“The loss to the world, by refusing to make use of one-half of the whole quantity of talent it possesses, is extremely serious.”

The Subjection of Women was released in 1869, a time when, in most of the world, women were considered the legal property—objects, not subjects—of men, specifically their fathers and husbands. John Stuart Mill, a nineteenth-century British philosopher who not only wrote political philosophy but also served in Parliament and advocated for many liberal reforms, challenged the status quo by pointing out the incredible cost to society of maintaining inequality between the sexes.

Mill was specifically addressing the equality of women in relation to men, but his reasoning as to why equality is desirable transcends that one case. Because his argument rests on the social cost of inequality, a modern reading of his text is easily reframed as “the subjection of people.” Even if that was not his initial intent, we can use our current understanding to adapt his ideas.

He argued that we need to give people a choice as to how they will best contribute to society. If we don’t, we prevent ourselves from accessing the best ideas and contributions. Humans face enough natural challenges, Mill thought, that to cut ourselves off from any part of the available pool of brainpower costs society timely and insightful solutions to our problems—solutions that may be better than the existing ones. People need to have equal freedom to choose the paths that they want to pursue.

***

Equality of opportunity

Mill was not delusional about equality and did not assume that everyone is equally capable of doing everything. His was more an equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcomes. That is, all people should be in a position to determine how they can best contribute to society. “It is not that all processes are supposed to be equally good, or all persons to be equally qualified for everything;” he explains, “but that freedom of individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures the adoption of the best processes, and throws each operation into the hands of those who are best qualified for it.”

In his time and place, he observed that women were not allowed to decide on how they would or could contribute to society. But, more importantly, their opinions and feelings on the subject of their lives were not even solicited.

He observed that the lack of testimony and perspective of women in both history and contemporary society, as well as the lack of access to education to enable them to contribute, meant that men’s general understanding of them was weak at best. Most men derived their opinion of women based on their feelings about the women with whom they had direct contact and the opinions of other men. “Accordingly, one can, to an almost laughable degree,” Mill wrote, “infer what a man’s wife is like from his opinions about women in general.”

The cultural conditioning of the time rendered women obscure. Mill notes that men often criticized women for possessing the qualities that men insisted they have:

“When we put together three things—first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes; secondly, the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character.”

For women, it is a catch-22. You must be what you are expected to be in order to be seen, but then you are seen only for what has been culturally prescribed.

The lack of access to women’s perspective often means that cultural stereotypes continue. Mill asks, “Who can tell how many of the most original thoughts put forth by male writers belong to a woman by suggestion?” To give just two of many examples, Zelda Fitzgerald probably contributed a fair amount of ideas to the books attributed only to her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. And William Wordsworth reputedly used passages from his sister Dorothy’s writing journal in his own works. Not to mention the many male writers whose wives were their editors, typists, and critics. The question Mill asked is still relevant today. The history of the Nobel Prize alone demonstrates how often men are given credit for the ideas of women. Aside from being an annoying injustice, the problem is that it obscures the contributions of women and reinforces antiquated notions of women’s capabilities.

***

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman

Mill was fully aware of the reinforcing feedback loop that made it hard for women to challenge the status quo. He supposed that women did not write more about their true feelings and perspectives because the power difference made it almost impossible. “As yet very few of them dare tell anything,” he writes, “which men, on whom their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear.” Thus, the feedback loop is that women could only express those opinions that men would support in order to achieve literary success, but then that success simply reinforced those opinions.

“But in history, as in travelling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds.”

The fact of cultural bias, and how it perpetuates itself, is easily extrapolated from the specific case Mill was arguing against to many similar power dynamics throughout history. One group has power. They justify that power as being natural in order to keep it. That idea of naturalness becomes part of the cultural rhetoric and becomes the lens through which the powerless are viewed. The powerless struggle to change because before they can attain rights they have to change the cultural narrative.

When we take away someone’s freedom to choose where they can best contribute based on cultural biases, it does not benefit society as a whole. It does us no good “to ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person’s position through all of life.”

When we don’t organize society on the premise of equality, we miss opportunities for improvement and development. We hold everyone back.

***

No one wants to be at the bottom

Mill was aware that to promote equality one had to deal with overcoming the influence of legalized power, which can be understood as one group having the power to direct the lives of another powerless group. His conclusions about the role and expression of power are applicable to any instance of systemic inequality.

“For everyone who desires power, desires it most over those who are nearest to him, with whom his life is passed, with whom he has most concerns in common, and in whom any independence of his authority is oftenest likely to interfere with his individual preferences.”

It is an argument we have all heard time and time again: because the inequality is assumed to be just the way things are, the power difference must be normal as well. Mill exposes the fallacy in this type of thinking when he asks, “But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?” The exercise of power by one group over another certainly does not feel natural to those who are being dominated, even if they may have internalized the same oppressive beliefs about themselves.

In the case of women in Mill’s society, the power to dictate their choices and options in life was not given to select men, but all men. In many cultures, the legal subjection of women to men is still the norm. In both cases, there is no evaluation of any man’s ability to exercise their power. As Mill pointed out, no one verified if a husband would be any good at being a husband.

In systems in which women have no power, there are fewer incentives for men to treat them well. He explains the backwardness of, for example, requiring marriage to a man to be the sole role for women when he says, “Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other doors against them lay themselves open to a similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations.” When something is desirable, people want it for themselves. If the choice is between some degree of liberty or total subjugation, people will choose the former. Thus, for the power to enforce the latter to exist, it has to be mandated and justified as “natural.”

Mill argued that “it is perfectly obvious that the abuse of the power cannot be very much checked while the power remains.” It is very unlikely that people who have power are inclined to give it up. In order to justify power accorded solely because of who you happen to be born as, the power must be conceived of as earned.

It’s often a case of making up arguments in order to justify the status quo, rather than deciding on a status quo based on objective observation and evidence.

For the same reasons that the way we justify our actions on an individual level makes it hard for us to admit we are wrong and change our minds, the justifications that a society produces to maintain a power structure are very hard to dislodge. Mill observed, “So long as the right of the strong to power over the weak rules in the very heart of society, the attempt to make the equal right of the weak the principle of its outward actions will always be an uphill struggle.”

Why bother to try to change power structures? For Mill, when power is concentrated in the hands of a section of the population, the people in the society with that power imbalance cannot exercise freedom. “The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism,” Mill writes. “Where there is least liberty, the passion for power is the most ardent and unscrupulous.”

According to Mill, liberty is the goal. His idea of liberty is incompatible with systemic inequality. To legislate inequality, to make it part of the social fabric, has two problematic effects. First, those who are considered “less than” cannot have liberty. But those who run the show do not have liberty either, because of the effort required to maintain inequality.

***

An accident of birth

The real problem is not that inequality works as the best state of affairs for everyone, but that there is fear of what an equal society might look like because we have yet to experience one. Essentially, there exists a fear of the unknown. Because an equal society would necessarily function differently, there is, of course, a hesitation regarding what one might be giving up.

Mill argued against the idea that the various states of inequality that he saw around him, the ownership by one group of people over another, were the result of careful decisions. “Experience cannot possibly have decided between two courses, so long as there has only been experience of one.”

Inequality is often explained by some version of “that’s just the way things are.” Certain groups of people are assumed to have certain intrinsic, unchangeable qualities and thus must be treated accordingly. Mill, however, felt that a lot of what we attribute to biology was actually a product of cultural conditioning. We inaccurately assume that what is common practice represents objective truths about the world, as opposed to being deliberately created and perpetuated because it benefits certain groups. Mill writes, “So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.”

The dishonesty of conflating the privileges you happened to be born to with your right to have those privileges was observed by Mill. He saw all around him evidence of those who were unable to acknowledge the extent to which their achievements were a result of the accident of birth. “Those whom privileges not acquired by their merit, and which they feel to be disproportioned to it, inspire with additional humility are always the few, and the best few,” he wrote. “The rest are only inspired with pride, and the worst sort of pride, that which values itself upon accidental advantages not of its own achieving.” It’s like congratulating yourself for winning a race without acknowledging, or even being aware, that you started closer to the finish line than all the other participants.

Mill suggests that maintaining inequality distracts us from addressing more pressing challenges:“One feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth,” Mill explains, “there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another.” There are struggles that we have to face together because they affect all of us.

In Mill’s time, he might have been thinking of the vulnerability of humans to disease, or the environmental and social effects of the Industrial Revolution. These same struggles frame the challenges we face today. We conquer one disease only to become vulnerable to another, and we are now trying to figure out how to not destroy our environment so much that we cause our own extinction. Reading his polemic suggests that expending any effort to maintain “prejudiced restrictions on one another” is a waste of energy that could be more effectively spent dealing with the very real threats we face as a species.

***

The greater good

Although Mill was writing about the specific case of the subjection of women in the society in which he lived, his arguments about the detriment of inequality to society are more broadly applicable. Thus, when he observes: “Is it not a mere truism to say that such functions are often filled by men far less fit for them than numbers of women, and who would be beaten by women in any fair field of competition?” we can say we agree that fitness for a position matters far more than the cultural attributes of the person filling it.

And when he questions: “Is there so great a superfluity of men fit for high duties that society can afford to reject the service of any competent person?” we can easily answer no.

When we limit people’s access to society based on assumptions about broad categories of attributes, we hurt everyone. Mill writes:

“To ordain that any kind of persons shall not be physicians, or shall not be advocates, or shall not be member of Parliament, is to injure not them only, but all who employ physicians or advocates, or elect members of Parliament, and who are deprived of the stimulating effect of greater competition on the exertions of the competitors, as well as restricted to a narrower range of individual choice.”

Just as monopolies on goods distort the value and availability of a commodity, a monopoly on choice by one social group distorts competency and achievement.

Mill suggests that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.” Regardless of how we go about promoting equality, it’s important to always remember why equality is desirable. The more equal we are in our freedom to choose how we can contribute to society makes it more likely that the best contributions will be realized.

The post John Stuart Mill’s Philosophy of Equality appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

The recent outbreak of the coronavirus is impacting people all over the world — not just in terms of physical health, but financially, emotionally, and even socially. As we struggle to adapt to our new circumstances, it can be tempting to bury our head and wait for it all to blow over so we can just get back to normal. Or we can see this as an incredible opportunity to figure out who we are.

What many of us are discovering right now is that the things we valued a few months ago don’t actually matter: our cars, the titles on our business cards, our privileged neighborhoods. Rather, what is coming to the forefront is a shift to figuring out what we find intrinsically rewarding.

When everything is easy, it can seem like you have life figured out. When things change and you’re called to put it into practice, it’s a different level. It’s one thing to say you are stoic when your coffee spills and another entirely when you’re watching your community collapse. When life changes and gets hard, you realize you’ve never had to put into practice what you thought you knew about coping with disaster.

But when a crisis hits, everything is put to the real test.

The challenge then becomes wrapping our struggles into our values, because what we value only has meaning if it’s important when life is hard. To know if they have worth, your values need to help you move forward when you can barely crawl and the obstacles in your way seem insurmountable.

In the face of a crisis, what is important to us becomes evident when we give ourselves the space to reflect on what is going to get us through the hard times. And so we find renewed commitment to get back to core priorities. What seemed important before falls apart to reveal what really matters: family, love, community, health.

“I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.” 

— Julia Child

One unexpected activity that many people are turning to now that they have time and are more introspective is baking. In fact, this week Google searches for bread recipes hit a noticeable high.

Baking is a very physical experience: kneading dough, tasting batter, smelling the results of the ingredients coming together. It’s an activity that requires patience. Bread has to rise. Pies have to cook. Cakes have to cool before they can be covered with icing. And, as prescriptive as baking seems on its surface, it’s something that facilitates creativity as we improvise our ingredients based on what we have in the cupboard. We discover new flavors, and we comfort ourselves and others with the results. Baked goods are often something we share, and in doing so we are providing for those we care about.

Why might baking be useful in times of stress? In Overcoming Anxiety, Dennis Tirch explains “research has demonstrated that when people engage more fully in behaviors that give them a sense of pleasure and mastery, they can begin to overcome negative emotions.”

At home with their loved ones people can reconsider what they value one muffin at a time. Creating with the people we love instead of consuming on our own allows us to focus on what we value as the world changes around us. With more time, slow, seemingly unproductive pursuits have new appeal because they help us reorient to the qualities in life that matter most.

Giving yourself the space to tune in to your values doesn’t have to come through baking. What’s important is that you find an activity that lets you move past fear and panic, to reconnect with what gives your life meaning. When you engage with an activity that gives you pleasure and releases negative emotions, it allows you to rediscover what is important to you.

Change is stressful. But neither stress nor change have to be scary. If you think about it, you undergo moments of change every day because nothing in life is ever static. Our lives are a constant adaptation to a world that is always in motion.

All change brings opportunity. Some change gives us the opportunity to pause and ask what we can do better. How can we better connect to what has proven to be important? Connection is not an abstract intellectual exercise, but an experience that orients us to the values that provide us direction. If you look for opportunities in line with your values, you will be able to see a path through the fear and uncertainty guided by the light that is hope.

The post What You Truly Value appeared first on Farnam Street.

In Becoming Wise, Krista Tippett writes about hope, and how transformative it can be.

“In a century of staggering open questions, hope becomes a calling for those of us who can hold it, for the sake of the world. Hope is distinct, in my mind, from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reveres truth. It lives open eyed and wholehearted with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

Hope makes us resilient and courageous. We can share our hope with others, engaging in a reciprocal exchange that makes us all stronger. Tippett writes:

“We want to be called to our best selves. We long to figure out what that would look like. And we are figuring out that we need each other to do so.”

and

“Hope is an orientation, and insistence on wresting wisdom and joy from the endlessly fickle fabric of space and time.”

So how might we give hope? Tippett shares this insight:

“There are millions of people at any given moment, young and old, giving themselves over to service, risking hope, and all the while ennobling us all. To take such goodness in and let it matter-to let it define our take on reality as much as headlines of violence-is a choice we can make to live by the light in the darkness, to be brave and free.”

And thus hope, as explained by Tippett, is a resource we can grow, give, and share together.

“It is a relief to claim our love of each other and take that on as an adventure, a calling. It is a pleasure to wonder at the mystery we are and find delight in the vastness of reality that is embedded in our beings. It is a privilege to hold something robust and resilient called hope, which has the power to shift the world on its axis.”

The post The Gift of Hope appeared first on Farnam Street.

“The big question about how people behave,” says Warren Buffett, “is whether they’ve got an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an inner scorecard.” To make his point, Buffett often asks a simple question: Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?

Comparing ourselves to others allows them to drive our behavior. This type of comparison is between you and someone else. Sometimes it’s about something genetic, like wishing to be taller, but more often it’s about something the other person is capable of doing that we wish we could do as well. Maybe Sally writes better reports than you, and maybe Bob has a happier relationship with his spouse than you do. Sometimes this comparison is motivating and sometimes it’s destructive.

You can be anything but you can’t be everything. When we compare ourselves to others, we’re often comparing their best features against our average ones. It’s like being right-handed and trying to play an instrument with your left hand. Not only do we naturally want to be better than them, the unconscious realization that we are not often becomes self-destructive.

Comparisons between people are a recipe for unhappiness unless you are the best in the world. Which, let’s be honest, only one person is. Not only are we unhappy but the other people are as well. They are probably comparing themselves to you—maybe you’re better at networking than they are and they’re jealous. At worst, when we compare ourselves to others we end up focusing our energy on bringing them down instead of raising ourselves up.

There is one thing that you’re better at than other people: being you. This is the only game you can really win.

When you start with this mindset the world starts to look better again. No longer are you focused on where you stand relative to others. Instead, your focus and energy is placed on what you’re capable of now and how you can improve yourself.

Life becomes about being a better version of yourself. And when that happens, your effort and energy go toward upgrading your personal operating system every day, not worrying about what your coworkers are doing. You become happier, free from the shackles of false comparisons and focused on the present moment.

When what you do doesn’t meet the expectations of others, too bad. The way they look at you is the same way you were looking at them, though a distorted lens shaped by experiences and expectations. What really matters is what you think about what you do, what your standards are, what you can learn today.

That’s not an excuse to ignore thoughtful opinions—other people might give you a picture of how you fall short of being your best self. Instead, it’s a reminder to compare yourself to who you were this morning. Are you better than you were when you woke up? If not, you’ve wasted a day. It’s less about others and more about how you improve relative to who you were.

When you stop comparing between people and focus internally, you start being better at what really matters: being you. It’s simple but not easy.

The most important things in life are measured internally. Thinking about what matters to you is hard. Playing to someone else’s scoreboard is easy, that’s why a lot of people do it. But winning the wrong game is pointless and empty. You get one life. Play your own game.

Article Summary

• The most important things in life come from the inside, not the outside.
• Comparing yourself to others is a recipe for unhappiness.
• You can be anything but you can’t be everything.
• There is one thing that you’re better at than other people: being you. This is the only game you can really win.
• Compare yourself to who you were yesterday.

The post The Danger of Comparing Yourself to Others appeared first on Farnam Street.

What we’re really focused on is thinking long-term, putting the customer at the center of our universe and inventing. Those are the three big ideas to think long-term because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, you have to think long-term. These three ideas, customer-centricity, long-term thinking and a passion for invention, those go together. That’s how we do it and by the way, we have a lot of fun doing it that way.

Ballet or Rock Concert?

When asked about the pressures of running a public company and meeting quarterly earnings expectations he said:

Well, I think that if you’re straight forward and clear about the way that you’re going to operate, then you can operate in whatever way you choose. We don’t even take a position on whether our way is the right way, we just claim it’s our way, but Warren Buffet has a great saying along these lines. He says, “You can hold a ballet and that can be successful and you can hold a rock concert and that can be successful. Just don’t hold a ballet and advertise it as a rock concert. You need to be clear with all of your stakeholders, with are you holding a ballet or are you holding a rock concert and then people get to self-select in.”

Big Things Start Small

While there is no one recipe that fits all, there are elements of what Amazon does that help.

[I]nside our culture, we understand that even though we have some big businesses, new businesses start out small. It would be very easy for say the person who runs a US books category to say, “Why are we doing these experiments with things? I mean that generated a tiny bit of revenue last year. Why don’t we instead, focus those resources and all that brain power on the books category, which is a big business for us?” Instead, that would be a natural thing to have happen, but instead inside Amazon, when a new business reaches some small milestone of sales, email messages go around and everybody’s giving virtual high fives for reaching that milestone. I think it’s because we know from our past experiences that big things start small. The biggest oak starts from an acorn and if you want to do anything new, you’ve got to be willing to let that acorn grow into a little sapling and then finally into a small tree and maybe one day it will be a big business on its own.

Step By Step Ferociously

The Latin phrase gradatim ferociter Is a Bezos favorite. What does it mean?

Well it means step by step ferociously and it’s the motto for Blue Origin. Basically you can’t skip steps, you have to put one foot in front of the other, things take time, there are no shortcuts but you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity.

Loving What You Do

Not every day is going to be fun and easy. That’s why they call it work.

I have a lot of passions and interests but one of them is at Amazon, the rate of change is so high and I love that. I love the pace of change. I love the fact that I get to work with these big, smart teams. The people I work with are so smart and they’re self-selected for loving to invent on behalf of customers.

It’s not, do I love every moment of every day? No, that’s why they call it work. There are things that I don’t enjoy, but if I’m really objective about it and I look at it, I’m so lucky to be working alongside all these passionate people and I love it. Why would I go sit on a beach?

The post Jeff Bezos: Big Things Start Small appeared first on Farnam Street.

At first, the concept drove debates in salons. Eventually, however, it shifted into discussions of art, often among the very people who selected and funded it. In the Medici palaces, for example, rooms were arranged so that paintings would face each other. The idea was that people would directly compare the works, forming and expressing opinions. These competitions shifted the focus from the art to the artist. If one painting was better than another, you needed to know who the artist was so that you could hire them again.

Artists benefited from this arrangement, even if they didn’t win. They learned where they stood in comparison to others, both artistically and socially. Not only did they understand the gap, they learned how to close it, or change the point of comparison.

Da Vinci believed artists thrived under such competition. He once wrote:

You will be ashamed to be counted among draughtsmen if your work is inadequate, and this disgrace must motivate you to profitable study. Second, a healthy envy will stimulate you to become one of those who are praised more than yourself, for the praises of others will spur you on.

Many people want to know where they stand in relation to not only the external competition but to the people they work with every day. A lot of organizations make such comparisons difficult by hiding what matters. While you might know there is a gap between you and your coworker, you don’t know what the chasm looks like. And if you don’t know what it looks like, you don’t know where you are in relation. And if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know how to close the gap. It’s a weird sort of sabotage.

