Month: September 2019

Employees hunt (or are head-hunted) for jobs. Periodically. Every 4 years on average in the United States.

Entrepreneurs launch things. Serially. Winning big enough to stop, with your first startup, is very rare, as is stopping after your first success or failure.

Gigworkers? We leap into opportunity spaces. Not just once, but repeatedly. In the most extreme case, every new gig is a leap, and since you ideally have many gigs going in parallel, you are always leaping on some track. Sounds exhausting? It can be. But it need not be. And on the plus side, it can be exhilarating.

The first leap is special though, both in terms of significance in your life story, and in terms of the extra preparation it takes. I’m going to do a short series (3-4 posts perhaps) on taking a first leap into gigwork, and retaining the goat-like leapiness indefinitely. It is primarily targeted at those of you who are either planning to make that first leap, or have already jumped and are failing at it.

For those of you who have already made your first leap, this series should help improve your leaping habit, as you eye leap n+1, and also help you reflect more clearly on past leaps.

Leaping takes a very different kind of preparation than job-hunting or startup-launching, but it does have one thing in common with those other two kinds of starts/restarts: it takes more scripting and preparation than you might think.

Most people under-prepare for job-hunting or startup-launching, but they tend to wildly under-prepare for the gig-economy.

Why?

Because a gig economy has no default, ceremonial starting point. No initial focus of attention to get you started.

To prepare for a job search, you update your resume, search job sites, and let your friends know you are looking.

To prepare for a startup launch, you brainstorm ideas, make prototypes and prepare pitch decks.

Even if these activities aren’t quite the right things to be doing, they do get you thinking about preparedness, and you might bootstrap from those formulaic behviors to more imaginative preparations that work better.

But there’s no such obvious ceremonial starting point for scripting a leap into the gig economy. Only a joke one — getting business cards.

Well, actually, there is one real starting point: getting and staying married to someone with a job, who is willing to support your risk-taking and backstop your first leap with their own stability (and you might have to reciprocate in the future if you want to be a gigworking couple).

But this is obviously not a decision you should make solely to hedge against the risks of leaping into the gig economy.

Also, three factors are making marriage less of a hedge against gig-economy risks.

First, jobs are turning equally if not more risky.

Second, there is a much higher chance than you might think of both of you wanting to make a move at the same time, often triggered by parallel behaviors like moving to a new city. In my case for instance, my wife quit her job and took a new one right around when I took my first leap, and we moved to a new city.

Third, more and more people are making their first leaps into the gig economy very young, long before they consider getting married. I made my first leap at age 37, nearly 6 years after I got married, after 15 years in the paycheck world. Many gig-economy aspirants I meet this days seem to be leaping in right after college or high-school, and at least a decade before they are likely to get married.

So bottomline, most people never script their first leap at all. So their unprepared leaps turn fatal (too often, literally).

This happens via three mistakes.

Three Mistakes and a Funeral

The biggest mistake you can make in launching a gig economy career is to think it is pure improvisation. Movies and TV shows encourage this misconception by portraying characters who quit in a huff at some last straw, some final unbearable assault on their dignity or values, and just make it work somehow. Think Jerry Maguire or Michael Scott in The Office declaring, “You have no idea how high I can fly!”

The second biggest mistake you can make is thinking the kind of scripting that works for either job-searching will also leave you prepared for the gig economy as a sort of bonus. After all, a gig economy is just a series of temporary jobs or a sort of I-am-the-product startup, right? Wrong.

The third biggest mistake you can make is to treat preparation for the gig economy as some sort of natural and pre-defined Plan B you automatically land in if you fail at the the other two. As though nature has very kindly arranged the gig economy as a sort of backup safety net. This idea has become just kinda-sorta-true enough (thanks to Uber and Lyft in particular) that it is the worst mistake of all, since it can tempt you into downwardly mobile trajectories.

Most people manage to make all three mistakes at once, and as a result, don’t so much leap into a gig career as crash unceremoniously into one, against their will, having been kicked out from a job or other seemingly safe-space situation (a job or other support system they thought was more secure than it was), with nowhere near enough logistical or psychological preparation.

How do you think that turns out? The leap turns into a crash.

Anatomy of a Crash

Crash-landers almost never make it well enough to last. They limp along just long enough, physically and psychologically battered, to either get back into a job (often a worse job taken out of desperation), or find a stable but unhappy situation as a dependent (via reluctant parents or a resentful spouse).

And many never make it at all. Unplanned crashes into the gig economy can go so badly, suicide is unfortunately a way out that many choose. It is a particularly severe risk for men.

If they survive and crawl back into the job economy, from the vantage point of failure, they help amplify the unfounded rumor that the gig economy is some sort of utterly unpredictable and precarious Hobbesian wilderness where you have to be some sort of lucky, unprincipled, mercenary hustler-barbarian to survive.

This is just plain false. With the right preparation, the gig economy is no more risky or uncivilized a place to be than the modern paycheck economy, or the entrepreneurial economy. The risks are just differently distributed, require different patterns of preparation prior to the first leap, and different ongoing risk-management behaviors.

There are two broad subsets of preparation required: inner and outer, which I’ll cover in the next two posts.

I tweet a daily consulting tip on the @artofgig twitter account and compile them every couple of weeks here as a newsletter issue.

Here are tips 76-90

Consulting Tip #76: Be liberal in the media you accept as input, and conservative in the media you select for output. You should be willing and able to process everything from screenshots of whiteboards to spreadsheets as input, but limit your output to 1-2 core media.

Consulting Tip #77: Include useful links inline, appropriately linked, in emails. As a consultant, LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You) is a part of being effective.

Consulting Tip #78: Be conservative in who you cc on emails, especially when communicating with senior executives. Even an innocuous seeming cc may have chain-of-command implications, be seen as second-guessing someone, or undermine someone’s authority.

Consulting Tip #79: Ambitious careerists may see other people’s consultants, especially those supporting senior executives, as “access hacks” and try to tempt them into influence-peddling games. Gently but firmly discourage all such attempts by making your own boundaries clear.

Consulting Tip #80: Understand in what way you constitute a “secret weapon” for your client and either play that role to the hilt (heh!) or refuse to play it absolutely. Don’t half-ass the role you’re cast in.

Consulting Tip #81: Clients may invite you to internal events with a ceremonial/sacred aspect, such as awards ceremonies or celebration dinners, to be polite. But unless you sense they really mean it, you should decline by default.

Consulting Tip #82: Good organizations, especially small teams/workgroups, tend to foster an atmosphere of intimacy and trust internally, like a family. As an outsider, be sensitive to their “family time” needs and back off if you sense you are intruding.

Consulting Tip #83: Do not accept gifts from clients that are either too personal or too expensive. If it looks like role-appropriate schwag relative to internal peers, you’re fine. Anything beyond that might mess with expectations/trust in subtle ways you probably don’t want.

Consulting Tip #84: Watch for signs of transference. Indie consulting is similar enough to therapy that you may attract inappropriate attachments from clients. You are not a parent, spouse, or best friend. You are a professional associate and service provider first.

Consulting Tip #85: Understand the seasons of the sectors you serve, but make your own seasons. Do not take notions like “planning cycle” or “sales cycle” too seriously. They are for large organizations acting at scale, not individual free-agent operators.

Consulting Tip #86: Learn to operate inside the decision cycle (OODA loop) of the client, but like an attentive waiter or parent who can anticipate needs before the subject becomes aware of them, not as an adversary.

Consulting Tip #87: When engaging a individual of interest within an organization, take note of the dissonance between their operating tempo and that of the organization: are they going with the flow, overtaking, pace-setting, or pace-disrupting?

Consulting Tip #88: Learn about the real history of an organization before attempting to understand its current state. Organizations have a tendency to present a timeless, ahistorical view of themselves that obfuscates unique traits under non-informative hagiography.

Consulting Tip #89: When designing and delivering workshops, decide upfront whether you’re preparing an intervention for a specific situation or a performance of general interest. The two require incompatible strategies and trying to do both usually backfires.

Consulting Tip #90: When developing a repeatable workshop offering, use a sufficiently modular structure so you can customize it, and build in enough interaction so it is self-personalizing to context.

Here is Compilation #5 (60-75) if you want to backtrack and catch up.

If you’re active on twitter, and want to join the conversation there, follow @artofgig, introduce yourself via a reply to this pinned tweet, and follow some of your fellow subscribers on this list.

Individual gig work is in a negatively defined lifestyle. You don’t want either the constraints of traditional employment, or the responsibilities that come with growth beyond individual scale as a small business or startup. These are both types of freedom, and there are consequences to choosing them that show up as constraints elsewhere in your working life. The freedom of gig-work comes with a price-tag.

You know best what choices you’ve made/are making/plan to make, but let me help you see the consequences of those choices.

Choices

First, consider this pick-2-of-3 triangle. For the moment, trust me that as a gig worker, you have to choose 2 of 3 and can’t have all 3. Identify your current choice. Don’t peek ahead.

It may be easier to think about what you’re currently most willing to give up.

Done? You didn’t peek ahead?

Okay. Consequences.

Consequences

Look at the side defined by your 2 choices (opposite the vertex you sacrificed). Those are the consequences you can expect, within about a year or so.

When you give up integrity of methods (in terms of skilled discipline and/or ethics) you break the feedback loop of mindful practice and growth that keeps your cognitive abilities and procedural-ethical judgments strong and growing. So you experience cognitive decline.

When you give up standard of living, you experience chronic anxiety, but this is of a subtle variety. The thing is, the anxiety is not caused by decline in standard of living itself, but social factors. You cannot keep up the class lifestyle expected of someone doing the things you are doing. And family and friends are often the biggest source of this anxiety because you care about them and they care about you. This dissonance between how you work, and how you must live to conform to the expectations of your milieu, creates chronic anxiety and increasing financial worry.

When you give up autonomy of goals (ie cede agency over deciding what’s worth doing/caring about and why) you can generally expect to get a lot more work. There is always a lot of demand for people who will do what they’re told within a sharply bounded scope, no questions asked. And you will tend to take the work, because you will start to measure your life by the numbers that get driven up by sheer quantity of work — dollars, fawning testimonials, awards. And you will find yourself getting overworked and exhausted. Again there’s a subtlety. It’s not the work itself that exhausts you, but the fact that you have to do it to a professional standard while studiously not caring (or pretending not to care) about why you’re doing it and for whom. Suspending the need for meaningfulness is exhausting!

But wait, there’s more! We’re not done yet! Not only are there consequences to your choices, there are natural compensatory behaviors that kick in, almost unconsciously.

Natural Patterns of Compensation

Yup. You may not realize what your getting yourself into until much later, but your subconscious tends to catch on and start doing its thing. Look at the next phrase on your side of the triangle to predict what it will do.

• You will compensate for cognitive decline by seeking out skilled hobbies and interests. Narrow paths of personal accomplishment where you can get a feedback loop of strengthening high-integrity behaviors going. This temporarily relieves the sense of decline (like scratching an itch) and restores confidence, but without addressing the root cause.

• You will compensate for chronic social anxiety by investing increasing energy into premium mediocrity (looking more successful than you actually are). Again, this temporarily relieves the social pressure and anxiety symptoms without addressing the root cause.

