The Art of Expanding Your Zone of Operation

Why understanding your expertise is key to extraordinary results

Standardized pay signals something important about the nature of work: standardized outputs.

When you use the same tools as everyone else, your output has very little variation. With software or machines the output becomes standard and certain.

Pay varies little because the outputs all hover around expectations.

It’s impossible for someone that works on an assembly line to have any variability in the car produced. The work they’re doing is defined by a narrow set of tasks. Each part of the process is controlled. You press a button, the press creates a part, that part is assembled, and the end result is 200,000 cars that all look and function the same. Machines are what really do the work.

Today software is getting up to speed with the age of AI.

5 years ago, you needed a team of machine learning engineers to achieve what products today can do through a simple API call. These modern tools change the output that’s possible. No longer is output required to be like an assembly line, instead it varies person by person.

You and I can both run different prompts and get different outputs. One could be significantly better than the other. A change in output means a change in pay too.

The creation of wealth is an artistic performance and the economy is becoming an opera.¹

The biggest reward goes to the best voices.

A return on the ordinary is falling (and fast). Middle talent is in high supply. Look around at any Fortune 500 company. Only 20% of people drive 80% of the results. Mediocrity is everywhere.

Creativity is what causes results to diverge from the mean.

Creativity is what turns work into art.

It’s what you’re really being paid to do. The best artists all understand their place in the world. There is an acute awareness of their zone of operation.

Know your zone of operation

Tim Brady was the first non-founding hire at Yahoo. In 1994 he was asked to write a business plan for the company as it transitioned from just a project to a startup. Brady had one of the largest influences on Yahoo’s success, but this was a surprise to a lot of people.

His background was never in tech. When asked if his mixed background in traditional engineering and business was the reason for his success, Brady said:

“It’s hard to know, since you don’t know the alternative. Probably more than anything, the business education gave me the confidence to know what I knew and what I didn’t know. I knew my zone of operation and things that I was good at and things where I knew I should go ask because I didn’t know what I was doing.”²

Success in any role requires you to understand your zone of operation.