Looking at self
On the three roles every successful endeavor needs, and how those same directions of thinking show up in how we approach problems in life.
I came to an understanding a long time ago that for a company, a product, a business, a service, or whatever else to succeed, you need an idea, resources, and a team. And in the team you need at least three representatives of three different directions. If there are fewer, it means someone is doing two roles, or that one person is doing everything for everyone. That's possible at a small scale, but it doesn't work with success and growth, there you need three.
These are the representatives of the consumer, the representatives of the producer, and the ones who will make it all profitable, or in some cases there can be other goals instead of profit, but one way or another these are the ones who keep the balance, so the wolves are fed and the sheep are safe, and the shepherd is alive too. But joking aside, these are the ones who will watch that the first two don't pull too much toward themselves, and that the whole idea makes sense. Let's say, roughly, a designer, an engineer, and a salesperson, though of course that's an excessive simplification. But profit is somehow too narrow. I like the Walt Disney quote, paraphrased it's about how they don't make movies to make money, they make money so they can keep making movies. Something like that.
But now I'm realizing this is broader. These are three directions of thinking about how problems get solved in general. It's how people approach everything in life. And there are more than three here, because not everyone thinks in terms of solutions and approaches at all. For example, some people don't want to solve anything, they want to do what they've been told. There are others who see everything as a game of chance, where you have to guess what's lying around loose and where. And in general there are a lot of different behavioral directions, I won't take it on myself to discuss them all.
We, of course, being complex and many-sided personalities, contain all of these types at once. But when we run into a task that has to be solved, often creatively, one of these approaches wakes up in us and starts to prevail. I explained it to myself as: everything around is a design problem and at the same time an engineering problem, and everything has to make sense and work long-term, or at scale. For example, would it be good if everyone did it this way. And of course you absolutely need the one who will actually do it all, because sometimes what's needed most is persistence and diligence.
Tags: philosophypsychologythoughts
