Playing Doctor

This is a surprisingly humbling pearl of wisdom from one of the most respected–and arrogant–professions on Earth. 

Don’t get me wrong: I love doctors.
 (and nurses, for the record). 

• My dad and brother are orthopaedic surgeons. My mom was a nurse until her passing. 

• I also have in my family 2 x emergency-department PAs, more nurses, a hospital administrator, and a biomedical engineer. 

• And at the risk of protesting too much, I was also lucky to work with some of the smartest doctors in the world at a healthtech startup. 

But relative to the average person, they’re arrogant. A mediocre surgeon gets treated with priestly respect. 

It’s a level of deference and respect that most Fortune 500 CEOs couldn’t dream of. Ever seen a CEO wear a white coat that no one else is allowed to wear? 

I rest my case. 👨🏻‍⚖️

Airline pilots are the next best example that comes to mind. 

Both medicine and piloting involve skill, but there’s one thing doctors specialize in more than almost any other occupation: knowledge. 

(With this in mind, it’s perhaps not a coincidence that we also call PhDs “doctor.”) 

The point is this: 

🎯 If one of the most educated – and most arrogant – groups of people on the planet says that half of what they know is wrong, then what does that say about how intelligent the rest of us are? 

Cheat Codes

The median westerner goes to school from the age of 4 to 23 and a half years old. 

That’s 19.5 years of learning one lesson until it is an inseverable part of us: 

Getting results means being smart. And you get smart by accumulating facts and tools that someone can quiz you on. 

There’s only one problem:

This lesson is false. ❌

📌 Here’s what this 2-decade “lesson” gets us: 

• Learning becomes an escape from discomfort. We avoid the cringe of putting ourselves out there by reading more books and taking more courses. (Read: procrastination) 

• We confuse knowing HOW to do something well with actually being ABLE to do something well (craft, skill). So we underestimate the work that building something great really takes. Then we end up disappointed when results don’t happen immediately. 

• Others expect great things of us on unrealistic timeframes, exacerbating our own self-defeating tendencies.

• We assume that being really generally smart generally gives us a shortcut on specific intellectual challenges. Sometimes it does, but often not. (And sometimes knowing a lot is actually a handicap vs. those who have “beginner’s mind.”)

• There is almost no workplace situation where arguing hard to be right pays. As a leader, this behavior will cause your people to disengage.  As a junior person, being smart makes you a threat – and annoyance – to your peers and those above.

• We pay educators to teach things that are testable. But numerous aspects of intelligence are hard to test: e.g. creativity, critical thinking, wisdom. 

• Things that matter more than information: money, power, network, discipline, working well with others. 

👀 What actually matters in the real world is getting the result you want. There’s a huge difference between knowledge – e.g. facts, data, processes – and results. 

If we’re ambitious (like you), the result we want is based on building something grand. It’s on the scale of a blockbuster movie. 🍿

Yet we convince ourselves that some guru out there has distilled the secrets of making that feature film into a series of napkin sketches. ✍️

These napkin sketches in the business world amount to the McKinsey-style 2x2 framework. 

Apples and Bananas

I can’t criticize business people who study business cases. That would be hypocritical. 

Based on Harvard Business School’s example, the majority of MBA schools use “the case method” to a significant degree. 

Studying what happened before has utility. 

In business school settings, cases are viewed with curiosity – not worship. A professor facilitating a case discussion provokes participants in dissecting what happened, why it may have happened, and what aspects are repeatable. 

In contrast, business biographies and the newsletters and LinkedIn posts of this nature skip the analysis. Worse, they purport to give you a PLAN based on ex-post rationalization. “Elon did X, so you should, too.” 

The problem is that YOUR situation is likely VERY different from that of the story’s main character. This makes it really hard to know what lessons are transferrable. 

Instead of a plan, what you should take away is a series of patterns – of moves that you COULD make (or that opponents might). 

Cases are a benign… case. 

Let’s move on to a sicker patient: frameworks. 

The Pre-AI Substitute for Thinking 

As I wrote recently, I really love my business school classmates. And to be clear, I was a lot more arrogant as a B-school student than I should’ve been. 

