learn · Skills & resources

Skills & resources

Tools and refreshers that support the lessons. Short, practical, and honest about their limits — use them beside a lesson, not instead of one.

Refreshers & tools

Pick up a tool when a lesson calls for it

Each entry is tagged with the theme it supports. Refreshers keep the Socratic habit: pause, write an answer, then compare. The aim is to explain the tool, not to memorise it.

Refresher · ~20 min

TRIZ refresher

TRIZ, the theory of inventive problem solving, grew from Genrich Altshuller’s study of patents in the USSR from 1946. This refresher covers technical and physical contradictions, the contradiction matrix and the 40 inventive principles, the Ideal Final Result, resources, separation principles, and trends of evolution — then works Lesson 1’s 30-second kettle through them. The point to carry away: first principles find the floor set by physics; TRIZ helps close the gap above it, and cannot beat the floor.

Supports Theme 02 · First principles

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More skills and resources are in preparation. Looking for the lessons themselves? See the ten themes.