Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Yesterday was the last class of my master’s program at Columbia (I have one more final next week, but no more class sessions). A bunch of us technology management students went out for drinks afterwards in celebration, and ran into another group of students from our marketing class. And it was interesting chatting with them and getting their perspective on the class, since we hadn’t mixed much during the class itself.

It was also interesting to hear what they thought of me personally. Apparently I had been dubbed “physics boy” after I let it slip in class that my background was in physics (I raised my hand in one class when the professor asked who had experience with data mining, and he asked me what my experience was).

I was also surprised at the resentment a couple of them felt towards me. I had spoken up in class pretty regularly, as I was trying to ensure my class participation grade, but I had apparently come off as a snarky know-it-all. Admittedly, that’s a reasonably accurate description, but I had thought I had learned how to keep that under control. Good to know I should still be working on that.

The reason I’m writing, though, is that one person (fuelled by alcohol) complained that I was “too smart”, and made the rest of the class look bad. I find this interesting because it ties into the research of Carol Dweck, who studies the corrosive effects of praising people for innate qualities like intelligence rather than acquired qualities like persistence and effort. If we are valued for our intelligence, then when somebody comes along with more intelligence, we are less valued. We have less worth. And that’s devastating.

I’ve experienced this effect firsthand, as going to MIT is a brutal experience. All students arrive at MIT having been the smartest person in the class for their entire lives, so it’s an incredible shock to their self-image to meet people who are not just smarter, but ridiculously smarter (like my freshman physics classmate who regularly doubled my test scores). MIT’s former policy of all freshmen being graded pass/fail was a life saver for me, as it took me an entire year to adjust to this new reality.

Another implication of Dweck’s research is that praising for innate qualities contributes to a zero-sum view of the world. If somebody else is smarter, that takes away from the specialness of my own intelligence. Their gain is my loss. So it’s in my interest to tear them down or find ways to show how they aren’t as special as me.

But that’s not how the world works. I need to finish Robert Wright’s Nonzero one of these days, as it details the ways in which progress occurs because of non-zero-sum interactions. When we “grow the pie”, everybody benefits. When we fight over our percentage of the pie, everybody misses out on those possible benefits, even if they have a larger share of the existing pie.

We go further when we work together and learn from each other. In industry, we benefit from being surrounded by talented coworkers, as our collective product is more likely to be successful. This assumes that one is in a team-oriented environment, and not one that practices destructive practices like rank-and-yank. But, in general, we try to hold on to the talented people around us, as we benefit from knowing them - talented people do wonderful things which we can participate in and learn from. They also tend to know other talented people in a meritocratic version of the old boy network, and being able to draw on those weak ties is a huge benefit.

Another interesting observation is that I’ve never gotten any vibe of resentment from my technology management classmates. In fact, they were defending me last night to this person. This provides some confirmation that real world experience leads away from the zero-sum your-success-is-my-loss view of the world, as everybody in my program has years of experience in industry. Meanwhile, the classmates who felt resentment were much younger - I think they were recently out of college. They may still be thinking they are being graded on a curve, where somebody else’s success pushes one’s own grades down.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of non-zero-sum thinking, and have been seeing it everywhere recently. I’m not sure it totally applies to this particular situation, but I think it does.

P.S. I should start posting more regularly again with classes being done. As usual, I have a ridiculous backlog of ideas that awaits only me being motivated enough to write them up.

P.P.S. I couldn’t figure out how to fit this into the post, but I wanted to comment about the weirdness of being praised for intelligence. There’s no reasonable reaction. “Thank you” is disingenuous, as intelligence is innate and I can’t really take credit for my genes. It’s also weird because intelligence really doesn’t mean that much in the big picture. Effort and persistence matter far more. Intelligence and all other innate qualities are only a starting point - what you achieve with the gifts you have been given is a far better measure of character. We should measure ourselves against our potential and what we could achieve, and starting with more luck in the gene lottery just means our potential is higher and we should be striving to achieve more.

A friend recently sent me an update email with the line:

She is my “it’s complicated” on Facebook.

[updated to add: the friend in question cites xkcd as his inspiration]

I think this quote is wonderfully transcendent in capturing the zeitgeist, so much so that I’m going to spend a blog post unpacking it. Grant McCracken introduced me to the anthropological concept of unpacking in this essay contest from last year (the winners are here), where he asks his readers to supply the “underlying cultural notions” that help to explain what has been observed. So let’s take a look at what’s going on in this quote.

