Damn, just had a magnitude 5 insight that explains nearly 100% of my success/failure pattern in consulting. I think I can finally put together my full theory of (indie) consulting.
Conversation
See, there are 2 kinds of consulting clients:
1. Confident people who want to pay for systematic doubt
2. Doubtful people who want to pay for systematic confidence.
I’m so bad at serving latter, if I could reliably detect them up front, I’d run away every time.
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Here doubt/confidence refers to EXTERNAL world (what’s going on outside your head, how to think about it, etc). INNER world doubt/confidence is a job for life coaches, therapists, philosophers, and spiritual advisors. I lack the empathy/interest/compassion to operate in this zone
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(Nuance: it’s not that I’m uninterested in others’ inner lives; I’m just uninterested/ill-equipped to help with the doubt/confidence dimension of inner life, which is where most people need the help, dealing with too much or too little confidence)
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Putting it all together, here is a 2x2 of who you should hire in what situation (and/or type of books you should read if your budget is limited). My market is the smallest and therefore obviously the most interesting and elite one. So elite, some months I have *no* client work🤣
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this 2x2 is the foundation of Integral theory (and DISC theory) and also I've seen it expressed as serotonin/dopamine, also forest/trees or global/analytical. Also rumsfeldian (unknown unknowns).
Which means there's prior art for how you can profile and segment a good lead.
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I think you may be lumping too many vaguely rhyming things together there :D
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Maybe they're all expressions of the same underlying interpersonal mechanics that have yet to have an empirical grounding (thinking eg. how before Farenheit there were dozens of words for temperature and after they all became scalar measurements on same line)
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