This may only work if you're me, but ...
My workplace performance took a huge upswing about a month ago. My boss sat me down and told me that I was annoying and upsetting various management people - who had no lack of annoyance factor themselves, but were after all the management. He told me to engage the public relations skills I'd shown in my volunteer work with Wikipedia.
Turns out this was the magical key - just by thinking of my emails as PR communications, and thinking of my job title not as "senior system administrator" but as "senior system administrator and operations team public relations", I'm charming and delighting people while the substance of the message remains the same. (Recent example: leaving a high-up marketer delighted and pleased that we'd blocked their broken effectively-open-relay "email a friend" form when it had been used for a spam run, and that the company would not be email blackholed a second time.) And it turns out that about half the job is in fact dealing with others.
Now I just need to remember to keep up with the machine-tending that is the first half of my job ...
For a while now I've been very interested in learning useful knowledge and acquiring useful skills. Of course there's no shortage of useful knowledge and skills to acquire, and so I've often thought about how best to spend my limited time learning.
When I came across the concept of Force Multiplication, it seemed like an appropriate metaphor for a strategy to apply to choosing where to invest my time and energy in acquiring useful skills and knowledge. I started to think about what areas or skills would make sense to learn about or acquire first, to:
There have been a small number of skills/areas that have helped me surge forward in progress towards my goals. I look back at these areas and wish only that I had come across them sooner. As most of my adult life has been focused on business, most of those areas that have had a tremendous impact on my progress have been business related, but not all.
So far I've found it hard to identify these areas in advance. Almost all of the skills or knowledge that I learned, that had a large impact on progress towards success, I pursued for unrelated reasons, or I had no concept of how truly useful they would be. The only solution I currently have for identifying force multipliers is to ask other people, and especially those more accomplished than me, what they've learned that had the most impact on their progress towards success.
So, what have you learned that had the most impact on your progress towards success (whatever that might be)?
Can you think of any other ways to identify areas of force multiplication?