but I like working alone.

There’s all this noise these days about working together. But let me ask you this. How can you think deeply, come up with solutions after careful thought and reading, research, study, and processing if you are sitting in a room full of people putting post-it notes on a chalkboard? What’s up with all the teamwork anyway?

One of the main misconceptions about collaboration is that you should do it. In fact, when the task is better handled by a single person, and it’s neither complex, or ambiguous, when the path forward is pretty clear, then you should definitely NOT collaborate.

But if it’s complex, complicated, uncertain, ambiguous, and tricky, you may need others to find the best solution. Even if you prefer working alone, you can still do that in stages, but make sure you carve out time for group work that is also deep, meaningful, and pushes you towards the best solutions. And it’s ok to use some of those colored post-its every once in a while.