# How to be a professional service provider

High-quality professional work is built around several things:

1. Legitimate skill above other people in a [specialization](jobs-specialization.md)
2. Some degree of [speaking](language-speaking.md) and [writing](language-writing.md) skill where they can convey information
3. The ability to set and enforce reasonable [boundaries](people-boundaries.md)
4. The ability to admit when they do *not* [understand](mind-understanding.md) something
5. A specific type of wisdom with respect to [staying legally safe](legal-safety.md)

For that reason, professional behavior is essentially a form of [maturity](maturity.md).

## Providing a service

Service providers are essentially a middle between other people's actions.

- This means that any professional is only acting on behalf of someone else.
- This *also* complicates things when the service involves a person's interaction with someone else already, since it now creates three people involved.

For the sake of [communicating](people-conversation.md) as well as successfully accomplishing tasks, every professional should *always* have at least 2 tasks for every single task they've been assigned:

1. Do the task they were given.
2. Communicate that they did the task back to the person who told them to do it.
3. If necessary, communicate that task to other relevant people (e.g., CC on an email).
4. If necessary or a [legal risk](legal-safety.md) otherwise, record that task being performed and communication about it.

## Avoid overextending

Scope creep is very common, which is from practicing in such a way that you end up drawing in related tasks not related to your specialization.

Unfortunately, it's very easy to not realize what you really don't know. For that reason, stick with what you know.