The Knowledge mechanic

If there is no business skill tree, what is marketing, sales, accounting, etc. if not skills?

Marketing is knowledge.

You gotta know about marketing to apply your skills in that specific way.

When someone says, "Trollbjorn is good at marketing" what it translates to is more like, "Trollbjorn is good at understanding their audience and talking to them in a way that gets them to use their product – you know, marketing."

"Know" is the operating word that gives it away – do you know marketing? Have you acquired the knowledge?

Knowing stuff affects the way you think. It modifies your desire. It adds detail and increases the number of actions you might take to achieve your desired outcome.

Something like this, visually:

If you don't know about marketing, at all, then after you build your coin-collecting app your thought_process.exe will not include debug symbols for marketing. Why isn't anyone using your app? The hell if I know. 🤷‍♂️

When you know about marketing and you learn about "audience building" then you may begin having thoughts or desires like:

"I want to find a place where coin collectors are hanging out."

Or:

"I wonder if this is a problem people actually have?"

Or, if you learn about a specific marketing tactic, it might make your actions more specific:

"Create an article using keywords that people are searching for in my niche."

There may be no skill tree of Business but there's a Knowledge Tree of Business, which would include Marketing and Sales underneath it, along with many others that go deep.

If knowledge adjusts the actions you take to achieve the desired outcome, how does that play with skills?

That's up next.

Cheers,
Kamran