Several years ago I asked myself a couple questions.
- Which things, if I were 10x better at, would make little difference?
- Which things, if I were 10% better at, would make a big difference?
I remember realizing, in particular, that if I knew 10x more about statistics, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. The limiting factor on statistics projects has rarely been my knowledge of statistics. The limiting factors are things like communication, endurance, organization, etc. Getting a little better at those things has helped.
This came to mind when I ran across a couple blog posts about Emacs and org-mode. It reminded me of a time when I was convinced that mastering these tools would make me significantly more productive. That was marginally true at the time, and not true at all now.
There’s a perennial temptation to solve the problem you want to solve rather than the problem you need to solve. The former may be in the 10x category and the latter in the 10% category. I would find it more fun to explore the corners of org-mode than to deal with proposals and contracts, but the latter is what I need to do today.
There’s an adage that says it’s better to work on your strengths than your weaknesses. I generally agree with that, but with more caveats than I care to go into in this post.