Let’s start with the mention of Facebook. Most people are at least aware of Facebook at this point - it’s a social networking site where one can share one’s life with one’s friends and acquaintances. In particular, one can describe one’s status in a variety of ways, write notes about one’s life, put up pictures from one’s life, etc.

One way in which Facebook is changing the culture is that there is an increased awareness of the public performance aspect of our actions. The Facebook generation is aware that they are always on stage and are comfortable with it in a way that writers like Daniel Solove certainly wouldn’t be. In fact, they use Facebook as a platform to communicate with their friends and update them more efficiently than could be done by communicating with them individually using SMS or phone calls. So it becomes a big deal when they change their relationship status on Facebook or when somebody edits their Top 8 friends on MySpace. Using such platforms to manage one’s social life becomes a reflexive performance with an explicit awareness of one’s audience; the platform is used to deliver public messages to one’s community about shifting social relationships.

The next concept I want to unpack is “it’s complicated”. In Facebook, you can describe your relationship status as one of: single, in a relationship, engaged, married, in an open relationship, or it’s complicated. The first four are the straightforward ones that everybody expects, but the last two are decidedly non-traditional. “It’s complicated” is a nice catch-all term for relationships that don’t fit into the normative bounds of society, where it takes time (and possibly a whiteboard) to explain what’s going on.

It seems like such relationships are becoming more common, and possibly even more accepted. My friend who lives with his two boyfriends is often disappointed when he gleefully explains his living situation and people say “Oh, that’s cool” rather than being shocked or dismayed. Conservatives might rail against such non-traditional relationships, but American society is slowly moving in the direction of “if it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad” (to quote Sheryl Crow).

I also wonder if Facebook including “it’s complicated” as a first-order option for relationship status will hasten the acceptance of such non-traditional relationships. Can the widespread use of Facebook redefine social norms? On Facebook there is no stigma associated with such relationships, as they are just another option in the dropdown box for relationship status (unlike other forms where one has to choose the dreaded “Other”). As people use Facebook to represent themselves, will the implicit acceptance of such relationships by the software influence how people think of those relationships?

I love how this one sentence indicates the direction our society is taking as we explore relationships that do not fit into the traditional nuclear family and how it affects us when our previously private social lives are a matter of public discourse. I don’t know if I have done justice to either the statement or the idea of unpacking, but hopefully this exercise gets you thinking about how even simple statements can tell us much about the state of our culture.

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possibly a whiteboard: My friend Brad had a special category at his Love Sux dinner for Valentine’s Day, where he said that even though the event was for single people, “if you’re in a complex kind of relationship where you really can’t tell if you’re single or not, you qualify. Just come by and complain to us how he’s really sweet but he’s with his wife and her girlfriend the circus-trainer for Valentine’s Day… White-boards not provided, you’ll have to draw on the placemats.”

I’ve been mentioning several theories to several different people recently and decided it’s time to put them all on my blog so they are easy to reference. Some are prescriptive, some are descriptive, but I find all of them useful in certain situations.

The Crusher Theory

Michael “Crusher” Ernst once explained this theory to me and Chuck, and I think it explains a lot about social interactions. The theory is that everybody is always the same age in your head as they were the day you met them. In particular, when Chuck said she was younger than I was, Crusher said that was impossible because I was 16 (he met me as a freshman) and Chuck was 20-something (the age she was when he met her).

It seems like a silly theory, except that it explains so much. Our parents always think of us as the little kids we once were. Our friends tie us to specific periods of our lives, and we behave differently with our high school friends, our college friends, our work friends, etc. And when they meet us in a different context, they don’t know what to make of us not being the person they expect, which is also why we feel such tension in situations where worlds collide, such as when parents attend a gathering with friends.

The Wes “Two Things” Theory

Wes explained this to me at Burning Man in 2000. His claim was that we only have time and energy in life to do two big things at a time so we have to select our big things carefully. For most people, the two things are work/career and a relationship/family. For me at the time, it was work and the chorus, and right now, it’s work and school.

I keep on trying to rebel against this theory, under the pretense that I can do more, but I never seem to manage it, and always end up wearing myself out. One of the results of that initial conversation was that I found a new job a month later as I realized I didn’t want to be spending one of my two “big things” doing what I was doing. Fortunately, in May I’ll be done with classes and able to select a new “big thing” at that point - now I just have to decide what that will be.

