Announcing The Knowledge Toolkit
Equipping you with the tools, ideas and frameworks to unlock peak performance
The World has changed…
…and continues to change at an ever-increasing pace.
The internet enabled the rise of the individual; AI has made it inevitable.
From physical work to knowledge work, the World has fundamentally changed over the past century.
The fortunes of yesteryear were built in the Physical World;
the riches of today are being forged in the digital World.
With all the technological tools available, a single individual can now build multi-million dollar businesses that previously required teams and teams of people.
…have you?
Taking advantage of this new World requires embracing new technology and embracing wilful ignorance. It also requires a mastery of self to avoid becoming a slave to the noise.
The journey can be daunting and overwhelming.
Navigating the endless noise to narrow in on the signal is hard.
To take advantage of The Great Reshuffle, you must build your system of navigating the New World.
As Michael Simmons points out, we’re still in the 1800s of knowledge work.
Most knowledge workers are winging it or using a best practice from their specific boss, company, or job rather than using the most scientifically tested approach. People are mired in never-ending meetings, going through endless to-do lists, and constantly responding to emails without measuring their productivity.
You must learn to become more effective at work, avoid distractions, and pursue the highest leverage activities to build the life you want and improve it for everyone around you.
To achieve excellence, you need to adopt, tweak and invent the best practice for you.
Every individual and organization can take the processes, ideas, and mental frameworks built by the giants before us and tweak them for themselves.
In our current state, little attention is given to the daily activities that take up a significant chunk of time daily.
The more you talk to knowledge workers about their work activities, the clearer it becomes that they, and their managers, have devoted almost no thought to this topic. The result? Every organization, often every individual, defines these “atomic-level” universal work activities inadvertently, randomly, and — of course — differently.
— William Heitman, author of Knowledge Work Factory
We have the technology we need to elevate our productivity and effectiveness, but the technology alone does not lead to change on its own.
As Jim O’Shaughnessy highlights in Network Effects, it’s not the technology alone that leads to progress, it is the collective efforts of humans who embrace new technology and push the wheel of progress forward.
That's why I'm starting The Knowledge Toolkit.
We live in a world where more and more value is created by knowledge work, i.e., working with information.
There are over a billion knowledge workers worldwide, yet most don’t spend enough time learning the skills that can help them achieve their full potential.
Knowledge workers need two types of skills to excel at what they do:
Technical skills - like programming, design, engineering, editing, financial analysis, etc.
Meta skills - higher-order skills that help you learn new skills and improve existing ones.
When people think of up-skilling, they generally mean technical skills. A lot of time is spent sharpening these skills, but almost none on the meta-skills - skills like learning to prioritize a deluge of tasks, retaining information, learning to identify and hone in on the highest leverage work for you, and much more.
The best pianists in the world practice scales every day. They practice warm-ups and many variations daily to play the piano better.
What is the equivalent of practicing scales for a knowledge worker?
Are you doing it? Daily?
Over the past decade, I’ve found there are a set of mental tools, ideas, and frameworks that anyone can use to operate at their highest potential.
Every week I will share these ideas and frameworks that will help you unlock peak performance at work and in your life.
Here’s one that I recommend starting with:
