When I look for a job or a business idea I try to think like an investor looking for an investment opportunity.
Is the problem or task real, worth solving, and something I am actually interested in, and is there demand for it now and in the future? The mistakes I have made were always when I skipped some part of this and focused on short-term thinking instead.
Mistakes are inevitable. Make enough of them and you start to notice a pattern.
Usually, a pattern of not being entirely honest with yourself on all the dimensions of the opportunity. Or, letting the short-term thinking obscure the long term one.
And that is, at least for me, the number one reason for any single one of the career and business-related mistakes I have made.
So having done enough of them, I eventually reached a point.
A point where I got lowkey pissed with myself for “choosing wrong”. So eventually I decided I needed to get more systematic about it next time around.
In practice that means that the long-term interests I have should be in the driving seat, which meant I needed to figure out a way to approach the critical decision-making points of life in a more structured way.
In a way that would allow me to be more objective and non-emotionally biased. So what better way to do it than thinking like a professional investor, which is how my 7-step opportunity evaluation framework was born.
(If you prefer to cut straight to the practical part, jump to the end where I share my skill prompt for doing this all with Claude or ChatGPT)
Think of it as a short investment memo you write for yourself before committing to anything, with each of the seven steps below as one section of it.
(Obviously, this requires that you know at least the direction you want to go. Without any clue what you want to do, this approach makes little sense and won't help.)
So here is how it works, step by step.