Not everyone responds to competition the same way. Pitting people directly against one another for a promotion might cause people to withdraw. That doesn’t mean they can’t handle it. It doesn’t mean they’re not amazing. Michelangelo once abandoned a competition with Da Vinci to flee to Rome—and we have only to look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to know how he fared.

But a lack of competition can breed laziness in a lot of people. Worse still, that laziness gets rewarded. It’s not intentional. We just stop working as hard as we could. We coast.

Consider the proverbial office worker who sends out a sloppy first draft of a presentation to 15 people for them to “comment” on. What that person really wants is the work done for them. And because of the subtle messages organizations send, coworkers will often comply because they’re team players.

Consider the competition to make a sports team. The people on the bench (people who don’t start) make the starters better because the starters know they can’t get complacent or someone will take their job. Furthermore, the right to be on a team, once granted, isn’t assured. Someone is always vying to take any spot that opens up. That’s the nature of the world.

I’m not suggesting that all organizations promote a professional sport-like mentality. I’m suggesting you think about how you can harness competition to give people the information they need to get better. If they don’t want to get better after they know where they stand, you now know something about them you didn’t know before. I’m not also blindly advocating using competition. It has limitations and drawbacks you need to consider (such as the effects it has on self-preservation and psychological safety).

The post Renaissance Paragone: An Ancient Tactic for Getting the Most From People appeared first on Farnam Street.

Of course, we all have moments when we’re alone and something suddenly clicks. We’d do well to remember, though, that in those moments, we are not as independent as we like to think. The people we surround ourselves with matter.

In part, because we tell ourselves the story of the lone genius, we under-appreciate the role of a team. Sure, the individual matters, no doubt. However, the individual contributions are supercharged by the team around them.

We operate in a world where it’s nearly impossible to accomplish anything great as an individual.  When you think about it, you’re the product of an education system, a healthcare system, luck, roads, the internet and so much more. You may be smart but you’re not self-made. And at work, most important achievements require a team of people working together.

The leader’s job is to get the team right. Getting the team right means that people are better as a group than as individuals. Now this is important.  Step back and think about that for a second — the right teams make every individual better than they would be on their own.

Another way to think about this is in terms of energy. If you have 12 people on a team and they each have 10 units of energy, you would expect to get 120 units of output. That’s what an average team will do. Worse teams will do worse. A great team will take the same inputs and get a non-linear outcome. The result won’t be 120; it’ll be 360.No matter where you’re going, great teams will get you there multiples faster than average teams.

Here is a quote by Steve Jobs on the importance of assembling “A” players.

I observed something fairly early on at Apple, which I didn’t know how to explain then, but I’ve thought a lot about it since. Most things in life have a dynamic range in which [the ratio of] “average” to “best” is at most 2:1. For example, if you go to New York City and get an average taxi cab driver, versus the best taxi cab driver, you’ll probably get to your destination with the best taxi driver 30% faster. And an automobile; what’s the difference between the average car and the best? Maybe 20%? The best CD player versus the average CD player? Maybe 20%? So 2:1 is a big dynamic range for most things in life. Now, in software, and it used to be the case in hardware, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; maybe even 100:1. Very few things in life are like this, but what I was lucky enough to spend my life doing, which is software, is like this. So I’ve built a lot of my success on finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for “B” and “C” players, but really going for the “A” players. And I found something… I found that when you get enough “A” players together, when you go through the incredible work to find these “A” players, they really like working with each other. Because most have never had the chance to do that before. And they don’t work with “B” and “C” players, so it’s self-policing. They only want to hire “A” players. So you build these pockets of “A” players and it just propagates.

Building a team is more complicated than collecting talent¹. I once tried to solve a problem by putting a bunch of PhDs’ in a room. While comments like that sounded good and got me a lot of projects above my level, they were rarely effective at delivering actual results.

Statements like “let’s assemble a multidisciplinary team of incredible people” are gold in meetings if you work for an organization. These statements sound intelligent. They are hard to argue with. And, most importantly, they also have no accountability built in, and they are easy to wiggle out of. If things don’t work out, who can fault a plan that meant putting smart people in a room.

Well … I can. It’s a stupid plan.

The combination of individual intelligence does not make for group intelligence. Thinking about this in the context of the Jobs quote above, “A” players provide a lot more than raw intellectual horsepower. Among other things, they also bring drive, integrity, and an ability to make others better.  “A” players want to work with other “A” players. Accepting that statement doesn’t mean they’re all “the best”.

In my experience solving difficult problems, the best talent available rarely led to the best solutions. You needed the best team. And the best team meant you had to exercise judgment and think about the problem. While there was often one individual with the idea that ultimately solved the problem, it wouldn’t have happened without the team.  The ideas others spark in us are more than we can spark in ourselves.

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***

Persistence in the face of defeat often makes the difference in outcome.

Ask any farmer, and they will tell you that orphaned Guernsey calves die. It’s not the fact that they die, so much as how it happens, that stays in the mind. An orphaned calf soon gets so hungry she picks a new mother from the herd. The cow promptly kicks the strange calf away. After all, she didn’t give birth to the calf—why should she feed it? The Guernsey calf gives up, lies down, and slowly starves to death.

The orphaned Brahman calf gets a different result. The same scenario plays out, with the calf being kicked out by the reluctant mother. However, in this case, the naturally persistent calf keeps coming, until the potential new mother acquiesces out of exhaustion. As a result of this persistence, the calf survives.

Persistence is hard. It’s hard to get kicked in the face and to keep going. It hits at your self-esteem. You begin to wonder if you have value. You begin to think you might be crazy.

So often we’re told that having a positive attitude is the important thing. You can get through the setbacks if you find the silver linings and believe in what you are doing. But it’s important to remember that persistence and a positive attitude aren’t the same thing. They differ in some pretty fundamental ways.

Positivity is fragile. If you’re positively certain that you’ll be successful, you’ll start to worry the minute things deviate from your plan. Once this worry seeps into your mind, it’s impossible to get out. You’re done. When the going gets tough, positive attitudes often vanish.

Persistence, on the other hand, anticipates roadblocks and challenges. It gears up for the fact that things never go as planned and expects goals to be hard to attain.

If you run into failure, persistence continues, and positivity disappears. Persistence is antifragile and benefits from setbacks, while positivity, like that Guernsey calf, crumbles when it runs into hard times.

When met with setbacks, are you a Guernsey or a Brahman?

The post In the face of adversity, are you a Guernsey or a Brahman? appeared first on Farnam Street.

What happens when someone repeatedly says it—whatever “it” may be—is not their fault?

“It’s not my fault I was late for the meeting. Traffic was bad.”

“It’s not my fault I lost money. I got the stock tip from a friend.”

“It’s not my fault I don’t have the skills for the job and was laid off. They should have trained me.”

I don’t want to get into edge cases. But most of the time these kinds of things are your fault. And if you don’t see that, you’re going to continue to find yourself in these situations over and over again.

You should have planned for traffic. You made a terrible investment and you have no idea what you’re doing. Stop waiting for people to teach you the skills you need to earn a living and go learn them.

When the passive mindset takes over, you say another phrase that drives me batty: “I can’t.” Actually, yes you can, you’re just not willing to pay the price. You’re not willing to do the work or spend the time. You’re not willing to do something hard. You’re not willing to sacrifice what’s needed.

The passive mindset is defined by an attitude, an assumption that life happens to you and you’re not responsible. People with this mindset also say things like, “Why does this always happen to me?”

When the language you use about things going on in your life is passive, you slowly convince yourself that nothing is your responsibility. This makes you feel good because it absolves you from responsibility. It means you don’t have to look inside yourself and change anything.  It means you’re not in control.

Well I have news for you: you are in control. You’re in control of how you respond to the ups and downs of life. You’re in control of how you talk to yourself.

An active attitude means ownership. You own your failures. An active mindset means you are responsible for things you control.

“Sorry, I should have planned for traffic, I’ll consider that next time.”

“Wow, that investment blew up! I really don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I should learn.”

“I got laid off because I didn’t make myself indispensable. I won’t let that happen again.”

The next time you catch yourself saying “I can’t,” say “I choose not to because….“

“I choose not to go to the gym because….”

“I choose not to learn something new because…” 

“I choose not to eat healthy because….”

It’s not that you can’t do something it’s that unless you have literally done everything, you’re choosing not to because the price is too high. Stop lying to yourself.

Own your choices. Own the process. Take control.

The post It’s All Your Fault: Active vs. Passive Mindsets appeared first on Farnam Street.

We are a culture of explainers. You’ve met them and so have I—the people who think they’re more informed than the experts, always happy to share their thoughts with anyone who will listen. Such people sometimes were considered quirky, even endearing, because they meant well and were usually few and far between. However, “the public space is increasingly dominated by a loose assortment of poorly informed people,” writes Tom Nichols in his excellent book The Death of Expertise.

There is an intellectual Gresham’s Law emerging, as misinformation overtakes knowledge.  But this isn’t really a new thing. The conflict between people who know and people who believe they know isn’t always so obvious, but as the gap between experts and the general citizenry grows, so too does the mistrust.

In some cases, ignorance has become hip. Consider the flat Earth movement, vaccines, or the raw milk craze of a few years ago. Rejecting the advice of experts has become a cultural symbol. Why listen to doctors about vaccines, or the Center for Disease Control about the hazards of raw milk? And don’t even get me started on the shape of the Earth.

Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in 1930 decried the “revolt of the masses,” writing:

Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified.

I may be mistaken, but the present-day writer, when he takes his pen in his hand to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, has to bear in mind that the average reader, who has never concerned himself with this subject, if he reads, does so with the view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather, of pronouncing judgment on him when he is not in agreement with the commonplaces that the said reader caries in his head.

Ortega y Gasset attributed the increasing numbers of the ignorant public to prosperity, among other things. It’s hard to argue with success. Technology, secondary education, and the emergence of the United States as a global power undermine the idea that average individuals are ill-equipped to decide for themselves. And yet those powerful forces also have demanded that individuals develop specialized expertise that conflicts with broader competence. Sometimes, we must even be content to know what we don’t know, and trust other experts.

In the 1960s, political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote that “the complexity of modern life has steadily whittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can intelligently and competently perform for himself.” In his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadter points out with concern that

In the original American populistic dream, the omnicompetence of the common man was fundamental and indispensable. It was believed that he could, without much special preparation, pursue the professions and run the government.

