Current category: generalist
Blog home
About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
email me if you have any questions or comments.
Using WordPress
3.1.3
I had lunch today with the always inspirational Grant McCracken, who leaves my mind fizzing with new ideas and thoughts, so I’m riding that energy wave and updating my blog.
As an aside, Grant is in the Bay Area talking about his soon-to-be-released book, Chief Culture Officer, about how companies need to incorporate an understanding of cultural forces into their executive planning, much as they do for finance and sales expertise. Read Grant’s blog for some neat thought experiments of how the corporate world would be different if such a position existed.
One of the questions we discussed today was how to find out what’s happening in culture. It’s too big a space for any one person to wrap their mind around, and the relevant forces only become apparent in retrospect. Grant’s suggestion was that the Chief Culture Officer (CCO) must be an expert at pattern recognition to find needles of insight among the haystacks of culture. I suggested that perhaps the CCO could serve as a lens, magnifying trends and bringing them to the attention of the relevant stakeholders. Both of these are decidedly human, and depend on the noticing skills of the person in question.
One idea we talked about is whether cultural trend watching can be automated in some way. Grant has a nice post about one potential tracker of fashion culture. Google Trends is another interesting way of tracking the cultural zeitgeist, as people’s searches reveal their concerns.
The risk with any sort of automation culture tracking is the same as with people, which is that biases may be inherent. The same things we are blind to as people may get coded into the routines we write to track the culture. We may not be sufficiently leaving ourselves and our algorithms open to the surprises of serendipity, the break in the patterns that is the only hint we get of the new patterns to come. We may ignore such breaks as “outliers” or reject them as mistakes in our algorithms. Thus arises the question: how can we plan to be surprised?
Note that this is anathema to many organizations, as surprise has a negative connotation. Some managers control their organizations with process and bureaucracy, and the last thing they want is to have any unexpected surprises. However, in suppressing the risk of negative surprises, those managers also prevent themselves from the potential of positive surprises.
What’s ironic about this tendency towards process and control is that it blinds such managers to the very trends that could blind side them in the future. Once a process is in place, people assume that the process is complete in and of itself, and so they stop paying attention to things outside the process, inconsistencies in the process results, and other hints that the process may no longer be applicable. They restrict their perception to what’s relevant to the process rather than using their peripheral vision to see what’s all around them.
Can we plan to be surprised while also institutionalizing what we know? I think we’re still learning how to do that. I’ve touched upon the idea in previous posts about social technologies and the balance between learning more about the world and latching our knowledge into place.
I think it also depends on maximizing people within the organization – as Grant pointed out today, companies have a huge wealth of cultural knowledge embedded within their employees but have no way of extracting or using that knowledge. Training people to notice when things don’t fit with tools like recognition-primed decision making may be more valuable than training them in a process which may become outdated within months.
And, unsurprisingly, I think it really helps to have generalists around as they are predisposed to see and understand patterns in disparate worlds. They are more likely to notice when new trends are coming, as they have different noticing filters from their varied backgrounds that let them see beyond the filters of the single-minded expert.
Lots of scattershot ideas here, which I don’t really have the time or energy to refine into a focused post. But I wanted to record my initial reactions, and hopefully I can build on them at some point.
I’ve been thinking on and off about this post for weeks, and it’s not coming together, so I’m just going to write up what I have and see what happens. Or at least put it up to instigate comments that will help me clarify what I mean (as the comments on my “Faking it” post led to the “Language Games” post).
The basic premise is that we use stories to make sense of the world. I’m using stories in a very broad sense here, including anything where there’s a causal narrative (X did something and Y happened). Let’s take some examples:
We tell stories to explain how the world works. And if we can’t make sense of the world with our existing stories, we invent a pattern (or story). This New York Times blog entry describes how superstitious beliefs go up in times of uncertainty, as people respond to their lack of control by finding patterns explaining what is going on, such that they understand the causes of the distress they’re experiencing. In ancient times, we anthropomorphized nature into the form of quarreling gods, as we imputed understandable human behavior to objects that were otherwise fearsome and unexplainable.
