I have been having conversations with my friends. One group of them have expertise in their areas. These are technical dudes. They tend to lack innovative solutions and carry bags of skepticism. The other group are generally hustlers. They tend to lack the abilities to execute their ideas.
Technical dudes tend to spend most of their time in their jobs solving specific parts of problems for their employers. As such, they accumulate lots of knowledge around these problems. The curse of knowledge generally drives them to be aware of almost majority of the pitfalls and limitation of the products they build. They lack the courage to take a leap of faith to invest their time outside their working hours. In addition, they become exhausted after they tackle the difficult problems for their employers. As such, they are less likely to focus on tackling problems outside their field. In addition, they tend to be introvert and spend time communicating within a relatively smaller social circle. As such, these situations further limit their abilities to expand their mental horizon outside of their existing problems.
Hustlers are generally spending most of their time selling the merits of their employers’ services or products. As such, they gain lots of understanding about communicating the benefits for their employers. The lack of depth for technical knowledge lead them to see endless possible extensions of these products or services. They lack the patience to invest their time outside their working hours to specify the details of the opportunities. Although they can keep seeking others to build products, they are less likely to understand the amount of resources, which consists of time and money, to build a product.
As such, the technical dudes tend to accuse hustlers of having cheap ideas while the hustlers tend to accuse the technical dudes of being incompetent of executing the ideas.
Note that life is not static, you can be a technical dude is some specific areas you know. Example, you are an computer engineer focusing on building a new functionality for www.foodmnm.com. Yet, you can also be a hustler by buying the latest Tesla motorcar and suddenly thinking of building a smarter electric car without having in depth knowledge of the car making industry.
So now you have know this, then what is the next step?
If you are interested to start a project, then you start by asking whether you are a technical dude in this project or a hustler in this project.
It is more likely that you are a hustler when you want to start a project. As such, you can start by sourcing for technical dudes. By talking to them, you get to evaluate the resource required to start your project and to evaluate its operational risks as well as financial risks.
If you are a technical dude and you want a change, then you should invest time with hustlers who can try selling the merits of the idea. By talking to hustlers, you get to understand what do customers want and whether this project is feasible to start with.
Now you understand the different types of people and their cognitive biases, you can either go and start a project with the right kind of people or you can just keep the status quo.
The choice is yours.
Sincere
Andrew Liew