Jargogled Impressions.

If you work in a typical job, what should you focus on – getting ahead or getting familiar?

The difference between the two is the former is relative, while the latter is intrinsic. There is no right or wrong answer, as much as there is the idea of identifying which one you want and sticking to it.

If you oscillate between the two, then you are handicapping yourself in your quest to focus. And in so doing, are failing to make progress with either vector.

Getting familiar with the work you are doing means you understand what you are doing much better than most others and are so well immersed in the domain and the skill it requires that you have no time to think outside of it. You are focusing on adding value, being useful, and maybe building something with the knowledge you are acquiring.

Getting ahead means you are doing the most impactful work, the one that gives you the leverage to expose yourself to career conversations and you are laser focused on getting to a place where you make decisions versus build. You are chasing after increasing the surface area of what you work on and elevating yourself from the noisy product building to the hairy factory building. Getting ahead means understanding the pulse of the business, isolating the areas which pack a punch in terms of impact delivered to the business, and going after it with vigor and confidence.

Another way of looking at it is, especially in the tech world, do you want to become a technologist or a businessman?

A technologist cares about the shape of the technology, its myriad design and form factors, the impact it has on society, and the ways in which it gets used by the users. Are we working effectively on super-alignment, is there a better model for VR, what crypto will mean in the future, what interesting use cases can be solved using shiny new tech?

A businessman cares about the revenue a new technology can bring. She cares about the partnerships it can spawn, and the GTM channels it needs. She wonders not about the philosophy of technology but about churn, CAC and ARR and such.

The paths are not mutually exclusive. They may converge somewhere in the future, especially if your technical skills become a superpower.

So, what should you focus on?

To answer this question, you need to reflect on where your strengths lie. And to learn to say no.

If you happen to be in a space where only a superhuman effort can bring your technical knowledge at par with the best and the brightest, then it would seem like a losing battle where you are constantly trying to keep pace with the ever-changing technological force. It might be easier, in this case, to maintain a healthy equilibrium between what you know and what you can find out, and instead focus on the more amorphous world of business. It’d not be easy to do as we are born with a curious mind and when we find interest in the space we are in, we tend to want to go deep and understand it better. But knowing where to draw the line is essential and that requires clarity on what your role should be as an expert and where you should rely on an expert.

Whichever way you go, it’s critically important to work on your own projects.

Projects that you are working on, not as an external imposition, but as an obsessively intrinsic interest, are the key to doing great work.

There’s an agency and an ownership which comes as part of these projects that are independently driven, which is unmatched by any other. The projects you pick up out of interest, is where you tend to build your strengths and organically bring concerted focus to. Through repeated iterations, false starts, and failure, as such projects typically go, you build the muscle you actually want versus the one you think you want. Our skills should be driven by our interests, and then our interests should be driven by our skills. There’s a positive feedback loop in there waiting to be exploited.

When people work on their own projects, not out of a sense of obligation, but in pursuit of interestingness, it kind of shows. These projects tend to be more grounded, with hard boundaries, and with usefulness as its core flavor. When we are not driven by optics but by a desire to understand, these projects can take a life of their own, subsuming you in their choppy, passionate waters.

Learning to say no is a vital skill. And it’s way more important than what most people tend to think. Our natural Duning Kruger effect tends to fail us when it comes to saying no because we tend to overestimate what is possible for us to do. Hence the ever-increasing deluge of things to do in your Todoist app, or the multiple projects you think you will make progress on.

Doing everything is doing nothing.

Even at work, where we feel things are imposed on us with no way out, there’s often an escape hatch lying around somewhere. But that requires a kind of clarity in vision that is hard for lay people to develop. Unless they go actively about and build it.

However, when you work on your own projects, this becomes easy. Your decision framework is driven by the elephant in the brain and does not require a pros and cons analysis.

If getting ahead is your game, then these own projects should likely be about furthering your understanding of the business ecosystem you operate in. And the best way to do that is to build a relationship network at work that provides you with the ammunition to sense and understand what matters.

If getting familiar is your trump card, then these own projects tend to become something that you ‘build’ physically. A POC here, a template there, a technical guide somewhere, and a tutorial everywhere.