• You will compensate for overwork and exhaustion with hedonistic excess. The finest wines! The finest clothes! The best business cards! Giving up on the search for meaning displaces those instincts to peripheral consumption tastes and pleasure orientation. Again, this only temporarily relieves the growing lack of meaning and sense of a void at the core of your work, without addressing the root cause.

We’re still not done! When you give in to natural, subconscious compensatory impulses for too long, leaving root causes unaddressed, you will naturally get to a point where that spells a particular ugly end for you. So here’s how your story ends down each of the 3 paths, if you don’t do something to alter course.

Endgames

• If you neglect integrity of methods for long enough, you will end up irrelevant and ridiculed as a faddish joke from another era, and eventually forgotten.

• If you neglect standard of living for long enough, you will descend into shameful poverty as you eventually fail to keep up even premium mediocre appearances.

• If you neglect autonomy of goals for long enough, your fate is descent into corruption and moral decay, as you gradually lose your moral compass and make increasingly terrible decisions. Each questionable decision will make the next one easier.

So that’s what’s in store for you down each of the pick-two-of-three paths.

Grim, huh?

Yes, but you can fix it, in one of three ways.

The Fix!

First, you can always increase your ambition level, and grow beyond individual gig-work. Of course, you’ll end up with different tradeoffs and constraints to navigate, but maybe that’s the challenge you want next.

Second, you can always try to go back to the world of traditional jobs if you can, and accept the constraints there. A good job will usually offer all three. But you know the price-tag that comes with that, otherwise you wouldn’t be subscribed to this list. But sometimes, that price tag can become acceptable when life circumstances change.

But third: if you want to stay in the gig economy, you can hack the triangle!

Yes you have to pick 2 of 3, but you don’t have to make the same choices in all situations and at all times. You can rotate through them in various creative ways! This creates a much more unstable lifestyle, but it allows you to address the root causes of the pathologies that lie in wait down each pure path. It’s like keeping a set of spinning plates spinning by darting among them.

There are 3 basic ways to do this.

1. Gig-division multiplexing (GDM): Have multiple parallel gigs going, where you pick a different 2/3 in each. This may take a while to spin up since in the early days, you may be in wing-and-prayer serial-monogamy gig mode.

2. Time-division multiplexing (TDM): Depending on circumstances and what constraints are tight or loose at any given time, pick a different 2/3. If you are flush from neglecting goal autonomy last quarter, ease off on the money-making and take a meaningful lower-priced or pro-bono gig (I recommend lower-priced/smaller over pro-bono; pro-bono work comes with its own baggage that needs careful handling).

3. Activity-division multiplexing (ADM): Every gig is multiple strands of interwoven activity. You don’t have to make the same 2/3 choices in all strands. For example, you can compromise on integrity of methods on presentation and packaging while sticking rigorously to your methods in the backend analysis and thinking work for example. There will nearly always be ways to make such factorizations.

(These are roughly analogous to FDMA, TDMA, and CDMA multiplexing strategies in communications engineering).

So there you go. Make your choices. Accept the consequences in the short term, but resist them in the long term. Make new choices when and where you can in order to avoid degenerating.

That’s the price of freedom: you have to stay mindful of the consequences of your choices, and change them as necessary, across the duration and scope of your career, at varying resolutions.

Freedom is for live players. If you act dead, you will eventually die for real.

Into the Yakverse Index

Gig work is seasonal, but not in the way nature or traditional trade and businesses sectors are seasonal. One of the most powerful aspects of gig work is that it gives you as much agency over your own time as you are capable of imagining and exercising (something the lawmakers in California seem intent on destroying, given the recent passage of AB 5).

Rather than being at the mercy of the natural or business seasons that govern your environment, you make your own seasons. And to help you do that, I want to introduce you to an ancient and powerful personal future divination tool, used by gig workers for centuries, called the Yak Zodiac (sometimes informally written as zodiyak).

Like the regular zodiac, the Yak Zodiac has 12 signs, but unlike the regular zodiac, it has no fixed temporal order, and no fixed mapping to constellations or the astronomical calendar. The signs also do not map to a fixed duration: depending on context, they might map to a minute, a month, or a year. Finally, each can appear more than once in a temporal narrative sequence.

The Yak Zodiac is a tool to help you make up your own calendar, marking your own seasons, with great control over sequence, duration, and repetition. There are rules, but they are not the familiar, rigid astrological ones, derived from the movements of stars and planets (or stock markets and fads). Instead they are in the form of a large variety of rule sets drawn from a rich tradition of divination games, much of which has sadly been lost.

The tradition represents a history of grappling with an insight that ancients stumbled upon that is increasingly relevant today: not only can you make up your own seasons, you must make your own seasons. Otherwise you succumb to the dreadful malaise of independent consulting: atemporality.

Where it’s never the beginning or end of anything for you (even if it is for your clients).

Where despite all the craziness, ups and downs, and cash-flow volatility, somehow, mysteriously, yesterday always looks like tomorrow.

Where it’s always Mild Panic Midseason.

Shakespeare knew all about atemporality:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. 

Curiously, these words are spoken by Macbeth, upon the death of his consultant-wife by suicide (unlike me, Lady Macbeth was totally evil rather than slightly evil, so let that be a warning to you, in case you are tempted by the Dark Side of the art of gig)

If you can’t stomach Shakespeare, atemporality for the gig worker is like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland. It’s always teatime. It’s always 4 PM. And you’re always just going around a table piled with dirty dishes with friends as trapped in atemporality as you.

To break out of atemporality and take control of your life, while acknowledging and accommodating the forces that are beyond your control, you need to make your own seasons.

You need to make your own time. You need the Yak Zodiac.

