Learning a bit of mathematical Category Theory is by turns fun and frustrating – ideas transition from obvious to incomprehensible within a few pages. But a small clan of key principles, perhaps with wide application, already seems to be emerging from the fog. For now, with the acronym TRIBE:

• Transcend - move up a level and look at things from a higher perspective, where distracting details fade and larger patterns emerge (cf One Transcend Suffices (2009-10-14))
• Rename - recognize that labels don't matter, that "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet", like mappings between things that are "really" identical in various ways (cf Naming Names (1999-10-10))
• Invert - turn things around, run processes backwards, and look for duality or complementary (cf Great Ideas (1999-05-03) and Mandatory Inversion (1999-09-02))
• Bypass - take a roundabout path to get to the same destination, e.g., tunnel down, move across, and then tunnel back up (cf Applied Bypasses (1999-04-14) and Creative Devices (2001-01-01))
• Embed - see something inside a larger, perhaps similar, thing and take advantage of that larger realm to understand features that were non-obvious (cf Expanding Contexts (1999-10-15))

(cf Greatest Inventions (2011-06-09), Simplicity via Abstraction (2016-01-07), Cakes, Custard, and Category Theory (2016-02-14), ...) - ^z - 2016-04-25