Venkatesh Rao: The Art of Gig
Remote work, indie consulting & the gig economy
Venkatesh Rao is a writer, consultant, and author. He has been writing about indie consulting for years and has recently published the Art of Gig, Volumes 1 & 2, which together take an in-depth look at the gig economy.
Ahead of the release of Venkatesh’s appearance on Infinite Loops (dropping Thursday, 23 March), here’s an edited version of the pre-interview primer we prepared on some of the key ideas and frameworks explored in The Art of Gig.
Background
Links
Website | Ribbonfarm | Newsletter | Twitter
Books
The Art of Gig, Volume 1: Foundations
The Art of Gig, Volume 2: Superstructures
“For those of you who have no idea what this is about, between 2019-21 I wrote a limited-run Substack newsletter on the indie consulting life and the gig economy. About 2/3 of the newsletter issues were non-fiction essays. These are compiled into the two volumes above. All the essays have been carefully edited, updated, grouped into hopefully useful sections, and sequenced. The material flows surprisingly smoothly, if I do say so myself. The images and diagrams have been up-res’d, updated, and in some cases, entirely redrawn for the books.”
“As the subtitles suggest, Volume 1 establishes some foundational ideas, and Volume 2 builds on those foundations. Both volumes are at a roughly intermediate level of sophistication, and should be accessible to anyone with at least a year or two of work experience. If you’re in the gig economy, are considering diving into it, or have been unceremoniously tossed into it by layoffs and such, I suspect these volumes might be useful to you. They should also be valuable to recent graduates thinking about alternatives to traditional career paths, though I suspect the material will be harder to grok without at least a little work experience under your belt.”
Themes
Finances & Security
Freedom & Finding Meaning
Conceptualising Gigwork
Knowledge Accumulation
Finding Work
Client Relationships
Theme 1: Finances & Security
“The line between continued survival in the gig economy and crashing out of it is a very thin one, no matter how long you’ve been in the game. Don’t get complacent about either the risks, or why the risks are worth taking on (short answer: freedom).”
Preparing for the leap
‘Leaping’ away from the paycheck world into gigwork requires scripting and preparation. Handle the process badly and you can end up crashing into gigwork with inadequate psychological or logistical preparation.
“Most people manage to make all three mistakes at once, and as a result, don’t so much leap into a gig career as crash unceremoniously into one, against their will, having exited a job or other seemingly safe situation with nowhere near enough logistical or psychological preparation. How do you think that turns out?”
The key factors to consider when leaping are preparedness, risk appetite, opportunity and depressors.
The main focus when leaping should be on “high-cunning exit conditions”, the best of which is a live asset that can be turned into the foundation for a gig-economy business almost immediately (e.g. a blog, a book, etc).
You will reach a stage where you need to identify a fixed leaping point and work towards that. “The rest will have to be done under live-fire conditions after the leap.”
Cash, control & community
If you have all three as a gigworker you are in a good place. Rational pricing and work-selecting behaviour is enabled by the venture-capital principle of cash and control. Liquid cash and control over your life allows you to be more strategic and selective in your decision-making.
Failure of nerve
The most basic level of failure in the gig economy is failure of nerve. To avoid crashing out of the gig economy gigworkers must develop their nerve by continually doing the thing that needs doing despite unpleasant emotional responses getting in the way.
“Failure of nerve happens when, despite being given all the facts, and despite the required reasoning being trivial, people fail to draw obvious conclusions about the future. The problem is that the simple reasoning from simple premises leads you towards an unpleasant conclusion that’s hard to face.”
“Though you can’t train your nerves in the same way you train skills that de-risk an activity, you can train them. What you’re learning is to act in certain ways despite unpleasant visceral responses getting in the way.”
“The good news about failure of nerve is that it cannot become a habit. If your nerve fails you often enough, you’ll just fail entirely and drop out of the gig economy into something else (generally more unpleasant). What can become a habit is acting with nerve. And that takes no real skill. Just doing the thing that obviously needs doing. And doing it again, and again. Until the panic reaction turns into an exhilaration reaction.”