One of my traits as a generalist is that I find patterns everywhere. This can be a strength, in that I can take a mass of data and observations and distill it down to an underlying pattern. The flip side is that I can often see several possible stories to explain what’s going on, and just pick one as a hypothesis. Somebody wlll point out an inconsistency in my story, and I’ll say “Oh, good point”, and switch to a different story (Paul Saffo calls this “Strong opinions, weakly held”, which I quite like). This can be quite frustrating to people who hold opinions strongly and sometimes even mistake them for Truth.
So my theory of the moment is that everything is a story:
Stories have targeted audiences – not all stories will make sense to all audiences. I can tell the story of a great play in football, and the eyes of my friends will glaze over. I can tell the story of evolution to a fundamentalist Christian and elicit an angry rebuttal. One of the dangers we face currently as a society is that we no longer have a unifying set of stories that you can expect everybody to believe. We have a fragmented set of audiences each believing its own stories. To put it in Latour-ian terms, we have a number of co-evolving parallel Collectives.
This fragmentation of stories and audiences drives the need for more generalists. One of my strengths is understanding different audiences well enough to tell stories that make sense to each audience. To take my well-worn example, when I was working on CellKey, I often had to translate between the physicists and biologists and software developers. The generalist can play the part of the Latour-ian diplomat, interfacing between different Collectives and finding the common ground on which they can be brought together.
Every time I post on this blog, I am telling a story. It’s not a story in a conventional narrative sense, but it is my way of making sense of the world, of describing the patterns I see around me. I record these story patterns with the hope that they can help others make sense of the world as well. This ongoing process of finding and collecting stories has been a fruitful one for me, and I hope that you find it useful as well.
P.S. Third week at Google, and already head-deep in a project. Stayed late at work tonight finishing up a presentation for tomorrow. And yet this is the night I make the effort to blog, partially because putting together the presentation employed these skills of telling a story from a mass of unstructured data, and partially because of the Cokes I was drinking at 8pm to help me with the final push.
My last post on faking it engendered some discussion that made it clear I hadn’t communicated my point very clearly. To paraphrase one uncharitable commenter, one interpretation is that I’m looking for ways to justify my tendencies towards self-aggrandizing attention-seeking egotism. And there’s certainly an element of that, as I thought I covered in that post before discussing more interesting possibilities to me. But I think there’s more going on, so I’m going to take another shot at explaining some of the context going on here (or dig myself deeper in my delusional attempts to justify my bad behavior).
If I wanted to learn a foreign language like Spanish, should I study in private, learn from books, and only dare to speak it in public once I have achieved full mastery of grammar and vocabulary? Of course not. The best way to learn a foreign language is through immersion: start speaking it among other speakers even if I’m doing it very poorly, and learn by the hilarious mistakes I’ll make in trying to communicate in that language. But more experienced speakers will get the essence of what I’m trying to say, and correct my mistakes, and that practice is how I’ll improve my command of the language. To connect this to my last post, one could call such practice “faking” one’s knowledge of the foreign language.
Joining any new group or community means learning a new language. Just because it is English and not technically a foreign language does not change this fact. If you’re playing ultimate frisbee and somebody yells “Force away!”, that has a specific meaning for everybody on the field that is not immediately obvious from the English meaning of those words. If you don’t respond appropriately, your teammates will start yelling at you, as I found when I was learning ultimate while playing pickup games. Just like the beginning speaker of a foreign language, I learned from those mistakes, and improved my speaking and comprehension of “ultimate frisbee language” through practice.
The same overloading of common words is true of scientific and professional communities. Part of the reason graduate school takes so long is learning to speak the language of one’s professional community. Each field of study requires a set of unique domain knowledge. The community could just coin neologisms for any new concept, which does happen, but more often, existing words are repurposed for this domain-specific context. For instance, if you ask a biologist, an engineer, and a programmer what a “platform” is, you will get three different answers, as we found out once when we spent an entire day at Sciex sorting out confusion around that word. Using jargon inconsistent with the community usage will cause miscommunication and demonstrate one’s lack of understanding of the field.
