The Art of Gig, Volume 1

The idea that “fortune favors the bold” is not an observation about the nature of divine agency, it is an observation about the interaction of active human agency, luck, and unintended consequences. Fortune appears to favor the bold because the bold are making their own luck by acting in obvious ways in response to obvious imperatives. Failure of n

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.

the problems external consultants solve always fall into two basic buckets: insufficient systematic confidence and insufficient systematic doubt.

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

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.

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

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

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

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