Avoid the stick house
“But one thing I’ve carefully avoided for a decade now is getting reliant on anything that looks like a stick house—a paycheck-like income stream that is just predictable enough to lull you into a false sense of security, but not actually reliable enough to buy you enough time to reorient in a real crisis—once you wake up to it.”
Become a prosumer
Prosumerism = gigwork + lifestyle design. Giving up the perks of a paycheck job and standardized consumption scripts provide you with production and status flexibility.
“The paycheck lifestyle is a split-brain producer-consumer lifestyle bridged by the all-important paycheck as the conduit of all value. It is the corpus callosum of the two sides of your industrial-age brain. The key point is that all work ends with paychecks and all of life begins with paychecks. Work-life balance is a cash balance.”
“Converting the fun hobby into an income-generating asset is a much more natural thing to do as well since gig economy people tend not to have values based on purist separations of work and play. For paycheck people, a hobby is likely to be a sacred escape from work3 that would be profane to try to make money off of.”
“For a paycheck person, it can feel seriously degrading to do things that would seem menial in relation to their work, like running a website with affiliate links or teaching a self-published course. Things paycheck people do outside of work must reinforce the status they project at work and in their communities (or at least, harmonize with it).”
“The great allure of the prosumer way is to break out of the straitjacket of a lifestyle unnaturally divided into production and consumption aspects, each driven by its own patterns of imitation and competitive signaling.”
Talking about income
Indie income is much harder to talk about than paycheck income.
“It is somewhere between childish and clueless to hold to arbitrary standards of openness for no good reason. This is particularly a lesson that struggling, early-stage indies need to internalize because they often don’t recognize the costs of openness. Some seem to believe they have so little, they have nothing left to lose.”
“What you say affects how you are perceived, and determines who is willing—or not—to deal with you. You exist in a world where visible vulnerability can be exploited.”
“Wanting to be completely open financially—whether the picture is one of abject despair or obscene success—is more often an exhibitionist impulse or a reaching out for human connection than it is a useful tactic for improving your financial condition.”
Theme 2: Freedom & Finding Meaning
“Work should be enjoyable, impactful, and serve a purpose for others beyond just making a living. When it meets those conditions, most people want to work more than four hours a week. Solving for minimal work around passive income streams is another way to act dead.”
Program your robot suit
Your gigwork identity is a robot suit that allows you to express the ‘real’ you. A job on the other hand is a plastic mask that hides the ‘real’ you.
“In the gig economy, you’re insourcing a lot of the robotic aspects of your being that were previously embedded in your workplace environment, and now have to be part of your life environment. In both cases, what they do is create a container for your squishy, messy, human psyche. In the process of insourcing, you’ll be personalizing and customizing to yourself, so you’ll be more free to express yourself. Recognizing this is what dissolves the paradox.”
“In the gig-economy we have to learn self-management behaviors. How do you approach self-management? Think of self-management as programming yourself like a robot.”
“You have to set up the social structure and cultural rhythms you need to function. That much is easy and obvious. The hard part of self-socializing is understanding how you depend on other people, who they are, and the extent to which they recognize the role they play in your new life, and then rearranging things if they seem to be unhealthy and limiting rather than healthy and enabling.”
Sneaking off
Knowledge work is never done. There are an infinite amount of blogposts to write, clients to find, etc. Gigworkers may often find that they nominally have more free time but simultaneously less time for the passion projects that motivated them to quit in the first place. The solution is ‘sneaking-off’:
“The thing is, fun things are only fun when you sneak off from things that feel like work to do them.”
“Sneaking off from an under-full to-do list doesn’t work, just as weight-training with no weights doesn’t work. You strengthen your sneak-off boldness by stealing from committed time, not by clearing and occupying free time. That’s just a hobby bad-boss-you tolerates.”
