Hey uguba ndubuisi, hope you're having a relaxing weekend.
Happy Mother's Day to all of the incredible moms out there. A special thanks to my Grandma, Aunt Diane, and Aunt Renee for all of the kindness and support you've given me over the years.
This week, I want to discuss three ideas:
1. How speaking with experts can accelerate your life and career.
2. The controversial Basecamp memo and its take on company benefits.
3. Interesting insights from Adam Grant's new book, Think Again.
👩🔬 Speaking with Experts
I've spent my career as a generalist in various industries. Over the last 6 years, I've been an investment banker, growth marketer, operations lead, sales lead, community builder, and writer.
I didn't plan to take this meandering career path. I've simply followed my interests, optimizing for learning and contribution. The destination matters far less to me than the trajectory and fun I'm having along the ride.
While the generalist path is not for everyone, it has worked for me. And through these experiences, I've learned that there is one meta skill that allows you to be a good generalist:
The ability to rapidly learn new skills and apply what you learn to solving problems in different environments.
The capacity to learn new skills and solve problems in new environments requires a number of "sub-skills," including a genuine curiosity about the world, a passion for learning, asking good questions, comfort with ambiguity, confronting imposter syndrome, and a willingness to challenge yourself, among other things.
While this process is deeply engaging, it can also be scary and mentally taxing, especially when you're solving difficult and high-impact problems for early stage startups like I've been doing over the past few years.
If you find yourself in this situation or want to be a better generalist, there is one little hack I've discovered that has dramatically accelerated my ability to move up steep learning curves in a short period of time:
Speaking with and learning from experts.
When I started out as a generalist, I would try to figure everything out on my own. I researched online, read books, and ran experiments. I still do all of these things, but when I take on a project in a new domain these days, I start by finding experts who have experience in that domain.
While it's easy to delude yourself into thinking that you're uniquely creative or that you're solving something that hasn't been done before, the reality is that most of the problems you face have been tackled by other people.
Instead of trying to be a hero and figuring everything out on my own, I get 1-2 experts on the phone for a 30-60 minute call. While I would happily pay for these conversations, most people love talking about their experience and passions with others, so more often than not, people willingly speak with me for no charge.
During these conversations, I begin by laying out the problem I'm trying to solve or the area I'm trying to learn more about. I openly admit that I have no idea what I'm doing and that I'm looking to learn more.
The rest of the conversation is mostly me listening, asking clarifying questions, and guiding the conversation in helpful directions.
What's stunning is that speaking with an expert for an hour can give you 6-12 months of experience.
If you find the right person and know how to speak with them, you can quickly learn about how industries operate, what tactics are effective and not effective, common mistakes, and ideas for how you can think about tackling your specific problem.
With this new base of knowledge, you start off with better ideas and approaches. You also get far more out of the additional research you do and hypotheses you test. Instead of starting your journey by crawling in the dark, you're already walking or jogging within the first week.
Following this process has allowed me to do reasonably well as a banker who had never studied accounting, a growth marketer who had never heard of a marketing channel, a team lead who had never run a team, and a website builder who had no design or development skills.
What's cool is that you can apply this skill to nearly every domain and problem you face in life.
Whether you're thinking about what to study in college, how to build a romantic relationship that endures the test of time, how to live a fulfilling life, or how to be successful in a new field, learning how to speak with experts is a superpower that will help you be a little better in every pursuit.
Like compound interest, being a little better at everything you do adds up over time and allows you to progress much more rapidly.
The end result is that you learn faster, perform better, and have a lot more fun along the journey.
👨💻 Basecamp Policy Changes
The founders of Basecamp published a memo about internal policy changes that received lots of criticism and resulted in 1/3 of their employees leaving.
You can read it here: Changes at Basecamp
The memo addressed 6 different topics:
- No more societal & political discussions the company account.
- No more paternalistic benefits.
- No more committees.
- No more lingering or dwelling on past decisions.
- No more 360 reviews.
- No forgetting what we do here.
While the public backlash and employee exodus focused on how the company is wrong about its approach to topic #1, the memo stimulated a number of interesting questions beyond where the public focused.
Since topic #1 could be the subject of an entire book that discusses the role of companies in facilitating and/or promoting various political and social ideals, I will leave my thoughts on this topic for another time.
One of the most interesting ideas the memo spurred for me is about how company benefits can be a paternalistic force.
So we're on the same page, the TLDR is that Basecamp, like many companies, had offered a a fitness benefit, a wellness allowance, a farmer's market share, and continuing education allowances for its employees.
They decided to eliminate these perks. In their place, they're offering employees the full cash value of the benefits, in addition to a 10% profit sharing plan for additional cash that you can spend as you'd like.
Explaining the change, the founders said,
"It's none of our business what you do outside of work, and it's not Basecamp's place to encourage certain behaviors — regardless of good intention. By providing funds for certain things, we're getting too deep into nudging people's personal, individual choices."
This take is interesting and directly opposed to common practices for technology companies, most of which offer a large set of benefits that address many of the personal and professional needs of employees.
I had never thought about these types of employee benefits as "paternalistic," but I suppose they are. By offering perks in certain domains, companies are incentivizing employees to adopt specific behaviors and embedding themselves in the full lives of employees.
Drawing on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, over time, companies have shifted from places that help us fill the bottom two rungs of the ladder to playing an integral role in influencing how we try to fulfill the top three rungs as well.
It's unclear whether this evolution is good or bad for employees. At the very least, it means that companies play a larger role in our lives and that our expectations of companies have expanded over time.
And if we're being honest, most companies don't do this out of the goodness of their hearts. In fact, many of the benefits they offer – like free meals, laundry services, and so on are designed to free up people's time so that they can focus on doing more productive work for the company.
These benefits have also disproportionality benefited young, ambitious males who are willing to dedicate their full productive energy to a company to ascend in their careers and receive big paydays.
While the situation is improving at many companies, benefits still lack in the realm of helping people be good parents, find balance between life and work, and build deep and meaningful friendships.
At the same time, these benefits encourage people to be and behave in certain ways.
They often have good intentions, like helping people learn and be healthier, but ultimately, they're still pushing the value system of what Silicon Valley believes about what it means to live a good and productive life.
While I'm not sure whether the heightened role of companies in our lives and the benefits they offer are "good" or "bad," the Basecamp memo raised a number of stimulating questions for me about what we should expect from companies, the role they have in fulfilling our hierarchy or needs, and the levels to which we accept and encourage their involvement in our lives.
🤔 Think Again by Adam Grant
I recently finished reading Wharton Professor Adam Grant's new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.
Per usual, Grant does an excellent job conducting research, doing meta-analyses, and leveraging the power of stories to reveal interesting insights.
The premise of his book is something that I'm quite passionate about:
How we can leverage the value of rethinking in our personal lives, our interpersonal interactions, and our collective actions to live a more balanced and fulfilling life.
I ended up taking a ton of notes on the book, and I published those notes publicly here: Think Again by Adam Grant.
I've also added these notes, alongside of a bonus section of Grant's 30 most important takeaways from the book, to Foundations, my searchable digital library with insights from more than 100 of the best books I've read.
You can access Foundations and the expanded notes here.
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Thanks for tuning in, and see you in two weeks.
Cheers,
Cal
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