Mastering the language of a given community is, in some sense, equivalent to mastering the system of thought used by that community. The practices of the community become embedded in the language, such that the two become tightly intertwined. Those who try to use the jargon without understanding the knowledge community will be exposed as charlatans as they will use words in combinations that make no sense to the insiders – I’m always entertained by how offended engineers get when bad tech speak is used in TV shows and movies. The converse may not be true, though; those who understand the system of thought will generally be able to communicate what they mean even if they don’t share a common language. For instance, doctors who speak different languages like Spanish and German would probably be able to work together just from the shared context of medical practice.
As another example of the strong relationship between language and thought, I continue to be fascinated by framing. If I had called my last post “practicing it” instead of “faking it”, I think I would have gotten different reactions from readers, as “fake” has negative connotations, implying the claiming of unearned mastery, and “practice” has positive connotations, implying that such mastery is earned. I chose the less charitable word precisely because I was aware of the egotistical way in which my behavior could be interpreted, and thought that the language choice would indicate that awareness. Alas, my communication was not successful, or possibly too successful, in that the framing of the behavior as faking activated an emotional context of unfairness I could not overcome. I should have known better, as I’ve read George Lakoff’s work on framing, and know that using emotion-laden words creates a powerful context which is difficult to override with logical debates (a lesson the Democrats have still failed to learn). And so I learn from this practice experience, and will write more effectively next time.
To take a quick detour into philosophy, I need to read Wittgenstein at some point because it seems like his concept of language games is very similar to this. Because the same word can be repurposed to many different uses depending on context, language is more like a game being played within a set of rules and we’re choosing which rules to use at any given time. Depending on which community we are speaking to or which context we are in, words take on different meanings – to use the example from that web page I found via Google, a boxer could either be a pugilist or somebody who puts things into cardboard boxes, and until I give you the context, you have no way to distinguish between those two meanings. And as a further aside, that’s reminiscent of superimposed wave functions in quantum mechanics that later collapse once an observation is made to provide a context, but that gets way too trippy, so I’ll leave that for another time.
Hopefully this further elucidation of the context of my thinking places my last post in perspective. I’m currently embarking on a severe test of my ability to grok new forms of thought and language, as my first day at Google was yesterday. Trying to get up to speed on a large organization with a very distinct way of speaking and doing is going to be a fun challenge for me. We’ll learn whether my practice in trying to cross disciplines over the past decade translates into this new context, and whether this skill is generalizable or not, as I believe it is.
I have a bad habit of trying to fake knowledge when I don’t have it. Whether the topic is world politics or art history or technology or postmodern sociology, I like to pretend that I am knowledgeable on the topic and keep on talking. This habit drives some of my friends crazy, as they feel that it is tantamount to lying. One of them asked me why I do it last month, and while I took a crack at an answer at the time, I’ve been thinking about the question and have some more thoughts.
My friend suggested that my faking was a hubris-laden attempt at being a know-it-all. And I think that’s part of it. Through high school, I could know it all, mastering all subject areas to which I was exposed. I was a champion “Scholastic Bowl” (aka Quiz Bowl) player, answering questions from math to literature to history to biology to physics. Even though it’s patently ridiculous for me to now pretend I can be an expert in all of those disciplines, a bit of me still clings to that youthful self-identity, and keeps on trying anyway.
And yet I’m perfectly happy to concede my own ignorance when confronted with somebody that clearly knows more than I do, so it’s not purely an ego thing where I’m trying to assert dominance. There’s something else going on here. After thinking about it some more, I think it’s actually tied into my identity as a generalist.
Part of being a generalist is understanding different subject areas well enough to effectively communicate with practitioners of that subject. That means not only speaking the right jargon, but understanding the structure of thought associated with that subject, and the mental connections that practitioners make. Without this framework understanding, the generalist will not be able to effectively translate into and out of the subject. For instance, physicists are grounded in a quantitative view of the world, so trying to communicate with them in terms of verbal abstractions will be ineffective; mathematical approaches will work better. On the flip side, biologists are more open to fuzziness, as biological systems are much less predictable and temperamental experimental subjects, so qualitative observations are acceptable.