The ‘Bug “Fear” Theory

My friend, DocBug, has the theory that when given an option among different things to do in life, one should always choose the one that scares you the most. I like it because it forces us to confront our fears and discover they are not as overwhelming as they initially seem. I’m not very good at following it, though. I guess I have gotten over some of my social fear over the past few years. Now I just need to get over my fears of conflict and rejection in both work and social settings.

The Raj “Just Do It” Theory

Many years ago, I was talking to my friend Raj and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life (funny how I still haven’t figured that out after all these years). I was debating whether I should take some time off and think about what I wanted to do. Raj said that thinking would never enlighten me as to whether I wanted to do something; the only way to know if I liked doing something was to do it. So he said I should just pick a likely candidate and try it out and see what I thought.

I’ve been following that advice ever since, and it’s led me through a couple different career paths and a number of different industries. I think it makes a lot of sense - I can come up with all sorts of reasons in my head for why something would or would not be a good fit, but none of my thinking can help me understand the day-to-day decisions and challenges of a job or activity.

There are probably others, but these were the ones that have come up in recent conversations. What theories do you use? Any you’d like to share?

Rock Band is a video game phenomenon. One enthusiast I know calls it the greatest in-person multiplayer game ever. Over the holidays, I played it three times in a week at three different apartments, and played it some more at our company retreat last month. So what makes Rock Band a great game?

First of all, it’s just fun. Almost everybody wants to pretend they’re a rock star, so being able to rock out with friends is a great experience. Everybody gets a prop (guitar, bass, drum set or microphone for vocals) and if you play the game on a big screen and hooked up to a stereo, it’s like starring in your own rock concert. They’ve done a good job of selecting songs with catchy tunes that most people know (who of my generation doesn’t enjoy rocking out to Bon Jovi?). But I think the design of the game is exemplary in other ways.

Rock Band enables people of different skill levels to enjoy playing with each other. This sounds minor, but imagine the experience of a novice playing a first-person shooter game such as Quake 3 with somebody that’s an expert. The expert kills the novice repeatedly, and it’s not fun for either player as the expert is bored and the novice gets no chance to improve. Compare that to Rock Band, where one player can select Easy and the other Expert, and both will be presented with game material challenging for their skill level. Everybody has fun, and when they make it through a song, they can celebrate together.

Rock Band also does a great job of continually challenging players. When playing Rock Band for the first time, you choose the Easy skill level of an easy song. As you get more comfortable, you can try harder songs at the Easy level. Once you can master the hardest songs on Easy, you realize that you can handle the easier songs at the Medium level, and start working your way through the songs at that skill level. The game offers a well-designed continuum of challenges so that there is always a next step just out of reach, so that if you try that song one more time, you might get through it. This continuous incremental achievement is gratifying and I think it is why many of my friends are so addicted to the game.

The game keeps players working towards improvement by offering excellent feedback. At the end of each song, each player is given a percentage grade showing how well they did at matching the patterns given to them. The grading is dependent on the skill level; the game is much more forgiving of being a split second off (or of being out of tune when singing) at the Easy level than at the Expert level. With the numerical grade, one can chart one’s improvement even when playing the same song repeatedly, and when combined with the range of game material discussed in the last paragraph, that offers players the challenge of always improving themselves.

The one area in which Rock Band could improve is in offering direct competition with others. While we were on the company retreat, we split up into two teams of four with roughly comparable skill levels, and took turns playing the same song to compare our scores (although we spent all of dinner arguing over what the proper way to compare scores would be). This turned out to be remarkably fun and each of us probably played our best when we were doing our battle of the bands because we were so focused. I imagine something like this is possible with XBox Live, but I’ll defer to others who would know better.

The interesting thing to me is that all of the design choices that make Rock Band excellent can be applied to management.

• Having fun is important. It may be difficult to quantify, but I believe that employees that are happy at work are more productive.
• People want to feel like they’re contributing regardless of their skill level - they don’t want to be on a team where the expert does everything and everybody else watches.
• Jobs should be designed so that they are always stretching employees’ capabilities. When they master one set of skills, introduce some new element that challenges them to continue learning.
• Consistent feedback is vital to employee satisfaction and improvement. When they know how they are doing, they have a target which they can aim to exceed moving forward.
• Competition is good. It gets people to push themselves harder than they would otherwise, and achieve results they would not achieve by themselves.

