How To Achieve Flow In Your Passion
to do it and there were roads
radiating out like wheel spokes from The Fortress
but they were strewn with landmines
so if he marched all his troops down any one road he'd suffer a lot of casualty
so he had the idea let's split up into
single file lines go to the
different spok likee paths and we'll synchronize
our watches and they converge there
at the same time and they Liberate the Fortress okay or they capture the
Fortress Liberate the country One More
Story Once a fire in a small town in
danger of spreading to neighboring structures fortunately was near Lake so
neighbors are coming and they're
filling pales and bailing water on it not working fire chief shows up she says
stop what you're doing everyone get
in a circle fill up your buckets get in a circle around the fire on the count
of three one two three dampens the fire and
good they put it out fire chief gets
a raise okay have you can you save me now doesn't matter you should this is I'm
giving you a very quick version but
the answer is you can arrange multiple low intensity Rays around me so they
converge at the focal point so they
go through my torso without damaging me because they're low intensity but they
converge at the right spot making high
intensity and this is a very
truncated version don't like if you were getting
the real test you would have had a
lot more time and still most people don't solve it so don't worry it's called
the dunker radiation problem this is a very
truncated version of a large body of
research that shows that when you're facing a novel problem the number of
solutions and the chance of coming
up with a good solution are predicted by the number and breadth of analogies
that your group can come up
with and what predicts that is the
breadth of experience of the people in the group so if you're facing a novel
problem and you have only people
with the same expertise it's not much better than having one brain okay what
you want
to do is come up with what's called
a reference class where you sit down you come up with as many structurally
similar analogies from all sorts of
different areas like this sounds
kind of like this and this other thing and they don't have to be as far flowing
as what I just did but in in the studies where
people have more time with each
successive story you tell them more people will start solving the original one
even though they don't know that
Are Neurodivergent
People Geniuses?
they're related and so you want to
get people together who are really different come up with a whole bunch of
uh of these like this kind of feels
like this look for which ones are structurally similar and you'll start
thinking of possible solutions yeah I
mean that's just such a brilliant
brilliant case for diversity in thinking and experience when you're building a
team when you're co-founding a team when
you're coming coming at a problem
and I was thinking actually yesterday about um microphones so this is the first
podcast
we've ever recorded if people
watching they might notice this all of a sudden it' be interesting to know if
you notice this before I mentioned it but there's
no microphone here and this is the
first podcast we've ever recorded where there isn't a microphone here and I was
thinking as you were speaking then about
how when we had the debate about how
to solve this problem with and the problem that we were trying to solve for is
that
there's guest bang on the table and
it comes through the microphone people send me messages on LinkedIn saying hey
it's
so annoying that people bang and
then whatever um so the microphones are now above us and coming down and as we
sat
around the three of us yesterday
it's kind of a little analogy for what you what you're describing you've got
will
who's got his experience in audio
you've got Jack who's got his experience and then you've got me who's got
basically no experience but I do do a TV show
called Dragon's Den where we wear a
different type of microphone and we were all chucking in our solutions to this
problem based on our own
perspectives of audio recording so um we Jack's solution
one but my solution before that was
while on drag and then we have one glue to our chest so why can't we just glue
it to the guest's chest and it was
interesting watching us all it iterate through these different solutions that
come from different places um doing this
kind of cost benefit analysis on
each of the solutions obviously one of the problems with my solution is guests
will touch their chest right and then that'll
[ __ ] that up so yeah
yeah yeah they touch so and then also we have to grope them when they arrive
which we also we
didn't like but it's the same thing
and you need you need a really diverse set of experiences to hone in on the
winning
solution um but in most Pursuits
what we do is we collect people who have done it before collect people who've
done it
before and and that it's not that
you don't want those people you just don't want only those people yeah and and
the tendency also is often to use the first
analogy that comes up you don't want
to do that either you want to like have a menu of possible solutions to to look
at
because like there's this thing
called the creative Cliff illusion people think their most their best ideas and
most creative ideas will come either quickly
or not at all and in fact they tend
to come later as you're trying to come up with ideas interesting yeah so but
our
inclination is that it's like this
flash of lightning and either it comes or it doesn't [ __ ] that's
made me question a
lot of things I do because sometimes
I get an idea I write it down and I share it straight away oh there's nothing