So when I’m faking knowledge on a topic, I’m practicing my skills as a generalist. Do I understand the structure of the subject well enough to keep up my end of the conversation? It’s a test of my mastery of the jargon, of the basic concepts of the field, of the way in which practitioners communicate. If I am not called out as a fake, I pass the unspoken test, and am accepted as one of the community. If I am called out (as my friend once memorably did in a conversation about art history when she said after five minutes “Wow, you know way less about this than I thought you did!”), I can review what I did wrong which helps me improve my understanding of the communication within that subject.
Understanding the language is also an essential element of being accepted within a community. I’ve written about this before with respect to ultimate frisbee culture, but it’s true of any community. Each community has its own jargon and cultural touchpoints, and knowing what those are is part of what it means to be a community member: Chicago Cubs fans are scarred by references to Bartman, classical music buffs have opinions about Mahler and Mozart, certain nerds talk in Star Wars quotes. My ability to learn the basics of the jargon and the culture of many different communities gives me the freedom to travel between those communities as a social butterfly, cross-pollinating between them.
Faking it is also a good way to find out if I’m talking to somebody who actually knows a subject. They’ll be able to catch me out on a topic, which becomes an opportunity for me to learn from them about that topic. This may not work, as many people are too polite to tell other people they’re wrong or full of crap. MIT tends to foster an adversarial conversation style, where mistakes are leaped upon, but more genteel members of society just nod politely and change the subject. So that’s a potential problem with faking it as a means for discovering expertise.
So does faking knowledge on a subject make me a charlatan know-it-all, unfit for society? Or does it make me a generalist, developing my ability to communicate between communities? What do you think?
In a continuation of my reflections on my personal brand as a generalist, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a generalist in corporate America. What is the value proposition that I as a generalist bring to companies and how can my skill set contribute to a company’s success? To put it more starkly, if I were to work as a generalist consultant, what would that even mean and how would I measure my contributions? Grant McCracken’s been struggling with the same question as an anthropologist, and it seems like there’s a lot of overlap between his answer and mine:
“Anthropologists are good at recognizing patterns in social and cultural data. My clients get this about me. They used to ask me to find the solution. More and more, they ask me to find the problem. How, they ask, should we be thinking about this? Anthropologists are good pattern seekers, good assumption hunters.”
Along similar lines, I’ve often said that one of my skills is asking the right questions. When confronted with an unfamiliar situation, I can draw analogies to other situations that I have previously dealt with, and ask a series of questions to narrow the cone of uncertainty. Once the situation is framed appropriately, that elicits a series of appropriate questions. I may not know the answers to those questions, but once the right questions are being asked, I can call on the appropriate specialists to answer those questions, as I described in a previous post defending generalists.
This reminds me of a question a friend asked me a couple months ago: does being a generalist just mean specializing in multiple areas? My instinctive answer was no, but it took me a while to articulate why. There is a different attitude towards the world – when confronted with a problem, a specialist, even a multi-specialist, tries to figure out how to use their mastery to answer the problem as posed, whereas a generalist asks questions to understand the system, possibly revealing an underlying problem that should be handled by a different specialist. I do think that experience in multiple specializations will tend to incline one towards the generalist attitude, as the different perspectives of each specialization will make one have to think about how the system fits together; after all, that’s how I got to this point, wending my way through physics and software and biotech. But I don’t think that’s the only way to become a generalist.
This question of what it means to be a generalist has also come up recently as I try to explain my latest career move to friends; when I say “I’m going to work for Google…”, they nod and say “Yeah, makes sense”, but when I continue with “…as a financial analyst”, they look confused and don’t see how it makes sense with the rest of my career. To explain what attracts me to this position requires a digression into my generalist quest, as part of the reason for taking this job is to give me more perspectives with which to work, including a financial perspective, a quantitative modelling perspective, and the perspective of working for a large company as opposed to a startup. Understanding how companies work as a system requires understanding the financial side, as that is a driving factor in many corporate decisions.
