The Smartest Person I Ever Worked With Taught Me One Thing
And it will stick with me lifelong
Do you know anyone who seems like they’re on a different level?
Have you met someone who thinks more efficiently than everyone else you’ve ever met?
I have.
I was lucky enough to work for someone brilliant and thoughtful.
A great thinker and a great manager. The two went hand in hand.
To this day, I’m still shocked by his ability to think.
The person
At a startup, I worked for this manager. We can call him Adam.
Adam was in his mid-thirties with 3 kids under the age of 5. Adam managed an engineering team of ~20 individuals. Outside of that, Adam spent several hours each day programming. He was one of the best programmers I’ve ever met. Beyond that, he was the best manager I’ve ever had and will probably ever have. It’s not like he was slacking off on either the management or the technical work.
Most people in tech are good people leaders or good individual contributors. There are a select few who can do both well.
I still don’t know how he did so many things at such a high level.
The skill
Working with Adam was a blessing. It was the highlight of my career.
Adam was a bright person. There’s no doubt about it.
But he didn’t necessarily fit into the archetype that society prescribes for “successful” people.
He had dropped out of college. He didn’t pursue higher education. He taught himself most of the skills he had.
While Adam was clearly intelligent, the main thing that differentiated him from anyone else that I’ve ever worked with was that he thought differently. By working so closely with him, I was able to learn from his unique perspective.
The skill that made him so successful came down to a couple of things:
- He was constantly breaking big problems down into smaller chunks that could be solved
- He was intensely focused on finding the root cause of problems our team faced
How this skill can be applied
My experience working with this incredible person showed me that you can do more than you think you can if you have the right perspective.
I’m not always successful, but I try to approach big problems in my life and break them down into smaller chunks.
Let’s say I want to save up $1 million dollars.
Okay, how could I first save up $1,000? How about $100,000? What about $500,000?
To make my first $1,000, I’d have to learn how to:
- Earn money
- Spend less money than I earn
- Put money away somewhere
These skills would benefit me as I then aimed for the bigger numbers.
I would have to learn how to scale up my energy and efforts.
Along the way, I’d probably have to teach myself about many topics by doing research on the internet.
His other unique ability revolved around a fixation on root causes.
He didn’t care about the superficial. He didn’t want to waste his time there. He was able to zoom out and try to identify what the underlying cause of the problems were.
When someone on our team came to him with an issue, it was like he knew that this issue was a result of something upstream. He then focused on how we could fix the upstream problem so that the downstream issues wouldn’t arise.
By focusing so intensely on root causes, he was able to prevent recurring problems from arising. He was getting more rewards for his efforts.
This allowed him to spend less time putting out fires.
This experience changed my life for the better.
It made me realize that while intellect is important, you can make massive progress if you optimize how you learn and approach the problems that come up in your life.
Changing your outlook and perspective can take you far.
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