History and Origins

Though much of the esoteric knowledge associated with the Yak Zodiac has sadly been lost, I have been able to reconstruct enough of it through my research to start practicing divination with it.

As I explained in The Secret History of Consulting: 1, the ancient roots of the consulting world lie in astrology, and it appears that somewhere along the way, ancient consultants decided they needed a tool that allowed them to invent the future rather than merely reveal it. The Yak Zodiac first appears (though not in its mature form) in various places along the Silk Road in the 6th century BC. Curiously, there is evidence that though the system was neither a secret, nor restricted to any group, it was rarely used by consultants on behalf of clients. Clients, it seemed, preferred the dismal certainties of the traditional zodiac over the unsettling agency of the Yak Zodiac.

The picture above is a photograph (excuse the poor quality) of a set of 12th century Yak Zodiac terracotta seals from Central Asia, owned by a friend of mine, a private collector and retired consultant in Zurich, who prefers to remain anonymous.

It is one of the last surviving complete sets, but apparently, at one time, most consultants working along the Silk Road carried a set in a small pouch (usually containing multiples of each tile), and played a variety of divination games with them, both alone and with each other, and on rare occasions, with clients.

I’ll share what I’ve been able to reconstruct of a few beginner games in a minute, but let me introduce the 12 signs first.

The Anchor

By one theory, our modern term “anchor client” can actually be traced to the Yak Zodiac symbol of the Anchor. In the ancient Near East, it was generally taken to symbolize a period of safe and reliable, but transient and fragile, refuge. A period governed by the anchor was a period of respite from the more extreme vagaries of consulting life.

The Zither

The zither, a common musical instrument across Asia and Europe, symbolized a period of poeisis, where you could expect to find the beauty in whatever you were up to. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret the zither as a sign of relaxation, leisure, and calm. The zither portends strains of beauty and poetry, and meaning-making, but does not promise freedom from risk or emotional repose.

The Four Moons

This is one of the most important tiles. The Four Moons, as best as we can reconstruct today, was the ancient equivalent of the modern indie consulting time zone, familiar to all of us, known as Waiting for Invoice Payment. A period marked by delayed fulfillment of expectations, and growing risk of non-payment, where you can neither easily move on, nor usefully act to change things. It is curious that four moons — about 120 days given a lunar month of 29.5 days — has remained the modern standard for “okay now it’s really late,” since large corporate invoices are often 90 days. So if you’ve been waiting 4 moons, it’s probably late on a big invoice and you’re in trouble. Though it generally marks a period of growing helplessness, it can also be interpreted as a period of development of strength, patience, resilience, resourcefulness, and other stoic virtues. A Four Moons period that does not kill you only makes you stronger.

The Bricks

The Bricks, of course, symbolize a period of building, consolidation, and accumulation of permanence and durability, often during a period of surplus time and/or money. In the volatile seas of free agency, periods when you can work on adding to an enduring core to your life are rare, and you must make the most of them. In many divination games, the Bricks tile is the only one to be assigned a fixed calendar position (often the month of August), since they have a tendency to line up with the slow seasons of the client sector being served.

The Oasis

The Oasis represents a nourishing, relaxing, and sociable break in what can otherwise be a struggle for survival in a hostile, endless desert of scarce resources. But beware — one cannot stay at an Oasis for ever! You must move on. The Oasis often represents a longer-than-normal gig with lots of room for creativity and relatively few constraints from the generous client or benefactor. Make the most of Oasis periods, but do not let yourself get lazy or too comfortable! I happen to be in an extended Oasis gig myself right now.

The Rain

The Rain is one motif that has retained its ancient symbolism. Today, we often refer to bringing in gigs or leads as rain-making. In the Yak Zodiac, the Rain can signify either a period of natural rain (ie unearned abundance), or a period or rainmaking, which may or may not actually work. A common beginner mistake in using the Rain tile is to assume it predicts rain, and trying to tell optimistic, fragile, and high-risk stories around them. While it certainly can be used to lay out best-case scenario forecasts, beware of the dark side of the Rain.

The Goat

The Goat of course, is a familiar animal across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southern Europe. Do not confuse it with Aries, the Ram, in the traditional zodiac. In the Yak Zodiac, the Goat represents a period of sure-footed exploration, unusual adventures in rugged new terrain, and of course, high-risk/high-return conditions. In mythology, the goat is often a symbol of the devil, or a trickster, and some of those connotations are also present in the Yak Zodiac, where it can represent clever hacks and arbitrage plays. It is also often a sacrificial animal, so the Goat can represent mortality risk (which in modern times can be interpreted as falling out of the gig economy and back into paycheck land).

The Crow

The Crow in the Yak Zodiac represents public appearance and performance. Think speaking at conferences or corporate retreats, appearing on podcasts, being interviewed, going to meetups, and so on. Though in many religions, the crow is a dark omen, in the Yak Zodiac, it actually represents light and civilization. Since the mature form of the system was developed in nomadic regions, where crows were generally encountered in cities, especially in public squares, they came to be associated with cities and other developed and settled environments. The dark side of the Crow is arrogance, posturing, premium mediocrity, and general desperate scenestering.

The Null

The Null is an interesting symbol that may have displaced an older symbol during the period when the concept of the zero made its way from India to Europe. It plays in Yak Zodiac divination a role similar to that of the zero in arithmetic, or the joker in a deck of cards. It does not necessarily represent nothingness or emptiness however. It can also represent extreme chaos. During the Crusades, it was often interpreted as the sign of war and strife, and a cue to get the hell out of Dodge. In many Yak Zodiac games, it appears as a punctuation symbol: a story must end once a Null tile is added. So it can often be used to cut divination sequences short, and thereby symbolize the future getting murky, foreshortened, and impenetrable.

