26. Snobby Holmesean Cases with Singular Features 🔗

I'm becoming more snobby about work than I can probably afford to be from a financial perspective. Like Sherlock Holmes, I require "singular features" to take a case. I can spot the consulting equivalent of a "evidence of cheating spouse for a divorce case" a mile off now.

A big truth of work-adulting is that 90% of business problems are at best mildly stimulating and tricky the first 3 times, and then boring and straightforward for n>3. You just have to grind through them. They require neither book smarts nor street smarts. Just sweat and time.

The only ways to make them “interesting” is to

a) add more money
b) add more unmodelable risk
c) add an interpersonal caring dimension for someone you like/love or dislike/hate
d) add a self-care dimension (proving yourself after self-esteem blow, healing narcissistic wound)

If $ and risk don’t motivate you, you have to either find the remaining 10% of problems or go into other fields. I’d say 90% of the 10% interesting business problems (ie 9% of total) are at VP+ levels, but the 1% lurking lower down food chain are the very best problems.

Unless you find this 10%, almost any other field has a higher proportion of “interesting”

Engineering/Art: 30-80% interesting
Housework: 20-40% interesting

Even the boring parts are more interesting. Routine tech calculations, “laying pipe” in novel writing, folding laundry

Typical “90% boring part” problems: dealing with problem coworker/boss/report, navigating a tedious political conflict involving people you don’t give a shit about, interpreting sales data, reading balance sheets, rerunning a spreadsheet model for the 4th year in a row.

People are generally paid in proportion to how much boredom they take on. And the boredom is a mark of competence by the way. Anyone who loves these problems past n=3 is likely cluelessly awful at dealing with them. Their incompetence lends interestingness to routine stuff.

In 2019, with everybody either exhorting you to “learn to code” or “become an entrepreneur” it is good to know why neither might fit you. Coding is easy to eliminate. You find out fairly quickly the hard way (6-12 months) whether you have a feel for it and are good at it.

Entrepreneurship is harder. The primary qualification is the courage to be bored for long periods of time without getting distracted. At least 5 years. Like, 90% of the time until an org of people to do the boring bits exists under your authoritah. I lack this.

If you’re not bored by the 90% you lack the imagination to solve the 10%. If you don’t have the courage you won’t endure 5 years of boredom. Life FOMO will claim you (“there’s got to be more to life than playing half a dozen games that seem to involve gearing ‘no’ repeatedly!”)

And if you eliminate both coding and entrepreneurship what’s left?

Everything else.