My friend group is like the US electrical grid system. This is an oversimplification, but the way the grid works is essentially having a base load that is fulfilled by local natural gas and nuclear plants¹ and a spiky local demand that is fulfilled by hydro or coal plants. The other interesting thing that happens is maybe best exemplified by the Pacific DC Intertie:

The Pacific Intertie takes advantage of differing power demand patterns between the northwestern and southwestern US. During winter, the northern region operates electrical heating devices while the southern portion uses relatively little electricity. In summer, the north uses little electricity while the south reaches peak demand due to air conditioning usage. Any time the Intertie demand lessens, the excess is distributed elsewhere on the western power grid (states west of the Great Plains, including Colorado and New Mexico).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie

This last point is the root of the similarity. To be more specific, my friends and I live our individual lives and for most of it, we are able to deal with whatever issues are thrown at us quite successfully. However, it happens sometimes that one of us may face a challenge that requires more “power” than they have available. Naturally, it would be great if one could just borrow some “power” from her friends and use it to solve the issue? And this is exactly what we do.

Sure, you can argue this is not always possible because certain tasks may require significant amount of existing knowledge, etc. That’s fair, and a bit obvious? I think the more interesting point here is that even when this is possible, there is a catch — this only works if the borrowed “power” is efficient. Remember that this is a spike demand situation, with some likely tight time constraint, so minimizing overhead is critical.

I appreciate the simplicity of this framework:

There are two types of people – the ones that can be assigned a task and manage to complete it successfully without much help, and the ones who don’t.

Sure, tackling a completely new challenge may require asking more questions and gathering feedback, and generally having more back and forth, and that’s why I am deliberately vague in saying “without much help”. Really the mental model here is something like this: imagine you look back at a task you have completed, and with the hindsight knowledge, you ask yourself how many of the questions you asked were really necessary. If the answer is most, you are in the first bucket.

It probably transpires that I believe it’s preferred to be in the first category. However, I think there is one caveat: if I just try to ask as few questions as I can, I may waste a lot of time figuring out answers on my own instead of leveraging somebody else’s knowledge. Also maybe “wasting time” is not quite correct either — it seems to be the norm that people retain information better when they reach the answers themselves rather than simply asking somebody else². So maybe I will say that

There are 2 types of people – the ones that can be assigned a task and manage to complete it successfully in a reasonable amount of time without much help and the ones who don’t.

I believe this is a useful framework because it captures significant meaning despite being very simple and easy to measure — just give people tasks and see how they perform.

In particular, I think this perspective has two important properties:

1. This is an ubiquitous quality in the sense that it does not apply to just one area of one’s life. I envision it more like a methodology used to approach completing any task. 
2. This is a self enforcing quality in the sene that the better you are at solving tasks fast without much help, the more people will trust you with increasingly complex tasks, and thus the more practice you will get on a varied range of tasks, which in turn will make you faster and more independent.

It was never quite clear to me how somebody ends up in a bucket over the other.  I guess consciously and actively refusing to take the path of least resistance — asking a question for every roadblock — is somewhat the correct way of implementing it, but I am not sure whether there is more to it.

What I know however is that I have a strong preference for interacting with such people. The main benefit that I am aware revolves around a sense of trust (that the task will get done) and freedom (that I will not need to watch over anybody’s shoulder).

I hope that by now, it is self-explanatory why I try to befriend such people and how this improves my personal life. I think there is something to be said about the ramifications of interacting with such people in my professional life as well. In particular, there are two main realizations I had after mentoring more than 50 people (either during my teaching years or my finance career):

1. The questions I receive are interesting and challenge me, thus forcing me to deepen my understanding of a topic in the attempt to provide a good answer³.
2. It saves me time / I utilize my time better for both me and the person I work with. This is obvious – if I have fewer questions to answer, it will take me less time, so I will be able to focus on more things in a day. But this is not all – sometimes it may be that I will spend the same amount of time answering questions, but I will be able to dedicate more of it to deeper explanations, and/or better targeted suggestions for self exploration.

All in all, I think the take-away here is quite simple: Try to be good at solving tasks fast and independently, and equally important, try to surround yourself with similarly minded people.

Footnotes

1. and some renewables, really the idea is that if the source of energy takes a long time to be turned on/off, its ill-suited to address local spikes in demand.
2. My rule of thumb is to spend 20-30 minutes on an issue, and if I don’t have an answer, I’ll just ask around. I can concede that the exact amount of time one spends searching may differ based on the problem at hand. However, I think it is only very difficult problems that should take significantly more than that, and searching for the answer alone may be the only path forward since others are unlikely to know the answer themselves.
3. I believe that the road from kind of understanding something to being able to reason through it if woken up at 3 am is long and arduous, and each such “revision” is a step in the right direction.