The Art of Gig, Volume 1

Discovering and developing a genuine beef into an artful calling card that lands you gigs is hard work. That’s why it’s a costly signal. You can’t fake it with simple bullshitting. You have to put in the work of: spotting a widespread pattern of disillusionment in the margins identifying the prevailing orthodoxy driving the disillusionment analyzin

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.

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

Create choices, not recommendations.

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

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

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

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.

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