The Higher You Go, the More Judgment Matters
Read on kevferrell.com
Welcome to REWIRE | REBOOT, a weekly newsletter where I share reflections from my ongoing personal growth journey and provide tested ideas, frameworks, tools and practices to help you create the life you want.
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In this issue:
- Rewire - 7 Lessons for the Real World
- Reboot - Don’t Ignore the Warning Signs
- One Action - Take Back One Hour
- Recommended - Clear Thinking
Rewire - Idea I'm Exploring
7 Lessons for the Real World
A couple of months ago, I shared 8 guiding principles for someone beginning a career or preparing to enter the working world.
Recently, I was asked a different question.
What advice would I give someone entering a large organization in a senior role, where the expectations, complexity, and consequences are all higher?
The fundamentals still remain.
Discipline. Consistency. Follow-through. Listening. Learning.
But what gets in your way changes as you become more senior.
Early in your career, much of your value comes from showing that you can execute. You do the work, meet your commitments, solve problems, and build trust.
At higher levels, execution is still required. But judgment becomes critical.
Your calendar fills up. Priorities compete. More people want your attention. Almost every opportunity can be made to sound important.
You can work harder than ever and still become less effective.
The challenge is no longer simply doing the work. It is deciding what deserves your time, energy, and attention in the first place.
Here are seven lessons I have found useful in the real world.
1. Protect your capacity
Set reasonable boundaries early.
It becomes much harder to reclaim your time after everyone has grown accustomed to having unrestricted access to it.
Structure your calendar around how you want to work.
Block time for focused work. Contain meetings where possible instead of allowing them to scatter throughout every day. Protect time for exercise, sleep, family, relationships, and whatever helps you manage stress. Remember the 6 domains of health and longevity.
There will always be exceptions. Make room for the situations that are genuinely important.
Just do not allow every request to become an exception.
Prioritizing your health is not selfish or separate from performing well. Your physical and mental capacity determine what you have available to contribute everywhere else.
Take care of the person doing the work.
2. Do less, deliberately
Your ability to say no becomes increasingly important as opportunities and responsibilities accumulate.
This does not mean reflexively rejecting everything. It means requiring a clear reason before saying yes.
Do not accept work you know you will not deliver. Do not make commitments you have no intention of honouring. Avoid taking ownership of things that neither fit your strengths nor require your involvement.
Every yes consumes more than time. It also consumes attention, energy, and credibility.
People who cannot say no often believe they are being helpful. In reality, overcommitting eventually affects everyone who depends on them.
Identify what is essential. Give those things the attention they deserve. Eliminate what isn’t.
Do less so you can contribute more.
3. Work where you create disproportionate value
Being busy and being valuable are not the same thing.
Your strongest contribution often sits at the intersection of two questions:
- What are you good at and genuinely interested in?
- Where does your effort create the greatest impact?
The goal is to identify work that feels comparatively natural or effortless to you but creates meaningful value for other people. I call this the Value Paradox.
What feels obvious or intuitive to you may be valuable precisely because it does not feel that way to everyone else.
This is not an excuse to avoid difficult or unglamorous work. Every role includes some of that.
It is a reminder that you should not spend most of your time proving you can do things that someone else could do just as well.
At a senior level, your responsibility is not to do everything yourself. It is to understand where your involvement changes the outcome.
4. Listen before you contribute
Most people talk more than they listen.
Seniority can make this worse. People may assume their position requires them to have an immediate opinion on everything.
It does not.
You don’t need to fill every silence. You do not need to demonstrate your value by speaking first or longest.
Listen carefully. Pay attention to what is being said and what is being left unsaid. Make sure you understand the actual problem before offering a solution.
Take a moment before responding.
When you speak with intention and only when you have something useful to add, people are more likely to pay attention.
Do not say more than needs to be said.
5. Create clarity
Ambiguity is expensive.
It creates duplicated work, missed expectations, delayed decisions, unnecessary conflict, and frustration between people who may believe they are working toward the same outcome.
Before work begins, clarify:
What outcome are we trying to create?
Who is responsible for delivering it?
When is it expected?
What does good look like?
The same principle applies to relationships and communication.
Make your expectations clear. Ask other people to explain theirs. Do not rely on assumptions when a direct question can resolve the issue.
Written communication is useful, but it also creates room for tone and meaning to be misinterpreted.
When an email or message thread starts circling, pick up the phone.
A five-minute conversation can prevent days of misaligned work.
6. Match the speed of the decision to its consequences
Not every decision deserves the same amount of time.
