If you want something done, give it to a busy person. With insight and focus, some managers are able to get more done in three hours than others can accomplish in a week.
If you can make your work your play, that is success. How is it in world of abundant information and AI that it seems so difficult to get ahead? Will ‘cut and paste’ knowledge and skills help a manager excel? Is it true that some key management skills can’t be taught? Why are leverage and scale so important? What is true wealth?
Strange thing is Sarah, the bright MBA and CPA clad energetic manager is struggling, despite being known as the ‘Queen of AI’. She just can’t seem to progress, despite her ability to access a tsunami of data and information.
Today knowledge and data are the booby prize, they are nice shinny bangles and glossy bling, but at the end of the day, everyone has access to the same information pool, and is spouting out the same tired old thinking.
Somehow you have to know something that the competition missed. Or, in that haystack of confusing data and information one has to spot patterns, glean insights that others are blind to.
That X factor that is required is what Naval Ravikant calls ‘specific knowledge’ which is something that can’t often be taught. In some ways this helps to explain why bright young university graduates with an abundance of paper qualifications struggle to find solid employment.
There is a long standing mismatch between what the employer needs [to add value to their business] and what the graduate student can offer.
Scale and leverage means making money
“If you want to make money you have to get paid at scale. And why you, that’s accountability, at scale, that’s leverage, and just you getting paid as opposed to somebody else getting paid, that’s specific knowledge.
"So, specific knowledge is probably the hardest thing to get across in this whole tweetstorm, and it’s probably the thing that people get the most confused about.
"The thing is that, we have this idea that everything can be taught, everything can be taught in school. And it’s not true that everything can be taught. In fact, the most interesting things cannot be taught," says Naval Ravikant.
“But everything can be learned. And very often that learning either comes from some innate characteristics in your DNA, or it could be through your childhood where you learn soft skills which are very, very hard to teach later on in life, or it’s something that is brand new so nobody else knows how to do it either, or it’s true on the job training because you’re pattern matching into highly complex environments, basically building judgment in a specific domain,” notes the Silicon Valley sage investor.
Insight + focus + energy
To have that ‘unique knowledge’, that secret sauce, look at it this way. Insight + focus + energy equals movement. Unfortunately, management and business is not like physics where you can simply do the empirical measurements, find the right equation to accurately predict the physics of motion and impact. Management is more difficult, like trying to guess the behaviour of a ‘black hole’ in space.
To gain what Ravikant calls ‘specific knowledge’ one has to have the real life experience, just like you can’t teach someone to swim in a classroom.
Time to jump in the information pool and get wet. Insight means seeing what everyone else sees, but noticing something different. Having an awareness that maybe there is something else going on here.
This insight is not going to come to you sitting in a cubicle or a corner office. One has to get out and talk to customers to understand their problems and needs. Not what you imagine them to be in fancy PowerPoint presentation with ‘all the answers’.
Focus means don’t try and be everything to everyone. In an age of ‘always on’ 24/7 distractions, ‘beep beep’ disruptions are everywhere.
Multi tasking with multiple devices is a myth, focus on one thing at a time. Your brain can only concentrate on one element at a time. Take some time to focus on thinking about how you think.
Notice that your mind is like a Colobus monkey in a mango tree, jumping from thought to thought. If you can’t control your mind, and be able to calm it down to focus, how can you be productive?
Energy is that ingredient required to power through tasks with grace, not chaos. Watch out for managers who tell you “my week is quite packed”.
If you want something done, give it to a busy person. With insight and focus, some managers are able to get more done in three hours than others can accomplish in a week. Insight + focus + energy equals wealth creation.
“Wealth is the ability to affect transformations,” notes David Deutsch.