Today, he knows that he cannot even make his breakfast without using devices, more or less mysterious to him, which expertise has put at his disposal; and when he sits down to breakfast and looks at his morning newspaper, he reads about a whole range of issues and acknowledges, if he is candid with himself, that he has not acquired the competence to judge most of them.

This overwhelming complexity of modern life “produced feelings of helplessness and anger among a citizenry that knew itself increasingly to be at the mercy of smarter elites,” writes Nichols. And Hofstadter warns, “What used to be a jocular and usually benign ridicule of intellect and formal training has turned into a malign resentment of the intellectual in his capacity as expert. Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.”

Don’t get me wrong. Reasoned skepticism and disagreement are essential to progress and democracy. The problem is that most of what’s happening isn’t reasoned skepticism. It’s the adult equivalent of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.

Sometimes experts are wrong and the common citizen is right, but those occasions are few and far between. What’s growing is our inability to distinguish between experts being wrong occasionally and experts being wrong consistently. Participants in public debate search for loopholes and exceptions—anything that provides an excuse to disregard opinions they don’t like.

This sets up binaries and polarities, demanding that things be either true or false. This eliminates nuance. The reality is that most expert opinions are true at least in part, and the real value in disagreement is not dismissing the thing entirely, but taking the time to argue the weak points to make the overall better.

Laypeople would do well to remember that reasoned disagreement is what moves us forward. Not every idea has to be complete and completely defensible right from the beginning. It is because we question and push ideas that we make the progress that we do. Experts would do well to remember that they may be masters of their fields, but they are servants to society. Mastery means nothing without trust and engagement.

It’s intellectual hubris to think that with a few minutes of googling our opinions are on par with people who have spent their lives in a domain. And yet we’ve been taught that we are entitled to our own opinion and that it deserves equal weighting. Sure you hold your own opinion, but it doesn’t deserve equal weighting.

The post The Distrust of Intellectual Authority appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

Trying to be perfect is a waste of time.

Many of us feel constant pressure to adapt perfectly to our environments, especially our workplaces. Don’t waste time, we’re told. Maximize the output of your moments. Minimize your energy expenditure. If you aren’t getting great, someone else is, so before you collapse into a heap of perceived failure, take stock and improve your efficiency. We assume this is the ticket to success—to continually strive to be the best at whatever we are doing.

There is, however, something to be said for inefficiency: not doing everything perfectly, expending extra energy, making mistakes, trying new things—and possibly sucking at them. Sticking with something, even if you will never be as good as the person next to you. You develop flexibility and adaptability. You’re better prepared for new opportunities when there are changes in your environment.

Inefficient does not mean ineffective, and it is certainly not the same as lazy. You do things. You just don’t always do them in the most effective way possible. You’re a bit sloppy, and use more energy. But don’t feel bad about it. There is real value in not being the best at everything.

Efficiency Makes us Fragile

To understand how inefficiency can help you get ahead, let’s start with a story.

Imagine a tree that grows these tasty, nutritious turquoise berries. A species of bird has adapted to eating them efficiently. It has a beak that gets under the protective berry shell just so, allowing it to consume loads of the ripest berries whenever it wants. Its claws have adapted to the tree’s slippery branches, so it is the only creature in the forest that can perch on them with ease. The tree produces these berries all year round, thanks to a stable climate, so there are tons of them. The bird has evolved for the task of eating these berries, and they provide all the bird’s nutritional needs, so the bird has no incentive to try anything else.

In the forest there also lives a little mammal. Occasionally, the bird drops a berry and this mammal gets a taste of them. It really likes the berries, and tries to get more of them. It can never compete with the bird directly, as the bird is so specialized. But over time, it adapts to the situation. It starts to go after the berries at night, when the bird is asleep and not feeding. Its claws evolve to grip the tree better. Its vision in the dark improves. Being more active at night, it finds tasty grubs to spear with those sharper claws, so it eats them as well. The bird still gets the majority of the berries, but the mammal gets enough to keep the effort worthwhile, supplementing along the way.

Then, one day, a huge environmental change impacts the forest where this is all playing out. It is significant and lasts for a while. The vegetation patterns are disrupted. Food sources change. Who is in the better position to thrive in the new conditions? The environmental changes are a disaster for the bird. They are an opportunity for the mammal.

Why? In part, because the mammal benefits from its own previous inefficiency. Both the bird and the mammal can get the juicy turquoise berries. The bird is significantly more efficient at doing so, which is an advantage in a stable environment. Nothing can compete.

But in times of change, the inefficiency that forced the mammal to supplement the leftovers it could scrounge when the bird was sleeping is an advantage. That inefficiency allowed for the development of other traits that gave it flexibility to adapt to changing environmental circumstances. It became a generalist, with some specialized features like night vision that are broadly useful.

There is a bright side to disruption. Short-term disturbances enable fast-growing species with high metabolic rates and with inert life stages capable of withstanding adverse conditions to capitalize on briefly favorable circumstances, and it is these opportunists that are in the best position to spawn highly competitive dominants in postcrisis ecosystems from which well-adapted incumbents have been eliminated. — Geerat Vermeij, Nature: An Economic History

Total efficiency constrains us. We become super invested in maintaining the status quo because that is where we excel. Innovation is a threat. Change is terrifying. Being perfect at something is dangerous if it’s the only thing you can do.

Perhaps we need to change our idea of what it means to be the best.

Have you ever been to a rock-climbing gym? You can usually pick out the beginners, because climbing quickly exhausts them and they end up using their hands like meat hooks to grasp the holds and pull themselves up the wall. After a bit of time, this changes. They figure out they’ll tire less easily if they use their legs more. So they develop their technique, pushing up with the legs more than pulling up with the arms.

After more time and effort and practice, new climbers can become really good at rock climbing. But no one gets good by using the same holds to climb the same bit of wall. Being really good at rock climbing means trying different techniques in different locations, dealing with weather and pain and the unexpected. It means being adaptable. Being a great rock climber is about adjusting for the environment, and continually seeking out the challenge of foreign rocks and new climbs. A climber who scales El Capitan 20 times will be incredibly efficient at climbing that one rock face—might even become a climbing guide—but will not be able to get up a new mountain with equal speed.

Efficiency is great in an unchanging environment, but to expect an environment to remain static is unrealistic. Environments change all the time. When workplaces value efficiency in a changing environment, they become fragile. Inefficiency, like a genetic mutation, can allow for serendipitous discovery. Sure, it may produce the same mistakes as before, but if the environment is different, they might actually work now.

Don’t be afraid of a challenge. Don’t be afraid of not being the best. When you routinely put yourself in situations where you aren’t the most skilled, you learn, you grow, and eventually, you adapt. You build your repertoire of traits and talents, so when change hits you have a wide array of skills. This flexibility can also give you the confidence to seek change. The mammal could explore and find new opportunities, but that bird was never going to leave the trees.

The post Getting Ahead By Being Inefficient appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

There is an important lesson to be learned from the story of Samuel Andrews, as told by biographer Ron Chernow in Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller.

John D. Rockefeller learned to clean oil from Sam Andrews. Andrews was the ideal partner for Rockefeller. While he lacked business sense, he had mechanical knowledge that Rockefeller didn’t. The quality of kerosene that Andrews was able to produce, and the efficiency of his process, rendered him indispensable—until something got into the way. But before we get to that, a bit of history.

It was Rockefeller himself who propositioned Andrews to go into business in the first place.

“Sam,” he said, “we are prospering. We have a future before us, a big future. But I don’t like Jim Clark and his habits. He is an immoral man in more ways than one. He gambles in oil. I don’t want this business to be associated with a gambler. Suppose I take them up the next time they threaten a dissolution. Suppose I succeed in buying them out. Will you come in with me?”

Andrews agreed, and they shook hands on the deal.

Only a few weeks later, Rockefeller quarreled with Clark. “If that’s the way you want to do business, we’d better dissolve, and let you run your own affairs to suit yourself,” Clark warned.  Rockefeller moved swiftly.

Rockefeller met with his partners and stated publicly that he wished to dissolve the partnership. The two sides walked away after the meeting with contrasting feelings. The Clarks imagined they had cowed the young whippersnapper, while Rockefeller raced to the office of the Cleveland Leader to place a notice dissolving the partnership.

The next morning the Clarks were stunned to see the notice. The Clarks failed to realize that Rockefeller had Andrews on his side. As per the partnership agreement, the business went up for auction.

Ron Chernow describes the situation thus:

Even as a young man, Rockefeller was extremely composed in a crisis. In this respect, he was a natural leader: the more agitated others became, the calmer he grew. It was an index of his matchless confidence that when the auction occurred, the Clarks brought a lawyer while Rockefeller represented himself. “I thought that I could take care of so simple a transaction,” he boasted. With the Clarks’ lawyer acting as auctioneer, the bidding began at $500 and quickly rose to a few thousand dollars, then inched up slowly to about $50,000—already more than Rockefeller thought the refining business worth.

Since this was such a critical and defining moment in Rockefeller’s career, we can read his own words:

Finally it advanced to $60,000, and by slow stages to $70,000, and I almost feared for my ability to buy the business and have the money to pay for it. At last the other side bid $72,000. Without hesitation I said $72,500. Mr. Clark then said: “I’ll go no higher, John; the business is yours.” “Shall I give you a check for it now?” I suggested. “No,” Mr. Clark said, “I’m glad to trust you for it; settle at your convenience.”

At age 25, he and Sam Andrews controlled Cleveland’s largest refinery. No sooner had the ink dried than they took up a metagame strategy, one of rapid expansion, that he knew was diametrically opposed to how the Clarks would likely respond.

Refinery after refinery came under their control. From the start, Rockefeller used his business sense and relied on Sam Andrews for technical advice. Rockefeller held Andrews in esteem until Ambrose McGregor was named superintendent of the Standard Oil refineries in Cleveland. McGregor demonstrated superior ability. Andrews was shown to be less capable. His ego took a beating.

One day in 1878, Andrews snapped at Rockefeller, “I wish I was out of this business.”

Rockefeller remained calm and called his bluff, replying, “Sam, you don’t seem to have faith in the way this company is operating. What will you take for your holdings?”

“I will take one million dollars,” Andrews shot back.

“Let me have an option on it for twenty-four hours,” said Rockefeller, “and we will discuss it tomorrow.”

