Here's some food for thought from Sahil Bloom. I used to assume that the smartest people had the answers to everything—that they just knew more than the rest of us. But as I got more experience and spent more time with brilliant minds, I began to realize that this simply wasn’t the case.
The most intelligent people don't have the best answers—they ask the best questions.
These people realize that finding the truth is much more important than being right. They legitimately enjoy being wrong—they embrace new information as “software updates" to their brain.
But asking quality questions is not enough to create quality outcomes:
Asking great questions is how you uncover the truth.
Bias for action is how you build upon that truth.
My Question-Action Matrix is a 2x2 to visualize this dynamic:
You can effectively place yourself and others in one of the four quadrants:
Q1: World-changers. This is very rare. These are the people with incredible curiosity, intellect, and engine.
Q2: Grinders/hustlers. High bias for action creates movement and results but may need the direction set by others.
Q3: Philosophers/thinkers. Extremely thoughtful but unable to go from brilliant idea to execution individually.
Q4: Dead zone.
A rough mental model for us to use here:
Invest heavily behind the Q1s if you have them in your team.
Hire more of the Q2s to execute.
Complement the Q3s—pair them with Q2s to action their ideas.
Scrub the Q4s.
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