The anatomy of a doer (ft. Simone Inzaghi)
Examining the world of doers.
A doer is someone who starts a task right away. While a thinker would develop a strategic plan first, think every step through, and then only start working on it.
We generally oscillate between being a thinker and a doer. And on average, every individual leans towards one of these archetypes.
Both doers and thinkers have their pros and cons. To have the best outcome as an individual or a group, we need to choose the suitable doer-thinker trade-off.
I am more of a doer than a thinker. So I can empathise with doers more. The biggest problem with the doers is that we often get stuck in a ‘local minima’. This means we would fail to introspect, see the bigger picture and act. For my work, this typically results in writing redundant codes that I need to clean up later.
Simone Inzaghi, the current Inter Manager, is a stud doer. He joined the team when Antonio Conte (more of a thinker and a whinner) left the club because of the financial situation. Inzaghi joined Inter, fine-tuned Conte’s formation a bit and started getting results right away. In his second year, now he is leading Inter to the UCL final. He hardly complains about the problems or challenges that he faces, but rather focuses on finding solutions and getting results.
But there was a brief period when Inter was horrible. Nothing was going right. In this video (2:10 to 3:20) Inter striker, Romelu Lukaku explains how Inzaghi introspected and went back to the “old ways of counter-attacking” which did miracles for the team.
Therefore, this is something that can make a doer very successful, I think. If the results are sub-optimal then a little bit of introspection is needed. What can help immensely is if you have a manager or an assistant or a colleague who is much more of a thinker than a doer, who can give you the much-needed input on time. Then the best of both worlds can be combined.
Are you a doer or a thinker? How do you cope with the challenges and opportunities that come with your style? What have you learned from working with people who are different from you? Please share your stories and insights in the comments below!
So in a creative writing class, we were introduced to the concept of planners vs pansters - planners wrote the outline of a story, created a structure etc and then start writing vs pansters who just jump into writing and let it flow. I feel I fall into the pansters category, in writing and in life both. And it would do me good to be a bit of a planner and also get a bird’s eye view before starting something. We may not always have other people to rely on for this. What do you think?