The Art of Gig, Volume 1

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

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.

They are what you might call “20% beef” where the starting point is rejecting some core sacred-cow axiom of a prevailing orthodoxy and then building something new and interesting on that foundation of principled dissent based on additional ideas and novel elements.

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

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:

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.

Create choices, not recommendations.