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Effort shock is detail shock is reality shock. Many things that seem like they’d be really cool to have done turn out to require way more effort, patiently wrangling more way detail than you realized was involved, than you’re willing to invest.
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What is the most detail-oriented activity you enjoy? Where there’s a huge number of details to get right and you just have to patiently work through all of them, and you either genuinely enjoy it or it feels like a soul-crushing grind?
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So one of the reasons I'm thinking about this is that work at abstract levels, like management and leadership, suffers from a lack of natural detail. A manager can't be a detail-oriented to the same degree as a mechanic because social reality has a lot less natural detail
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I think the way great managers and leaders become great is by creating a world of detail for themselves that is comparable to the natural detail environment that accompanies individual contributor work. Those who fail to do this fail at their jobs.
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The thing is, the "domain" of leaders/managers is other people, and people are not things. If you bring "thing" like detail orientation to people, you'll come across as creepy/stalkery. You don't want to obsess over people the way you might over a car engine.
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I suspect that coming across as creepy/stalkier is not really a limit on the detail-orientation of the social domain (management, sales, and other kinds of influencing). It’s just a sign someone is bad at that domain.
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Consider the kind of very high-resolution detail-orientation that a novelist brings to conceiving and depicting a well-drawn character. There are certainly some managers and salespeople who carry around an equally deep but unspoken model of the people they are working with.
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Ie if your best idea for satisfying the urge for detail in your job leading a 1000 person org is to learn everyone's names and their kids names and birthdays... chances are you suck deeply at your job and should be fired.
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I agree with that example. I guess I’m arguing that human character is a “deep detail domain” which is off-limits for direct discussion but which effective influencers exploit indirectly. This is opposed to “shallow detail domain” which is ineffective.
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