Skill tree of Means

Means is another primary ability for the developer archetype. For Expertise, we introduced the idea of Major and Minor skills.

The Major skills for Means I originally proposed was Personal Finance and Creativity. I'm going to tweak these slightly to Funding and Scrappiness. The other one someone pointed out that I was searching for the right word for was Connections.

Funding – governs the effectiveness at acquiring and managing funding for your work

Scrappiness – governs the effectiveness of how you use means to achieve your goals

Connections – governs the effectiveness of your network to provide means of support

Now we can build in some Minor skills:

The breakdown might look like this:

• Funding: Money management and capital acquisition skills
• Scrappiness: Self-awareness and experimentation skills
• Connections: Networking and relationship-building skills

Remember that skills govern the effectiveness of the actions you take in the world.

Meaning: a high-level Funding skill does not mean you're wealthy, but more like... you are more likely to succeed at getting money when you need it. Your "net worth" is a separate value you track on your character sheet. When you cancel a subscription to save money, you did a money management check and succeeded.

Alright, so how does this check out? Me again with low-mid-high:

• Funding: Mid. I have pretty good money management skills, thanks to understanding the financial independence framework. But I have low to zero "capital acquisition" skills. I've never dealt with venture money or business loans, and have only ever self-funded projects.
• Scrappiness: High. I experiment a ton. Building a SaaS, making blogs, video production, courses, freelancing, the list goes on. And I've done it since I was a teenager. Self-awareness is "learning from past mistakes," self-reflection, and course-correcting. All of this lets me do more with less.
• Connections: Mid. I do have a lot of "access" to people in big companies and through my network. That would allow me to find work pretty quickly if I needed it. I'd say my relationship-building needs work. The difference is quality vs. quantity.

It feels like these major/minor skills are measured or added up differently than Expertise was (based on past projects). Low-mid-high is easier to think about.

Why does this matter?

Well, depending on the archetype you're going for, you might be lacking in some areas.

If I was going for The Founder archetype, I might need to get familiar with venture capital funding or finding investors.

Simiarly, pretty much every archetype besides ones that keep you employed require mid-level money management skills. It will be hard to work for yourself without understanding more about taxes, budgeting, and simple accounting rules. The Early Retiree would require a high skill to deal with investment drawdown and cash flow.

And try being The Indie Hacker without being scrappy.

Cheers,
Kamran