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Practice like an expert, speak like an enthusiast
Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Speak like you’re an enthusiast, not an expert. Expertise positioning is very dangerous for a lot of people because it leads them to imposter syndrome and insecurity. You don’t need to be an expert, you need to be a practitioner.”
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The time it takes
Some of the most dangerous driving happens when a person leaves late and still tries to make it to the destination on time. They figure they’ll save time in traffic. Or, in other words, they rush. Experts do not rush. Experts know how long a process inherently needs to take. They embrace the German word…
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3 life lessons I learned from one of the world’s best executive coaches
Nobody gets to the Olympics without a coach, the saying goes. The concept clearly applies to business leaders and entrepreneurs, whose performance influences dozens, or even thousands, of people. Marshall Goldsmith is among the most prominent of these executive coaches. I knew him through his cleverly titled book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You…
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Contentions: Less marketing, more teaching
David Heinemeier Hansson’s latest on earning attention, and out-teaching the competition, is really great. Basecamp is one of the rare examples of organizations that publish really great writing—books like Rework, magazines like Signal v. Noise, etc. Anyone who wants to study them, take notes: It’s not content marketing. At least, not in the conventional sense.…
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The decisiveness advantage
David C. Baker writes in The Business of Expertise: “After looking at 1,340 examples of successful experts, the only consistent trait was that they were risk-takers. That means that they were wrong a lot — but that they were usually right about the important things. It also means that they always made decisions. They weren’t…
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“It depends”
In order for someone to give you an answer, they need to understand your question. That doesn’t just mean they’ll listen to your question; they need to know what you’re asking them. That’s why sometimes even with the most helpful of intentions, the answer is still, “It depends.” There are way too many facts they…
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Seasons
People who seem to get a lot done don’t make progress on everything at the same time; rather, they make focused progress in spurts on one thing at a time. These experiences can seem like seasons, though it can happen more than four times per year (i.e., quarterly planning). One perspective is microseasons. Another is…
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Stone soup
This is a classic fable about a group of travellers showing up to a village with an empty pot. The villagers are unwilling to feed the travellers, so the travellers put a stone in the pot and boil water. The travellers offer to share their stone soup with some of the villagers, though the soup…
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Value ≠ compensation
Opportunities present themselves in different costumes. Heuristics can be helpful, though only to a certain extent; sometimes good opportunities present themselves as bad ones first. You have to know what you want to get out of a project. Is there something specific that you want to learn? Will it be a case study for a…
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Writing culture
Remote companies are going to draw in the most talented people. As teams grow, they also need to spend more time maintaining communication. A team of 3 people needs just 3 lines of communication; a team of 11 people will need a whopping 55 lines of communication, and a team of 14 people will need…