How much are you paying for the privilege of having someone else tell you what to do? So many of us happily give up our freedom and our income potential in exchange for having someone else take responsibility for telling us what to do next. How much are you giving up?
Clients and staff make irrational requests all the time. That doesn't make them unreasonable. If satisfying their request moves things forward, it's not always worth the effort to teach someone a lesson. Sometimes, it's more effective to just embrace their irrationality. Being right doesn't always have to be the goal.
Scientists make predictions, and predicting the future is far more valuable than explaining the past. Ask a physicist what will happen if you fire a projectile like this in that direction, and they'll know. Ask Walter White how to make the meth blue and you'll get the right answer.
Analysts who come up with plausible explanations for what just happened don't help us as much, because it's not always easy to turn those explanations into useful action.
The practice, then, is to start making predictions. In writing. You don't have to share them in public, but the habit will push you to understand your instincts and to sharpen your ability to see what works (and what doesn't) without the easy out of having to explain what already happened.
I predict that the more you practice your predictions, the better you'll get at discerning where the science is.
...work hard. That way, you'll have something to show for it. The biggest waste is to do that thing you call work, but to interrupt it, compromise it, cheat it and still call it work. Stop gossiping and playing stupid games at work with your colleagues. Instead do something to advance your career and the company. In the same amount of time you can expend twice the effort and get far more in exchange.
Companies should never try to change the worldview of the audience they're selling to. The term worldview in this context is the set of expectations and biases that colour the way each of us see the world. The worldview of a 50 year old luxury wine-loving investment banker is very different from that of a 21 year old graduate. One might see a £1,000 bottle of Château Pétrus as both a bargain and a must-have, while the other might see the very same bottle of wine as a tasteless and insane waste of money. Worldview changes three things: attention, bias and vernacular. Attention, because we choose to pay attention to those things that we've decided matter. Bias, because our worldview alters the way we filter and interpret what we hear. And vernacular, because words and images resonate with people differently based on their worldview. It's extremely expensive, time consuming and difficult to change someone's worldview. Sell nuts to squirrels, don't try to persuade dolphins that nuts are delicious.
On social media people talk endlessly about all the things the typical person can't possibly afford. Mansions, cars, jets, jewels, dinners with Gwyneth Paltrow. At the same time, you get negative feedback when you talk about things people have chosen not to have. If you promote a great product that only works on an iPhone, all the people who have chosen Android get angry, that special kind of angry that belongs to the people who made a decision. The reason, I think, is that you're reminding people of a decision they made, a decision that might have felt right at the time, but when they made it, they didn't know what would happen. Turns out there is a big difference between "don't tell me what I can't have" and "don't tell me what I've chosen not to be able to have". So dreaming of winning the lottery is fine but experiencing regret over a decision is not.
If you're not eager to share your perspective, don't bother sharing it. The audience wants to hear what you have to say, and if the question isn't right on point, reframe it, and answer that question instead. If your answers aren't interesting, exciting or engaging, that's on you.
"I did the reading."
No one said the preparation part was fun, but yes, it's important. I wonder why we believe we can skip it and still be so extremely smart.
Philosophers and lawyers talk about agency: the responsibility that comes with the capacity to act in the world. If you can decide, if you can act, you have agency. Life without agency would be a nightmare. Trapped in a box, unable to do anything by choice, nothing but a puppet. It always makes me wonder why then, do both companies and people struggle so intently to avoid the responsibility that comes with agency? "It's not my job, my boss won't let me, there's an ISO rule, we're prohibited, it's our supplier, that's our policy...". It's not something you can turn on or off. Either you have the capacity to act in the world. Or you don't.
The news tells us about the world economy or the national economy, or even the economy in a specific region. This is easy to talk about, statistically driven and apparently important to everyone. But in reality this has absolutely nothing to do with your day, your job and your approach to life. If the unemployment rate in market research doesn't match the national numbers, the national numbers don't matter so much. Economics used to be stuck in geography. Now, as markets and industries transcend location, useful economic stats describe the state of the people you're working with and selling to.