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Critical Skill 7: Bias Toward Action with an Eye on Opportunity Cost

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Failing Faster Isn’t Enough.

Future Skills

Three tasks on a desk. Three people are asked how to do them. One says jump in and get started “Just decide.” The second, more thoughtfully offers, “Wait. Let’s study them first.” A third person walks in to say, “Why are you wasting your time on revamping our flagship product? Use those resources to take down our competitor’s newest entry.”

Which of the three has the right approach? Put them together, and they all do.

It’s true, if we don’t act, we won’t move forward. If we don’t risk failure, we’ll not learn or innovate. Planning and packing and moving on that trail used to be the explorers’ way. Being an innovative explorer is no longer enough. That philosophy has a major part missing.

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Critical Skill 6B: 5+1 Ways to a Best-Fit Niche for YOU & the Market

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Finding that Ellusive Niche

Future Skills

Everyone talks about finding their niche, but I haven’t heard much about how to do it. How do you do a niche that fits? Finding a niche is Critical Skill 6 in what I call The 10 Skills Most Critical to Your Future. Once you can find hidden assumptions, you’re on your way to finding hidden niches.

Finding a niche that fits you and the market takes involvement, patience, and self-awareness — you need to know all points of view to get the perfect fit, and nothing less will do.

That best-fit niche is a tiny space where you’ll live, work, and relate to people. You’re going to have to like it there, but so are folks who don’t even know you. How do you find the niche that works for you and attracts an audience? [Read more…]

Critical Skill 6A: Five Tools for Finding Faulty Assumptions

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What Is the Premise Behind your Thinking?

Future Skills

At the time I was an Executive Editor. The project was simple. Build a binder of about 300 pages. I’d probably built four times that many books already. For a rush job, this one should be a piece of cake.

We made the bookmap. We went through the usual steps. We got the pages. Got the binders. Got everything ready for assembly. That’s when we faced our hidden assumption.

We’d assumed that Binders go together exactly like books do.

They do except in one important way. Books don’t have those tab dividers. Our tiny assumption caused a major, stressful, and immediate problem. The first divider belonged between pages 23 and 24. So? [Read more…]