-Comb Over
I recently turned 34. This squarely puts me in my mid-30s. I feel like a different person than I was in my 20s. A junior employee asked what I wish I knew in my early 20s that I know now. A lot came to mind. Experience. There’s also the “knowledge is knowing and wisdom is doing”. But thinking about it now, my answer doesn’t feel satisfactory.
I’ve learned a lot from the people I’ve interacted with. Close friends, women I’ve dated, jobs I’ve worked, places and cultures I’ve lived in. Being exposed to alternative perspectives will quickly change anyone with an open mind.
I gained heuristics that I’ve sharpened throughout the years. It takes me less iterations to get to the truth. It takes me less iterations to get to what’s important. Experience empowers pattern recognition. Experience hones crafts.
Just because some skills seem soft, it doesn’t mean they aren’t crafts that need to be honed over time. When investors ask me thoughts on other businesses, my investment mind is activated, and I analyze the business. I forwarded one of these emails to a friend recently to show them something else, and they remarked at how I broke down the business to its core components and quickly surfaced all the key questions that should be asked. It felt obvious to me when I wrote it… but that’s because I was an investor for 8 years. Of course it’s obvious if you’ve been doing anything for that long. It made me remember that craft is uncommon.
Other soft crafts include things like running meetings. The best business people I know can get more done in a 10 minute meeting than good business people get done in an hour. I’ve partially learned that craft. Cutting to the core of things.
I remember first doing business calls in my early 20s. I was afraid to get on the phone. I got good at writing emails. I became known for writing great emails… helpful, but not nearly as helpful as I thought. Now, for any sensitive matter, I prefer shorter emails when possible and a short call or in person meetings. Internally, writing is super important as a best practice as we want a record and want to make decisions based upon merit, instead of who is the most persuasive/charismatic in the room.
I discussed facts more in my 20s. Now, I spend most of my time discussing why. When I read books by or about people I respect in my 20s, I’d take almost everything as true. It took me a while to gain the confidence to challenge the written word. To gain confidence in my own, unique opinions. I learned to still appreciate others' work but even when regurgitating it, I’ll have my own added flavor or thoughts on top of it. We need confidence and a large knowledge base to form refined opinions. Now, I’ll even read books where I sometimes only agree with 20% of the book. There’s a lot of value in books where you only agree with 20% of what’s written. It’s likely showing a viewpoint you haven’t thought of before and exposing you to truths on the other side.
In the west, project management proficiency is the way society gauges someone being an “adult”. In my early 20s, I got by just keeping things in my head and doing them as fast as possible. This didn’t scale. I remember when it broke. I was consulting with 5 companies at once and running point on multiple deals. I wasn’t sleeping. I started to forget things. I never forgot things. I told a mentor what I was going through, and they said to start writing things down. To read some productivity blogs. They didn’t even tell me about project management in particular, but their simple advice changed my career. I learned to write things down. I devised a system that works for me. Now, I have everything in a queue. Life’s a lot easier once you learn the craft of project management.
There are hundreds of other things I’ve learned in the last decade. I’ve been very lucky. Society may think project management is most important for adults. My bias is that adults must form their own opinions. Unfortunately, some people never become adults.