Be less efficient.
Yes, you heard me right.
(And by the way, today’s email has nothing to do with presentation skills. So if you’re a presentation skills person, you’re going to need to do something else today. Sorry about that.)
Business loves efficiency. Efficiency firmly resides in the category of “this is good, we want more of it.”
Humans, especially humans in business, like to think they are efficient. The reality, though, is that they are not. If they were, we wouldn’t always be trying to replace them with machines. If you have a job, it shows that your company is willing to put up with some inefficiency so it can get whatever you are providing.
Providing that requires that you be inefficient. If you try to be more and more efficient, you will be replaced by a machine.
Like Y Combinator’s Paul Graham says, “Do things that don’t scale.”
Learning, for example, is never efficient. If you are trying to learn your customers, why on earth would you try to be efficient?
Do something inefficiently today, and see what you can get out of it that you wouldn’t normally get out of it. That’s often where the value is.