Can vs. Should
The book’s central distinction. “I can do that” is a capability claim and says nothing about fit. Most careers are built entirely out of cans. Can describes the full menu of possibility. Should requires a filter.
First: Ch 2
Potato
The uniform, legible, easily categorized professional shape that hiring systems are built to find and slot. Efficient, defensible, and not what humans actually are.
Adapted from Rory Sutherland, Alchemy · Ch 2
Pineapple
The particular combination of attributes that makes a person unique and unusually well suited to certain contexts. Our distinct quality and value.
First: Ch 2
Potato Valley
Any environment, a company, an industry, a culture, that rewards broadly useful, predictable behaviors and deprioritizes everything else. Valleys don’t recruit people who fit the mold so much as create the mold and reward those who force themselves into it.
First: Ch 2
Koi Pond
A better environment that’s still an enclosure. Nicer water, same walls.
First: Ch 3
Green Teams Dot
Availability masquerading as performance. Any signal we maintain as evidence that we’re doing well even though it has little to do with what matters.
First: Ch 1
False Shoulds
The internalized voices that argue for someone else’s path in the language of safety and reason. Five species: Professional, Societal, Family, Past Self, and Future Self. They never die. They grow up and learn to argue in the language of our current values.
First: Ch 7
Jam Table
The set of options we can perceive. More options don’t improve our odds of choosing well and can paralyze us, but it’s very hard to choose something that never made it onto the table.
Adapted from Iyengar and Lepper (2000) · Ch 6
Macaroni
The hundreds of thousands of small, ordinary tasks that fill a career, as opposed to the hero moments on the cover of the picture book.
First: Ch 11
Armor
The externally legible professional identity built from titles, credentials, employers, and roles. Useful, temporary, incomplete, and frequently on loan. Check inside for the embossed “Property of.”
First: Ch 12
Plywood
The organization, seen as a structure of work that needs doing. A board with holes cut to the shape of the tasks it needs filled.
First: Ch 18
Couch Problem
Preserving a once-successful decision as a permanent constraint, so every new circumstance has to be organized around the old solution long after its fit has changed.
First: Ch 23
Invisible Fence
A boundary that was undoubtedly a blocked path at one time and that we stopped testing long ago. Boundaries age. Not all of them are still live.
First: Ch 24
Coins
Money, correctly understood. Not the point of the game but what buys extra lives. Coins purchase recoverability, the ability to make one wrong move without ending everything.
Adapted from Super Mario Bros. and the Stoics · Ch 25
Shirt Colors
A shorthand for the role we most naturally occupy on a crew, regardless of what the org chart says.
Adapted from the original Star Trek · Ch 21
Nothing matches that one. It might be in the other forty.