Pursue enchantment
Managing your psyche as a free agent is crucial. Without the tether to a paycheck job it is possible to become disengaged from the world and to lose your sense of meaning. To avoid this free agents must actively pursue their primary mode of enchanted engagement with the world.
“The greatest endemic risk to the psyche today is not that you’ll end up on the streets next week or fail to fund your retirement in thirty years. The greatest risk is that you’ll feel so relentlessly battered by the weirdness all around that you’ll go numb and simply disengage from the world entirely today.”
“Pay yourself first in 2021 means prioritizing time for some activity that keeps you positively engaged in the world, through some enchanted mode of seeing, being, and doing that resists disenchantment and retreat.”
“Pay yourself first in 2021 means aggressively nurturing and defending your primary mode of enchanted engagement with the world, even if it means forgoing some money in order to buy yourself the time to do so—something I’ve done frequently.“
“Enchantment is not just for game nights with friends or whatever traditional or New Age rituals you favor. Or something to relegate to hobbies, fiction-reading, and TV-watching. It is something to infuse into everything you do.”
Towards infinite games
The ideal form of gigwork is infinite not finite – it should be enjoyable and serving a purpose beyond just making a living.
“You know you are free when your motivation is infinite-game-like: you’re playing to continue the play.”
“Good game rules make you want to keep playing and stay in an indefinitely perpetuated state of play until you run out of energy.”
“Bad game rules hook your worst instincts and drive you to win, once and for all, regardless of what it does to other players, and arrive at a permanent win condition and never leave.”
“Companies are naturally constructs designed to catalyze seriousness rather than play, which arguably is why the work-vs.-play dichotomy emerged in the first place.”
Fixed point futurism
One can find meaning and purpose through ‘fixed point futurism’.
“Don’t make plans, choose fixed points. Choose one thing to make true, force to be true, about the future. Something that is likely to be within your control, no matter how the future plays out. Something that isn’t rationally derived from something else more basic, but is sort of arbitrary and self-defining. The more nonsensical the better. The fix for the default disease of having more rationality than sense is to aim at more nonsense than sense.”
“A way to understand fixed-point futurism is to think of it as a priceless commitment. No matter what happens, and no matter what else goes wrong or off-the-rails in weird ways, you’ll make sure one thing goes really, really right, even if you have to go crazy making sure it does. In other words, you’re committing future agency and surplus resources unconditionally to the defense of your fixed point”
“Your chosen fixed point is basically a proxy for your identity. To contemplate giving up the fixed point is to contemplate changing who you are at a deep level. Those are the stakes of fixed points. It’s not that you’re not willing to change at a deep level, even a death-and-resurrection rebirth level. It’s about what stakes represent the existential cost of that depth of personal change.”
“Fixed point futures are strange attractors. Everything else starts revolving around them once you truly commit to them. You’ll know because from rational, spreadsheet perspectives, nonsense will start pulling ahead of sense . . . which is a good thing. A decade ago, my motto was Be Slightly Evil. Now it is closer to Be Slightly Nonsensical.”
Prioritise passion missions
“The passion part of life still has to emerge, for most of us, as a positive externality from the more pragmatic, money-focused activities of life. Your passion mission may have a certain amount of natural economic potential (which newer tools help realize more easily), but typically not enough to be self-sustaining.”
“Passion missions typically extend past single projects, like writing a single book or screenplay, or completing a single hardware hacking project. They are activity streams you want to sustain indefinitely, whether or not they turn out to be financially self-sustaining.”
“Your passion mission will almost certainly temporarily fall by the wayside, as you scramble to get better systems in place to navigate the much more volatile world of free agent money-making.”
“You arrange the money-making around the passion work, not the other way around. You try to reserve your most alert and creative days and hours for the passion work.”
“Passion missions are best fed with sustainable time and money surpluses, not by drawing down savings.”
The myopic annual review
Now is not the time for panoramic ‘annual reviews’. We need a myopic perspective of our lives.
