Analyze. Decide. Execute.
That’s all you need. Literally.
If you can analyze your situation and context well, make a well-grounded decision, and execute effectively — the only thing that stands between you and eternal career glory is bad luck.
Now, obviously, all three of those meta skills feed off of a whole bunch of sub-skills, abilities and competencies.
So I want to try something unusual here. I will give you a gigantic list of nested topics that reside under these three meta skills.
And you can just take this overview as a primer and go “huh, never thought of it this way” or even “wow, this makes a ton of sense!”
If not, you at least have a cool list.
1) Analysis Skills
1.1) Understanding data and information
- Understand the difference between data, information and knowledge
- Understand the difference between correlation and causation
- Differentiate between anecdotal data and data patterns
- Avoiding the “tick the box” problem
- Distinguish signal from noise
1.2) Extracting knowledge from data and information
- Understand discrete vs. continuous thinking
- Understand binary vs. probabilistic thinking
- Understand the survivorship bias
- Avoid the causal reduction error
- Don’ think in false dichotomies
- Avoid the base rate error
- Apply Occam’s Razor
2) Decision-Making Skills
2.1) Understanding the decision-making process
- Define the decision drivers and weigh their importance
- Available resources (talent, money)
- Degree of variability of resources
- Time-boxed vs. quality-boxed
- “Good enough” vs. “perfect”
- Knowns vs. unknowns
- Risk of bad decisions
- Unknown unknowns
- Overall objectives
- Understand or define the decision style
- Cooperative (2-3 people, typically leaders, decide together)
- Democratic (team-majority decides)
- Unilateral (one person decides)
- Ensure everyone knows decision style and decision-responsibilities
2.2) Leveraging effective decision-making heuristics
- Find and focus on the highest leverage decisions
- that influence the whole process
- that impact many people’s work
- that determine broad directions
- Understand higher-order consequences
- Understand necessity vs. sufficiency
- Apply explore vs. exploit
3) Execution Skills
3.1) Turning ideas into structured, flexible action
- Structuring and defining milestones
- Understanding “achieve-or-die” milestones
- if you do not achieve those the whole project will not work
- reverse engineer how to get to them fast and with minimal risk
- Along the process: understand what leaders decide vs. what teams decide
- Regularly checking in with those working with you and communicating effectively
- Reporting on progress, contextually and effectively
- Zooming out and deciding on pivots or adjustments
3.2) Effective execution
- Self-organization and -management
- Required technical abilities
- Focus ability
Unsurprisingly, almost all of these come with a whole set of their own skills, abilities, and talents you need to be good at them.
And that’s exactly why continuous personal development will always be underrated.
Cheers,
Phil