[quote]“Samuel Andrews was taken into the business as a poor workingman with little or nothing in the early stages when it was difficult to find men to cleanse the oil. … He had too much conceit, too much bull-headed English obstinacy and so little self-control. Was his own worst enemy.”[/quote]

The next morning when Andrews arrived, Rockefeller had a check made out for one million dollars.

While he appeared confident, Rockefeller was petrified at the thought of Andrew’s holdings hitting the open market and depressing the stock. Andrews thought he had bested Rockefeller. However, when Rockefeller sold the shares to William H. Vanderbilt for a quick $300,000 profit, Andrews changed his mind, voicing his displeasure to Rockefeller.

Rockefeller, feeling some sense of loyalty to the man who had helped him build and empire and quickly fallen out of favor, offered back the stock for the same price at which he had sold it.

Feeling slighted, his ego bruised, Andrews spurned the offer. This decision kept him from becoming one of America’s richest men. The very same stock would have been worth $900 million by the early 1930s.

Later Rockefeller would say of Andrews, “He was ignorant, conceited, lost his head…governed by the same wicked sort of prejudice accompanying the egotism so characteristic of that type of ignorant Englishman.”

There is a little Sam Andrews in all of us. The lesson to walk away with is that temperament matters. A lot.

The ability to keep your head when others are losing theirs is a superpower. The world doesn’t always work the way you want to it. People will slight you. You’ll get fired. You’ll make mistakes. People who are smarter than you will compete for your job. And how you respond to all of this will make all the difference.

Rockefeller gained an advantage by keeping his head while others lost theirs. In fact, the higher the stakes, the cooler he was said to become. Andrews, on the other hand, couldn’t keep his head. As a result, a blow to his ego prevented him from being one of the richest men in the world.

The post Samuel Andrews: The Man With the Billion Dollar Ego appeared first on Farnam Street.

We only get one life, “and it seems to be it is better to do significant things than to just get along through life to its end,” writes Richard Hamming in his book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn.

The book explores how we do great things. And wouldn’t we all like to do great things? But what are the methods we should employ in order to do great things? What are the mental disciplines that we should learn? Where do we start?

Hamming starts by arguing the way you live your life—the extent to which you intelligently prepare—makes a huge difference.

The major objection cited by people against striving to do great things is the belief it is all a matter of luck. I have repeatedly cited Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind”. It both admits there is an element of luck, and yet claims to a great extent it is up to you. You prepare yourself to succeed, or not, as you choose, from moment to moment, by the way you live your life.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 209)

In any great outcome, there is a component of luck. Yet if life were all about luck, the same people wouldn’t repeatedly do great things. Einstein did many great things. So did Newton. Elon Musk has been successful in multiple fields. The list goes on.

When someone repeatedly does great things it is because they prepared in advance to advance to recognize, work on, and fill in the blanks when necessary. This is the essence of intelligent preparation.

Intelligence comes in many forms and flavors. A lot of the time it’s not easily recognized — a lot of people who repeatedly do great things were poor students. IQ does not ensure academic success. Brains are nice to have but they are even better if you know how to use them.

How to Do Great Things

You need to believe that you are capable of doing important things. Your mindset determines how you experience things, what you work on, and the tactics and strategies you employ to accomplish those goals.

Among the important properties to have is the belief you can do important things. If you do not work on important problems how can you expect to do important work? Yet, direct observation, and direct questioning of people, shows most scientists spend most of their time working on things they believe are not important nor are they likely to lead to important things.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 210).

If what you are working on is not important and aligned with your goals—and a lot of what you do and say isn’t—then why are you doing it? The question you need to ask yourself if “why are you not working on and thinking about the important problems in your area?” How can we expect to achieve great things if we are not working on the right problems?

You need to be willing to look like an idiot. Think of this as confidence meets courage.

[Claude] Shannon had courage. Who else but a man with almost infinite courage would ever think of averaging over all random codes and expect the average code would be good? He knew what he was doing was important and pursued it intensely. Courage, or confidence, is a property to develop in yourself. Look at your successes, and pay less attention to failures than you are usually advised to do in the expression, “Learn from your mistakes”. While playing chess Shannon would often advance his queen boldly into the fray and say, “I ain’t scaird of nothing”. I learned to repeat it to myself when stuck, and at times it has enabled me to go on to a success. I deliberately copied a part of the style of a great scientist. The courage to continue is essential since great research often has long periods with no success and many discouragements.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

You need to strive for excellence. This isn’t as easy as it sounds but it as an essential feature of doing great work.

Without such a goal you will tend to wander like a drunken sailor. The sailor takes one step in one direction and the next in some independent direction. As a result the steps tend to cancel each other, and the expected distance from the starting point is proportional to the square root of the number of steps taken. With a vision of excellence, and with the goal of doing significant work, there is tendency for the steps to go in the same direction and thus go a distance proportional to the number of steps taken, which in a lifetime is a large number indeed.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

The conditions you think you want are rarely the ones that help you produce your best work. You need the feedback of reality in order to keep your feet planted on the ground.

Age is a factor physicists and mathematicians worry about. It is easily observed the greatest work of a theoretical physicist, mathematician, or astrophysicist, is generally done very early. They may continue to do good work all their lives, but what society ends up valuing most is almost always their earliest great work. The exceptions are very, very few indeed. But in literature, music composition, and politics, age seems to be an asset. The best compositions of a composer are usually the late ones, as judged by popular opinion.

One reason for this is fame in Science is a curse to quality productivity, though it tends to supply all the tools and freedom you want to do great things. Another reason is most famous people, sooner or later, tend to think they can only work on important problems—hence they fail to plant the little acorns which grow into the mighty oak trees. I have seen it many times, from Brattain of transistor fame and a Nobel Prize to Shannon and his Information Theory. Not that you should merely work on random things—but on small things which seem to you to have the possibility of future growth. In my opinion the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J has ruined more great scientists than any other place has created—considering what they did before ore and what they did after going there. A few, like von Neumann, escaped the closed atmosphere of the place with all its physical comforts and prestige, and continued to contribute to the advancement of Science, but most remained there and continued to work on the same problems which got them there but which were generally no longer of great importance to society.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

Work with your door open.

Working with one’s door closed lets you get more work done per year than if you had an open door, but I have observed repeatedly later those with the closed doors, while working just as hard as others, seem to work on slightly the wrong problems, while those who have let their door stay open get less work done but tend to work on the right problems! I cannot prove the cause and effect relationship, I only observed the correlation. I suspect the open mind leads to the open door, and the open door tends to lead to the open mind; they reinforce each other.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

People who do great things typically have a great drive to do things.

I had worked with John Tukey for some years before I found he was essentially my age, so I went to our mutual boss and asked him, “How can anyone my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back, grinned, and said, “You would be surprised how much you would know if you had worked as hard as he has for as many years”. There was nothing for me to do but slink out of his office, which I did. I thought about the remark for some weeks and decided, while I could never work as hard as John did, I could do a lot better than I had been doing.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 212)

Focused investment of only one hour a day can double your lifetime output. Intelligent preparation is like compound interest, the more you invest, the more situations you can handle, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc. The investment of one hour a day by Charlie Munger to learning new things is an overlooked gem hiding in plain sight.

This isn’t about who works the hardest but rather who focuses their limited energy on the right things. Learning things that (1) change slowly and (2) apply to a wide variety of situations could be a better use of time than learning something incredibly time-consuming, rapidly changing, and of limited application.

Hamming dedicated his Friday afternoons to “great thoughts.” Setting aside time to think is a common charasteristic of people that do great things. Not only does this help you live consciously it helps get your head out of the weeds. The rest of us are too busy with the details to ask if we’re going in the right direction.

People who do great things tolerate ambiguity — they can both believe and not believe at the same time.

You must be able to believe your organization and field of research is the best there is, but also there is much room for improvement! You can sort of see why this is a necessary trait If you believe too much you will not likely see the chances for significant improvements, you will see believe enough you will be filled with doubts and get very little chances for only the 2%, 5%, and 10% improvements; if you do not done. I have not the faintest idea of how to teach the tolerance of ambiguity, both belief and disbelief at the same time, but great people do it all the time. Most great people also have 10 to 20 problems they regard as basic and of great importance, and which they currently do not know how to solve. They keep them in their mind, hoping to get a clue as to how to solve them. When a clue does appear they generally drop other things and get to work immediately on the important problem. Therefore they tend to come in first, and the others who come in later are soon forgotten. I must warn you however, the importance of the result is not the measure of the importance of the problem. The three problems in Physics, antigravity, teleportation, and time travel are seldom worked on because we have so few clues as to how to start—a problem is important partly because there is a possible attack on it, and not because of its inherent importance.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 213)

If you find yourself blaming your (mental) tools, do something about it. Learn the mental models, listen to great people talk in detail about their experiences, and more importantly take ownership. Moving forward requires change but change does not mean that you are moving forward. As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

The post How to Do Great Things appeared first on Farnam Street.

“Are you dense?” the gate agent blurted to me, clearly frustrated as I asked a question she’d be asked a million times that day. Only moments before, I had been sitting on a plane to Seattle when the announcement came over the PA system that the flight was cancelled.

The instructions were clear: check with the gate agent for reassignment.  I was tenth in line. By the time I talked to her, this agent had already had to deal with nine angry customers. She wasn’t frustrated with me, but I knew that everyone else had verbally beat her up. I also travel enough to know how seldom that works. She had instructed the previous nine passengers to collect their bags, go through customs, and go to the Air Canada customer service desk for reassignment.

“I guess you’re right, I can be slow sometimes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Her words finally caught up with her, and she apologized. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. I didn’t mean—”

“You’ve had a long day. People are frustrated and taking it out on you when it’s not your fault. I know how hard that can be.”

She cracked a smile, the first I had seen from her since I joined the line. And she happily found me a seat on the next flight.

She was being rude. Yes. But that wasn’t the best version of her.

When people are rude, our subconscious interprets it as an assault on hierarchy instincts. Our evolutionary programming responds with thoughts like, “Who are you to tell me something so rude? I’ll show you….”

Our instincts are to escalate when really, we should be focused on de-escalating the situation. One way to do that is to take the high road.

Say something along the lines of “I can see that.” You don’t have to apologize. You don’t have to agree with what the other person is saying. But I promise the results are magic. It’s hard to be angry with someone who agrees with you. And when there is no one to argue with and they’re the only person worked up about the situation, they will quickly feel uncomfortable and try to correct course.