“The 2020s, it seems to me, are going to be more about meanings than contents. It is a decade for myopic rather than panoramic views of your life.”
“There are many lives you could live, but none you have to live. All next door to the one you are living. Yet despite the close presence of potentialities they work so hard to access, indies often end up living lives that are no more complex than the ones they left behind. All that risk, so little to show for it. All that extra optionality, so little extra dimensionality.”
“Resist the urge to judge, organize, make to-do lists, or tidy up. Hold off on those resolutions and goals. Don’t ask yet whether it sparks joy. Ask what all of it means and what it could mean.”
“Rather than taking stock of your world, to reshape it top-down, which is the point of panoramic perspective-taking, appreciative myopia is about re-sensitizing yourself to the flows of your world by making yourself a stranger to it. “
“The big picture is not the hard picture to stay aware of. It’s the little picture. The close-in, close-up environment of life.”
Theme 3: Conceptualising Gigwork
“The gig economy is defined primarily by the glitches, exceptions, and incoherencies of the mainstream paycheck economy. Our messy map is the reason their suspiciously clean map doesn’t fall apart.”
Positioning vs People schools of consulting
“This is the divide between the Positioning and People schools of consulting. The essential difference between the two schools is that the Positioning school takes its intellectual cues from economics and uses formal models and numbers as the ultimate foundation for everything, while the People school takes its intellectual cues from sociology and psychology and uses narrative as the ultimate foundation for everything.“
“You should also care because indie consulting is almost entirely People school. The converse is also true, though less strongly so: the People school is dominated by indie consultants (and smaller boutique agencies). So merely by identifying as a current or aspiring indie consultant, chances are, you’re at least unconsciously sympathetic to the governing philosophies of the People school, and unsympathetic to those of the Positioning school.“
“Peak Positioning was probably sometime between 2001 and 2015. The output of the Positioning school has declined in quality if not quantity. It hasn’t had truly fresh big ideas to offer since the late 90s and is running largely on momentum and fumes at this point. “
“By my estimate, about 80% of the consulting industry (in terms of revenue and profits, but not headcount) is aligned formally or informally with the Positioning school.”
“The conclusion to draw from this, however, is that your best approach to creating trust and getting good gigs is Approach 4, i.e., a People-school approach to a problem whose structure is illuminated by a Positioning-school analysis.”
Institutional patterns
The role of the consultant is to participate in non-routine institutional patterns. The consultant addresses “capability shortfalls that fall through the cracks between in-house capabilities and systematically outsourceable capabilities.”
Big Consulting
Big Consulting optimises for grind, not independence of thought or imagination.
“A good part of the consulting market is a corporate assisted-living facility for geriatric companies.”
“That’s the most important thing you have to understand about the Big-Three consulting world: it selects for intelligent, high-energy grinders, not snowflake philosophers driven by foundational curiosities.
“What the big consulting armies are selling is not genius brainpower, stellar imagination, reserves of courage, philosophical insight, or even skilled labor time. They are selling the distance that enables them to look in places internal eyes cannot look, and turns impossible problems into manageable grinds. At scale.”
“My null hypothesis is that organizations that are zombified enough that they cannot run themselves without Big Consulting support perhaps shouldn’t continue to exist, and deserve to be disrupted and displaced by organizations that can do the necessary thinking on their own (with some modest help from us indie consultants of course). And if the market left over when you eliminate the zombie-life-extension segment isn’t big enough to sustain Big Consulting, perhaps Big Consulting needs to shrink.”
The clutch class
Gigworkers are not capital or labour. They are ‘clutch class’.
“If you think of organizations as cars, a good mental model of the politics (not economics) of work is that capital is the accelerator, labor is the brake, and middle-management is the gearbox. And we gigworkers? We are the clutch. We help disengage/re-engage the drivetrain during gear-shifting, as operating regimes change and organizations need to adapt behaviors.”