P.S. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a month, but life has been crazy. This is only the second weekend I’ve spent in New York since mid-December, and the other one was when I had class from 9 to 5 on Saturday and six hours of reading to do on Sunday. I have several posts I want to write, including catching up on my backlog of book reviews, so please nudge me if I don’t start writing more often.

Earlier today, my friends were putting their house back together after the party last night, and called me up to ask me where I had put something while cleaning up yesterday afternoon. I told them, hung up, and then thought about what had just happened. It felt almost like something out of a religious myth, where people had made a plea to the heavens for information, and their request had been granted.

I’m reminded of a similar incident last summer when Jofish and I called up our friend Bats from the Home Depot aisle to get his advice on which products we should be buying for our home improvement project. Thirty years ago, we would have been reliant on the salesperson in the store; instead, we were able to consult the most knowledgeable person we know on the subject of construction. It seemed unremarkable at the time, but in retrospect, it shows how technology has made us much more powerful. Anything known by anybody we know can be shared with us at the push of a button. Our intelligence has become multiplied and distributed across dozens if not hundreds of people.

Stories like this make me feel like we are starting to achieve the aspirations espoused by the Whole Earth Catalog when they said “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it”. While none of us are omniscient, the oracles of Google and Wikipedia certainly grant us knowledge. I can pull out my cell phone and within seconds get the answer to almost any question, no matter how trivial (at the party last night, there was a dispute over who sang “Don’t you want me?”, quickly revealed by Google to be Human League). Think about how fantastic it would look to somebody even fifty years ago for me to consult a pocket-sized device and be able to read off so much information.

On a more personal level, we have more tools than ever to know what our friends are doing. I can see what my friends are thinking on blogs and LiveJournal. I can get real-time status updates from Facebook or Twitter. I can even see what they’re doing by looking at their pictures on Flickr. For instance, pictures from last night’s party are already popping up on Facebook, and they were up on Flickr this morning, so only one day later you can see images from an event at which you weren’t present. While it may not be omniscience, it can certainly feel god-like at times.

There are downsides to having this much access to information. It’s easy to become sucked into the flood of information and never do anything with the information gained. One can easily spend all day following the exploits of people around the world (I have a particular weakness for following Chicago sports). We have created this surfeit of information following the American mottos of “More is better” and “Too much is never enough”, but it’s unclear we know what to do with this information access. If we are becoming like gods, we need to learn how to become good at it, and figure out how to turn our partial omniscience (oxymoronic?) into action.

Perhaps omniscience is not a state to which we should aspire. It’s hard to resist the temptation to gather more information in the hopes that the next piece of information will determine what we should do next. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to know everything, but instead to quickly discern the most critical piece of information and figure out how to learn that. When Jofish and I were looking for home improvement advice, we could have spent days doing research. Instead, we called Bats, and used his expertise to sort through the different possibilities quickly.

We still haven’t learned how to live with these increased powers granted to us by technology. Our cultural and societal values are still trying to catch up, as is demonstrated by the various debates over privacy with regard to Facebook and MySpace. Another example of our struggles to deal with the implications of technology is the debates over stem-cell research and the questions raised by genetic engineering. How would we behave if we had the powers of gods? How should gods behave? We may have to answer these questions over the next few decades, especially if those who believe in nanotech or the Singularity turn out to be prescient.

I’ve mostly been able to ignore the subprime mortgage mess. I don’t work in finance (although several of my classmates at Columbia are walking on eggshells), and my investments are mostly long term so the volatility in the markets doesn’t really concern me. But then I read the following paragraph in The Economist:

The boldest suggestion has come from Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a guarantor and supervisor. The crisis is so grave, she argues, that most borrowers who are facing resets but still paying their dues should be given the chance by servicers to switch into fixed-rate loans at the starter rate for the full 30 years.

I’ve since seen other articles indicating that the government is seriously considering plans to freeze these loans at the introductory rate for at least five years. And I’m furious.

When I bought my condo, I looked into adjustable-rate mortgages. They started off at a lower interest rate than a fixed rate, but then would be released to the market rate after the introductory period. I did my research (i.e. I asked my parents) and determined that interest rates were as low as they’d been for decades, so the market rate would almost certainly be higher after the introductory period. With that in mind, I went with the fixed-rate mortgage, despite the initially higher interest rate.

