Managing people, reading between the lines, design and web3.
Hey there,
I'm currently interning as a research data scientist. My boss is a brilliant researcher and an awesome guy: kind, patient, ambitious. But he's very bad at:
setting a clear direction,
communicating a clear plan,
explaining the current state.
This made for a disappointing experience because I enjoy taking ownership of the projects I'm working on in order to move fast and take initiative.
I tried just asking, many times, but he always find a way to go off on a tangent for hours on end…
This week, however, I did something different. At the beginning of our meeting, I took the lead and shared my understanding of:
the direction,
the plan,
the current state,
in clear and detailed written words. All he could do was correct me. No long monologue about irrelevant stuff. So now, I finally have what I was looking for from the beginning.
You don't need to be smarter, have more experience or be a manager to manage people. We should all manage people. You should manage your manager. This is an orthogonal skill that doesn’t depend on how good you are compared to them.
If you're facing a difficult situation because of how someone else is behaving, try managing them, i.e act in a way that gets you the results you want in a way that acknowledge their personality.
🤔 What I’m thinking about?
Nuances.
You don’t want to be nuanced when creating content. You’ll never see someone say:
There's a gender income gap but it depends on the industry and the level of the person and the country, and …
Instead, this is a more engaging (clickbait) title:
Gender pay gap is not real
Of course, there are nuances to that statement. But if you add them, there's nothing to debate about.
As a consumer, we must acknowledge these missing nuances. What are the other dimensions that the creator is purposefully missing?
I'm particularly interested in two statements (mentioned in the previous issues):
If you want to be successful, you need focus.
Intensity over everything.
Focus
Many influencing people are advocates of focus: work on one business, on one project.
But of course, you can't only have one area of focus in your life. You have family, friends, health, etc.
And even in the area of "work", these people actually have other things they are taking care of: creating content, investing, mentoring.
I think, what they really mean is:
Don't spread yourself too thin.
In other words, if you meet someone and they ask you what you’re up to these days, you shouldn't hesitate or share a long unprioritized list. It should be a pitch of your number one focus right now.
Intensity
Should we be very intense, or should we follow the compound promise of consistency?
My reading of this is, why not both?
You can be consistent while being very intense:
exercise every day, with HIIT type workouts,
work on a side project every Saturday, in a highly focused state.
🔗 My favourite links this week
📹 What it’s like to design world-class interfaces - sometimes I dream about dedicating my life to designing a very simple app to perfection 😅
🎙️ DeSo Apps (Decentralized Social - a social network platform built on blockchain) - If you don’t understand or don’t believe in web3, give this a watch it’ll change your mind!