Making enemies is expensive. Sometimes you don’t even realize how expensive. I saw one of those other nine passengers two and a half hours later, running to the gate to board the flight I was on. They had only just gotten through the hassle that resulted from their dealings with the gate agent—while I had grabbed a glass of wine and read a book. They had no idea how much their rudeness cost them in time and energy. It wasn’t visible to them. It was, however, visible to me.

The high road not only holds your frictional costs to the minimum, but it makes you happier. You’ll go farther and faster than others in the same situation. Sure, it involves putting your ego aside for a second—but if you think about it, this approach can often be the quickest to getting what you want.

The post There’s Seldom Any Traffic on the High Road appeared first on Farnam Street.

Everyone, in nearly every industry, ponders, “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” The goal is to gain an advantage by anticipating the future. If only it were that easy. The problem is, we’re almost always wrong.

Capitalizing on what will change requires many things to go right. Not only do you have to correctly identify the variables that matter, but you also have to accurately predict how they will play out in the future and get the timing right. Despite their extensive education and fancy math, economists struggle to forecast the next year, let alone the next decade. And, on the rare occasions when they are right, it’s mostly just dumb luck.

All the effort and energy that goes into speculating things that cannot be known comes at the expense of things we can know.

A More Important Question

While it’s entertaining to guess what the future holds, a more important question is, “What’s not going to change in the next ten years?”

This is the secret to how both Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett built their fortunes. The leader of one of the most innovative tech companies and the head of one of the most boring conglomerates agree on one thing: understanding what will remain constant is more valuable than predicting what will change.

Bezos realizes the energy and effort put into predicting what will change is a speculative bet. It might work, and it might not. The hope is that if it works, it pays off spectacularly, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t cost you much.

While investing in what’s changing is risky, investing in what stays the same is not. Bezos realizes investments in what doesn’t change will still pay off in ten years.

“When you have something you know is true, even over the long term,” he said, “you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

Rather than the sexy speculation of what will change in the future, our effort is better spent on the boring truth of what stays the same. During the dotcom boom, while most people were caught up in the hype, Buffett was in his Omaha office, asking himself what would remain constant. His biographer, Alice Schroeder, explained his approach:

There is less emphasis on trying to reason out things on the basis that they are special because they are unique, which in a financial context is perhaps the definition of a speculation. But pattern recognition is his default way of thinking. It creates an impulse always to connect new knowledge to old and to primarily be interested in new knowledge that genuinely builds on the old.

While we can’t predict the future with any degree of accuracy, we can position ourselves to thrive in multiple possible futures. The key is often found in what doesn’t change.

The answer to how to position yourself often comes down to what doesn’t change.

We may not know when a financial panic will hit, but we know one will come. We may not know what job we’ll have in the future, but we know that acquiring certain skills will likely increase our value. We may not know when a supply chain crunch will happen, but we know it will happen eventually. We may not know which competitors will stumble, but we do know that when they do, it will present an opportunity for those who can pounce. We may not know what we’ll sell in ten years, but we do know that customers will still want high quality, low prices, and exceptional experiences.

The path to success lies not in predicting the future but in positioning ourselves for it.

The post The Magic Behind Bezos and Buffett: Things That Don’t Change appeared first on Farnam Street.

The most popular answer to this question surprised me. About half the people who are asked pick Sonny: Santino Corleone.

“Everyone loves Sonny,” writes Talmer Sommers in his book Why Honor Matters.

Sonny is a hothead. He’s the oldest of the Godfather’s three children and arguably the most unstable, impulsive, and violent. The guy is a moral sewer — he cheats on his wife, speaks out of turn, and almost goes out of his way to find violence. He single-handedly almost brings the whole family from the apex to ruin. He’s the reason his father gets killed. In the end, it’s his impulsive behavior that gets him killed at the tollbooth.

And yet we love Sonny. Sommers argues, “we love him for his passion, courage, guts, integrity, and most of all for his loyalty to his family.”

When he learns that his sister has been abused by Carlo, her husband, Sonny loses his temper. There is no hesitation. No deeper consideration. He just hops in his car, heads straight for Carlo, and gives him the beating we all know he deserves. “When it comes to defending his family,” Sommers writes, “Sonny doesn’t calculate the best move, the most profitable move … Sonny just acts out of stubborn passion and a sense of honor.”

Honor might be about business for Michael, the cold, calculating brother, but for Sonny, it’s deeper. It’s personal.

But what is honor? A word? A tangible thing with value? A shared belief?

Honor can be a verb (“Honor thy mother and father”), a noun (“We must preserve the family honor”), an adjective (honor society), and a form of address (“Your honor, I object”). … Honor spins a dizzying web of values, virtues, codes, commandments, and prohibitions that are constantly changing and evolving. And honor makes no pretense to universality. The honor of the Mafia is different from the honor of hockey teams.

So, our definition of honor can change over time and depend on context. Furthermore, our cultural attitudes toward honor are all over the map. Sommers writes:

When it comes to honor we’re positively schizophrenic. On the one hand, we have deep nostalgia for the honorable way of life. … But at the same time, we find many aspects of honor to be absurd, petty, and morally reprehensible. After all, doesn’t honor lead to blood feuds, pointless duels, vigilantism, revenge, racism, nationalism, terrorism, bullying, and violence against women? Isn’t one of the signs of civilizations progress that we’ve put honor in the rearview mirror and replaced it with a commitment to dignity, equality, and human rights?

Nobody teaches us about honor. Sommers was trained in the Western ethical tradition in school, “which meant that [he spent his] time engaging in debates between harm-based theories (such as utilitarianism) and dignity- or rights-based theories (from Locke, Kant, and John Rawls).”

Then he stumbled upon so-called honor cultures, “societies where honor was a central part of their value system.” He writes,

To my surprise these cultures had a starkly different way of understanding responsibility and its connection to freedom. Like most philosophers in my area, I was obsessed with questions about how we can be truly free in a world governed by the laws of nature. How can we blame, praise, and punish people for actions that didn’t originate in them, but were caused by factors that might trace back all the way to the big bang? Honor cultures didn’t struggle with this problem, because they didn’t think a strong form of free will was necessary for holding people responsible for their actions. They didn’t regard the absence of control as an excuse for behavior. In honor cultures, you can get blamed for actions that weren’t intentional, for actions committed by relatives, ancestors, or other members of your group.

Most societies throughout history have been on the side of honor, the exceptions being the “WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies.”

Sommers was drawn to the courage, integrity, solidarity, drama, and a sense of purpose and meaning that exist within honor-based cultures. He regards these as “attractive values and characteristics, important for living a good life.” He also says that he has “come to believe that the Western liberal approach to ethics is deeply misguided. The approach is too systematic, too idealized and abstract—incapable of reckoning with the messy complexity of the real world.”

***

The rest of the Why Honor Matters goes on to offer a defense of honor. Sommers’ ultimate conclusion is that “honor systems flourish only when they’re effectively contained. Fortunately, honor can be contained; we can restore honor into a larger value system while at the same time limiting its potential abuses.”

The post Why Honor Matters appeared first on Farnam Street.

(My essay appears in the The Warren Buffett Shareholder.)

I’ve been going to the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting almost yearly since 2008. My routine might be familiar to many – maybe uncomfortably so — and yet that routine is part of the experience.

After missing the meeting one year because of a cancelled Friday flight, I decided to start adding a bigger margin of safety and arriving on Thursday. If the flight is on time, it gives me two days to hang out before Saturday’s meeting, and I put that time to good use. Usually the meals leading up to the meeting are filled with friends, FS readers, and business partners.

When the big day finally arrives, I get up as early as my friends allow and drag everyone to the meeting, waiting in line at the CenturyLink Center’s south entrance to get a good seat. The crowd at the door is full of hedge fund managers, teachers, small investors, technology entrepreneurs, college students, people from all over — Buffett and Munger junkies all. It’s a motley crew, to say the least.

As a group, we’ve all got some peculiar wiring. More than once, we’ve sat out there in the rain, more or less oblivious to the bad weather, as we discussed such topics as first-conclusion bias, insurance float, the intricacies of goodwill accounting, the merits of the latest acquisition, and the future of discount furniture retailing.

As the meeting gets started, I listen as intently as I can, but like most people in the audience, I find myself drifting from time to time. The bland questions seem to repeat year after year and offer the same predictable answers as the year before. Fortunately, the questions have improved since Warren changed the meeting format by inviting analysts and reporters.

So sleepy or not, I listen, I write down notes, I laugh, I rummage around the Convention area and eat Dilly Bars and See’s Candy, I return to the meeting and learn some more. Write, eat, write, whisper, laugh, write, whisper, laugh, write. At some point, the day is up and it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface. What about last year’s unusually high amortization charge?

After the meeting, it’s time for a drink at the hotel across the street. All I want to do is take a nap, but that’s not what I’m here to do. I try to meet with one particular person, but I see someone else, and of course he’s got a friend in tow. Then I see an employee from Berkshire whom I want to ask a question, so I ditch my friends for a minute. Then I see the professor I met that one year. Then I see… This goes on for a few hours, until dinnertime.

Dinner, of course, is simply more of this. More friends; more talking about business, investing, learning, and mental models; more catching up. On Sunday, I get up early again and go to another breakfast, or perhaps a brunch meeting. I meet up with more old friends, more new acquaintances.

The Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting is an excuse to gorge — not just on Dilly Bars, See’s Candy, and steak, which I wholeheartedly consume, but also on friends, conversation, and learning. The whole experience is intensely stimulating, in the mildly stressful “these people are a lot smarter than me; I really need to read more” kind of way.

More important, the annual meeting offers a reminder of what matters. The world we live in is full of 24/7 noise — full of people who are trying to tell us to learn about the new and novel, people telling us we can get something for nothing, people trying to tell us the unknowable, people who won’t do the work. When you’re living in the moment, it’s hard to see that you’re in this system. It’s only when you step back that you realize that your mind has become cluttered and you’ve lost a sense of what’s important and what’s meaningful.

Omaha is a reminder of what’s important in relationships. The local residents are enormously kind and tolerant of over 50,000 people swooping in for a weekend. They are so kind, in fact, that I call them honorary Canadians. The people who come to the meeting tend to be part of a unique subset of society. While they might be bankers, teachers, businesspeople, or even unemployed, they share the same values of delayed gratification, integrity, and generosity. They share the same desire for learning. Everyone is happy. What you won’t find in Omaha are complainers, people trying to scare you, or people seeking to get rich overnight. In essence, you find yourself surrounded by the people you want to become.