And now I’m being penalized for being fiscally prudent. If they freeze the loans at the introductory rates, then people who made bad decisions are being rewarded by getting to keep their low interest rates, while people like me who made good decisions are penalized with higher interest rates than we otherwise would have had. That doesn’t feel right.

At the same time, I understand the social issues at play here. Having to foreclose on people’s homes doesn’t help anybody - the bank is left with an asset it can’t sell to cover the loan because the housing market has been weakened, and the people lose their home. The government is intervening because the economy is being damaged by the housing market decline. I get all that. But I still can’t get over my initial angry reaction.

Where does social responsibility end and personal responsibility begin? I believe that we should have a social safety net, but I also believe there has to be consequences to actions or the same mistakes will continue to be made. I don’t understand the people who said they didn’t understand what they were getting into and they were misled by evil mean brokers who said they could afford these big loans. Regardless of what they were told, they were the ones signing a contract, and they were the ones responsible for fulfilling the terms of that contract. If they got suckered by a seller in a flea market, we would have no sympathy for them, but because it’s their house, they expect to be bailed out.

There’s been an infantilization of society where people expect that they can make stupid decisions and somebody else will have to deal with the consequences. This has been happening because it removes responsibility from people, and also because institutions benefit by exerting more control over people’s lives (the MIT Freshmen on Campus decision comes to mind). But being an adult and a citizen means taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. It means admitting mistakes and trying to fix those mistakes.

I wonder what can be done to instill that attitude in our citizens moving forward, and how to remove the temptation from institutions to increase their control. That would be the socially responsible initiative, encouraging people to learn from their mistakes rather than seeking to shield them from the consequences of those mistakes.

Amazon link

Subtitled “How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow”, this is a book applying the ideas of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to running a business. Maslow’s hierarchy states that people have different needs, but they can’t even think about certain needs until more basic ones are considered. We have to have food and shelter and safety before we ever start thinking about friends and family. We have to have friends and family before we worry about fulfillment, etc.

Conley applied these ideas in running his hotel management company, Joie de Vivre. He says that everybody involved in a business, from employees and customers to investors, have a hierarchical set of needs. For employees, the baseline need is for good benefits, a fair salary and to be treated well. But that’s not enough to get employees to be loyal participants in the business. Once those basic needs are satisfied, they have social needs - they need recognition from their peers and from their management. If all of their basic and social needs are met, then they look for meaning in their job, where it’s not just a job, but a calling, sharing the company’s mission.

He goes through similar pyramids for customers and investors, and observes that only by reaching the top levels of each pyramid do you get fanatic employees, fanatically loyal customers (Apple), and fanatically loyal investors. And getting those fanatics is a great place for a business to be.

These ideas make a lot of sense to me. As I mentioned at Thanksgiving, I’m fortunate that I’m in a position where I can worry about that top level of the employee pyramid, where I’m looking for meaning in my work. It also helps explain why I’ve been dissatisfied at other jobs in the past, despite getting paid well and having autonomy - I either didn’t feel I was getting the recognition I deserved within the company, or I didn’t share in the company’s mission.

While there aren’t any radically new ideas here, this book presents a good framework to think about the issues associated with running a company. It’s not the answer, but I like the viewpoint it presents, and it’s one I’ve referred to several times since I started reading this book.

When I first went to work for Applied Strategies, I didn’t really understand what they did. Applied Strategies (at that time) specialized in doing demand forecasting using decision analysis, which meant that we constructed mathematical models to estimate the size of a market for a drug or a vaccine. Our analysts used complicated decision trees, taking into account the probability of getting to clinical trials, succeeding in each phase of clinical trial, getting FDA approval, what other competitors were entering the same space, how much it would cost to build a factory and scale up production, etc.

At the end of all of these calculations, a number was delivered as to the size of the market. And I was horrified to think that this number was a deliverable. There were an absurd number of assumptions made in the calculation of that number, and changing any of those assumptions would alter the number significantly. So I couldn’t figure out what the value of that number was.

