The Art of Gig, Volume 1

Here is the big idea to keep in mind: About 90% of your effectiveness as a sparring partner derives from the depth of your appreciative worldview, developed and expressed through critical reading, writing, podcasts, and talks. Only about 10% depends on your in-session sparring skills. In this, sparring skill is similar to negotiation skill. In nego

These two loops—both of which are metacognitive OODA loops with the sparring serving as an orientation activity for both parties—are at the heart of sparring. Where this beautiful symmetry breaks down is in the relative value of the two loops. The client’s loop passes through the real world. The sparring partner’s loop passes through the adjacent-p

It’s weird how often it ends up working like this. You might talk for hours, but in the end, it’s one casual phrase or thought that ends up unlocking the critical idea. My very first client said as much to me—that after twenty hours of chatting, the value I delivered all down to one phrase I happened to drop casually in thinking through a problem:

Way back in 2009, Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void called this the “Sex and Cash” theory.1 The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the assignment covers both bases, but not often.

This is the divide between the Positioning and People schools of consulting. The essential difference between the two schools is that the Positioning school takes its intellectual cues from economics and uses formal models and numbers as the ultimate foundation for everything, while the People school takes its intellectual cues from sociology and p

Indie consultants naturally fit in where the capability gap is either small enough and oddly-shaped enough to be filled by a few individually contracted people, or where the gap is large, but can be filled by a fairly generic type of labor without the help of a labor-aggregating counterparty. The four response regimes of consulting

Bootstrapping with beefs doesn’t have to be done with writing. You could do a book, or a talk, or a show-over-tell artifact that falsifies a commonly held belief via counterexample. Or even just a Twitter rant. If you’re not a creator type, you could develop a sales pitch for use in 1:1 conversational selling that’s based on a beefy take. There are

The work of the knowledge worker is never done. You can always do an infinite amount of work for a finite piece of output. There are always more plans you could make, more background research you could do, more skills you could develop, more trends you could stay updated on, more refinements you could add to the slide deck, more Q&A you could p

Knowing which nut to tighten to resolve a mysterious noise is a simple example of a knowledge asymmetry. In this case, the knowledge was everything. The mechanic didn’t bring any execution skills to the party. He could have consulted on which nut to tighten for $49.90 and the customer could have done the execution themselves, saving $0.10.