Getting back to the original question of what it may mean to be a generalist consultant, I think it may mean analyzing companies as systems by examining how the different parts of the company are working together. By being able to talk to each area of the company in their own language, based on my own experience as a developer, scientist, manager, and now analyst, I could see how the areas are working together or against each other. The delivered analysis would include asking and answering the right questions to understand why delivered results are not consistent with stated goals, including inconsistent incentive plans, interdisciplinary communication difficulties, etc. (as an aside, I need to do some more reading in the field of organizational behavior and organizational learning, as that would seem to be a field where these sorts of questions are being asked). And the experience of building revenue models at Google will give me tools that may be useful in generating ROI spreadsheets to convince management of the value of such analyses. I don’t know – I’m still playing around with ideas here, as the branding of myself as a generalist is still a work in progress.
Tomorrow, some thoughts on how my generalist perspective sometimes mischievously reveals itself.
P.S. I’m back! Since my last post three weeks ago, I’ve road tripped across the country with a friend and a harp via Chicago, the South Dakota Badlands and Yellowstone, moved into a rented house in Mountain View, and caught up with several Bay Area friends. I start work at Google on Monday, but I’ve been enjoying the time off after a crazy summer of job hunting, packing and moving. If you’re around and want to hang out this week, let me know.
Seth Godin is one of my favorite writers, but I have to take exception to his latest post called We specialize in everything:
When choice is limited, I want a generalist. When selection is difficult, a jack of all trades is just fine.
But whenever possible, please bring me a brilliant specialist.
If you’re shaking your head in agreement with this obvious point, then the question is: tell me again why you’re a generalist?
He later added a coda suggesting the idea of specializing in being a generalist, but sticks to his guns that “My point is that you never call on these people [generalists] when there’s a better specialist available.”
As somebody who has branded himself as an unrepentant generalist, I have to respond from my admittedly biased viewpoint.
I actually agree to some extent with Godin’s point. As The Only Sustainable Edge points out, specialization drives greater achievement in a given field, as monomaniacs achieve a level of focus that dabblers can not. Specialization also implies that only those who are truly passionate about a field will commit to the field and become the best in the world at what they do.
I think the flaw in Godin’s argument is revealed in his second paragraph: “If I need an animator, I can find the world’s best animator.” Here’s the subtle point: how do you know that you need an animator? That seems like a trivial question, but it gets to the heart of why generalists matter. Once you have defined the problem, and scoped it, and figured out exactly what skill set you need to solve your problem, then of course you’d hire the best person you can find with that skill set.
Specialists only know how to attack problems in one way – that’s part of specializing. To be the best at what they do, they have to ignore other ways of approaching the world and shut out other perspectives. A specialist is the proverbial hammer treating every problem as a nail.
So when you have a problem, how do you determine which specialist to use? Each specialist will tell you their skill set is the right one to solve the problem, because if they didn’t believe in the power of their specialization, they wouldn’t be a specialist. You need a generalist, somebody who can evaluate the problem from multiple perspectives. and who can ensure that the specialists picked will fix the real problem rather than a symptom.
The other absolutely vital role for generalists is in communication. Specialists see the world from their perspective, so for them to communicate with other specialists requires a generalist who knows enough of each specialization and its jargon to be able to translate between the worlds. This is a role that I have been very successful in filling at all of my different companies, especially on the interdisciplinary team of CellKey, where we had physicists, biologists, engineers and software developers all working together on the same product. Without a generalist, you have specialists talking past each other, and their effort is wasted because you can’t get them all working together and speaking the same language.
Maybe this is what Godin meant when he suggested one could specialize as a generalist, but I think that his post overestimates the value of skill alone, and underestimates the social difficulties of selecting and aligning specialists. The problems of language alignment and of picking the right team of specialists are where generalists provide value in a way that specialists can’t, precisely because they’re specialists.
I just realized I don’t have an “About Me” page on this blog. You can get a sense of who I am from reading the various posts and browsing the archives, but I figured it might be handy to have an introduction post. This is partially inspired by skimming through Derek Powazek’s book Design for Community, which emphasized the importance of making the people behind the site real. So…
I’m Eric Nehrlich. I call myself an unrepentant generalist.