When you’re listening to Warren and Charlie talk, the noise of the unimportant vanishes. In its place, you find the same topics year after year. The same phrases. The same patterns. The same predictable answers. Even the same basic eating habits. So why go if the answers are always the same? After all, I’ve been attending for nearly 10 years; by now, haven’t I heard most of what Warren and Charlie have to say?

The point is that the answers stay the same. Warren and Charlie talk about the same invariant general principles every single year without fail. What I’ve learned most from Warren and Charlie over the years is the beauty of what doesn’t change. When you learn something that doesn’t change, you can step off the treadmill of keeping up and start to compound your knowledge. While this compounding may slow you down at first, it offers exponential returns. After all, what better investment can you make than learning, with deep fluency, timeless principles like second-order thinking, something that applies to a wide variety of situations and is likely to remain constant?

You can see in real time how Warren and Charlie adapt their timeless principles to the reality of the day. There is no wishful thinking, just a lens into the world. By applying timeless concepts to whatever is topical, they show a deep, multi-layered understanding of what’s happening in the world. Implicit in all of this is how they work with the world rather than against it.

And Warren and Charlie are not the only ones I learn from. I also learn from the hedge fund managers, teachers, small investors, technology entrepreneurs, and college students who are waiting outside the arena in the rain. I learn from the friends and acquaintances at the breakfasts, brunches, lunches, dinners, and cocktail hours. I learn from the Berkshire employees and the professors-I-met-that-one-year, and the guy who knows more about insurance than I’ll ever hope to know.

The world becomes clear after I leave Omaha. My sense of what’s important is renewed — what might have been the most urgent thing in the world on Thursday now seems to fade into the distance as unimportant. I make better decisions, I become a better person, and material concerns fall by the wayside. There is nothing missing. And because what’s important has been amplified, I’m better able to make the decisions I’ve been postponing. When I’ve been surrounded by so many people, my sense of the person I want to become improves.

I don’t go to Omaha looking for answers; I go for the pursuit. I go there to deepen my understanding of the key ideas that matter in work and life. It’s almost like changing your oil. As the year goes on, little bits get in your oil. At first, if you don’t change your oil often enough, your engine runs suboptimally. Eventually, however, if you still don’t change your oil, your engine seizes. Going to the meeting is my oil change.

Charlie has always called Berkshire a “didactic” enterprise. For a while, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. (I had to look up “didactic,” too.) But I get what he means now. The annual letter, the meeting — partially, these serve to inform the shareholders. But let’s be honest, it’s about more than that. Warren and Charlie don’t need to make such a production of the annual meeting. It’s a platform for the two Wise Men of Omaha to tell us the way it is and show us how it could be. (The maddening thing is that they’re usually right.)

And that’s the way many shareholders see it, too. Berkshire isn’t just a company that’s made us a great deal of money. And it hasn’t just provided a way to learn how to make more money. Berkshire is a philosophy of life — a philosophy of trust, a philosophy of lifelong learning. Mainly, a philosophy of rationality and independent thinking in a crowd.

Charlie likes to say that if he and Warren had stopped learning when they were young, Berkshire would be a shadow of its current self. And I realize that is the lesson I relearn every year in Omaha, among the chained-together meetings and the lack of sleep. We’re all trying to create positive outcomes and to do that in the right way, with humility, gratitude, and rational thought. We’re trying to grow.

Because what else would motivate a bunch of nutcases to fly 400 or 500 or 2,000 miles (or 2,004 kilometers) to eat candy and listen to a couple of old men talk about business?

After nine years, I still don’t quite know the answer. All I know is that I’m one of those nutcases. And I’ll keep coming back as long as Berkshire Hathaway will have me.

The post My Berkshire Hathaway Reflections appeared first on Farnam Street.

Understanding the difference between speed and velocity can help increase your productivity, simplify your focus, and improve your results.

Progress Drives Results

Let’s begin with the difference between velocity and speed. Don’t worry, we’re not in physics class here.

Velocity and speed are different things. Speed is the distance traveled over time. Velocity measures displacement. It’s direction-aware.

The important distinction is that velocity has both speed and direction.

Velocity moves you toward a goal. Speed does not. If you are in a race and you run in a circle, you might move with a lot of speed, but you’re not closer to your destination.

Progress matters more than movement.

How do we think about velocity when it comes to work?

Focus impacts velocity. Right now, you might have 5 different projects you’re working on at work. Assuming you have 5 usable hours each day, each project gets one hour per day. Because you have so many different projects, you feel really busy (speed), but you’re not making as much progress as you want (velocity). If you cut your projects back to 3, you’ll not only increase the velocity on those 3, but you’ll find that your 5 hours of time becomes 6 as you spend less time ‘getting up to speed.’

If you want to get stuff done, progress matters, not speed.

Progress is velocity in the right direction.

In order to make progress, you need to do two things: 1) get the direction right and 2) concentrate as much energy as you can in that direction. All of the energy that doesn’t go toward moving you in the right direction comes at the expense of progress.

Here are three ways you can increase your velocity:

1. To the extent possible, ruthlessly shave away the unnecessary tasks, priorities, meetings, and BS. Put all your effort into the projects that really matter.
2. Don’t rely on your willpower to say no; instead, create systems that help you fend off distractions. I have two friends who were about the same weight several years ago. Around that time, one of them was diagnosed with celiac (gluten intolerance). He immediately started to lose weight after changing his diet. Upon seeing this, my other friend decided that he, too, would go on a diet to lose weight. Because they both ate out a lot, they both were frequently in situations where they would have to make healthy choices. The person with celiac developed “automatic behavior“; he had to avoid gluten if he wanted to stay healthy and pain-free. The other person, however, had to keep making positive choices and ended up falling down after a few weeks and reverting to his previous eating habits. Another example: One of my management principles was “no meeting mornings.” This rule allowed the team to work, uninterrupted, on the most important things. Of course, there were exceptions to this rule, but the default was that each day you had a three-hour chunk of time when you were at your best to really move the needle.
3. And finally, do as I did, and say “no” to your boss. The best way I found to frame this reply was actually the same technique that negotiation expert Chris Voss mentioned in a recent podcast episode: simply ask, “how am I supposed to do that?” given all the other stuff on your plate. Explain that saying no means that you’re going to be better at the tasks that are most important to your job, and tie those tasks to your boss’s performance.

Read Next

Eight Ways to Say No With Grace and Style

The post The Difference Between Speed and Velocity: Getting Stuff Done appeared first on Farnam Street.

***

Here’s a common problem that a lot of people are unaware of: John is a remarkable employee. He delivers day in and day out. Jane is equally remarkable and delivers just as well. They’re identical twins except for one difference. That one difference makes Jane incredibly valuable to the organization and makes John much less valuable.

That difference is friction.

To get John to do what he’s supposed to do, his boss comes in and hits him over the head every day. John can’t keep track of what he’s supposed to do, and he does things only when instructed.

Jane, on the other hand, shows up knowing what she’s supposed to do and doing it. She delivers without any added work from her boss.

John and Jane have the same boss. The amount of effort required to get John to do something is 10 times the amount of effort required to get Jane to do something.

***

Let’s shift our perspective here.

From John’s point of view, he’s competent and capable, even if he’s not ambitious or highly motivated.

From Jane’s point of view, she’s equally competent and capable and wonders why she’s treated the same as John when she does the same amount of work with way less hassle.

From the boss’s point of view, they’re both valuable employees, but they are not equally valuable. Jane is much more valuable than John. If one of them had to be let go, it’d be John.

***

Let’s invert the problem a little. Instead of asking what more you can do to add value you can ask what you can remove.

One of the easiest ways to increase your value to an organization is to reduce the friction required to get you to do your job. You don’t need to learn any new skills for this; you just have to shift your perspective to your boss’s point of view and see how hard it is for them to get you to do something. Like nature, which removes mistakes to progress, you can remove things to not only survive but thrive. (This is one of the ways we can apply via negativa, an important mental model.)

Think about it this way. Your boss, like you, has 100 units of energy a day with which to accomplish something. If you both spend 10 units on getting you to do the thing you already know you should be doing, you’re making yourself look bad, despite the amazing quality you deliver. And you’re making your boss look less productive than they really are in the process.

When we think of improving our value to an organization, we often think about the skills we need to develop, the jobs we should take, or the growing responsibility we have. In so doing, we miss the most obvious method of all: reducing friction. Reducing friction means that the same 100 units of energy are going to get you further, which is going to get your boss further, which is going to get the organization further.

The post Friction: The Hidden Force Holding You Back appeared first on Farnam Street.

Even if you managed to escape this question until high school, then by the time you got there, you were probably expected to be able to answer this question, if only to be able to choose a college and a major. Maybe you took aptitude tests, along with the standard academic tests, in high school. This is when the pressure to go down a path to a job commences. Increasingly, the education system seems to want to reduce the time it takes for us to become productive members of the work force, so instead of exploring more options, we are encouraged to start narrowing them.

Any field you go into, from finance to engineering, requires some degree of specialization. Once you land a job, the process of specialization only amplifies. You become a specialist in certain aspects of the organization you work for.

Then something happens. Maybe your specialty is no longer needed or gets replaced by technology. Or perhaps you get promoted. As you go up the ranks of the organization, your specialty becomes less and less important, and yet the tendency is to hold on to it longer and longer. If it’s the only subject or skill you know better than anything else, you tend to see it everywhere. Even where it doesn’t exist.

Every problem is a nail and you just happen to have a hammer.

Only this approach doesn’t work. Because you have no idea of the big ideas, you start making decisions that don’t take into account how the world really works. These decisions ripple outward, and you have to spend time correcting your mistakes. If you’re not careful about self-reflection, you won’t learn, and you’ll make one version of the same mistakes over and over.

Should we become specialists or polymaths? Is there a balance we should pursue?

There is no single answer.

The decision is personal. And most of the time we fail to see the life-changing implications of it. Whether we’re conscious of this or not, it’s also a decision we have to make and re-make over and over again. Every day, we have to decide where to invest our time — do we become better at what we do or learn something new?

[quote]If you can’t adapt, changes become threats instead of opportunities.[/quote]

There is another way to think about this question, though.

Around 2700 years ago, the Greek poet Archilochus wrote: “the fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.” In the 1950s, philosopher Isaiah Berlin used that sentence as the basis of his essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” In it, Berlin divides great thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who have one perspective on the world, and foxes, who have many different viewpoints. Although Berlin later claimed the essay was not intended to be serious, it has become a foundational part of thinking about the distinction between specialists and generalists.