I eventually figured out (or had it explained to me) that the real deliverable wasn’t the number; it was the model. By constructing this model that had all of these assumptions and possible inputs, our customers could then see for themselves how altering certain assumptions would affect the result. The model also helped our customers do a sensitivity analysis and figure out which inputs had the greatest effect on the final result, which determined the inputs for which they needed better data. In other words, the deliverable wasn’t even the model - it was using the model to help the customer determine the relevant factors in their analysis, changing how they viewed the world.

In class this evening, we were discussing various frameworks for strategy analysis, from Michael Porter’s Five Forces Analysis, to a standard SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), to a PEST framework (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological). One of my classmates at the break was commenting that he wasn’t sure that he saw the value in such analyses, because things change so fast these days that the result of the analysis is stale as soon as you’re done.

His comment reminded me of my Applied Strategies experience, and I observed that the point of the analysis was not in the specific results, but in the change in view that results from doing the analysis. For instance, us technologists find it very easy to get sucked into the everyday grind of specific deliverables. But if we do a five forces analysis, even if the results of that analysis are immediately obsolete, it starts to get us thinking about the big picture of the overall industry and where it’s heading. Doing such an analysis changes how we see the world, and that is the important result.

I am also reminded of scenario planning, as described by Peter Schwartz in The Art of the Long View and at a Long Now talk. The point of doing a scenario analysis isn’t to predict the future - it is to prepare oneself for the future. By examining the larger trends that can shape the future and how one’s organization would react to those trends, scenario planning allows the organization to identify key pointers that indicate which way trends are heading and therefore be able to take proactive rather than reactive action.

This idea that the results of a process are a change in view rather than a tangible result resonates with me. Many organizations claim that people are their most important asset, but few organizations follow through in realizing that changing the viewpoints of their people is among the most effective investments they can make. If everybody in the organization is thinking strategically (shades of Semler), then the organization will have achieved greater results than they ever could have by investing in technology or tangible assets.

Several people have asked me why I’m pursuing this degree in technology management, when it appears to them that I have all the skills for management already. This viewpoint change is a significant component. I know how to think like a scientist, an engineer, a technologist, and an end-user. I even have some inkling of how to think like a manager. But this program is giving me the tools to think like an executive, and to put issues into the terms they will understand.

As an aspiring generalist, I believe in the power of bringing multiple perspectives to an issue, of having many mental models in my toolkit. I want to be able to communicate effectively with every level of the organization, from the peons doing the front line work, all the way up to the executive board who are concerned with ROI and shareholder value. I want to be able to re-frame issues and ideas in such a way that they make sense to anybody I talk to (part of the point of this blog is for me to practice explaining ideas within the constraints of a few paragraphs). I’m still not quite sure what precise career path this is preparing me for, but I’m investing in the most valuable resource I have, my mind, and I look forward to the eventual returns on that investment.

Paul Graham makes the provocative claim that “It may not matter all that much where you go to college.” He’s been evaluating startup founders as part of his Y Combinator program for a few years now, and “what we’ve found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it’s negligible by comparison. We can learn more about someone in the first minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went to school.” While I agree with his premise that it’s important to evaluate people on their merits, not on where they went to school, I disagree with his conclusion that the college choice does not matter.

Going to a school like MIT drives one to achieve more than one would otherwise. Graham acknowledges that “The other students are the biggest advantage of going to an elite college; you learn more from them than the professors. But you should be able to reproduce this at most colleges if you make a conscious effort to find smart friends.” But I think he underestimates the difficulty of finding those “smart friends” at a typical university as compared to the elite.

In high school, I was never particularly challenged despite being in all of the gifted classes in a very good public school with other privileged intelligent kids. Most of my classmates went on to the University of Illinois, which is a great school, but I would have been able to continue coasting there, getting high grades without really trying. Maybe there would have been a few people there who could challenge me, but finding those few people out of the tens of thousands of students would have been extremely difficult.

Going to MIT raised the bar for me. At MIT, I had to work much harder than I had ever worked before just to keep up. My freshman year, I had a physics classmate who regularly doubled my test scores (he’d get a 96 when I got a 48). Other friends were able to maintain their straight A average with ease while I was struggling to learn study habits that I had never previously needed. I learned humility at MIT in a way that never would have happened at someplace like Illinois.