wrong with sharing the idea right but if you're if you're like trying to solve
a
real problem I wouldn't stop at your
first idea throw it out there for discussion and then allow it to and then keep
yeah stay open to it and and don't
assume that you know if something
didn't come to you with like a flash of insight that you should just stop
thinking
you're writing a book about
constraints yeah and you you know I'm not going to give away all all of the
things in the book because you know you to sell it
especially since like half of it
isn't written so it's I can't even give away half but I found this story about
Apple
really important because it's helped
me think about some of the things I'm doing in business but also in my life are
you able to share that story of of Apple
what you've discovered in terms of
focus and constraints sure not not not Apple so much as as um another company
uh
called General magic that was uh a
lot of the team that designed the original
Mac came to this company and it was
like the the the hottest thing in Silicon Valley and they were going to build
um
uh the iPhone they had the idea they
had the vision like the drawings they have look like the iPhone they had the
team
from the Mac they had this
incredible Talent uh they went public in a so-called concept IPO they didn't
have a
product yet but the idea was so hot
that they were taken public uh and long story short it turned into a disaster
because
they had no boundaries they had as
much money as they wanted they didn't have any customer in mind um they uh
anything
they thought was cool they built it
and so the project just grew and grew and grew and grew and never found the
focus
to to kind of turn into anything
usable but a lot of the alumni that came out of there realized that that was a
problem
and so going forward they would have
lessons like you're better off envisioning a customer even if it's the wrong
person than none at all and just
building something that's cool
because even if it's wrong you can learn that you were wrong by trying
something whereas if you don't have one you don't
even have sort of a feedback
mechanism for Learning and so it was spending some time with with some of those
alumni um
got me really interested in in
constraints and uh I'm still putting together some of that some of that writing
so I don't know that I can do it
justice at the depth um that I could
if I'd already written it but it's interesting with the words you use because
there appears to be a bit of
kind of like a paradox or
contradiction in this idea of like breadth and then constraints and focus and
it's this
interest you know I mean that's part
of the reason I got interested in it because a question after range that people
had for me was you know how do
you know when to focus right like so
it really very much came out of this question because eventually you get this
broad toolbox you have to focus it
into achievement at some point right you don't want to just pinball forever
which is what you said as your like hot
streaks hot streaks right you want
to folus into a hot streak eventually and it also came out of this aspect of me
search you know research is research
um where my own biggest challenge the
bigger my projects are and the you
know books being big projects for me the harder it is for me to draw the
boundaries of what is in Bound
because the the topics I take on in my my books are by definition can't be
perfectly
answered balance of Nature and
nurture and developing a skill how broad or specialized to be and when and so
I've
had so much trouble saying this is
the boundary for what fits in here and so I myself wanted to get better at at
learning how to use constraints uh
in in my own work so for the first time with this book for the first time I
said
because I I for both of my previous
books I've written like 15% the length of a book and then had to cut back
because I just shove in everything I
think is interesting this time I said I'm going to have an architect ahead of
time forc myself to adhere to that and
one of the first things I noticed
was it's I I usually don't write the chapters in order and I I started with
this book with my normal process of
I'm going to jump in with chapter five because I just did the research and I
realized because I was starting to
see like this is going to break some of the structure up and
downstream I'm leaving all these
blanks because I don't know what I will have already said so I actually have to
go back and start an order so now you know
after being in writing for whatever
like almost 20 years suddenly I have a totally new work
process and I'm writing an order for
the first time which is interesting and and a bit scary but I'm writing at
length too I'm actually going to turn in a book
at the length of a book for the
first time are you not um at all concerned about AI as a writer because you
know
these models are getting smarter and
smarter every single week and just generally how do you look at the the sort of
future of work in a world of AI
it feels like it's going to be such
a disruptive force in you know oh I think it is career planning and like what
do I
do with my future I mean it might
touch everything but one I love playing with it so I'm I have these competing
forces
of like maybe it'll um you know I'm
a very curious person and so if I'm I I I
play with probably about four
different AI programs a day but the the one that's the most useful to me is
called site.
again is it I don't have like any
affiliation with any of these things I'm just a subscriber s. where I can put
in
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