(But I was older than everyone else and just off the plane back from capture-kill missions overseas. So it was hard to take Connecticut trust-fund kids in salmon pants seriously. Maybe cut old Andrew a little slack 😅 🙏🏽)

Anyway, despite aforementioned love, one of the patterns that always made me laugh came after what I thought were the absolute BEST, mind-blowing case discussions – maybe even best educational experiences – of my entire life: 

🎭 🎭 🎭
Act III, Scene I
Harvard Business School classroom, students packing their things

Me:  
Hey, Professor of Accounting, that case was incredible. I’m curious how you think Point Y applies to X situation?

Accounting Prof:  
(Gives insightful answer)

Me:  
Thanks! 

Classmate (former consultant): 
(Aggravated and out of breath for some reason)
Hi Professor of Accounting, so…. like, what’s the framework? 

Accounting Prof:  
(Puzzled expression)
What do you mean?

Classmate:  
Is there, like, a 2-by-2 or some sort of acronym we can take away? 

Accounting Prof:  
(Earnest expression)
(Exits conversation gracefully)

End Scene 🎬

Those consulting classmates of mine knew something at that time that I didn’t learn until much later:

Frameworks sell. 

👀 But look:
I not only USE frameworks, I develop my own proprietary ones. 

Frameworks are MEANT to be a substitute for from-scratch thinking. And that’s okay! 

✅ Save time
✅ Make better decisions
✅ Simplify the complex
✅ Teach it to others

The PROBLEM is that many business leaders misuse frameworks. 

❌ To appear smarter
❌ As a bludgeon to get their way
❌ As CYA in case a decision produces a failure
❌ As a crutch, to avoid the effort of critical thinking. 

The Hidden Cost

The sad thing is that thinking critically helps you get SMARTER. 

Take this thought experiment: 

Your 1970s coglomerate is entering new markets, and you need to make some strategic decisions. You check out a few HBR articles on microfiche, but nothing satisfies. So you invent Michael Porter’s 5-Forces model on your own. 

Five years later, your nephew Ruprecht, spoiled jerk that he is, is running the tobacco company he inherited and is on an M&A spree. He has the same issue as you did: “How do I make better decisions upfront about what businesses will succeed or fail?” 

He listens to Michael Porter’s then new book on cassette tape in his Cadillac Coupe de Ville on his commute. It gave him some answers – and pretty quickly! 

But who has more of a hold on strategic questions: you or Ruprecht? 

He has done the equivalent of running to Home Depot to buy a power tool he doesn’t really know how to use. It might get a job or two done, but he’s not suddenly a general contractor.

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to bury our head in the sand. By all means, keep up with the state of the art and best practice.

But in business, a lot of time “best practice” can be defined as “what any reasonably intelligent person with good morals would do if they spent any amount of time thinking about it.” 

Confederacy of Dunces

The intellectual bar in an organization slopes sharply down toward “simple.”

Simple is fast. Simple is memorable. Simple is actionable. 

But simple can also become dogma. 

Self-involved middle managers often confuse simple with truth. 

The worst authority figure I’ve witnessed was my manager at AWS. Every time I brought up a question, an idea, or an insight, she would berate me: 

“Stop being so editorial. Enough with the philosophy.” 

If a plan or a writeup wasn’t straight out of the Microsoft-AWS B2B Enterprise Sales Playbook, it was dead on arrival.

What mattered to her were buzzwords and highly adopted frameworks. 

So with that in mind, let’s take two viral frameworks as examples: 

Example 1: The Eisenhower matrix 

I’ve written previously in this newsletter about how most prioritization frameworks aren’t helpful. The prime example of this is the vaunted Eisenhower matrix of importance vs. urgency. 

I also kinda like this version because the examples show just how much a waste of time frameworks can be:

After all:

• How many parents with a crying baby have ever whipped out their Eisenhower 2x2 to figure out what to do? 

• Does anyone working at a desk need a framework to tell them that “busy work” isn’t high-ROI? 