And such humility continues to be reinforced. While I might be considered successful by many people based on my income and my achievements, I’m below average for my friends. On one mailing list of my friends who are managers, the introductions made me realize I was among the oldest and least accomplished of the participants, as everybody else was a CxO or VP or Director. I haven’t been featured in a New York Times article, as many of my friends have. I don’t have a patent to my name. I am not the world expert at anything. Just this past weekend, it was amazing to hear about all of the great things that people I know have been doing. Because my friends from MIT set a high standard, I am driven to achieve more than I would settle for otherwise.

Graham’s point may be that entrepreneurs need to be sufficiently self-motivated as to not need the competition of others to drive themselves past their limits. I agree with him that one can get an education of similar value at other universities, as the actual course material is the same. Perhaps a proto-entrepreneur would take full advantage of such opportunities without being forced to by the competition of other students. But I know I would not have - that may just demonstrate my laziness, but I often don’t see a reason to work harder than I have to in a given situation.

I also agree that it’s possible that the people that get into elite universities and do well at those universities are the rules-followers, and that to be a good entrepreneur means being a rule-breaker. I would contend, though, that if one can’t figure out how to master the college grading system, one is going to have a significant challenge figuring out how to master the ever-shifting economy of the real world. Learning the rules of a system and how to win under those rules is a skill that is only dismissed by those that can’t figure out how to beat that system.

As I said at the beginning, I agree with Graham’s premise that we should judge people on their own merits, not on where they went to college. But I strongly disagree with his conclusion that college therefore doesn’t matter, as I believe that my merits are much stronger than they would otherwise have been because I went to MIT. I have achieved more and gone further because I struggled through MIT than I ever would have if I had coasted through another school. And I still believe I have a long way to go, because my MIT-educated set of friends makes me believe that I shouldn’t settle for where I am now.

P.S. Having said all that, the admissions process to get into an elite university is truly ridiculous at this point - they may just be flipping coins in the back as there are far more qualified applicants than there are spaces in the incoming class. But I still believe that the education you get is worth it if you can get in because of the caliber of the other students.

P.P.S. Speaking of university, I went to the first class of the term this evening, and this is shaping up to be our hardest term yet. Man, this class is going to be rough. But it’s going to be really good for me if the prof follows through on what his intended goals are.

I liked the career advice from Scott Adams last week (also seen at Seppo’s blog), where he points out:

…if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.

I think that Adams’s point is that no matter how narrow a field you define for yourself, you’re not going to be the best in the world at it. However, once you start combining fields, the possibilities go up exponentially so intersections of two or three fields are less populated and competitive.

Adams is also right about not having to reach the top of a field to reap the benefits. Most fields have a learning curve of diminishing returns, where you can learn 80-90% of the field in a few years, but have to spend the rest of your life to get the last 10-20%. Even worse, other people in the field are simultaneously mastering the field, so you have to work continuously to match the rising level of mastery. However, if you settle for the competence of 80% rather than mastery, you can leave the field after a few years and learn something else.

One important benefit of competence in a field is the ability to speak the language or the jargon. Being able to communicate with the masters of the field means you can benefit from their expertise without having to attain it yourself. You can engage their interest and convince them to apply their skills to the problem by framing it in terms they understand. This skill is particularly important when dealing with a discipline that tends to be dismissive of outsiders, like, say, software developers.

Adams’s post reminds me of Grant McCracken’s post where he points out the importance of hiring people who have more than one deep interest:

Once someone has mastered one additional identity (or deep interest) it is easier to master new identities in the same way (and perhaps for the same reason) that knowing one additional language makes it master more languages. The candidate has learned to learn.

By learning how to learn, people can reach the point of competence in a field ever faster, increasing the number of possible ways to combine their competencies and create a niche for themselves. They can speak the languages of the experts, making them a “boundary spanner” across different areas of the organization. They can find the innovation happening at the constructive interference between fields.

I’m biased, of course, in that I call myself a generalist. I have to take the Adams strategy of combining fields, because grad school in physics proved that I don’t have the necessary focus to succeed in a single field. I’ve covered this terrain before (see the comments on my post about passion), but it’s always going to be a continuing theme in my life until I find a niche where I achieve “success”.

I’m still working out what fields I want to combine. Given my previous careers in physics and software development, and my current foray into management, leading a team to develop scientific software might suit me nicely. I’m also interested in the possibility of leading an interdisciplinary team - I really enjoyed working at Signature with the mix of biologists and physicists and engineers and software developers. The post by Adams is a good reminder that I’m not necessarily drifting - I’m just building up competence in the several fields I need to create my niche.