“A second sense in which we are the clutch class is in the sense of the sports slang term: we are typically roped in to break stalemates and frustrating equilibriums, and actually make things happen and deliver some high performance during critical periods. Both senses of the word should suggest a very uncomfortable relationship to labor movements and socialist politics.”
“We are in the high-agency/low-capital quadrant of the economy.2 This makes it worth our while to cut our own deals with whomever we can, whenever we can.”
“Mechanisms do matter, but the ones that we actually employ towards political ends are adapted to our political ends, not those of either capital or labor.”
“Push come to shove, where we stand depends on where we sit. And in almost all cases, we sit right next to management and capital, serving as clutch players, helping shift gears where necessary, helping with surge actions, helping break out of stalemates.”
Mercenaries vs missionaries
Gigworkers are mercenaries, not missionaries.
“In the stories of history as written by winners or losers, it is the fate of mercenaries to be cast in a role that is worse than the good or bad guys in any account: shadowy figures who refuse to pick permanent sides, and subvert, through their very presence in the story, any claims to absolute rightness made by missionaries on all sides.”
“You can see a similar behavior today in a certain class of indies in which I count myself—between gigs they tend to write stuff calling bullshit on the cynically manipulative empty pieties being spouted by missionaries in the paycheck world; a sort of intellectual brigandage.”
“I find this both grimly hilarious and highly validating. Missionary endgames reveal the true nature of missionary postures. The idealism that seems so solid, virtuous, and noble at the beginning of a mission is often revealed to be a thin fiction overlaid on motives far worse than those of unapologetic mercenaries.”
Theme 4: Knowledge Accumulation
“The newbie leads-and-deals level of indie consulting is, in my opinion, best tackled by diving right into the deep end, with just a vague idea of what you’re going to do, and a few months worth of savings to live off while you figure it out.”
Ask actor questions
When considering gigwork options there are two categories of questions, ‘actor’ and ‘model’ questions. Actor questions are based on experience and iteration. Model questions are abstract and not experience based.
“Now here’s the thing: for almost all of you, the good questions are going to be actor questions and the bad questions are going to be model questions. At the same time, nine out of ten questions that occur to you to ask are going to be model questions. So your meta-process should be: quickly get to good enough on the “model” questions while keeping your eyes open for your unique version of the true “actor” questions.”
“Model questions can be asked and answered before doing anything. Actor questions typically require you to already be in the game before they can be answered.”
“It should be obvious that actor questions are all versions of the question, what makes me pop memorably from context? Model questions are all versions of the question, how can I fit harmoniously into the context?”
“Getting to good questions is a process of following a trail of clues and solving the mystery of who you are as a free agent. When you’re done, you’ll have a story rather than an answer, one that energizes your career rather than merely removing some uncertainty from it.”
Growth comes from iteration
Learning should not be abstract and divorced from experience. Growth comes from iteration:
“The newbie leads-and-deals level of indie consulting is, in my opinion, best tackled by diving right into the deep end, with just a vague idea of what you’re going to do, and a few months worth of savings to live off while you figure it out.”
“To last longer, you have to discover who you are, by doubling down on things you like to learn, while working on gigs.”
“It’s a bad mistake to separate your learning interests from your working interests.”
“At the learning flywheel level, you should strive to say yes to gigs where you’ll learn more of what you want to learn, and no to gigs where you won’t. It’s as simple as that.”
“Finding and staying in the maximal iteration/learning rate zone of what you enjoy is a pretty subtle challenge.”
“Believe it or not—and this is heresy to doerists—a life of pure learning and new personal records is not satisfying. If you get stuck at the learning level, you will burn out in about three years. To survive longer, you have to explore how you create value for others”
“Learning is a matter of disciplined curiosity, conscious cultivation of knowledge and skills, and strategic choice of gigs. You can learn without really growing, and many people do exactly that. That’s how you get trapped in shticks.”
