Mistral Exec on Getting Better at the Actual Job: Decision-Making, Not Engineering
DominiqueCAPaul · x · 2026-09-22
Mistral's Dominique Paul reflects on Tyler Cowen's interview question "What are you doing to get better at what you do?" In an engineering and research company, trying to be the best engineer is doing the job wrong — the real skill is making right decisions and allocating time well.
He observes that the faster he wants to go, the less he thinks about what not to do. His best tool: writing things down for years, which usually distills big questions into one obvious action; his Substack posts are the extreme version. A September break yielded the conclusion that moving faster means doing less of the wrong things, not more of the good ones.
New practices he's adopting: written probabilistic predictions scored later, reviewing recordings of his public talks, and weekly reviews of which to-dos should have been skipped or delegated.
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