🛠️ Career Strategy

You Need a Portfolio

As economist Tyler Cowen and entrepreneur Daniel Gross explain in their phenomenal book Talent, “most of us have a bias toward well-spoken and articulate storytellers … [but this bias] can cause you to hire glib but unsubstantial people and overlook rare creative talent … Focus instead on the substance and quality” of the person. Portfolios provide yet another way to knock the recruiter over the head with evidence of your substance and quality. 

You may worry that your work is not interesting enough to merit a portfolio. But here’s the truth: all project work is portfolio-worthy. 

Because all project work is about solving problems. And portfolios, when done right, are simply proof that you have solved problems well. You don’t need a fancy website  or award-winning aesthetics. You need signal. And portfolios, when structured correctly, send massive signal to the recruiter. In fact, in a 2021 study of 156 employers, 75% said portfolios are useful to them during the hiring process.

Getting Set Up and Writing Case Studies

To launch your portfolio, you need a website tool. You could use tools as varied as Notion, Carrd, Google Sites, or any of hundreds of other options. But I’d recommend Beehiiv (what I use to write my newsletter). First off, it’s free. Second, it has both a website builder and email newsletter capabilities, so you can actually send email updates to interested parties about your job search or even turn your portfolio into a blog. 

Once your portfolio is set up, what goes in it? Every case study in your portfolio should answer five questions:

If you want to know how to write a great case study, please sign up for the newsletter :) 

⚡️ Execution Insight

The Price of Process

As you know, I write a lot about process in this newsletter. But I’ve glossed over some things that I’ve always taken for granted:

1. that great, talented people will be doing the processes

2. that the business will remain the same or similar enough that processes make sense

Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir, has written some very underrated blogs about growing a massive business. His post “There is no process. It will be painful.” brought these assumptions to the fore for me (emphasis my own):

“The fetish of scaling through structure, process, and legibility are opioids, not medicines, for success. It is comforting to believe that the durability of our work will not depend on the unpredictable humans that come after us but rather on the predictable levers we have agency over to codify the continuity of our creations.”

“Systematized solutions operate more like zombies. Process begets more process. Before you know it, the failed process is all that is left. Instead of working for the content, it sought to be the content.”

“We can abandon the search for opioids and instead focus on what truly matters: Doing the things. Metabolizing the pain into content. Without process we face much more variance - results could be amazing or a flaming failure. But that too is good, authentic, and forces us to learn and evolve.”

Process is not an end in itself. Yes, process can make things more predictable and reliable. But at what cost?

When we force predictability and reliability, we give up the outcomes on either end of the curve: greatness or garbage. And when individuals are forced to abide by process, they stop thinking about how things could be better.

Let us remember, then, that process is not the end, but simply a guidepost for the work. Process does not guarantee that the output is great, but simply predictable.

🧠 Curiosity Corner

What if Michael Jackson trained Anakin Skywalker?

I generally enjoy this YouTube channel that makes Star Wars parody music videos with AI. I understand many people think AI art is not art, but some things simply wouldn’t be possible without it because they would cost an impossible amount of time, money, and coordination.

With all that said, I hope this silly song puts a smile on your face.

💼 Job Board

Set Strategy, Get Paid 💵 

Here are the 3 most interesting remote job openings I’ve seen this week:

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That’s it for this week.

-Rahul from The DesAI Digest

P.S. Reply back to this email with a business challenge you’re facing! I’d love to help.

P.P.S. if you liked this, forward it to a friend. And if you hated it, forward it to an enemy.