The Future of Generalist Work
I believe “what effect do you want to have on people” is one of the most important questions we should ask when we are making something. Life isn't just a series of problems to be solved but experiences to be had.
Things I'm thinking about
Top tier executive assistants are great at many things but have critical core operational tasks and simply don’t have the wide strategic business context required for CoS-style work.
Michael Houck • Understanding Cost Of Sales | Blog - Houck's Newsletter
So many of the problems that teams have — communication, organization, strategy — are unrelated to the function.
23 Tactical Company Building Lessons, Learned From Scaling Stripe & Notion
Generalists can unlock solves to org problems specialists have trouble fixing.
Emotional labor is the opposite of the industrial economy’s task-based, measured output. Even if we don’t dig ditches, the offer for a certain kind of work was: Process this pile of papers and we don’t care whether you like (or pretend to like) your job. The labor is the easily measured stuff.
But AI and mechanization have turned this sort of task... See more
But AI and mechanization have turned this sort of task... See more
Emotional labor and its consequences
My aha moment of the value of first principles thinking was when I was at Dropbox. We would hire a ton of really smart people that had never done sales and had them do sales. There are a lot of disadvantages to that, but I do think it led to a ton of innovation. That's how we got our very innovative go-to market motions because a lot of those... See more
Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)
Mastery is not only about getting better at your craft, but also about finding ways to eliminate the obstacles, distractions, and other annoyances that prevent you from working on your craft.
Top performers find ways to spend as much time as possible on what matters and as little time as possible on what doesn't. It is not someone else's... See more
Top performers find ways to spend as much time as possible on what matters and as little time as possible on what doesn't. It is not someone else's... See more
Superhuman
What is generalist mastery? Connecting the right dots, realizing that some dots matter and other dots don’t. Not every dot should be connected.
Keep a curiosity inbox. Whenever you get a new idea, write it down in a specific note or on a dedicated page in your notebook. Then, each time the idea pops back into your mind, give it a mark or increase its rating. Over time, you’ll develop a ranked list of ideas based on your long-term interests. This strategy allows you to continue exploring... See more
nesslabs.com • The Curiosity Conflict: The Struggle to Shift From Exploration to Exploitation
Every. Single. One. of the startups that I've worked with have some
co-founder (or early team) dynamic that implicitly shapes their lasting culture.
These practices may be well-known and honored, or they may be hard-coded yet unspoken (like the pie in my story above). Either way, they are a part of the company’s DNA — its nature.
As an Ops Leader,... See more
co-founder (or early team) dynamic that implicitly shapes their lasting culture.
These practices may be well-known and honored, or they may be hard-coded yet unspoken (like the pie in my story above). Either way, they are a part of the company’s DNA — its nature.
As an Ops Leader,... See more
Amanda Schwartz Ramirez • Find the sacred pie
