Only work with smart people #Raul6Tips

I only work with brilliant people. Or, as I said at Freelance Camp Vancouver 2011, I refuse to work with stupid people. I know, this sounds horrible. I felt horrible as I said it, publicly. But it’s true. One of the keys to my success is that I surround myself with, I immerse myself within, a bunch of really smart people. I trust my friends and colleagues to do what they are supposed to do because I know they have my back. They know my standards of work quality. And I have such limited amount of time that I need to invest it the best way I can.

I’m very successful not only because I work very hard, but in large part, because I have a framework of trusted colleagues, friends, co-authors and partners on whom I rely. I co-author papers with only some of the top scholars in the world, with great co-authors, and with some of my very best students. I collaborate in consulting projects (or teaching projects, as I did with my good friend Lisa Thomas-Tench when we co-taught Marketing and Economics, or with my good friend Rebecca Bollwitt when we co-taught seminars for WorkSafe BC. Same thing in my current project for the City of Surrey with my friends and colleagues from Invoke. I co-wrote the winning proposal with another very close friend and brilliant woman, Grace Carter). That’s how I keep winning and succeeding: by relying on the great work of others, and by contributing sound, solid work.

I co-authored a book with Arieanna Schweber not because she is one of my closest friends. I did it because she is brilliant. Admittedly, that was one of the key elements of how I got to work with Arieanna (because we are friends). But I chose to be her co-author because I knew she had A LOT of experience building online communities. We are really good friends, but beyond that, we have a lot of mutual respect for each other’s body of work.

I co-organize Mental Health Camp Vancouver with Isabella Mori not only because she’s one of my best friends. I do it because I know we GET each other. We have each other’s backs. We KNOW how we function, we KNOW what we need to get done in order to achieve success in our shared project. And she has my full respect with regards to mental health and social media.

Isabella and Raul Credit: Karen Hamilton (Tiny Bites) on Flickr

I have Jonathon Narvey and Shane Birley as my co-organizers of the Vancouver Blogger Meetup because they are both trusted, respected bloggers who have proven to be as engaged and devoted to the Vancouver blogging community as I do (both of them were, in case you didn’t know, part of this year’s and last year’s organizing committee for Northern Voice 2011).

I chose 2 brilliant young women as my interns (Anabelle and Jessica) from all the applicants I had because they are smart, and they are as engaged with the arts community as I am. Their commitment to my causes is a direct reflection to their commitment to working with me and their similar philosophy to me. And that rocks, because that’s how we’ve been able to provide support and coverage for the arts community.

(You can see how hard we’ve worked to support the arts community as much as we’ve been doing in the past 6 weeks.)

And the list continues…

The projects I do with the people I work with are a direct reflection of how much respect I have for their work. It’s an explicit endorsement of how much I value what they bring to my life, not only as friends but as colleagues. This doesn’t mean that I can’t respect the work of others or that I won’t collaborate with others, but it does mean that if I have a series of offers to collaborate in projects, I will choose those where I can find the most reward and the highest return on investment.

And it’s not the return on investment on my money: it’s return on investment on the brain cells I use. So that’s the first of my 6 tips on how to manage yourself as a project. Work with the smartest people you can. Surround yourself with bright people.

This is post 1 of 6 for my 6 Tips on How to Manage Yourself as a Project, the talk I gave at Freelance Camp Vancouver 2011. You can read the rest of my series here.

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