Practicality
The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.
-Stephen McCranie
I used to think the most competent and successful were the smartest or had the best ideas. No, the best operators are the most practical.
They don’t waste time with useless shit that most other people do. They protect their time and only do work that has a purpose. Even when it sometimes seems small, it shows the team they care about and pay attention to the details.
Real World
Junior employees often wonder how their boss knew in seconds that a number was wrong. The junior had a massive spreadsheet to get to that number. Did the boss:
Calculate it quickly
Have amazing intuition from years of pattern recognition
Knew the problem/answer beforehand
All the above
It’s 5) None of the above.
The analyst doesn’t understand the number. The analyst did the work to get to a number, but the analyst doesn’t know what the number actually means. The boss looks at reports and says immediately if something is off. You don’t need a scale to know that a 350lb man is fat.
Before starting Ender, I used to think great operators have pattern recognition because that’s how investing works. There’s some pattern recognition of what tends to work, but it’s not the core skill. Operators understand what numbers mean in the real world. It’s not just a number on a spreadsheet. Even if the number seems abstract, great operators break it down into what it means in terms of the business. When your business is shipping out 5,000 widgets per month, and the number implies you’re shipping out 200 widgets per month, you instantly know it’s wrong.
Of course juniors produce numbers that make no sense. They don’t understand the business as a system. They think about one task instead of how it impacts the system as a whole.
Operators know what’s directionally correct. The best operators know what’s directionally correct everywhere they operate. They quickly get up to speed on the fundamentals.
A sales leader spots when a marketing campaign’s conversion rate suddenly drops below the industry benchmark. Instead of rechecking every metric, they know the core drivers of success and thus immediately isolate the issue, avoiding wasted effort.
A production manager notices a report indicating a 40% increase in defect rates overnight. Recognizing that such a spike is impossible given current processes, they identify data entry errors rather than overhauling operations.
Conclusion
Practicality means understanding the true meaning behind numbers and actions. It’s about protecting time, prioritizing what truly matters, and always focusing on the bigger picture.
Those who pontificate without doing lack understanding. It’s why political pundits have the best-sounding awful ideas. As Richard Feynman said, “Physics is to mathematics as sex is to masturbation.”