There is great pleasure in watching your friends succeed. If you have common values, their success celebrates your values. If you like them personally, you get to watch good things happen to nice people, which is one of life’s undersung joys.

Material resourcefulness

These three core conversational roles are the guide, the colleague-friend, and the producer. The guide, like a good teacher, offers you your own wisdom. The colleague-friend offers honesty and encouragement. The producer takes on the secondary creative task of fitting an idea to the constraints of the market. Whether you are being managed or managi

There is something in Fogarty’s path that is, as in any original and authentic story, not directly replicable. It is not a pattern to copy but a reminder of where to start.

In all of this talk of professional identity, the Keyser Söze of this book is Adam Smith, the founder of economics himself. He was labeled an economist after the fact but he couldn’t have been one before he invented the field. In that sense he was an artist and the field he invented was his point-B creation.

terms. To capture that cross section of your own particularity, you need to design your own metaphor, and then become as broadly conversant as you possibly can. Like the computer recognizing cat photos, you need to own your ability to synthesize information across many fields—but from the point of view of your unique cross section.

Bruce Henderson, the founder of the Boston Consulting Group, introduced the classic management-consulting framework of the growth-share matrix in 1970,

The producer is the difference between a good idea and an actual success, but the true art of the producer is to commercialize the idea while also not stunting its growth by compromising too early.

You need to think in terms of what I will call an “income portfolio” to keep your production economics in balance while you work, and also in terms of a traditional investment portfolio to manage the risk and return of what you create. As we will see momentarily, the income portfolio has the characteristics of a “cross-subsidy” in which one area su