There’s an old joke about a drunk man looking for his keys under a lamppost. Someone stops and offers to help. He asks, “So, did you lose your keys here?” The drunk replies “No, I lost them over there, but here’s where the light is.”
I routinely talk to people who have strong technical skills and who want to go into consulting. They usually think that the main thing they need to do next is improve their technical skills. Maybe they know five programming languages but believe learning a sixth one would really open up opportunities. (Invariably the five languages they know are in demand and the sixth is not.) Or they have a graduate degree in math but believe there’s an area of math they need to learn more about.
They’re looking for their keys under the lamppost. And I completely understand. I would rather learn another programming language, for example, than go to a conference and hustle for work.
There’s something to be said for improving your strengths rather than your weaknesses, unless your weaknesses are the rate limiting factor. If sales are holding you back, for example, then you need to learn to be better at sales.
Yep—been in too many boardrooms where “data-driven” meant “We filtered the dashboard until it said what we already wanted.” The lamppost isn’t just a metaphor, it’s infrastructure for bad faith analytics.
What’s worse is when people build the lamppost themselves—crafting collection methods, survey questions, or data visualisations that guarantee a convenient conclusion. It’s not searching under the light because it’s there—it’s installing the bulb yourself and calling it empiricism.
At some point, “data science” became PR for executive instinct. Now the light is brighter, but the keys are still lost.
Yeah. My multiple forays into consulting/contracting each eventually stumbled in the same way: I suck at self-promotion. Schmoozing. Networking. Marketing. The whole shebang.
Once I got a contract, I did really well. It took longer than it should have for me to realize that 95% of my contracts came by word-of-mouth, that is, others marketing me, just because they wanted to, out of an abundance of kindness.
Looking back, I now realize I should have simply offered those folks a bounty for each successful contract, such as a 10% agent’s fee. Essentially turning them into my external marketing team.
I did try to join other consultancies, ones just large enough to have in-house marketing, but each interview revealed it would have been “just another job”, with little of what I liked most about consulting/contracting: Independence.