The Lamp

The Lamp is perhaps the most ambiguous symbols in the Yak Zodiac, with its meaning varying wildly by context, the type of game being played, and situational factors. It can represent the obvious things — an idea, enlightenment, searching in the darkness, leading the way. But it can also represent death and resurrection (think of it as a pilot light). In the grammar of many divination games, the Lamp often follows the Null, in which case, the sequence usually represents a regenerative period. In modern conditions, it might represent reinventing yourself. A sequence that goes Oasis-Rain-Null-Lamp is sometimes called an Elevation, and forecasts a leveling-up of your gig art through a period of either crisis or opportunity.

The Rat

The symbolism of the Yak Zodiac is often the exact opposite of traditional symbolism. Where rats are often symbols of disease and pestilence in other mythologies, in the Yak Zodiac, it is one of the most beloved symbols. It represents a determined, cautious period of doing what must be done, scurrying through sewers or over rooftops, often dealing with unpleasant situations, encountering risks with big downsides like a health emergency, but (unlike the Goat) no upside. The Rat is something like a symbol of stoicism, but it also represents domesticity, healing, self-compassion, working on backend things like invoicing and taxes, self-care, and mental health. Ignore the Rat at your peril. In games, an opponent might challenge a sequence with no Rat with psychological stressors.

The Yak

The Yak, after which the Yak Zodiac is named, and which lends its name to the Order of the Yak (the ancient consulting secret society which we’ve encountered a few times already), represents wholeness, uniqueness, contemplation, and perspective. It also represents arbitrariness, stubbornness, and grit, and is often associated with periods of imaginative personal growth. In modern conditions, a Yak period is a good time to work on your personal branding and positioning.

Though the history is unclear, it appears that the Yak Zodiac was already in use before the Order of the Yak was founded, and that many of the founding members of the order were in fact well-known astrologers. I’m still digging through my research here, but it appears that in divination games, the Yak represented the opposite of the Null; a fullness of substance, self-awareness, self-actualization, and self-definition. But it also representing risks of self-certainty, self-importance, egotism, pompousness, and blindspots.

Basic Divination Games

Here are a few of the basic divination games I’ve been able to reconstruct from the sparse historical records I’ve found so far.

• Three Paths is a basic beginner solitaire game played on New Year’s eve. You simply take 12 seals out of a bag, one by one, blind, and arrange them in a line. A narrative woven around the sequence would then constitute a forecast for the year ahead. You repeat this process 3 times, and then pick the best story as the one to try and make true. When played with other consultants around a campfire, they try to challenge your stories and choices.

• Your Stack, My Story is a two-player game, where one player arranges a set of 12 tiles in a stack, and the other player forecasts the year ahead for the stacker, constructing a forecast one tile at a time, and extrapolating it as each new tile is revealed.

• The Angry Yak: Another two-player game, where one player has a set of all tiles except the Yak tile face up in front of them. The Yak tile is placed in front of the other player. Both take turns improvising a story. The player developing the sequence plays themselves, the person the forecast is for. The other player takes on the role of the Angry Yak, and aims to disrupt the story the first player is trying to develop at every move, basically playing a hostile environment. This game was apparently an ancestor to the modern technique known as worst-case scenario planning.

• Your Trees, My Forest: Another two-player game, where one player silently lays out a sequence of tiles representing the events of the past year, and the other player narrates the story as it is laid out. It is a gentler, more reflective version of the Angry Yak game, focused on reflection, growth and learning.

Using the Yak Zodiac

I’ll be sharing more about the Yak Zodiac in this newsletter, as my historical research proceeds, and perhaps developing a kit for it. Since this is ancient traditional knowledge, it is in the public domain. So you are welcome to make your own sets and start practicing divination by yourself or with your friends. In fact I encourage you to do so. For too long, this interesting store of esoteric consulting lore has been the preserve of secret societies and private collectors. It is time to democratize and open-source it.

If you’d like to experiment, you can print out the image on the top (or the individual images), and glue them to cardboard tiles. Or you can just write the names of the 12 signs on pieces of paper, and fold them.

Traditionally, the divination kit consisted simply of a small bag with several of each tile. There appear to have been various versions, but one I’ve been able to reconstruct fully and try out is the Persian Style Yak Zodiac kit, which was popular around the 8th century. It had the following numbers of tiles.

• Anchor: 2 tiles

• Zither: 1 tile

• Four Moons: 3 tiles

• Bricks: 1 tile

• Oasis: 2 tiles

• Rain: 1 tile

• Goat: 1 tile

• Crow: 2 tiles

• Null: 4 tiles

• Lamp: 1 tile

• Rat: 3 tiles

• Yak: 1 tile

The research is slow-going, since few relevant materials and artifacts survive, and most are in the hands of private collectors, secretive modern organizations that trace their lineage to the Order of the Yak, and most importantly, in the oral traditions passed on from consultant to consultant.

One of my projects is to restore this heritage, so if you’ve encountered the Yak Zodiac before, and know of any ancient divination games that can be played with it, do let me know. Hopefully, we’ll soon have ourselves a reconstructed and resurrected tradition of Yak Zodiac divination.

Into the Yakverse Index

We’re now 4 months into the Art of Gig, and this is my 25th newsletter. I am finally beginning to get a sense of what I’m doing here, so I am ready to start pretending this is what I was planning all along.

As we switch gears from summer mode to fall mode (indie consulting is a game with strong seasonality to it), it is time for me to do a proper guided tour of the ground we’ve covered so far, so you can see and navigate the bigger picture taking shape, and get a sense of my cunning plan to catalyze a Brave New Age of Gigwork.

