Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, this is refreshing to read. One of my favorite scenes in movies is the Wolf in Pulp Fiction, because the comedy of it is how there's no magic to the Wolf. My own entry into consulting was similar to this guy's story - it felt huge and mysterious and forbidding beforehand, but in hindsight it was just a bunch of breaking problems down to stuff that felt boring and mundane in hindsight, even if the solutions were stylized to my own needs.

One thing that was important to me was to be able to max out retirement contributions even while being self-employed. (I think a lot of folks that go into business for themselves will too easily convince themselves to sacrifice that early on.) So I had a spreadsheet that basically factored in my needed take-home income after taxes and retirement contributions, and added in those taxes and contributions, and I turned it into a daily (weekday) dollar amount that I needed to earn, complete with 7-day and 30-day moving averages. Being able to check that daily helped me to know whether I was on the right track. For the first few years, I think that was around $300-$400 per day - later on, I was able to stop paying attention to it since I was exceeding it so much.

there's no magic to the Wolf

Funny. That's my favorite scene in that movie, too. For exactly the same reason. I only find it comment-worthy here because you're the first person I've heard outside myself make this observation.

Another scene I really like, for similar didactic reasons, is the opening scene to the HBO series Rome, where Caesar's army is battling the Gauls in a forest and Titus Pullo breaks out of formation to start kicking barbarian ass. Vorenus, his commanding officer, has to follow him out at great personal risk to knock him back into line.

I see it as an allegory for the perils of bringing a ninja/rockstar/cowboy to a mature team that has a greater need for professionalism and discipline.

The first time I hired a really well-known, expensive attorney, I felt the same way you do about the Wolf. I thought "There's no magic to what he is doing, he is having the same conversations and doing the same things that I would". It was the same when I took on a very wealthy business partner - he did many of the same things that I would do.

In most cases, the work these kinds of people perform is neither magical nor brilliant. It's that because of their reputation, resources, and influence, when they do the same things that you would do, it has an entirely different result. This is just one of the many unfair aspects of life - knowing exactly what to do and working hard on it isn't even close to enough to make you successful. If no one listens to you, it doesn't matter what you say or how brilliant it is.

A similar situation is discussed in Godin's Linchpin: you could do most of that attorney's job, perhaps even better than he does, except for what he does for five minutes a day. Of course, all the value is created in those five minutes.

I think also, a really top notch expert makes what they're doing seem so effortless that you do think "yeah, that's just what I would have done".

And probably you would have, at least eventually, although maybe with a couple of false starts and by that point perhaps some misfeatures have already been locked in and now your simple, elegant solution (the one you came up with all on your own without some fancy consultant) isn't quite going to work the way you'd like it to, but it's still 90% of the way there and you're only a little bit over budget -- so long as you cut a couple of the less useful features you should hopefully get the whole thing done before you lose the support of management -- but then they change CTO and the whole thing gets put on hold indefinitely.

There's often no "magic" to what consultants do, and expertise is the accumulation of innumerable layers of knowledge / insight / practice. I'm a grant writing consultant and years ago I wrote a post about why it's so hard for many employers to hire employees as good as the better consultants: http://seliger.com/2008/06/22/why-cant-i-find-a-grant-writer.... Employees and consultants are also incentivized in different ways that sometimes makes hiring an employee better and sometimes hiring a consultant better.

One thing I'd emphasize about consulting, however, is the need to almost continually market. That seems foreign to many people thinking about consulting (and I too admire the Wolf's scenes in Pulp Fiction, but we never see any marketing from him—I guess he's in a line of work that's word-of-mouth only).

I thought that was the whole point/comedy of Winston Wolf - that the criminals were so stupid, a guy with an average IQ was revered as a mastermind.

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