14.01.2022

Black and White thinking

As freelancers and consultants nothing is more important than how we think. Much has been written about mental frameworks and while most of these are helpful allow me to suggest an addition.

Perspective

Every action you take, decision you make and word you speak is an expression of what's going on in your head. I believe most people think without thinking. Their perspective on life is one that's naturally evolved from childhood until now.

While this works for some, I've found it helpful to be mindful of certain mental models which are essentially changes in perspective. Years ago I read this illuminating article on the subject: Mental Models - The Best Way To Make Intelligent Decisions.

By nature I'm what you might call a 'Worrier'. When presented with new information my knee jerk reaction is to identity dangers, risks and pitfalls. Untamed, this attitude inhibits action and ironically introduces the risk of losing out on good opportunities.

One of the ways I made this work for me, was to use Probabilistic Thinking and put numbers on the various risk scenarios. Often I would dismiss good actions because they carried an unarticulated 5% risk, but with a slight change in perspective I was able to navigate these situations quicker and more reliably. There's a big difference between saying "There's a risk" and "There's a 5% risk".

Black & White thinking

Black & White Thinking (BWT) is the idea of consciously adjusting the zoom of your mental lens. I've had the pleasure to work with many great CEO's and they all shared a common innate ability to quickly zero in on the most important factors in any decision.

Imagine you're caught in a war zone and need to make a quick escape. The path to your left is rocky and difficult to sprint through. The path on the right is cleaner but goes upwards at a steep angle. Oh, and on the right there's an enemy platoon with guns trained on you.

Intuitively you (hopefully) realize that the quality of the road matters little in relation to the guns aimed in your direction - So you take off to the left.

In business the scenarios we navigate are much more complicated, so we need some mechanism of adjusting our lens to capture only that which impacts the outcome.

Notice how leaders will sometimes zoom out all the way in order to drive home a point:

"The customer is always right"

Obviously, the customer is not always right. But some manager, at some point in time, had enough of explaining to Johnny in Customer Service that he shouldn't be picking fights with customers over dimes, so he zoomed all the way out and made the above statement.

This will work in many situations, but it will also fail in quite a few.

Dial in your priorities

What's the ultimate goal of your freelancing career?

For some it's to build up enough cash to bootstrap a successful business/agency

For some it's the thrill of making it on your own

For some it's a route to the best work/life balance possible

For all of these, the number one resource they need is money/revenue, so in making decisions focusing on the risk/rewards in terms of money is essential to reach some higher goal.

Money famously doesn't grow on trees. They come from customers who see the value in the work that you do. And here we see why Business is such an interesting sport, we have 2 dependencies that are crucial to our success: Customers and Money - So how do we pick one that's most important?

Train of thought

I'm not thinking of a literal train, but:

"The train of thought or track of thought refers to the interconnection in the sequence of ideas expressed during a connected discourse or thought, as well as the sequence itself, especially in discussion how this sequence leads from one idea to another."

A key lesson when working with BWT is avoiding the loss of important nuances. I've found it most helpful to shift focus/M.O in sequence, assigning importance to different details along the way.

First you'll want to speak with some customers - Anyone who's able to pay your invoices are qualified for review. Call them up, send them an email, attend their events, whatever gets the dialog started.

Once you've got your foot in the door, zoom in. It does not matter that they're a million dollar company, a great brand, that their CTO loves you - At least not now. This is the point where our focus shifts from customer acquisition back to Money. All that matters is this: How much are they willing to invest in whatever you're selling.

You could be pitching to Tim Cook at Apple and wasting your time if he's not willing to invest appropriately in your project. If that's the case you would once again need to shift focus, to perhaps building a relationship or getting an introduction to someone else whom you could work with.

A couple of years ago I had a meeting with a very interesting start-up looking to build some very interesting tech. They had investors lined up, the 2-year plan looked smashing. The founder then said "Lau, we want you as a partner, and all the partners here work for free investing their own time". Now as most of you software developers know, accepting that offer at face value would instantly make me the biggest investor, but oddly you couldn't figure that out by looking at the equity distribution. Long story short, these guys introduced me to a network of investors that I've done quite a bit of work. The start-up found a younger developer who was happy to put in 12 months of work for 4%, which after 3 years was worth zero USD, but that's a story for a different post.

Tactical Awareness

Planning or training these scenarios achieve the same result, you start to act in a way which is optimal for any situation - Possibly without even thinking about it.

Here's some potential goals as inspiration

You'll notice once you start planning out these scenarios, that your entire line of thinking changes with the situation, allowing you to quickly zero in on that which is most important to reach your final goal - Whatever that may be.

For many people, this isn't strictly necessary as they either by nature or experience do it naturally. But even for those people the predictability of their actions and total success rate will improve along with their focus, by plotting the path before walking it.

Pitfalls of Black & White thinking

Imagine you're a doctor trying to figure out if a patient has diabetes. If you just look at the patients body, you'll be right perhaps 5% of the time. If you zoom into his blood stream, you'll get maybe 10%. If you zoom further into the molecules you'll get close to 100%. If you zoom further into the atoms, you'll be back at 5%. The changes in perspective include or exclude nuances, your job is to figure out which nuances matter for your outcome.

In my younger years I worked with a lot of sales people. Most of them were highly attuned to their clients emotions, personal affairs, desires, family situation, hobbies etc etc. They used these nuances to achieve a significant level of success.

When I worked in sales, I disregarded all of these nuances. I was specifically opposed to the idea of creating a semblance of friendship when it was mostly a commercial relationship - I only cared about the business objective my client wanted to achieve and how I could help facilitate that. You might think that I stood out like a sore thumb and that the clients preferred the free lunches, the compliments, the feigned interest in their personal affairs, but the opposite turned out to be true. And I did make a few friends, but not as a means to cash a check.

The pitfall here, is that we only have so much focus to give. If you turn it to irrelevant details, you'll miss opportunities that could otherwise have turned into great projects.

I've worked both as a CEO and a solo-developer. In both situations you run the risk of getting caught in the trenches. With tasks piled up on both sides you quickly lose perspective and simply move from one thing to the next. This is extremely dangerous as your success will be left to chance.

Another Pitfall is hero worship, ie. "If Warren Buffet says it, it's got to be right". I've not been able to catch much inspiration from famous entrepreneurs when they talk about their "morning routine" that helps them maintain this high-level perspective. Consider Mark Zuckerberg for instance. He can start the day with 1 hour of Yoga followed by a deep meditation while sipping smoothies and still, during this time, have made more money than you will this year. I like a calm morning as much as the next guy, but I also like being efficient. For Mark, he feels that this is key to his success and if I idolize the guy, I'll think it's my key as well.

The opposite of idolization is also a common pitfall. If you hate Mark Zuckerberg with a passion, you'll probably dismiss everything he says off hand - But humans are complicated with many nuances. Mark (or insert a person you strongly dislike) is intelligent, he makes some good points from time to time. The onus is on you, to take in that information with the correct lens. I willing to bet, that if you take a good look at the political figure you hate the most, you'll find some issues where you agree with him/her.

BWT is a powerful tool to zero on that which matters most. BWT is a dangerous pitfall which blinds you to important details. Both are true.

Go get 'em

I hope this post inspired you to consciously decide which zoom levels are appropriate for the various situations you face as a freelancer and that this will make some prioritization easier and more fruitful.

Happy Freelancing!