The key to both is this maslowesque hierarchy of needs diagram.

Towards a Full-Stack Conversation

The current larger conversation about the gig economy is almost entirely — to the tune of 90% — bogged down in the two bottom layers of this pyramid, narrowly concerned with questions of lead conversion rates and financial survival, and a < 2 year strategy horizon. By contrast, the corresponding conversations about regular careers, or startup entrepreneurship, are much more mature and full-stack, covering the entire equivalent pyramids, and lifespan-length horizons.

When I started out in 2011, there was little to no useful advice out there on how to actually go about crafting a satisfying and meaningful life out of internet-enabled gigwork. Much of what I read amounted to religious ranting about the moral superiority of free agency, cargo cult “systems”, uncritical dogmas about the superiority of “value-added” consulting, ethically dubious arbitrage games, and most worryingly, widespread predatory contempt towards clients (paradoxically alloyed with whining victimhood).

And of course, lots of exhortations to aggressively chase leads, spray-and-pray pitches at potential clients, and generally be an obnoxious, glad-handing hustler 24×7. The gig economy is not immune to hustleporn.

Much of what I read was actually lazy ports of how-to wisdom from two sources: entrepreneurship and sales. Almost all of it was useless because indie consulting and gigwork are not like either of those activities. The superficial base-layer similarities — necessary reliance on a conversion funnel, and precarious cash flow — leads people to ignore deeper and more consequential differences.

I decided very early on — like a couple of months in — that if success and survival in the gig economy meant exhausting zombie hustling and soulless grinding, I didn’t want it. So I decided to figure out my own playbook. I’m now 8 years, 1000s of hours, and dozens of clients into running that playbook, so I think I can say with some confidence that the Art of Gig playbook I’m slowly laying out in these newsletters has been validated at least at an n=1 level.

With 25 issues worth of hindsight, my goal with this newsletter has been to try and level up the conversation around gig work into a full-stack conversation, where people like you and me are talking about all levels, rather than just the bottom levels. So here is a tour of the newsletter issues so far, sorted by level.

Leads and Deals Level

The newbie leads-and-deals level of indie consulting is, in my opinion, best tackled by diving right into the deep end with just a vague idea of what you’re going to do, and a few months worth of savings to live off while you figure it out. What you’re solving for at this level is simply leads and (closed) deals, and bringing in the money by any means necessary.

But it’s a mistake to try and work that problem directly, by playing it like a formulaic numbers game the way sales people sometimes do. It may work in the short term, but it’s a recipe for very quick burnout. As with any kind of gambling, be wary of people selling you “systems” that are “guaranteed” to deliver a certain return rate in conversions and closed deals.

No “system” to enter indie consulting survives first contact with a No! from a potential client, or the first bout of cash-flow panic. So it’s best to just dive right in. Just focus on making money any way you can, and acquiring a broadly useful situation awareness of how the game is played. You can worry about theorizing your model later.

The consulting tips I tweet from the @artofgig account, and compile here, are a good place to start, as are “grown-up” discussions with experienced consultants (as opposed to patronizing baby-talk discussions). Don’t worry if they seem either irrelevant or like very distant concerns. My goal at this level is to help you develop a big-picture awareness, via aphoristic exposure, of full-stack consulting lore and wisdom. Drawn not just from my own experiences, but from those of people who I think are doing it right.

1. Consulting Tips Compilation: 1 (public)

2. Consulting Tips Compilation #2 (public)

3. Consulting Tips Compilation #3 (public)

4. Consulting Tips Compilation #4 (public)

5. Consulting Tips Compilation #5 (public)

6. 42 Great Imperatives (public): A list of 42 principles at all levels from newbie to experienced, dropping you off the deep end for situation awareness.

7. Discussion: Gig Economy Forecast: A discussion thread of current trends in indie consulting, based on a 2×2 prompt classifying trends into sectoral, global, management, and creative-destructive.

Free Cash Flow Level

If you get stuck in the leads-and-deals level, you probably won’t last longer than 6 months. Even if your funnel is converting well, and generating enough income to live on. Unless you leave that base layer within about 6 months, you will experience burnout due to the sheer joylessness of the grind of that level of the game. To get to the next level you need to focus on free cash flow.

As an indie consultant, you are primarily an investor in yourself, and the best principle for making this investment is the venture-capital principle of cash and control. The more you have a strong, liquid cash position, and control over your life, the easier it becomes to be strategic and rational about pricing your services right and saying yes or no to gigs based on considerations other than rent-panic levels.

At this level, you’re basically learning to just run your indie consulting life as a business, and acquire and refine basic instincts around pricing, supply and demand for your services, and negotiations, all driven by an understanding of your own needs, lifestyle costs, and operating margins.

Here are 3 posts where I’ve explored aspects of this.

1. Knowing Which Nut to Tighten: Consulting, the principal-agent problem, how the knowledge economy shapes gig work, and how companies manage the risks of working with consultants.

2. When is a Gig an Engagement? (public): The difference between contractors and consultants, why it is valuable to be perceived as the latter, and how haggling over prices affects that perception. Plus an exploration of transactional, quasi-social, and intimate zones of gig-work.

3. Making it Interesting: An exploration of how to keep gig work interesting, using the price to partner, raise to risk approach to pricing your services, and resisting the temptation to price yourself too high or too low to attract interesting work. All explored in conversation over a cup of coffee with Bernie Anscombe of the Anscombe consulting clan.

Learning Flywheel Level

If you get stuck at the free-cash flow level, and never get beyond solving for maximum money with minimum time investment, and maximal cash-and-control — this is the basic flaw of the 4-hour-workweek libertarian fuck-you-money approach — you will burn out in about 2 years. To last longer, you have to discover who you are, by doubling down on things you like to learn, while working on gigs.