“Growth is the result of integrating your experiences, figuring out what they mean, healing any scars, and evolving beyond them.”
Consultants do not have scientific knowledge
“When it comes to gigups and startups, nothing important that you think you know is known in a scientific sense.”
“Why is science lost in going from pure bouncing balls to applied bouncing balls? What is gained in giving up a purely scientific posture in what you’re doing? In the simplest terms, science is “lost” because startups and gigups both require integrative modes of knowing, and the price of achieving effective integration is that you must necessarily go beyond the limits of scientific modes of knowing.”
Exploiting knowledge asymmetries
Consulting is built around knowledge asymmetries:
“This is often the case in consulting. The execution skill is often either trivial or available in-house in the client organization. The entire value lies in knowing which nut to tighten.”
“While it is inherent to all knowledge work, the principal-agent problem is particularly acute in any relationship where the typical principal has a need that is rare enough that there is no incentive for them to get systematically knowledgeable about the domain, while fulfilling the need is so common an activity for the agent that they have incentives to learn to do it very cheaply, systematically, and efficiently.”
“Any employee with a very unique, opaque, and illegible skill is a huge risk for an organization. To prevent such an employee from falling prey to principal-agent temptations, or being poached by a competitor, they are likely to end up so highly compensated that it is simply not worth their time or energy to exploit the asymmetries of their knowledge.”
“Sherlock Holmes, I would argue, is the model every independent consultant ought to aspire to. Not in the sense of affecting the posture of a genius, but in the sense of ignoring the contours of knowledge held to be self-evidently meaningful and important by professionals, and navigating by your own amateur—but grounded—maps of the territory.”
Theme 5: Finding Work
“All indie consultant positioning that works amounts to: it doesn’t have to be this prevailing orthodox way that you’ve been disillusioned by, there is another, better way, and here’s how you go down that road.”
Bootstrap with beefs:
“One good answer to how to bootstrap from 0 to 1 is: indie consultants bootstrap with beefs.”
“Though I got a lot of praise and gratitude for them, as lead-generation essays they were utter flops. Why? Because they weren’t alternatives to existing ways of doing things.”
“What is differentiation for an indie consultant? Differentiation is the right amount of beef in your positioning; notionally about 20%.”
“You are modeling a clear, generative way to break away from something that a lot of people are disillusioned with.”
“All indie consultant positioning that works amounts to: it doesn’t have to be this prevailing orthodox way that you’ve been disillusioned by, there is another, better way, and here’s how you go down that road.”
Casual coffee meetings
Venkatesh’s workflow is dependent on casual coffee meetings.
“The headline is crystal clear: at least my kind of consulting practice is hugely dependent on gigs that start out as casual coffee meetings.”
“A casual coffee meeting is a low-planning, low-stakes, opportunistic meeting without a great deal of marginal effort to make it happen.”
“This is post-hoc analysis for me. For years, I’ve had a policy of basically never paying out of pocket to go to a business conference (social/cultural conferences are different). I only go as a speaker or panelist, with paid-for travel costs, and only to places I actually want to go to as a tourist anyway, preferably with my wife.”
Rely on inbound leads
“Rely only on inbound leads to get gigs. Within gigs, never do billable work that you’re not explicitly asked to.”
“Every outbound pitch, every uninvited speculative proposal, every suggestion within a gig that could be perceived as manufacturing unnecessary billable work for yourself, exposes you to possible accusations that you are exploiting gullible leaders/managers (or colluding with corrupt ones) to parasitically feed on a weak organization. I personally don’t like to play risk management games when it comes to reputation, so I’ve pretty much stuck to 100% inbound and 100% do-only-what’s-asked consulting, with no passive or bundled billables.”
Theme 6: Client Relationships
“In the indie world, you either die a martyr or survive long enough to see yourself turn into a nerd.
Consultants are shadows
Indie consultants are ‘shadows’ of their client principals.
