Michael

improve

Here is a simple list of broad actions that could lead to improvement/progress.

They are quite generic and could cover many real life scenarios: personal goals, projects, the economy, relationships.

Weirdly I couldn't find such a simple list

I think these are mostly self explanatory but anyway...

survival is about meeting the minimum expectations. The defining property is there exists some expectations that must be met continuously. Inability to meet these expectations will result in no further opportunities... An interesting point is that these minimum expectations will likely remain forever and likely increase in scope, you will have more minimum expectations and have to meet the prior ones too. So make sure they are met and ask if unsure!

skill-stacking is about building the foundational structure that allows you to do greater things. The defining property is that the more advanced/later stages require the earlier stages to have been completed first, and possibly required to be completed to a high standard. Things like serendipity probably require skill-stacking too since you need to be prepared to notice and take advantage of these unexpected events. This is mostly a bottum-up process, in contrast with a top-down/brute-force approach.

following is about letting someone else go first. The defining properties is that (1) you know someone else is already trying, (2 - optional) contingent on their success, you feel like you will be in a position to quickly catch up to reach the same goal. The risk of trying and failing is offloaded to someone else. I think this example surfaces implicitly in real life as a type of second mover advantage.

leapfrogging is about skipping steps. The defining property is in contrast to skill-stacking, rather than building all the necessary foundations and going through all the traditional steps, you skip a bunch of steps and "jump into the deep end" or perhaps the new frontier. You believe all the steps may not be required to be successful in the deep end, or that you can address that issue later.

reallocating is about moving a resource you own/yourself to places where it is valued (by yourself or others). The defining properties is that there exists a different place where something you're in control of has value, and you can deliver it. For example one of your skills used in your current job is highly desirable in another field, so you consider moving. You could also consider queue cutting as an example of this but that would be at the cost of others, its not a pareto improvement. You could also coordinate amongst others to make a move together. Trading and teaching are the classical examples of reallocating.

unblocking is about allowing yourself to feel the reality. The defining property is that your current understanding of the world is either not correct, or not correct enough and there exist blockers stopping you from seeing correctly. For whatever reason (e.g. biases, emotions, bad measurement, etc), you are mistaking the map for the territory and the task is figuring out what the blockers are/why your map is wrong.

You could do bad things to improve, like stealing, but note this is not creating wealth and does not improve things overall. You could also be lucky and have every opportunity handed to you, but this caps out eventually. People say you should do the thing you love, and that love is biconditional with what you want to improve.

There are also lots of ways you can perform each of these actions more effectively but I have intentionally omitted all of those details. I've also ommited the pros/cons and weighted importance of each of these actions, that is all to be found out.