People ask me this all the time. It's a hard question to answer, because I don't really ever do the same thing twice. It's probably best to look at the intersection of what I care about and what I'm capable of before examining the actual gyrations I make in real life.
My mental model goes something like this: Unless your raison d'être is either to take things out of the ground or move those things around the planet, you probably spend much of your waking life, as oblique as it may seem, trying to figure out what to do with all the stuff that is already lying about, including yourself. The more we get a handle on our most basic problems of survival as a species, the more choices open up to us. At the same time it becomes less obvious what to do. Much more overhead goes into preparing for and ultimately making these choices, and the effects of the choices we make, good or bad, become enormously more pronounced.
It is the ability to make good choices, then, that I care deeply about. I dedicate a great deal of my attention toward enhancing this ability. Though making good choices isn't just about deciding: we must also consider the situational awareness that drives those decisions as well as the ability to carry them out. I believe the most empowering thing we can do is to gain comprehension over our environment and master the processes that enable us to perform within it.
I focus this concern chiefly at three related problem spaces: Ordinary people doing everyday things, service organizations dedicated to supporting and improving their communities, and of course, entrepreneurs intent on driving the rich dialogue that continually changes the face of our society.
I have considerable experience with a number of forms of expression. I spent the first half of my life engrossed in building things with my hands. I then graduated to visual imagery. My last ten or so years have gradually become predominated by computer code, writing and mathematics, in that order.
My quasi-Piagetian procession through this repertoire of expressive capacities, in addition to tightly weaving them together, has also trained me in the art of growing the repertoire itself. Standing on numerous thresholds between disciplines normally reserved for specialists likewise affords me a somewhat unconventional perspective on how we go about our business in this era.
My method is no secret. It was devised in 1945 by the mathematician George Pólya as a pedagogical tool:
What was conceived as a metaheuristic for teaching mathematics works beautifully when applied to just about any problem-solving endeavour. At a glance, this little list is obvious to the point of being facile, but I believe it conceals an important truth which we can reveal by holding it up as a lens on contemporary business: thick on execution, thin on just about everything else, especially understanding.
Execution is essential, because without the doing, nothing gets done. In an economy of industrial mass-production it's also what costs the most, and thus traditionally gets the most attention. This state of affairs has since been turned on its head.
In the domains of manufacturing and construction, both the objective and the method are well-understood. One only needs to get the constituent materials and tools and do the work that puts them together. The farther removed from these domains we get—which as I mentioned maps to an increasing proportion of human activity—the materials and tools required to execute are less obvious because the method we must employ to achieve the objective isn't obvious, because the objective itself is often not entirely clear. What's more, the act of defining an objective and establishing a method often entails, as a byproduct, a great deal of the execution required to produce a result. Achievements for which the content is significant behave this way, from media products like text, visual art, music and movies, to digital products and services, to the blueprints and process models that get so eclipsed by the execution costs of industrial construction and manufacturing.
Jump the gun to execution and you can go in circles indefinitely. Understand the problem and you often get your desired result as a byproduct of gaining comprehension. That's how I do what I do.
What I do on a daily basis is whatever I need to do to gain comprehension over whatever I'm working on, and to communicate that understanding to whomever I'm working with. If that means learning an extinct language, building a postmodernist steel sculpture or performing an interpretive dance, so be it. So far, however, I've managed to get away with reading things, listening to and watching things, talking to people, giving presentations, building models, drawing diagrams, writing, schlepping data and writing code. It's a pretty straightforward and low-cost operation when you make the goal to understand.