“Your job as an indie consultant is to get inside the OODA loop of the client, as an ally, and help advance their goals. This is easiest when the client is a leader rather than an abstract organization.”
“Being recognized as a leader within an organization means your funding requests within your domain are not typically challenged, so you, as an indie, only have to make one person happy.”
“The net effect is something like being an evil twin. The “evil” part is the opposed growth aspect. The “twin” part is the integrated aspect. Sparring work in particular is about managing the tension of these two aspects of work. This means your ideal client is someone who is mature in the same ways you are and growing in the same ways you are, just from the “other side.””
“Generally only indies can truly play this opposed role. Consultants from larger firms don’t relate individually to leaders in the same way. Instead, the self-shadow relationship holds at an organizational, firm-to-firm level.”
“This default shadow role means the default perception of an indie consultant showing up in an organization is negative.”
Sparring
VR’s consulting style is based around ‘sparring’.
“The goal of sparring is simple: to improve the quality of live theorizing executives do around their ongoing work.”
“Conflicts of interest often prevent direct peers from serving as sparring partners for each other, despite being the best suited for it in other ways. Peer executives are often competing with each other for power, influence, and control over specific situations, so mutual sparring support is limited to windows of opportunity when they are not striving at cross-purposes.”
“Unlike a therapist or life coach, a sparring partner does not support inner work except occasionally as a side effect. Psychological insight into human nature is helpful, but not central to effective sparring. Unlike philosophical counselors or mentors, the sparring partner does not occupy the position of a respected elder guiding an executive through inner or outer challenges they themselves have already been through. Your own banked growth experiences are helpful, but not central, to effective sparring. Unlike an executive coach or teacher, the sparring partner does not support general-purpose behavioral development (forming good habits, losing bad ones, developing specific skills), in areas like productivity, emotional self-regulation, or “crucial conversations.” Behavioral insight is helpful, but not central.”
“What is central to effective sparring partnerships is actual understanding of the business domain and organizational environment. Having access to the enabling background knowledge is one half of the problem—largely solved by the internet. But actually being able to think on your feet with that knowledge is a different matter altogether, and the other half of the problem—one most people will fail at.”
“So a good way to start figuring out the core of the appreciative worldview that can potentially form the core of your sparring practice is to own the guru-jeopardy and ask—what am I a guru of?”
“About 90% of your effectiveness as a sparring partner derives from the depth of your appreciative worldview, developed and expressed through critical reading, writing, podcasts, and talks. Only about 10% depends on your in-session sparring skills.”
Portals, not flags
When arguing with principals optimise for portals not flags:
“In the indie world, you either die a martyr or survive long enough to see yourself turn into a nerd. And to turn into a nerd is to open up a unique portal. The opposite of planting a flag is opening a portal. Building resonance is about opening portals instead of planting flags.”
“Portals eat flags for lunch. They offer seductions that offer an escape from your client’s pet laments. Instead of saying “my view of why your world sucks is better than your view of why it sucks,” you say “I agree the world sucks, in exactly the helplessness-inducing way you say. Here is an energizing place to escape to, and maybe find a way out.”
“This incidentally is the lesson in the existence of lemon markets next to yours. People are hungry for anything that offers respite from the bleakness of the laments they are helplessly attached to.”
“You’re free, they’re not. That’s the main source of your value. If you choose to tap into it and share it. Don’t build a hill for yourself to die on. Open up a portal for them to walk through.”
Pricing
“Because consulting is an intellectual partnership that is too bespoke to easily compare to substitutes, and only works if both parties see each other as fully human. The relationship is a bit above pricing discussions. If a client sees you as a functional and sharply scope-limited cog producing a deliverable component of a larger activity, that’s a contracting relationship.”
“Approach pricing your services as a consultant the way you approach making a restaurant suggestion if someone offers to buy you dinner. You will make a suggestion that is acceptable to both of you socially, because the main point is to spend time together, not maximize the dollar or caloric value of the food you can get out of it.”
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