Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors: Covert Techniques for a Remarkable Practice

Sufficient smarts. Not necessarily brilliance, but at least an ability to apply critical thinking skills. Lots of discipline. Distractions are death by a thousand cuts. I’m writing this right now on an island. It cost money and time to get here, but it’s the only way I can get this book out of my head onto paper. I fly into SDQ because it’s a quick

Clients come to experts with challenges that they can’t solve. They’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit and it’ll take a ladder to get the rest. Or they’ve eaten everything on the plate except the vegetables and it’s going to be a slog to get through the rest of the meal.

If you are at the outset, just building your practice, maybe have another (even part-time) job to make enough money to fight off starvation and retain your expert posture. Or save up enough money before kicking it off publicly so that you don’t panic.

One of the things that impactful experts do is make connections between disparate areas of knowledge. They see things in one field and apply them in another. Useful nuggets of insight are buried everywhere.

Point of view: While you can’t promise to always be right, you can obligate yourself to express a helpful point of view. If you don’t have one based on your previous work, you’ll embark on some fresh research to shed light on the client’s challenge.

It’s a destructive false choice to assume that you have to be a deep expert or a broad generalist. You need to be both—and you’ll pull that off by diving really deep in your work life, but then backing far away and developing a crazy pursuit of all kinds of unrelated, interesting things in your personal life.

The expert has a point of view (or perspective). The expert is concise. The expert is believable. The expert can answer follow-up questions without choking. The expert seems confident. The expert holds many principles subject to later modification. The expert—in a work setting—believes the “how” is just as important as the “what.”

The third type of day (Perspective) is the weekend, for most people. It’s when you become a normal human again, reconnect with people, pursue hobbies, do physical labor, read, and largely forget about work. They are Perspective days because they keep you grounded. You soak things up like a sponge, often learning things that have nothing to do with

The first kind (Preparation), which will comprise three or four days of each week, are the days when you get things off your plate or clear the deck. I call these Preparation days because they are designed to enable you to do something else. These are full of all the little things that won’t change your life but must get done anyway. You’ll do 20 o