How can you have impact when you’re mostly an influence-r, not a do-er?
One option is to be a thoughtful agitator and productively meddle:
And a lot of those people are really fantastic, and it would be a mistake of me to be getting in their way but [I] want to find some way to have some amount of productive meddling. I think similarly for John, I’ve been encouraging him to make sure that we retain sufficient productive meddling on the finance side, because he’s very good at it. Patrick Collison c/o Invest Like the Best
What’s the difference between productive meddling and pointless meddling?
- Productive meddling is high-trust. You probably need a lot of shared trust with the people you are meddling with.
- Productive meddling costs something. It’s probably OK if they sometimes get annoyed at the meddling, but it’s not free.
- Productive meddling has a point. Pointless meddling is unproductive — you should be able to say why you’re meddling if asked, and you should usually share. In general, Choose to communicate more.