It’s a bad mistake to separate your learning interests from your working interests. That’s a recipe for eventually hating your work, thinking of it as just a way to pay the bills and fund your fun, and an activity that you’d rather make “passive” and get yourself out of. It rarely works.

In other words, once you have a robust dealflow going, and enough cash and control to actually be able to run your indie consulting life as a sustainable business in non-panic mode, you can start saying yes and no more thoughtfully to opportunities, and start spinning up your unique learning flywheel within your gigwork.

At the learning flywheel level, you should strive to say yes to gigs where you’ll learn more of what you want to learn, and no to gigs where you won’t.

It’s as simple as that.

And it’s the opposite of passive income. This is as active as income gets. You’re not looking for shortcuts. You’re looking to make the long way the fun way.

Why? Because at this point, you are solving the problem of figuring out who you are. This is effectively indistinguishable from what you’re learning the fastest, which in turn is almost entirely a function of what behaviors you are repeating most frequently and enjoying in your gigs. In other words, iteration rate of mindful deliberate practice.

Finding and staying in the maximal iteration/learning rate zone of what you enjoy is a pretty subtle challenge. It took me nearly 3 years to figure out that it was “conversational sparring” for me. You have to scope your gigs right, have lots of the right kind of conversation, and be very productive in the right kind of deliverable medium.

Here are some posts exploring these matters.

1. Maneuvers vs. Melees (public): An application of the military concepts of maneuvering versus melee warfare to consulting, mapping sales and finance functions to the latter, and everything else to the former, and a discussion of how and why this matters in indie consulting. This issue featured the return of Arnie Anscombe.

2. The 12 Eigenconversations: An exploration of the 12 basic types of conversations you can have in consulting work. The post introduces my elusive and shadowy older brother Mycroft Rao, who I turn to when I’m stuck. Also featuring Arnie Anscombe.

3. The Shtickbox Affair: The dangers of building your consulting life around shticks, both to you as an indie consultant, and to your clients. Explored via a mysterious case featuring Agent Jopp of the FBI G-Crimes division and my frenemy Guanxi Gao.

4. The Medium is the Client: An application of the “medium is the message” principle to consulting work, and how the medium of delivery for your services strongly shapes how you and your clients perceive each other, and how it can affect the structure of mutual expectations and compensation. All explored through the lens of a mystery featuring a corpse, 4 consultant suspects, and Agent Lestrode of the FBI G-Crimes division.

5. Elements of Consulting Style (public): A discussion of 4 basic styles of consulting: Explorer, Integrator, Tester, Achiever, using a 2×2 framework of inner versus outer, confidence versus doubt.

Value Theory Level

Believe it or not — and this is heresy to doerists — a life of pure learning and new personal records is not satisfying. If you get stuck at the learning level, you will burn out in about 3 years, or about as long as the average consulting shtick lasts before people get tired of it. To survive longer, you have to explore how you create value for others.

Once you have a sense of confidence in who you are, through success in your learning efforts and a stably spinning flywheel, you can start to expand your horizons. You can look at your role in the world of work critically, and ask what am I doing here in a relatively disinterested way, without being insecurely attached to your hard-won skills.

When you’ve bootstrapped this level of mindful ongoing interrogation of your working life, you will be able to more readily see the world from the point of view of your clients, critically interrogate your own evolving identity, and become aware of your blindspots, rationalizations, and limiting self-perceptions.

It is necessary to have established this ongoing interrogative process, as a set of habits, before you can ask meaningfully the question how do I actually create or add value? If you ask it too early, you will only find ritualistic, self-serving answers.

1. Response Regimes in Indie Consulting (public): An exploration of how consultants help organizations generate non-routine responses to situations, via a 2×2 risk-versus-urgency model of 4 response regimes: strategy, first-response, preventive care, and surge capacity. As a bonus, crossing this with the 2×2 model in Elements of Consulting Style, we get a schema of 16 styles of consulting.

2. You Are Not a Scientist: A brief exploration of the dangers of imagining that the work you do is “scientific”, and an exploration of 4 modes of consulting knowledge: simulation, fiction, thick description, and science. On a 2×2 of course!

3. Always Be Strategizing: The importance of making sure whatever you do has strategic relevance, and developing a sixth sense for when that is happening, and the relationship to expectations structures. All seen through the lens of a critical conversation about the parable of the three stonecutters and a device known as the strategometer.

4. The Clutch Class: A Labor Day special post, arguing that indie consultants and free agents are best understood as scabs in relation to the labor movement, and why that is both a good thing under modern economic conditions, and a perception to own rather than apologize for.

Growth Story Level

If you get stuck at the value level, you will last perhaps 5 years before you burn out due to either extreme idealism or extreme cynicism.

Unfortunately, a clear-eyed questioning of whether you’re adding value will often yield the answer, no. And you can get sucked in from there into perennial agonizing and fine-tuning of your work, in an attempt to find a Grand Unified Theory of Guaranteed Value Addition.

This is a utopian trap. You’re actually doing far better than average if you can claim that you are adding value in 1 out of 2 gigs. A more typical rate I suspect is 1 in 5 (below that, you’ll likely feel like you’re participating in a bullshit-work economy).

The corresponding dystopian trap is coming to believe that nothing can ever get better, and slowly succumbing to temptations to fraud, bad-faith, and corruption.

The growth story level is about making your peace with the best effectiveness of impact you are able to generate, without falling victim to either utopian idealism or dystopian cynicism.

One of the reasons many indie consultants fail to do this and get trapped at the value theory level is that they fail to distinguish learning (one level below) from growth (one level above). They think the value theory level is the top of the pyramid.

