In this series I’ve argued that doing high quality work, fast, is a superpower1 and that focusing on your craft, not politics, is critical to developing that superpower2.
Developing the superpower also requires mastering multiple fundamentals at a basic level, even if they aren’t a direct requirement of your specific craft.
The most valuable lesson I’ve learned about the basics came from a coach, who repeatedly told his athletes:
There are no advanced moves, only mastery and combination of the basics.
Talented athletes can perform basic maneuvers perfectly, almost every time, in almost any context. That foundation enables them to employ multiple basic skills simultaneously or in immediate succession, on demand. Those are the plays show up on Sports Center.
The same is true in knowledge work. You’ve probably experienced the joy of working with people who have mastered the basics: The best engineers understand how the business makes money and the problems the product solves for customers. The best marketers have a comprehensive understanding of the company’s data, including the limitations.
We love working with these people because they require little education and have the context required to make good decisions quickly. Our time with them is inherently productive. They’re good and fast.
Contextual basics
Business fundamentals
If you work for a business, the center of gravity is revenue generation. The better you understand how a business makes money, and the different ways they want to make money, the more context you will have for your prioritization and decisions, and the better they will be.
This requires an understanding of various business models and their financial underpinnings, as well as the associated go-to-market motions. Combined with an understanding of the market landscape (competition), these form business strategy.
Learning these fundamentals doesn’t require a business degree. Curiosity, diligent reading and field observation can take you farther than most get.
Politics
Career progression as its own end is a long-term limiter and thief of contentment. But humans are self-interested, and thus political, creatures. For everyone but monks, it is impossible to pursue craft without engaging political systems.
Grasping basic power dynamics, psychology and incentives help you interpret the behavior system (business) and its parts (people) objectively, which is mandatory for understanding how to thrive in that system while focusing on your craft.
Skill basics
Writing (as thinking)
David McCullough, one of America’s best authors, gave what I consider to be the best definition of writing3:
Mainly writing means a great deal of hard thinking, the popular impression notwithstanding.
Good writers are good thinkers who have honed the craft of turning their thoughts into words. The best do this with distinct, recognizable style.
In every company and every role I’ve ever had, those around me who were good writers had more career leverage than their peers. I’ve experienced this myself.
There are many reasons for this, but the main one is simple: life, work and people are complex. Businesses are complex. Good thinkers who can accurately distill that complexity naturally create value, especially when they have a high level of context across the fundamentals.
This skill is particularly important for knowledge workers today. Not only is written communication the primary medium of communication with humans (i.e., Slack, email), it’s also the primary form of communication with AI.
Every good writer I work with is a power-user of AI.
Verbal communication
Being a good writer doesn’t make you good at verbal communication, but crystalizing your thoughts is more than half the battle.
Human-to-human verbal communication has always been central to society, but I believe it will become even more important for knowledge workers in an age where autonomous machines communicate with us as part of our daily work. Analog trust will always be valuable.
On a very practical level, if you are a strong verbal communicator, you will have better meetings and have a better relationships with your team and your boss. Over time you’ll be chosen to present critical information to important people and, hopefully, publicly represent your company’s brand.
And, of course, as voice increasingly becomes an input interface for AI, skill in clear verbal communication will become more valuable.
Product
Software ate the world and now AI is eating software...and turning it into more software.
Having a good handle on the basics of “product work” has always been valuable, but in a world where there is no barrier of entry to building most software, it will be a critical differentiator for knowledge workers.
I’ll define product work as the deep understanding of a customer problem, combined with the skill of translating that understanding into the right functionality and user experience.
Translation requires a solid grasp of what needs to be done to actually deliver something to a customer, which centers on both user experience design the software development lifecycle.
Product work is extremely hard and the key is understanding why it’s hard, even if you don’t do product work.
The good news is that with AI, you can practice UX and software development yourself by solving a real problem and building a real solution.
Data
Writing is one primary medium for distilling business complexity, but the other is data.
Data can objectively describe how a business is behaving in reality and reveals how that behavior differs from the business strategy, which is critical intelligence for making good decisions.
There are two important data skills:
- Understanding what the right data is and how to get it
- Analyzing that data
Businesses produce a huge amount of data, so a deep understanding of the business model will help you focus only on the data that is most important. Even then, getting clean data out of a business is deceptively difficult (though AI is making it easier). Most data problems I’ve experienced start here, before the analysis has begun.
Analysis really means uncovering meaning from data, which most often materializes as some kind of report (forecast, adoption, churn, etc.). Having basic analytics skills also helps you understand reports produced by other people (and the veracity of those reports).
You don’t need to be a professional analyst, but being able to derive your own accurate insights and understand the insights uncovered by others, on a data set level, will help you rapidly navigate complex business questions.
Philosophical basics
This is the most subjective of the fundamentals, but also the most important.
Having a handle on reality as it is, and confidence in your view of the world, helps you navigate the marketplace of ideas quickly and accurately, and assess your own ideas more objectively.
This is the “hard thinking” part of good writing and materializes as conviction, which people can sense.
Two tools have been extremely helpful for me in building philosophical muscle.
Mental models
Mental models abstract core principles from various disciplines, enabling you to apply them in the context of specific questions or problems to dramatically improve decision-making.
Shane Parish built on Charlie Munger’s work to collect key principles into a book series, The Great Mental Models4.
For example, understanding the basics of thermodynamics and equilibrium can help you understand and predict the behavior of a system (business, relationship, etc.) under stress.
History
History is the source material for enduring mental models.
It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes5.
Theodore Reik, The Unreachables
The best way to build an objective perspective on the present and future is to study the past, even (and perhaps especially) in the age of AI. We are certainly in uncharted territory, but the more I read history, the more convinced I am that there is nothing new under the sun6.
The basics make specialization even more valuable
Specialization is a matter of practicing a specific set of skills or (combinations) so that you over-index in ability for those skills. Someone who practices data skills can become a data analyst.
But mastery of the basics dramatically increases the value of specialization. This is because you can perform the specialty with the right context. The analyst goes beyond producing reports to delivering the key insight the business needs to accomplish their strategy.
The basics are right in front of you
When I got to the end of this draft, the list of basics felt longer and heavier than I thought it would at the start. If I read this at the beginning of my career, I probably would have felt overwhelmed.
Here’s what I would say to my 22-year-old self:
This isn’t a to-do list, it’s a guide for seeing opportunity. You’ll have the chance to write, work with data and reverse-engineer business fundamentals in your day-to-day work, you just need to think about your job as a laboratory, not a paycheck.
And you always, always, have the opportunity to read.
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Footnotes
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Being fast and good is a superpower is the first post in this series. ↩
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_ How to do good work fast: pursue craft, not politics_ is the second post in this series. ↩
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David McCullough talked about writing and thinking in the preface to Brave Companions: Portraits in History. ↩
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I highly recommend purchasing a copy of The Great Mental Models by Shane Parish. ↩
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Often misattributed to Mark Twain, the quote about history rhyming came from Theodore Reik in one of his essays, though there have been many similar quotes, including one from Twain. ↩
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In the Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes [tells us] (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%201%3A9&version=ESV) “what has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” ↩