What does that mean? It means I specialize in nothing. Or everything.
My being a generalist is partially aptitude (I learn fast so I can pick up new ideas quickly, and I have enough mental models that adding more is easy), partially limitations (I don’t have the focus necessary to dive deep into a subject for five years, as I found when I tried to be a grad student), and partially interest (I like talking about everything). The phrase “Unrepentant Generalist” is a reminder to myself to glory in rejecting specialization, and to explore where this generalist path leads. I use this blog to help trace that path, recording my thoughts on everything from cognition to community to conversation to design to management to media to philosophy to politics to stories.
I didn’t mean to be a generalist; in fact, I had planned to be a specialist. When I was a kid, I decided I was going to be a particle physicist because I was a big nerd and wanted to be Richard Feynman when I grew up. I did a high school science fair project at Fermilab, went to MIT where I worked on the Superconducting Super Collider over the summers, did an internship at CERN, and went to grad school at Stanford to work on the Stanford Linear Accelerator. But instead of studying physics all the time like my compatriots, I was singing in the chorus, playing volleyball, going to various talks, running the alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer FAQ, etc.
So I left Stanford to try a different specialization. I had always liked computers even after taking several CS courses at MIT, and friends and advisors often wondered why I chose physics over computers when I had a knack for getting computers to do what I wanted. Since physics hadn’t worked out, I went to work for a friend as a software consultant. Working with a variety of companies taught me about software, but taught me even more about people. I learned that the best technical solution was not always chosen, and that clients rarely asked for what they wanted, so I started to see the limits of being a specialist.
I then joined Signature BioScience, a highly interdisciplinary startup developing new instrumentation for drug discovery. Working there gave me a unique insight into the dynamics of an organization, as the software I developed had to reflect the interests of everybody from engineers to testers to biologists to physicists to managers. I eventually grew into a “union foreman” role, representing the interests of employees to the management team, as I had worked with all factions of the company and understood their issues. And I began to see my value to Signature was not my specialized software expertise – it was my ability as a generalist to meld different viewpoints into a coherent synthesis that happened to be expressed in software.
Signature BioScience unfortunately went bankrupt due to some poor decisions by the management team. The failure of Signature as a company showed me how even a great technical team’s efforts could be wasted by key management decisions. I realized that the value I could bring to an organization by improving its management would easily dwarf any technological contributions I could make, given the multiplier effect of management decisions on the rest of the organization. And my skills as a generalist were well-suited to management, as managers have to balance the interests of their group with those of the larger business, so it requires the ability to see from multiple perspectives.
With this in mind, I moved to New York in 2006 to join a Software Management Training Program at Fog Creek Software, and concurrently completed a M.S. in Technology Management at Columbia University, a degree that is similar to an MBA but with a focus on using technology strategically to serve the business.
Upon completing the program, I decided to move back to California to work for Google in Mountain View. I will be an analyst on a sales finance team that develops revenue forecasting models to help Google executives make decisions. I was drawn to the position because I get to use both my quantitative skills in building the models and my generalist skills in that the models are built on understanding everything from the technical product decisions being made, to sales and marketing strategies, to what customers and competitors are doing, to the larger economic and business environment.
(last updated August 2008)
If that didn’t satisfy your curiosity, here are some links to other versions of me:
Invitation
Now it’s your turn. I’d love to be introduced to any or all of my readers. Feel free to do so in the comments, or send me an email if you’re too shy. Say who you are, why you read this blog, and anything else you want to share.
Beemer commented on my last post:
But it makes me think that it would be really, really useful if we had a big long list of all the different kinds of thinking the human brain can do, and if people knew what they were good and what they weren’t good at on that list.
This reminded me of one of my pet peeves, the inability of many people to even recognize the existence of different kinds of thinking, let alone actually be able to classify those different kinds and rate their ability on them. I have brought up this point several times before, including one of the Latour posts, where I state:
I think that it is so important that people are aware of the provisional nature of reality established by a collective. That they understand that there is not a “One True Reality” that only they are privy to. I also think that it reminds us to go humbly when we enter the realm of a different collective.
