Love this quote from Gregory Northcraft: "The difference between experience and expertise is that with expertise, you have a predictive model that works." Sort of adds a new layer to 'you can either have five years of experience, or one year of experience five times.'
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There are lots of non obvious implications from this single quote.
For instance: want to hire a good generalist for your startup? The best indicator: they have a history of finding ‘predictive models that work’ in all their previous domains. You can test for this.
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When you say “that person might not be the smartest person in the room, but boy are they effective” what you’re essentially saying is that they have a history of systematically looking for predictive models that work. This quality is orthogonal to intelligence.
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How would one develop this skill of "looking for predictive models that work", especially since some decisions take a long time to know their outcomes?
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That's the big question, isn't it? Some people seem to have it, and some don't.
e.g. You ask "oh, you seem to have gotten good results running marketing for X, how did you do it?" — some people can give you a credible, thoughtful explanation, and others are all over the place.
(That's a long way of saying I don't know the answer, and I'm still searching!)
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