Welcome to the weekend edition of my newsletter - ideas, mindsets, and technology to innovate your best self and unlock high performance.
🎧 Use the Substack app to listen to the audio version of this newsletter.
🌟 I hope you find one nugget to practice this coming week.
✍️ Share your comments at the bottom of this post.
📚 Books & Articles
As a former product manager, I worked extensively with “personas, " the product's end users or experience. Given how easily people can relate to them, I often use product management metaphors in coaching.
Recently, I was in a coaching session exploring overcoming self-limiting beliefs in specific work situations. This led to identifying what kind of person must show up in these specific situations - the “stage.” When you consider our professional and personal lives, we are a portfolio of personas. Embodying and performing as a persona can help us perform at the top of our game when and where it counts. This is the essence of the picture below, where the personas emanate from a core vision.
The book The Alter Ego Effect by Todd Herman is a fantastic read the goes deep into this idea and is for anyone who wants to learn how to show up with a secret identity and perform.
🚀 Career
As career paths become more fluid due to the rapidly changing environments, finding your path is generally not a one-and-done proposition. It’s something we need to practice throughout our careers. This is the focus of “Finding Your Path to Mastery.”
Given the rapid adoption of AI tools, I believe human skills will become even more important as a differentiator. This is the focus of the “Competitive Advantage Formula.”
🧭 Finding Your Path to Mastery
One of life's most important tasks is finding your unique path where you excel in a field, connect deeply with it, and derive fulfillment. My work as a coach helps people synthesize, embody, and take action towards a path calling them with curiosity and rewards most important to them.
Author Robert Greene outlines the five strategies for finding your "Life's Task" in his book Mastery.
1️⃣ Return to your origins - The primal inclination strategy:
In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Childhood attractions are hard to put into words and are more like sensations - that of deep wonder, sensual pleasure, power, and heightened awareness.
2️⃣ Occupy the perfect niche - The Darwinian strategy:
The more people there are crowded into a space, the harder it becomes to thrive there. The game you want to play is different: to instead find a niche in the ecology that you can dominate.
3️⃣ Avoid the false path - The rebellion strategy:
A false path in life is generally something we are attracted to for the wrong reasons - money, fame, attention, and so on. Your strategy must be twofold: first, realize as early as possible that you have chosen your career for the wrong reasons, before your confidence takes a hit. And second, to actively rebel against those forces that have pushed you away from your true path.
4️⃣ Let go of the past - The adaptation strategy:
You are not tied to a particular position; your loyalty is not to a career or a company. You are committed to your Life's Task, to giving it full expression. It is up to you to find it and guide it correctly.
5️⃣ Find your way back - The life-or-death strategy:
No good can ever come from deviating from the path that you were destined to follow. Not seeing clearly ahead of you, you will end up in a dead-end career. Make your return to the path a resolution you set for yourself, and then tell others about it. It becomes a matter of shame and embarrassment to deviate from this path.
How is your path differentiated through a unique combination of skills and experiences that may make it hard for others to penetrate your market?
What are the feelings and emotions throughout the day when you are working on your craft?
Imagine your career being its full expression, emanating from deep within who you are and your unique value proposition: What are you doing?
Competitive Advantage Formula for Career Success
With the world’s knowledge available easily and quickly through AI assistants and agents, combining unique capabilities to remain relevant in your career field is critical. Domain expertise, in it by itself, is no longer a source of competitive career advantage. Most people today are leveraging AI tools to automate and accelerate productivity. Human-machine augmentation is now becoming an expectation and table stakes for most jobs. Given that AI tools are ubiquitous and cheap, your competitive advantage will be eroded and become less relevant unless you double down on the skills that make us human.
I work and coach people primarily in the tech space, where most people focus on the technical skills needed to become successful in their field. Of course, these are required, but I believe three “human” skills are just or more important than the pure domain expertise required to perform well.
Emotional Intelligence: Self-awareness, discipline, empathy, motivation, relationship building, and conflict resolution. Strategy 1 - Know Yourself in the Career Strategy Framework includes articles to help you build deeper self-awareness and motivation to strengthen your inner world. Our ability to embrace and learn to change is a critical skill, given that we change and the world constantly changes. Master of Change by Brad Stulberg positions a powerful mindset and principles for personal change and transformation.
Career Strategy: You must learn where and how to compete in your field of choice. Success does not randomly come to you. You must hunt as a strategist to find a valuable problem to solve with your unique expertise. You must act like a marketer to position and sell your expertise as a product. You must build power as a strong brand and network of people to get things done. Strategy 2 - Target Your Product in the Career Strategy Framework can help you think like a strategist and product manager to determine where and how to compete.
Decision-making and Execution: You must become skilled at making quality decisions using principles and techniques that move you a step closer to your vision each day. Then, once you have made the decision, you must take action to derive results. Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish is an excellent book that can help you shape your thinking to make quality decisions.
You can also leverage machines to help you derive knowledge and guide you in these three areas.
How will you build deeper self-awareness?
What changes may be required to strengthen where and how you compete?
How confident and satisfied are you with recent decisions? How could you improve your decision-making process?
🤖 Tech
Perplexity AI is a tool that I started using a few weeks back. It’s a powerful and unique platform that offers a chatbot-style search engine, a mobile app, and a Chrome extension, all powered by AI technology. The platform allows users to ask questions in natural language and provides responses gathered from multiple web sources. Perplexity AI uses several large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI ChatGPT, to power its platform.
One of the unique features of Perplexity AI is its ability to allow follow-up questions for more insights, with responses based on the context of previous interactions. I especially like how the answers cite every source used to deliver the response. I often follow the cited sources for more information and to learn.
Perplexity AI offers several benefits for research, making it a valuable tool for various professionals. Here are some of the key advantages:
Comprehensive and Fast Answers: Perplexity AI provides fast and comprehensive answers to complex questions, allowing users to learn new things and explore different perspectives
Information Organization and Refinement: The platform helps users find information from multiple sources, refine their search, and organize subtopics logically, making it easier to find supporting details for research
Credible Sources and Citations: Perplexity AI can be used for citations, research, and sources by checking the credibility of the information and providing citations for the answers
Versatility: It is a versatile tool that can assist researchers in their research, writers in their writing, and professionals in various tasks such as answering questions, generating text, and summarizing content
Data Analysis and Insights: Researchers benefit from Perplexity AI's ability to sift through extensive databases, offering vital data and insights for informed decision-making
User-Friendly Interface: The platform is easy to use and navigate, making it accessible to a broad audience, and it offers a seamless experience for information discovery and sharing
You can download iOS/Android mobile apps or Google extensions by clicking the “Download” link in the lower left of the browser.
👀 Thanks for reading Graymatter, and I would love your help sharing my work with others!
I look forward to hearing your feedback and ideas.
- James