Here is my note for “4 Strategies To Find The Work Only You Can Do (And Why It’s More Profitable Than Ever)” by Taylor Pearson.
The work only you can do
There are stages of a career: getting competent, getting good, getting paid well, and most people stop here. But there is a final stage on which a monopoly founded. It’s “the work only you can do.”
Blue ocean strategy and mini-monopolies
The essential idea behind Blue Ocean Strategy is that of value innovation: offering new products that create “blue oceans” of uncontested market space by pursuing a better cost structure (giving you access to a bigger market) and differentiation at the same time.
The same strategy can be applied to your career as well. You can create a high margin and highly defensible position in the market.
The foundation of your monopoly: the combination of your unique strengths
There are two facts when it refers to your strengths:
- Your individual skill set follows a power law. It means your performance is built on a small number of skills of you.
- Your strengths never fall within “industrial notions of boundedness around skill sets” as they are not commoditazible but monopolistic.
Productivity, and profits, in an entrepreneurial economy are achieved by working on complex projects where progress isn’t made in a straight line, but in a seemingly rambling, meandering path, combining different concepts, skill sets and experiences from different domains.
If we categorize our work using Cynefin framework, you can see “boundedness in the entrepreneurial economy is complex instead of complicated.” There is no specific way to get the right answer to resolve the “unknown unknowns” in the complex domain. This is where your unique strengths come into play.
The question then becomes: How can you find your unique strengths, to do the work only you can do, to serve a growing market?
4 strategies to find the work only you can do
Find The Resistance. Run Towards It.
Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.
[…]
Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign.
Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.
Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.
– Steven Pressfield, The War of Art.
Do an anti-productivity productivity day
Marc Andreessen once shared some of his personal productivity techniques and one of them is “don’t keep a schedule” which can be practiced partially or regularly.
By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day.
As a result, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time.
Embrace Via negativa productivity
Productivity is an act of subtraction not addition.
Simplify your life with elimination, automation and delegation so that you can focus on what matters most. However remember the lesson from Timothy Ferriss, “Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined.”
Discover your unique ability from the others’ eyes
Pick 10 people who have known you well in different contexts in your life (childhood, high school, college, jobs, and etc.), and send them an email asking how do they think of the characteristics, talents and strengths that differentiate you from others. In their responses, look for commonalities and recurrences of any particular words or phrases, and then think about how did they shape who you are and the way you advance in your life.
As Casey Neistat says, “Persistence and endurance will make you omnipotent,” so please stay on your life bus.
以下是個人閱讀泰勒．皮爾森所撰寫之 4 Strategies To Find The Work Only You Can Do (And Why It’s More Profitable Than Ever) 的筆記。
專屬於你的工作
一般人的職涯都會經歷足堪勝任、出類拔萃和功成利達等階段，卻也僅止於此。但職涯的最終階段應該是找到專屬於你的工作，開創獨占市場。
藍海策略和微型獨占者
《藍海策略》的基本理念便是價值創新，也就是透過同時追求更佳的成本結構 (以進入更大的市場) 和差異化，提供可開創無人競爭之市場空間 (即「藍海」) 的全新產品。
你可以將相同的策略應用於個人職涯，在就業市場中占有兼具高利潤和高防禦性的有利地位。
獨占市場的根基：獨特優勢的組合
你的個人優勢會符合下列兩項事實：
- 你的個人技能遵循冪定律，這表示你的績效表現只取決於少數幾項個人技能。
- 你的優勢具備獨占性而非商品性，因此不會完全落入「對個別行業劃分的技能界線」之內。
在創業型經濟中，你必須完成複雜的專案才能實現效率和利潤。而這些非直線式專案的進展看似散漫且不著邊際，並混合不同領域的概念、技能和經驗。
如果我們利用庫尼文架構將工作予以分類，你便會發現「創業型經濟中充斥複雜而非繁雜的工作」。你無法透過特定方法得到所謂的正確答案和解決複雜領域中「未知的未知」，而這便是個人獨特優勢得以發揮的空間。
如此一來，我們所面臨的問題就變成：你要如何找到自己的獨特優勢、投入專屬於你的工作以為成長中的市場貢獻價值？
4 種方法助你找到專屬於你的工作
正面迎擊你的抗拒心理
大部分的人都擁有兩種生活選擇：一是我們所選擇的生活，二是我們內心嚮往卻未曾實踐的生活。這兩者之間的區隔便是抗拒心理。
[…]
你正因恐懼而手足失措嗎？這是好現象。
恐懼是好事。恐懼如同自我懷疑，都是指引我們人生使命的指標。
你要記住我們的經驗法則：我們愈是怯於某項工作或使命，便愈能肯定我們的天命所歸之處。
恐懼是抗拒心理的具體體驗，恐懼程度就等同於抗拒心理的強度。因此，我們愈是對某項事業感到恐懼，便愈發確定該事業對我們本身和心靈成長的重要性。這也是抗拒心理的來源，我們不會對毫無意義的任務心生抗拒。
– 史蒂芬．普雷斯菲爾德，《藝術之戰》
享受反效率的高效生活
Marc Andreessen 曾分享他提升個人效率的技巧，其中一項就是「不安排任何行程」。
不安排任何行程的意思是：拒絕預先承諾在未來的任何時間點履行任何約定，包含任何會議和活動。
因此，你隨時都可以直接著手進行最重要或最有趣的工作。
一般人確實難以徹底實踐這項原則，但你也可以選擇在特定日期或範嚋內予以實行。
遵行否定式效率法
提升效率的正確方法是善用減法而非加法。
透過排除旁騖、自動化和授權來簡化生活可讓你專注於最重要的任務。但請記住，提摩西．費里斯提醒我們「絕不自動化可排除的任務，也絕不授權可自動化或簡化的任務」。
透過他人的視角發掘你的獨特優勢
從你的童年、學生時代、職場生涯等不同人生經歷中挑選 10 個非常瞭解你的人，並透過電子郵件請問他們認為讓你有別於他人的特質、天賦和長處。你可以從所有回覆中找出共同點和重複出現的任何字詞，然後回想這些優勢如何塑造你和你的人生發展。
正如凱西．奈斯塔特所言：「不厭其煩的堅持不懈讓我們無所不能」。無論如何，請留在來自赫爾辛基的人生巴士上，而這也是讓你達到卓異彼岸的惟一途徑。