Berlin wrote that “…there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system … in terms of which they understand, think and feel … and, on the other hand, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.”

A generalist is a person who is a competent jack of all trades, with lots of divergent useful skills and capabilities. This is the handyman who can fix your boiler, unblock the drains, replace a door hinge, or paint a room. The general practitioner doctor whom you see for any minor health problem (and who refers you to a specialist for anything major). The psychologist who works with the media, publishes research papers, and teaches about a broad topic.

A specialist is someone with distinct knowledge and skills related to a single area. This is the cardiologist who spends their career treating and understanding heart conditions. The scientist who publishes and teaches about a specific protein for decades. The developer who works with a particular program.

In his original essay, Berlin writes that specialists “lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects … seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all embracing … unitary inner vision.”

The generalist and the specialist are on the same continuum; there are degrees of specialization in a subject. There’s a difference between someone who specializes in teaching history and someone who specializes in teaching the history of the American Civil war, for example. Likewise, there is a spectrum for how generalized or specialized a certain skill is.

Some skills — like the ability to focus, to read critically, or to make rational decisions — are of universal value. Others are a little more specialized but can be used in many different careers. Examples of these skills would be design, project management, and fluency in a foreign language.

The distinction between generalization and specialization comes from biology. Species are referred to as either generalists or specialists, as with the hedgehog and the fox.

A generalist species can live in a range of environments, utilizing whatever resources are available. Often, these critters eat an omnivorous diet. Raccoons, mice, and cockroaches are generalists. They live all over the world and can eat almost anything. If a city is built in their habitat, then no problem; they can adapt.

A specialist species needs particular conditions to survive. In some cases, they are able to live only in a discrete area or eat a single food. Pandas are specialists, needing a diet of bamboo to survive. Specialist species can thrive if the conditions are correct. Otherwise, they are vulnerable to extinction.

[quote]A specialist who is outside of their circle of competence and doesn’t know it is incredibly dangerous.[/quote]

The distinction between generalist and specialist species is useful as a point of comparison. Generalist animals (including humans) can be less efficient, yet they are less fragile amidst change. If you can’t adapt, changes become threats instead of opportunities.

While it’s not very glamorous to take career advice from a raccoon or a panda, we can learn something from them about the dilemmas we face. Do we want to be like a raccoon, able to survive anywhere, although never maximizing our potential in a single area? Or like a panda, unstoppable in the right context, but struggling in an inappropriate one?

Costs and Benefits

Generalists have the advantage of interdisciplinary knowledge, which fosters creativity and a firmer understanding of how the world works. They have a better overall perspective and can generally perform second-order thinking in a wider range of situations than the specialist can.

Generalists often possess transferable skills, allowing them to be flexible with their career choices and adapt to a changing world. They can do a different type of work and adapt to changes in the workplace. Gatekeepers tend to cause fewer problems for generalists than for specialists.

Managers and leaders are often generalists because they need a comprehensive perspective of their entire organization. And an increasing number of companies are choosing to have a core group of generalists on staff, and hire freelance specialists only when necessary.

The métiers at the lowest risk of automation in the future tend to be those which require a diverse, nuanced skill set. Construction vehicle operators, blue collar workers, therapists, dentists, and teachers included.

When their particular skills are in demand, specialists experience substantial upsides. The scarcity of their expertise means higher salaries, less competition, and more leverage. Nurses, doctors, programmers, and electricians are currently in high demand where I live, for instance.

Specialists get to be passionate about what they do — not in the usual “follow your passion!” way, but in the sense that they can go deep and derive the satisfaction that comes from expertise. Garrett Hardin offers his perspective on the value of specialists: 

…we cannot do without experts. We accept this fact of life, but not without anxiety. There is much truth in the definition of the specialist as someone who “knows more and more about less and less.” But there is another side to the coin of expertise. A really great idea in science often has its birth as apparently no more than a particular answer to a narrow question; it is only later that it turns out that the ramifications of the answer reach out into the most surprising corners. What begins as knowledge about very little turns out to be wisdom about a great deal.

Hardin cites the development of probability theory as an example. When Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat sought to devise a means of dividing the stakes in an interrupted gambling game, their expertise created a theory with universal value.

The same goes for many mental models and unifying theories. Specialists come up with them, and generalists make use of them in surprising ways.

The downside is that specialists are vulnerable to change. Many specialist jobs are disappearing as technology changes. Stockbrokers, for example, face the possibility of replacement by AI in coming years. That doesn’t mean no one will hold those jobs, but demand will decrease. Many people will need to learn new work skills, and starting over in a new field will put them back decades. That’s a serious knock, both psychologically and financially.

Specialists are also subject to “‘man with a hammer” syndrome. Their area of expertise can become the lens they see everything through.

As Michael Mauboussin writes in Think Twice:

…people stuck in old habits of thinking are failing to use new means to gain insight into the problems they face. Knowing when to look beyond experts requires a totally fresh point of view and one that does not come naturally. To be sure, the future for experts is not all bleak. Experts retain an advantage in some crucial areas. The challenge is to know when and how to use them.

Understanding and staying within their circle of competence is even more important for specialists. A specialist who is outside of their circle of competence and doesn’t know it is incredibly dangerous.

Philip Tetlock performed an 18-year study to look at the quality of expert predictions. Could people who are considered specialists in a particular area forecast the future with greater accuracy than a generalist? Tetlock tracked 284 experts from a range of disciplines, recording the outcomes of 28,000 predictions.

The results were stark: predictions coming from generalist thinkers were more accurate. Experts who stuck to their specialized areas and ignored interdisciplinary knowledge faired worse. The specialists tended to be more confident in their erroneous predictions than the generalists. The specialists made definite assertions — which we know from probability theory to be a bad idea. It seems that generalists have an edge when it comes to Bayesian updating, recognizing probability distributions, and long-termism.

Organizations, industries, and the economy need both generalists and specialists. And when we lack the right balance, it creates problems. Millions of jobs remain unfilled, while millions of people lack employment. Many of the empty positions require specialized skills. Many of the unemployed have skills which are too general to fill those roles. We need a middle ground.

The Generalized Specialist

The economist, philosopher, and writer Henry Hazlitt sums up the dilemma:

In the modern world knowledge has been growing so fast and so enormously, in almost every field, that the probabilities are immensely against anybody, no matter how innately clever, being able to make a contribution in any one field unless he devotes all his time to it for years. If he tries to be the Rounded Universal Man, like Leonardo da Vinci, or to take all knowledge for his province, like Francis Bacon, he is most likely to become a mere dilettante and dabbler. But if he becomes too specialized, he is apt to become narrow and lopsided, ignorant on every subject but his own, and perhaps dull and sterile even on that because he lacks perspective and vision and has missed the cross-fertilization of ideas that can come from knowing something of other subjects.

What’s the safest option, the middle ground?

By many accounts, it’s being a specialist in one area, while retaining a few general iterative skills. That might sound like it goes against the idea of specialists and generalists being mutually exclusive, but it doesn’t.

A generalizing specialist has a core competency which they know a lot about. At the same time, they are always learning and have a working knowledge of other areas. While a generalist has roughly the same knowledge of multiple areas, a generalizing specialist has one deep area of expertise and a few shallow ones. We have the option of developing a core competency while building a base of interdisciplinary knowledge.

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

— Archilochus

As Tetlock’s research shows, for us to understand how the world works, it’s not enough to home in on one tiny area for decades. We need to pull ideas from everywhere, remaining open to having our minds changed, always looking for disconfirming evidence. Joseph Tussman put it this way: “If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.”

Many great thinkers are (or were) generalizing specialists.

Shakespeare specialized in writing plays, but his experiences as an actor, poet, and part owner of a theater company informed what he wrote. So did his knowledge of Latin, agriculture, and politics. Indeed, the earliest known reference to his work comes from a critic who accused him of being “an absolute Johannes factotum” (jack of all trades).

Leonardo Da Vinci was an infamous generalizing specialist. As well as the art he is best known for, Da Vinci dabbled in engineering, music, literature, mathematics, botany, and history. These areas informed his art — note, for example, the rigorous application of botany and mathematics in his paintings. Some scholars consider Da Vinci to be the first person to combine interdisciplinary knowledge in this way or to recognize that a person can branch out beyond their defining trade.

Johannes Kepler revolutionized our knowledge of planetary motion by combining physics and optics with his main focus, astronomy. Military strategist John Boyd designed aircraft and developed new tactics, using insights from divergent areas he studied, including thermodynamics and psychology. He could think in a different manner from his peers, who remained immersed in military knowledge for their entire careers.

Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Kepler, and Boyd excelled by branching out from their core competencies. These men knew how to learn fast, picking up the key ideas and then returning to their specialties. Unlike their forgotten peers, they didn’t continue studying one area past the point of diminishing returns; they got back to work — and the results were extraordinary.

Many people seem to do work which is unrelated to their area of study or their prior roles. But dig a little deeper and it’s often the case that knowledge from the past informs their present. Marcel Proust put it best: “the real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.”

Interdisciplinary knowledge is what allows us to see with new eyes.

When Charlie Munger was asked whether to become a polymath or a specialist at the 2017 shareholders meeting for the Daily Journal, his answer surprised a lot of people. Many expected the answer to be obvious. Of course, he would recommend that people become generalists. Only this is not what he said.

Munger remarked:

I don’t think operating over many disciplines, as I do, is a good idea for most people. I think it’s fun, that’s why I’ve done it. And I’m better at it than most people would be, and I don’t think I’m good at being the very best at handling differential equations. So, it’s been a wonderful path for me, but I think the correct path for everybody else is to specialize and get very good at something that society rewards, and then to get very efficient at doing it. But even if you do that, I think you should spend 10 to 20% of your time [on] trying to know all the big ideas in all the other disciplines. Otherwise … you’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. It’s not going to work very well. You have to know the big ideas in all the disciplines to be safe if you have a life lived outside a cave. But no, I think you don’t want to neglect your business as a dentist to think great thoughts about Proust.

In his comments, we can find the underlying approach most likely to yield exponential results: Specialize most of the time, but spend time understanding the broader ideas of the world.

This approach isn’t what most organizations and educational institutions provide. Branching out isn’t in many job descriptions or in many curricula. It’s a project we have to undertake ourselves, by reading a wide range of books, experimenting with different areas, and drawing ideas from each one.

Still curious? Check out the biographies of Leonardo da Vinci and Ben Fraklin. 

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