I think this is partially related to my last post in that to be able to recognize different kinds of thinking, one has to start thinking about thinking, which is the same sort of meta-thinking that I think leads to irony and other interesting things. Plus, y’know, most of philosophy. Meta meta meta.
While I was mulling this around just now, I came up with a funny analogy that I wanted to share (which is most of the reason I’m writing this post). We all know of the stereotype of the clueless American tourist, who, when confronted with somebody who doesn’t speak English, raises their voice and repeats their question louder and louder, as if that would make a difference. It’s almost as if they don’t recognize that the person they’re talking to (aside: I just spent 30 seconds trying to think of a noun that means “person one is talking to” – conversational target? conversant? Language geeks, I call upon you!) may use a different language.
Now think back to a meeting that you’ve had at work. Two people start the meeting with very different mental models in place of the topic of discussion. They go back and forth, each one raising their voice, because it’s almost as if they don’t recognize the other person may have a different mental model. Same mistake, different context. It’s a reminder that when we disagree with somebody, we should not automatically assume they’re wrong (except when they disagree with me, of course 
), but need to take the time to figure out if they’re speaking a different (mental) language, using a different way of thinking from our own.
I believe that one of my strengths is that I’ve spent a great deal of time examining different ways of thinking and how well I use them. I recognize that I can use different ways of thinking like tools from a toolbox. Because I am open to at least considering other ways of thinking, it often makes me uniquely qualified to “translate” between them. At my last job, it was my responsibility to take the inchoate desires of the biologists and translate them into specifications that the programmers could code to. I was essentially the only person who could talk to each side in their own language.
I feel like this is an important skill, and one that will become ever more important in a world of increasing specialization. I just haven’t figured out what kind of career it sets me up for, if any. One of the ideas I floated recently when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up was being an “Innovation Catalyst”. I’m not the person who’s going to do the innovative work myself – that’s just not something I’m very good at. But I am the person who can pretty quickly grasp the implications of innovative work, be able to see the big picture, and connect it with other innovative work that I know about. I can ask the appropriate questions to push innovators in the right direction. Hence the term “Innovation Catalyst” – I’m not necessary for innovation, but I could be an element that can speed it along. It’s nothing more than an idea as of yet – I have yet to figure out if there are any practical implications. I suppose it means I should be scoping out careers like research management and possibly venture capital. Hrm. And I should note that this isn’t a new idea for me – check out this note from a year and a half ago, where I reiterate this career desire. I just need to figure out what it means.
Anyway. Just to let people know, there’s going to be a whole slew of random posts coming up – I have something like 12 post ideas recorded as drafts from the last few months, and I’ll start to knock them off in my free time. Plus whatever new ideas I have, of course. Oh, the excitement. I bet you’re just quivering with anticipation.
Beemer put up a thoughtful comment in response to my last post. To quote one part:
Smart kids, especially the ones who go places like MIT, often get this idea that they need to be Einstein or Newton, which is frankly silly. Because that’s not how the world works — it’s the total contribution of everyone, in a whole bunch of different dimensions, not just superstars in narrow but visible fields.
I’m certainly guilty of this. It’s easy to believe when you’re a smart kid in a small pond that you have what it takes to be a superstar. And it’s even still conceivable when you’re at MIT, because you’re surrounded by superstars. And it’s not like they blow you out of the water with their intelligence – you hang out with them, have interesting conversations, things like that. Part of what distinguishes the superstars is just staying productive, as I mentioned in that last post. But I think there’s another part as well, which is the ability to focus on a narrow field.
One of the things that eventually got me to drop out of grad school was that I didn’t care enough about physics to make it my life. My fellow students spent morning, day and night studying physics (true story: our quantum field theory prof told us that we’d have to spend three or four hours a night studying, plus weekends if we wanted to keep up. I didn’t. Most did). We’d be out to dinner on a Friday evening, and they’d be talking physics. And I just didn’t have that level of commitment. There were so many other things to think about or talk about.
