Being more like Whoopi
And Louis CK. And that philosophical fox. And mathematician Richard Hamming. And my favorite animated character.
Idols
I loved Whoopi Goldberg before I knew her name.
Sister Act II was playing on a local cable network when I was in high school in India. I had no idea who she was, but the movie was thoroughly entertaining. She was energetic, genuine and you couldn’t stop yourself from singing “Oh Happy Day” along with her. She did not become my icon until the credits rolled at the end. I had assumed that all the musical numbers in the movie were performed by people we in India refer to as “playback singers” — the vocals behind all Bollywood musical numbers, the actors very rarely lend their own voices to the songs. But the credits of Sister Act II told me that a) the name of this stupendous performer was Whoopi Goldberg b) that she sang all those amazing numbers herself!
In hindsight, what impressed me then is something I value and respect now. Almost every person I chose to call a personal icon has one defining trait — being good at a bunch of things that are related instead of being great at just one thing.
EGOT
One consistent advice I got from all my teachers in school was that I lacked focus. Not in the sense that I was distracted on the task at hand, but that I wanted to participate in too many things. We were asked to “be good at one thing” or “focus on getting that one skill right”. Wanting to do too many things was a sign of a fickle mind. Here was Whoopi — a great actress AND a great singer. This didn’t even include her work as a talk show host and a broadway star. By 2002, she was inducted into a very select group (just 12 people as of 2014)- the EGOT — people who have won all four major annual American entertainment awards: the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. That’s a person who not only dabbles, but excels in these fields. She’s not a jack of all trades, she’s the master of all of them. And that’s why she’s my hero.
I have always wanted to learn a lot more new skills than I am physically & mentally capable of. I’ve failed at many. Oh so many. Hawaiian guitar. Javascript. Pencil shading. It was like throwing up learning at the wall of life and seeing what sticks. Some stuck - Dancing. C++. Business Strategy.
P.S. Sister Act II was better than Sister Act and I will fight you if disagree.
Complex problems
I recently spoke to the folks at GapJumpers about my views on where I see the comms industry going. They asked me a question that loosely translated to “specialists vs. generalists in the advertising/marketing.” It got me thinking about this stuff even more. Here’s what I told them…
There is a definite place in the world for laser-focused expertise — strategy is not one of them. Richness in thinking comes from diversity of exposure. You don’t come up with interesting new connections if you only read about one thing over and over. That was the fundamental flaw of all industries that got disrupted by some new app.
Complex problems are created when more and more systems intertwine; they command diverse points of view to solve them. More than ever before, we are finding problems from one field bleed into and even overtake other fields. The more connected everything gets, the more the boundaries of whatever you consider “your field” expands, and blurs.
Complex problems deserve pluralistic solutions.
This has increasingly true for business & strategy. Think about cell biologists who are actually in the business of physics or that clothing manufacturers are in the business of technology or that people who study diseases are in the business of tracking shipping containers.
Richness in thinking comes from diversity of exposure.
The reason we keep hearing “we are not a <insert industry here> company, we’re a tech company” from large corporations is them realizing this blending of fields and attempting to embrace multidisciplinary.
This is truest with industries who move fast through their adoption, innovation and revision cycles — like technology or fashion. If you’ve invested your whole life perfecting the art of making the perfect chiffon jacket, and chiffon runs out of the collective favor of public taste — you either find a new material to perfect or find a new use for your old chiffon. Either way, you need to branch out, and branch out fast. Vested expertise often fails us in fast moving industries. We become so invested in our bubbled thinking that we forget to even consider that other industries have probably seen a similar problem in past and solved it and all you need to do is steal with pride.
I’d like to be a fox
Nate Silver’s post for the relaunch of FiveThirtyEight introduced me to an old philosophical construct of hedgehogs (who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea) and foxes (draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea). I try hard to adopt the mindset of the latter at work. A pluralistic view is crucial to what I do. I work across multiple industries as a consultant to some of Google’s clients — by mining signals from Google’s data troves, observing patterns in tech use and understanding motivations behind human behavior. I couldn’t imagine doing what I do if I was able to do only one of those things. While I need to crunch big datasets for what trends I see in searches for beauty products, I need to be equally adept at combining that with ethnographic studies done about people’s trip to the grocery store.
Then there’s an added layer of multidisciplinary. There are industry experts and analysts that I deeply respect, but sometimes fail to see the wood from the trees in their respective “assigned” fields. Just in the last month I’ve worked on projects around the beauty industry, the gaming industry as well as telecom. I learned something in each one that I applied to the others.
Hedgehogian hubris blocks you from adapting fast enough. And silicon valley is just as guilty of being a hedgehog.
Something nearby.
I read a post once at least a month; it’s an address by American Mathematician Richard Hamming to researchers — but it has taught me a lot about success, skill and a few other things.
Somewhere around every seven years make a significant, if not complete, shift in your field…What happens to the old fellows is that they get a technique going; they keep on using it. They were marching in that direction which was right then, but the world changes. There’s the new direction; but the old fellows are still marching in their former direction.
What he’s describing is what the tech world calls a “pivot”, applied to one’s own life. And in your own life, pivoting out of necessity is much harder than pivoting out of curiosity.
Pivoting out of necessity is much harder than pivoting out of curiosity.
I’ve seen this pattern in a lot of scientific greats. Heisenberg — stalwart of quantum theory. His doctoral dissertation? Fluid Mechanics. Claude Shannon — father of information theory. His doctoral dissertation? Population Genetics.
What’s your EGOT?
EGOT isn’t about four completely unrelated fields. It’s about excelling in fields that bleed into each other. That’s the kind of interdisciplinary learning I personally aspire to.
Again, quoting Richard Hamming…
You have to change. You get tired after a while; you use up your originality in one field. You need to get something nearby. I’m not saying that you shift from music to theoretical physics to English literature; I mean within your field you should shift areas so that you don’t go stale.
Tools.
I went through a crisis of sorts over a year ago when I thought I had absolutely no marketable skills. I took an inventory of all the things I’d picked up over the years and had either become rusty or stopped using that part of my brain. Data Analysis was at the top of this list — my thesis in college was about data mining & artificial intelligence, and over the years I’d lost touch with it. Now I’m all brushed up on my SQL and on my way to hit up data exploration using R.
One of my superiors once told me that my job as strategic planner at an ad agency was to say smart things in meetings. That was not good for my sanity. “Say smart things” = “just have an opinion” = more non-contributing zeroes in the world. The tools are what calmed my nerves about tangibility of skills. For an “information worker” like myself, this is what took mefrom pushing email to “making stuff”— whatever your interpretation of that is.
Like a lot of other folks I love Louis CK, and his advice sums this part up.
My biggest advice to people would be key on the technical. If you learn how to use these machines—cameras and editing systems and stuff like that—then you will have the tools to do stuff creatively. There’s some people who turn up their nose to the technical side of production. It’s the dumbest thing that people do, because then you need to get permission and crews to shoot for you. But I learned how to fix the fucking cameras at this local-access cable station.
Learning to learn.
I have a long list of skills I want to pick up, topics I want to learn about, places I want to visit and movies I want to watch. And it’s not casually perusing these new topics and skills — but going deep.
Working in one of the fastest moving industries and for one of the faster moving companies within it, what terrifies me is calcification of my skills. And if dabbling is a gateway drug to future expertise, I want to experiment as much as I can.
Also, dabbling is good for your brain.
I leave you with one of the favorite lines from one of my favorite animated characters of all time…because sketching is the next thing I want to get good at.
It is important to draw wisdom from different places. If you take it from only one place it become rigid and stale.
— Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender
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