and so I've often thought about how best to spend my limited time learning.

When I came across the concept of Force Multiplication, it seemed like an appropriate metaphor for a strategy to apply to choosing where to invest my time and energy in acquiring useful skills and knowledge. I started to think about what areas or skills would make sense to learn about or acquire first, to:

1. increase speed or ease of further learning/skill acquisition,
2. help me achieve success not only in my current goals, but in later goals that I have not yet developed, and
3. lead to interesting downstream options or other knowledge/skills to acquire.

There have been a small number of skills/areas that have helped me surge forward in progress towards my goals. I look back at these areas and wish only that I had come across them sooner. As most of my adult life has been focused on business, most of those areas that have had a tremendous impact on my progress have been business related, but not all.

So far I've found it hard to identify these areas in advance. Almost all of the skills or knowledge  that I learned, that had a large impact on progress towards success, I pursued for unrelated reasons, or I had no concept of how truly useful they would be. The only solution I currently have for identifying force multipliers is to ask other people, and especially those more accomplished than me, what they've learned that had the most impact on their progress towards success.

So, what have you learned that had the most impact on your progress towards success (whatever that might be)?

Can you think of any other ways to identify areas of force multiplication?