But in this age of increasing specialization, it really is a full-time job to become an expert in a field, to keep up with all the latest journals, to practice your chosen profession, etc. To become a world-renowned expert, you have to pretty much sacrifice everything else in your life to your field. David Foster Wallace touches on that in his descriptions of the tennis prodigies in both Infinite Jest and the essay titled “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” in his book of essays. And I’m not willing to make that commitment. To anything.
I think part of my reluctance is that the learning curve levels out so fast. Beemer once pointed out to me that it’s always more exciting taking intro classes, because you’re getting exposed to a whole new way of looking at the world and a whole new vocabulary. Once you get past that, then it’s a whole lot of slogging while you pick up all the nuances and details that only matter to other practitioners in the field. And then it’s the focused rat race I mentioned earlier.
I get excited about learning new things and being exposed to new ideas. And staying in one field doesn’t really offer that opportunity, because of the levelling of the learning curve. Physics is a good example – after you take mechanics, electromagnetism and quantum mechanics in your first two years of college, what happens? You take them again as upperclassmen, exploring more nuances. And then again as grad students. Over and over again. Sure, you’re learning more details, and more refined mathematical techniques, but you’re not learning anything fundamentally new.
I’ve mentioned it before, but my ideal job is one where I scan results in a whole bunch of fields and try to figure out how to synthesize them. Constant stimulation. I’m not sure I have the self discipline to sit down and learn stuff like that, unfortunately – there’s so much stuff that I’ve thought about learning at least the intro-level stuff, like sociology or biochemistry, or even economics, that I’ve never followed up on. But it’s in the right ballpark. This blog and my reading list which spans a bunch of areas is my feeble attempt to move in that direction.
Once I get to the point where I’m modestly competent at something, I’m bored. This has been true throughout my life – I have an attention span of about 2-3 years on anything. I burned out on college bad by my senior year. Grad school? I lasted three years. My first job? Two and a half years. I’ve been in my current job four years, but my role has changed a few times in that time. This is my sixth year in the chorus (it took longer because chorus only meets once a week) and I’ll probably quit in the next couple years, because I’ve gotten the routine down and want to move on to something else. I’m still in the learning stage for frisbee, because I’ve only been doing that for a year or so, so it’s still a challenge and a lot of fun. I need to find new challenges for myself on a pretty regular basis. Although I’m still considering what the next one should be (yes, folks, I know your answer is “dating!”)
So that’s my personal choice. I’d rather be modestly competent in a bunch of different things, with a broad but shallow knowledge base, rather than become the total expert in one thing. It fits me better personality-wise. Or so I tell myself. When I’m feeling more cynical, I say that it’s just because I’m lazy and unwilling to put in the effort to be really good at something, instead relying on my native talents to get me up to the mediocre level. But every now and then, it twinges. I want to be a superstar. I do. But I’m not willing to sacrifice the rest of my interests to do it.
I’m not really sure what the point of this post is. Just to warn y’all, and as you’ve probably already observed, this round of posts will probably be fairly introspective. Part of that whole midlife crisis is thinking a lot about who I am, what I do, and my role in the world. So I’ll be writing it up and posting it here, but I don’t really expect anybody other than me to be interested.
P.S. I was sharing some of these theories with a coworker today, especially with regard to the shape of the learning curve, and he pointed out that certain fields differ on the shape of the learning curve. Some fields tend to be knowledge-based – his example was biology or medicine. Medical school is basically a whole ton of memorization. It’s a linear learning curve – the longer you spend learning stuff, the more you know, and the more competent you are. Fields like physics or mathematics tend to be more concept-based; once you grasp the theoretical system, you can understand the rest and contribute. In support of his distinction, he noted that Nobel Prizes in Medicine often reward scientists’ work done at a relatively advanced age, whereas Nobel Prizes in Physics often rewards work done while a young scientist or even a grad student. It’s an interesting thought. I wasn’t quite sure how to tie it in to the rest of my post, so I left it for a postscript.
