When we think of productivity, we typically think about machines, or automation, or efficiency planning. But can you get to a higher level of productivity using nothing but people?
Continue reading “People Productivity”People Productivity
Category career
The Secret to Success
Over the past few years I’ve delved into researching what makes successful people so successful in the first place. The trouble with this is that there’s no universal answer; most successful people may do something, but not all of them. And yet, I think I’ve finally found the one thing that I see all successful people doing.
Continue reading “The Secret to Success”With Smart People
Whenever I’m in a job interview, I always tell people that my career mission statement is “to work on complex and meaningful problems with smart people”. Now, I agree with all of this statement, and most of it makes perfectly good sense. However, I’m surprised by the fact that no one has ever asked me a vital question here: “Who are ‘smart people’?”
Continue reading “With Smart People”The Function of Success
Photo by jose aljovin on Unsplash
Quite a while back I promised that I would elaborate on two functions that I posited: The Function of Success and the Function of Opportunity. Today I wanted to focus on success; more specifically, career success.
Creatives vs. Technicals: Which Should You Focus On?
One of life’s greatest conflicts is between the arts and the sciences. The right brain and the left brain. The creatives and the technicals.
In reality, no one thinks that one of these groups is inherently useless. But what’s the right mix? Honestly, it changes depending on what sort of project you’re looking at. A SaaS company would need a larger proportion of technicals rather than creatives, where something like a film project might require more creatives than technicals, and a video game might be split roughly 50/50. I also believe that the greatest competitive advantage here are the people who are focused on training both sides of this dichotomy. If you’re well trained as both a creative and a technical, you can do wide swaths of the work yourself; this not only helps with expenses on projects but can also help in terms of career options.
Everyone is naturally aligned with one of these two. I found from a young age that the creative element aligned with me greatly, but that I had trouble fulling realizing projects due to that missing half. Over the last couple of years, I’ve tried honing my technical side by focusing more on programming and engineering projects, in hopes of equalizing both these sides. I’ve found that doing this has helped me greatly, and I’d recommend it to most other people. There’s certainly more technical guides and tutorials out there on the internet – probably because technical knowledge is less ethereal than creative knowledge – but there are still resources out there for things like art, writing, and design.
Overall, the question should not be about being a creative or a technical, but rather a creative and a technical. Some might argue that more focus is better; I’m not saying that you can’t be more focused in one area than another, but I do believe that having at least basic knowledge contained in both fields will do wonders for you long-term.
Anyway, that’s all for this one. I do want to point out that we have a brand new newsletter! Following this will give you the low-down of all the new stuff I’m working on. You can subscribe to it here.
