How to Take Your Performance to the Next Level

• An Advisor always needs people to advise. Analysis is fine, and can be fun, but the day you discover that you have no direct audience for your conclusions—sitting by yourself, analyzing for the sake of it—will be a very bad day for you. Make sure you are always being paid to offer your conclusions to someone. You need this “someone,” this “someone with a dilemma,” to prove to yourself that you are valuable. And smart.

• You are the kind of person who respects experts. Why? Because experts have studied their subjects deeply and can pinpoint which details make the difference, which distinctions really matter. You are wired to appreciate this kind of inquiry. So ally yourself with a couple of carefully chosen experts in your field. Hang out with them. Read their articles or books. Volunteer to support them in their next big project. Their practical wisdom will intrigue and inspire you.

• Become a credentialed expert yourself. Choose your discipline and then build your career around deepening your expertise in this discipline. Pursue all the professional and academic qualifications available within this discipline. Your long-term career success hinges on your credibility and, like it or not—actually, you do like it— these sorts of qualifications, publicly displayed, give you an extra boost of credibility.

• These qualifications will also give you detail and, as an Advisor, you do wonders with detail. With some people detail disappears inside their heads into ever more convoluted theories and concepts. Not so with you. Your command of detail gets displayed for us all to see. The deeper you investigate a subject, the more fine-tuned and subtle your distinctions become. Since your mind instinctively uses distinctions to clarify other people’s problems—“What’s unique about your situation is X, and that’s precisely why you should do Y, and not Z”—your deepening expertise makes your advice so much more insightful and effective.

• You are at your best when you can see the people on the receiving end of your strength as an Advisor. So, as your career progresses seek out more demanding audiences. “More demanding” might mean “wider”—can you publish your insights in blogs, articles, or even books? It might mean a more discriminating audience—a group of your peers, perhaps, or your most valuable customers. It might mean a higher profile audience—the “C” suite or the highest levels of government. Or it might mean a higher stakes audience—the launching of a business, children at risk, or national security.

• You will always be at your best when the route ahead is unclear and someone needs to come in, assess all the facts available, and make a decision. Start-ups fit this description nicely. Your career could very well be a series of startups that require your particular gift for pragmatic decision making.