Bootstrapping
Engelbart's strategy of using your tools to build better tools, in an accelerating loop of self-improvement.
Bootstrapping was Douglas Engelbart's core strategy, not just a feature of his lab. The idea: take the tools and methods you've built for augmenting intellect and turn them on the work of improving those very tools. The better your tools get, the better you get at improving them — a compounding, accelerating loop.
Engelbart's research group practised this on themselves, using their own NLS system to design NLS. He generalised it into "ABC": improving the work (A), improving how you improve the work (B), and improving how you improve that (C). Most organisations, he lamented, only ever invest in A.
It's a deeply optimistic idea about leverage — and a quietly demanding one. It asks you to spend today's effort on tomorrow's capability, which is exactly the investment busy people never make. It underlies everything in the tools-for-thought tradition.