Learning is a matter of disciplined curiosity, conscious cultivation of knowledge and skills, and strategic choice of gigs. You can learn without really growing, and many people do just that. That’s how you get trapped in shticks.

You can also learn within a fixed theory of value addition, and grow complacent within a fixed sense of your own worth. That’s how you become part of a faddish trend. A fad is basically an uncritical, fixed, widely-shared value theory that only dies when it starts to fail miserably, triggering utopian or dystopian yearnings and behaviors.

Growth is the result of integrating your experiences, figuring out what they mean, healing any scars, and evolving beyond them. This means reflecting on what happens to you and to the world around you, as a result of you doing what you do, and extracting the right lessons. How do you know when the lessons are the right ones? When they point the way to continuing the game in the most interesting way possible, instead of adding more details to the map of whatever “value-addition theory” rut you are in.

This is a storytelling task. You have to repeatedly tell both your own story, and the story of your environment, at all scales, in order to maintain a constant, live sense of how you’re part of a bigger story. Writing this newsletter is part of my own attempt to address my own current growth needs.

Here are 4 posts to help you do the same.

1. The Shadow’s Journey: Exploring the psychological role of the indie consultant as a shadow, and the importance of origin stories (as opposed to resumes and titles) for indie consultants.

2. The Two Shadows of the Hero: Playing detective to diagnose what’s going on in an organization, sorting out the effects of malice versus stupidity, and the relative merits of investigating a situation through reasoning versus watercooler gossip and grapevine data. All through the lens of the Bermuda Triangle Case. This post introduced the FBI G-Crimes division, Agents Lestrode and Jopp, reintroduced my frenemy Guanxi Gao.

3. A Tale of Two Schools: A survey of the structure of the consulting industry, the people school vs. positioning school divide within it, the core playbooks of the two schools, and how indie consulting fits within a landscape dominated by larger positioning-school firms.

4. The Secret History of Consulting: 1: The first of a 3-part Big History of consulting. In this part, I cover the pre-modern era, from antiquity to about 1453. Future parts will cover early modern (1453-1945) and modern (1945-today) eras. The goal of this series is to help you situate your work within a tradition of work that is as rich and long as traditional employment, entrepreneurship, or just being born wealthy.

So that’s where we are now, 25 posts in. Next week, I’ll shift gears a bit, and start exploring Fall themes. We’ll see how that goes.

I tweet a daily consulting tip on the @artofgig twitter account and compile them every couple of weeks here as a newsletter issue.

Here are tips 60-75

Consulting Tip #60: Beware of the Employee Orientation 101 syndrome where you get tempted into trying to learn your client’s business the way new employees do. You’ll learn the wrong things at very high cost. Hack your own way into an understanding that works for the gig.

Consulting Tip #61: Get good at picking up on on clues about how a client business works indirectly, like a detective. Clients have problems they want solved. They’re not tour guides.

Consulting Tip #62: When you have opportunities for discovery conversations with people at a client organization who are not primary clients you report to, make the most of it. Have good questions ready, that uncover information helpful for your gig. Try to be helpful in return.

Consulting Tip #63: As an outsider, you will effectively be “borrowing” the status and authority of your primary client as you navigate the organization and talk to others. Behave appropriately, as a delegate of your primary, but do not abuse the borrowed social capital.

Consulting Tip #64: When talking to people who report to your client, put them at ease by clarifying the scope of what you’re doing and why, and indicating clear boundaries for the conversation. But don’t try to bond with them as a peer.

Consulting Tip #65: In discovery, when people seem concerned about how what they’re telling you will be used, just tell them. And ask if they’d prefer to act on their own judgment or want you to convey a message. Discovery chats with client employees are not interrogations.

Consulting Tip #66: People tell outsider consultants things they wouldn’t share with fellow employees. Respect the confidence, but gently set boundaries if they wander into inappropriate sharing that might put you in a tough spot. There are things it is better not to know.

Consulting Tip #67: When working with an organization, you will typically sign an NDA. But be aware that NDAs are just the baseline level of discretion you are legally bound to. You should hold yourself to much higher standards, including internally among company employees.

Consulting Tip #68: In certain gigs, you may end up better informed than most employees, and keeping secrets between employees of the client organization may actually be a bigger challenge than complying with the NDA. Be on the alert for accidental internal indiscretions.

Consulting Tip #69: If you bring a particular narrow technical background to a broader indie consulting domain, resist the temptation to apply it unless that’s specifically what you’re being paid to do. Use the background as a source of general principles, not specific skills.

Consulting Tip #70: If you do not have the technical background to understand a deep technology underlying a client business, do not try to fake it. Play student, set boundaries. Fakery will be obvious to the experts long before you realize you’re hemorrhaging credibility.

Consulting Tip #71: Try and land at least one gig in a new industry every year, no matter how small, and even if the work itself isn’t new. As a consultant, your growth is a strong function of the frequency of sectoral boundary crossings you can sustain.

Consulting Tip #72: Even when you have a lucrative anchor gig going that’s temporarily generating more than enough income, try and keep 1-2 smaller gigs with modest billings alive too. It’s how you avoid cognitive capture by a single big client. Monogamy kills gig lives.

Consulting Tip #73: Differentiate your service offerings around what makes your clients special, rather than around what makes you special.

Consulting Tip #74: On Labor Day, be polite and courteous to paycheck types, wish them a happy Labor Day, and make secret plans to turn all their jobs into some mix of apps, AIs, robots, and gigs for yourself.

Consulting Tip #75: Communicate with people you need to influence via the simplest and most informal medium possible that does the job.

Here is Compilation #4 (45-59) if you want to backtrack and catch up.

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