A useful framework from author and creator of Farnam Street, Shane Parrish is to consider two things:
- How consequential is the decision?
- How difficult would it be to reverse?
When a decision has limited consequences and can easily be changed, decide quickly. The cost of gathering more information may be greater than the cost of being wrong.
When the consequences are significant and the decision is difficult to reverse, slow down. Gather the information that could materially change your choice.
The mistake is treating every decision as though it carries the same weight.
Similar principles apply to people decisions.
Hire slowly and carefully. The wrong hire can create costs that reach well beyond the role.
On the other hand, once a performance or fit problem has been fairly assessed, move on quickly. Do not allow discomfort to become indefinite delay.
Postponing a necessary decision rarely makes it kinder. It usually allows the consequences to spread.
Think at the speed the decision deserves.
7. Stay teachable
Seniority can create the illusion that your job is to know everything.
It is not.
Your job is to keep learning.
Read. Ask questions. Observe how other people operate. Seek out perspectives that challenge your own. Remain open to information that changes what you believe.
Expertise is valuable, but it can also create a ceiling when it becomes part of your identity.
The moment you decide you have mastered something is often the moment you stop improving at it.
Being willing to change your mind is not weakness. It is evidence that you care more about reaching the right conclusion than defending your original one.
The most capable people I know remain curious.
They never act as though the learning is finished.
Final Thought
These lessons will not eliminate pressure, uncertainty, or difficult decisions.
They will help you direct your effort more deliberately.
As expectations rise, the answer is rarely to keep adding more meetings, commitments, hours, and responsibilities.
The advantage comes from knowing what to protect, what to decline, where you create the most value, when to listen, when to decide, and when new information requires you to reconsider.
The higher you go, the more judgment matters.
Reboot - Health & Longevity
Don’t Ignore the Warning Signs
The same judgment that protects your time and attention should also apply to the signals your body sends.
I am generally better at applying it at work than I am in the weight room.
Do not ignore the warning signs.
A nagging pain, sore joint, or irritated tendon is information.
Listening to it may mean the difference between modifying your training for a few days and losing weeks or months to a more serious injury.
Not every uncomfortable sensation is an injury. Muscles become tired and sore after demanding or unfamiliar exercise.
Sudden, sharp, worsening, or localized pain deserves a different response, particularly when it is accompanied by swelling, weakness, instability, a pop, or a loss of normal movement.
I know this.
Yet I still have to keep relearning it.
A couple of weeks ago, I felt what seemed like a strain while bench pressing heavily.
I backed off, but I completed the workout.
Over the next few days, the pain was significant and the range of motion in my shoulder was severely limited. Then it improved quickly.
I interpreted improvement as recovery.
This past week, I returned to heavy benching. Muscularly, I felt strong after the extra rest. There was still some mild soreness, but I treated it as something I could work through.
I almost made it through the session.
On the final set of the day, I increased the weight for incline dumbbell presses. As I hoisted the dumbbells into position, I heard and felt a loud pop.
The weights hit the floor, and I could barely move my arm.
I am now adapting my training, focusing on rehab, working with healthcare practitioners, and waiting for imaging to determine the extent of the injury.
The warning signs had been there.
I focused on the information I wanted, such as my returning strength and reduced pain, while discounting the signal that did not fit the outcome I wanted.
That is not toughness.
It is poor judgment.
Knowing when to push is important. Knowing when to pull back is just as important.
Stop or modify the movement when pain is sudden, sharp, worsening, or changes how you move.
Do not try to prove your resilience with one more set.
The goal is not simply to complete today’s workout.
It is to stay healthy enough to keep training.
To win the game, or even just to keep playing, you have to stay in the game.
The warning signs are there for a reason.
Listen to them.
One Action
Take Back One Hour
Open your calendar and protect one uninterrupted hour during the next seven days for the activity that will contribute most to your capacity or your highest-value work.
Name the specific outcome in the calendar entry.
Then decline, shorten, delegate, or move whatever would otherwise take that hour.
Let me know how it goes. Just reply to this email.
Inspirational Quote
“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
– Peter Drucker
Recommended - Read
Clear Thinking
Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parrish is a practical book about recognizing the moments when emotion, ego, social pressure, or habit begin making decisions for us.
It reinforces a theme that runs through all 7 lessons in this issue: good judgment depends on creating enough space to identify what matters before reacting, committing, or deciding.
It is particularly useful for leaders, entrepreneurs, and anyone who wants to make more deliberate decisions under pressure.
Readers Corner
Ask Me Anything
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Until next week,
Kevin
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