You, your employer, the taxman, your family, your social network, and even business SaaS tools all treat the organised collection of work that we call “jobs” as a space that needs to be filled with a capable and intelligent worker. In this traditional corporate sense, every job is a seat. A living embodiment of the responsibilities that can be abstracted away and folded neatly into the title on the seat.

Non-corporate jobs, the trades, and highly specialised roles, e.g., medical specialists, do not suffer as much from this problem. Because the seats come with a typical physical test of performance—how many bricks were laid, is the plumbing fixed so that the septic tank does not backflow into the toilet? How well does the new cupboard hold up?

But even the trades do not fully remove the seat. Nor can they, or even should.

The seat is an important part of any job. In fact, it is the job itself in the full form factor that we each recognize. If the plumber can sort out a leaking basement but cannot handle basic admin, customer service, time management, and the intuitive process that is not directly connected to fixing septic pits, but enables those fixes. Heck, he even needs to perform tasks that yield the outcome of homes with plumbing in need of fixing. He can do either of three things. Learn this, hire someone, or lose business.

My point is that, in the last few months, I’ve been coming to terms with the seat of the job and the (for lack of a better term) skill of the job. Specifically, I have been learning to recognize and respond to what the seat—my seat—brings; versus what my unique set of experience, personality, knowledge, network, instincts, taste, and judgement bring.

Both are necessary for a job to be done well continuously. And both reinforce each other. 

For example. I can recognise the influence of my seat when I get certain emails or even get treated in a certain way, that in different circumstances, would be out of sight/mind. The seat brings that prestige, a certain implicit trust, and maybe even direct value. But that is all the seat can do. It can get the emails, but it is not going to get the job to a Done state. This is where the skill—the combined accumulation of judgement, personal and institutional experience, a good network, the right knowledge set and the discipline to see matters through—comes to play, and shifts the game from open to closed status.

Skill (which is really not a good name for this) can also generate and close value. It is what some businesses hire for when the seat is lacking, and they need to jumpstart the seat value by tapping into Skill.

In my short time in white-collar work, I did not always operate with this consciousness. But now that I have begun to see it, I appreciate it all the more, and I remain humbled when The Seat brings something my way. And most importantly, begin to distinguish the value my skills package contributes, plus find ways to refine and compound it.

When I started as a journalist, my very first gigs were in roles where another person’s seat had created an opening. In the sense that they vouched for the quality of my work. My “sponsor” (who herself was hired for her skill—she was a well-known radio OAP and news editor) had interacted a bit with the still very raw and early form of my writing skill to be able to use her seat to create an opening. As it happened, both she and the organisation—a technology event organiser—were impressed. That one-week stint led to a fuller, longer-term contract with another workplace, which afforded me even more opportunity over time to learn how to skin the game, and eventually how to hunt them. In this particular case, the workplace seat I was to fill needed building. So I started with what I knew (my skill) and built towards what needed to be done (the Seat).

I used and expanded both The Seat and My Skill for roles that eventually put me squarely in the middle of modern digital journalism. I quickly found that the seat brought an influx of game to be skinned and properly prepared. But the seat also forced me to learn to hunt. And with each successful hunt and game preparation, I compounded—without knowing it then—my skill pack.

I remember one incident in TechCabal at the final edition of Future of Commerce before it was merged into Moonshot as a content track. Someone in the faculty at Michigan State University reached out, and as we got talking, it became evident that this game was not my usual. Usual meaning, a news lead. Instead, it fell into the revenue bucket of Big Cabal Media. Guess what I did. I bought a flight ticket to Lagos on my account (I want to say almost instinctively, because looking back, it barely made sense) and spent a few days just to have a couple of hours meeting with this gentleman. Long story short, that became a $26,000 sponsorship ticket for Future of Commerce 2022, for the privilege of sitting on one panel during the event.

More recently, I saw a $47k ticket through to close from an Asian DFI, for two weeks of virtual training. The seat provided the email, but after multiple attempts to route it through the revenue function failed to move the needle, I took it on and arbitrarily put down ~$47,000. I say arbitrary, but part of it was gut sense, and a feel for what would pass muster at an organisation that had crippling bureaucracy with little time to spare.

By the way, it doesn't have to be $$$ always. It can be relationships, distribution, seeds planted, or collaborations. Value comes in different forms, shapes and sizes.

Of course, at the time, I had no idea what I was doing. All of this is in retrospect—another sign of compounding skills, I believe. But as I’ve now come to become conscious of this “instictiveness”, my next challenge is to sharpen it to consistency and even better, to sharpen it into origination, that is, the active sport of the hunt. Instead of simply being good on instinct. In fact, both the instinct and the hunting need a ton of effort, particularly to get to a state of disciplined consistency and better batting average results wise.

The goal of the worker is to constantly compound the effect of the seat into his or her skill. The natural result of that accumulative effort is also that the seat gains so much more power and influence from the sum of both its original state and the additive inflow from an actively compounding skill-owner. 

The skill owner becomes much more valuable over time. And if done right, the seat gains so much more power where proper institutional memory muscle exists. The next person in the seat gets a boost right off the start. However, since the seat does not automtically of its own guarantee success. The risk of Skill-Person changes is that the new owner of the seat fails, and the seat consequently loses some strength if the failure is poorly managed.

The goal of the worker is to constantly compound the effect of the seat into his or her skill. But it starts with a clear eye that recognizes the influence of the seat and is determined to compound into the best you can be. This is a note to myself. Go compound.

The cover image is Rembrandt's "The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild" (1662), a group portrait of five Amsterdam cloth inspectors and their attendant. These men — the staalmeesters — held unpaid, one-year honorary positions at the heart of the Dutch textile trade, grading fabric quality by pressing lead seals that determined whether cloth could be sold at a premium across European and global markets. Their seat gave them the authority to stamp the seals, but only accumulated expertise in cloth could tell them how many seals to press. The original hangs in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Artist/Source Rembrandt/Google Arts & Culture, Public Domain via Wikimedia