The funny thing is that some examples actually need the opposite prescription that consultants would give you. (Maybe that’s why they don’t get white coats 😅) 

For instance, “distractions” and “interruptions” should be deleted. If you’re the CEO, is it that much better to have your SVPs distracted all the time? Clearly delegation is often NOT the best solution (vs. redesign of your ops system, for example). 

But something about the Eisenhower matrix strikes us as interesting. And thus we assume that it must have value.  

Example 2: The Three Currencies 

Okay, I said “sicker patient” above.

But sorry–this one is terminally ill 🤒:

The post caption continues: 

This framework has the appearance of wisdom because it seems so neat and tidy and modular. But it is a prime example of the word “specious.”

The 3 Currencies idea, if you can even call it that, doesn’t tell you anything most adults don’t already know.

Worse, there are a number of gaps:

• The post asks what “you need.” But Warren Buffett doesn’t NEED more knowledge. Given how much money he has, the post should criticize him for not spending his money to acquire knowledge more quickly. What an idiot, am I right? 😅 

• There’s a severe limit on the purchasability of time. Often we get more time by building systems to be more efficient. This is using time to get… more time. But the post says to “trade the other two.” 

• Since any knowledge you acquire was obtained through time and money, having a distinct third concept in addition to time and money is superfluous. 

• Knowledge is an asset, but pickup trucks can be assets, too. We can use pickup trucks and time to get money. We can use money and time to get pickup trucks. I think we have 4 currencies now, not just 3. 

• Do you need someone to tell you to spend time and use your brain to earn money? 

• The next time you lack knowledge, will you do anything differently to learn now that you’ve seen this framework? 

Again, the 3 Currencies model is interesting–but not useful.

I’d argue that this framework actually made 9 out of 10 readers on LinkedIn dumber. 

Stop filling your brain with Crumbl cookies. They’re really delicious. And they’re killing you softly. 🍪

🎯 Rather than the 3 Currencies model, you’d be better served just focusing on one thing: return on time invested. 

As a startup founder, your time contribution every month should return more value than it did the month before. As a company executive, your results should dramatically increase year over year based on the same time input. If you invested money to get those results, then net that out like any investment. 

Whether you gained knowledge or not doesn’t matter–unless it brought you joy. Otherwise it was just a means to an end. 

What’s Actually Useful

Despite my rant above, there ARE some mental models and frameworks that are useful. 

But beware: most are not. 

And many SMART people delude themselves into thinking they are making progress, even though they’re just learning “cool stuff.” 

If you’re building something big, I recommend spending more time: 

✅ Building skills
✅ Perfecting your craft
✅ Turning science into your own special art

And if you still want to focus on being smarter, then: 

1️⃣ Read challenging books
2️⃣ Solve hard problems
3️⃣ Talk to smart people
4️⃣ Start learning frameworks and mental models from the very best: Charlie Munger, Farnam Street (Shane Parrish), and Rolf Dobelli. 

🧠 Above all, keep in mind the parable of the fox and the hedgehog: 

All the animals regard the fox as clever, because he knows many things. 🦊

But the hedgehog knows one big thing. 🦔 

❤️ Andrew

Coda

Ironically lawyers don’t get nearly the same level of respect as doctors do despite the fact that a lawyer goes to school just 12.5% less than an MD.

Outro 

Before the outro, could I ask a HUGE favor? 🙏🏽

↳ Could you text this to just ONE person that this newsletter might vibe with?

Massive thanks—I’m indebted. 🫡

If you had a kid at any point in the 2000s, you heard this song while driving your “Cadillac of minivans” through the suburban jungle. Brings back memories. 

Before you judge, minivans are damned practical, okay?! 

Also, people hadn’t discovered SUVs yet. 

Except OJ. 

PS. If you make fun of Raffi, I will cut you.

Cheers

🍪 Let’s talk: Had your fill of Crumbl cookies and need solutions that work? Grab your free slot to meet with me, and let’s unlock some things together. 🙌

🔎 Find me on LinkedIn.
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Get unstuck, and crush it. Double period. 🔱

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