The gaps in your skill set
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the gaps in my skill set. As we’re now about to head into the year’s final quarter, I’ve been looking back at the two-year review I wrote at the beginning of the year and assessing my progress.
And it’s a mixed bag.
I decided to spend some time focusing on building up the blog and the newsletter instead of jumping into creating another fully-fledged product, which seems to have worked. Sort of. Newsletter subscribers have almost doubled, which is great. RSS feed followers, however, are about the same.
Things that can be measured can be managed, as the saying goes, but the interesting part is trying to assess what can’t be measured.
Time away from the “projects” has also been useful because distance often bring perspective and, as Alan Kay famously said: “A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” I have a clearer idea now, for example, about how to turn my short-lived JS course “Uncluttered” into something more broadly useful to people than I did at the start of the year. If I had rushed into fixing it at the start of the year, then the revamped product would have ended up having just as narrow an appeal as the original.
I also now have a much clearer idea for how to follow up on Out of the Software Crisis and The Intelligence Illusion in a way that builds on them both. That perspective change has affected my choice of topics for the blog/newsletter over the past few months. I think it’s been an improvement, for the most part, and the parts that haven’t improved can be fixed.
The most exhausting part was the realisation that I’d have to honestly assess the gaps in my own skill set and figure out which gaps have to be filled by learning and which should be filled using outside assistance.
The biggest gap is one I share, I think, with most developers and writers:
- I’m really bad at figuring out what my logical audience is, in terms of the size of the potential market and how my skills could help them.
- I’m extraordinarily bad at coming up with structured, repeatable ways of reaching that logical audience.
Uncluttered, which I mentioned above, is a case in point. It’s all about web development without node, but because it doesn’t commit to a specific non-node solution (Rails, Symfony, etc.) it ends up not having any appeal for anybody.
Another example, which I can’t get into too much detail about, unfortunately, is a funding application I submitted last year, well before I even began this self-assessment process. The business development portions of the application were so badly done in hindsight that now, whenever I think about that application, I have to fight the urge to write a personal apology email to the people who manage the fund to apologise for wasting their time.
At least now I understand how startups end up with the underpants gnome business strategy!
The core issue is that I have always had a hard time letting go of my own interest. All too often, the thought process has been simply:
“This is interesting to me, therefore I shall sell it, and people will buy it.”
Instead the thought process should be:
“This is something people need and want that I find interesting, therefore I’ll make things to address those needs, some of which I might be able to sell at some point.”
You can’t find the cross-section between your interests and the audience’s needs unless you put in the work of researching the audience’s needs in the first place.
I did that research for Out of the Software Crisis and The Intelligence Illusion – audience research, problem discovery, and the like were instrumental in shaping the books, but those are also the only two times I actually did the work. I’m good at researching problems, but audience research not so much.
The embarrassing part is that this is not the first time I’ve noticed that I have this skill gap, but it does feel like the first time I’ve integrated the criticism and let go of my grand ideas for what people should be interested in.
And that’s a start.