What Are Serial Innovators?
differentiate luck from uh good luck
and bad luck from skill and the worst
forecasters turn turned out to be
like the most narrowly specialized people who were it do not that these people
are not
important for generating knowledge
but who came to see the whole world through sort of one lens or mental model
and
would they had spent their whole
careers kind of studying one problem and and would see the whole world around
that
and they would wrap everything into
that story basically so in in this this research they were called The Hedgehogs
who knew one big thing whereas the
good forecasters were the foxes who knew many
little things and sometimes they had
an area of expertise and sometimes they didn't but more important than what
they thought was how they
thought they would collect different
perspectives they use social media anything they had to take their own
hypothesis and tell get other people
to falsify it for them uh and those people
turned out to be the the best
forecasters and when they were put together in groups with one another they
became even better because they had
this approach of of sort of borrowing from the scientific method to test their
own
ideas basically and it just
surprised me that these sort of random people in many cases in a
tournament where they were pitted
against the intelligence community in the United States that had access to
classified information that they did
not they beat them handily and I just wouldn't have
believed that unless I unless I saw
it that that body of research about forecasting the ability to see around the
corner a a big aspect of what made
people good at it was actually the
researcher who led this work described those people as having dragonfly eyes
dragonfly's eyes are made of thousands
of different lenses each one of
which takes a separate picture and they are synthesized in the dragonfly's
brain and
so these people are gathering all
these different perspectives and they can seem sort of confused and equivocal
so they
might not make for good TV guests
they actually found in the research because they don't go on and say this is
how it is like the housing crash is coming and
bl blah you know they're more
circumspect in some ways they might not be as good TV guest but they're very
good forecasters it just made me think
that on a personal level I need to
keep pushing myself out outside of my zone of comfort more that's one of the
big
things I took away from the book
range but also just much of your work is it's easy to get complacent in What I
Know
Who I Am My identity what I do and
in fact that's probably the biggest risk to my future success but also probably
to
my fulfillment as well and it it
goes against our natural inclination to push
into uh unknown territory yeah
because the older we get the more like you know they say you can't teach an old
dog new
tricks I think it's more like the
old dog doesn't really want to know learn new Tri tricks you know can't see the
point in learning a new trick and to
that point of the of the so-called
Big Five personality traits in Psychology one of them is called openness to
experience which is the most
predictive of creativity and in in middle age it reliably goes down goes down
but
actually a study I loved in the book
found that if you force older people to do something new can be some sodoku or
something even if they don't get
good at that thing if it's new to them it will improve their openness to
experience so
you can actually stem the decline of
openness to experience it's not inevitable just by forcing yourself to do new
stuff that you're not competent
at is like great for brain health uh
it makes your life feel longer because our memory Works in sort of chapters
where
when you try new stuff it's like a
new chapter so it'll make your life feel like it's not passing as quickly and
it keeps your openness to experience from
The Most Important
Idea In David's Work
declining and so just like picking
something to do that's new even if you're not planning on getting really good
at it I think is important it's
funny I said that thing a second ago
about um when I look at someone's LinkedIn and then I looked down and I
found this little research um piece
that LinkedIn did that I'd pulled out that
said one of the best predictors of
who um would become an executive in a company yeah was the number of different
job functions that individual had
worked across an industry so that's research done by LinkedIn wasn't it yeah
wasited
that was on about a half million
members yeah and and the interesting thing about that was I when I was in
contact with
LinkedIn uh talking about that and
trying to get some of that data I said I kind of feel like your
guy's product might militate against
people doing this because you're saying
this is this is who's doing the best
but they might want a much cleaner kind of linear trajectory yeah um so maybe
you
should build another product where
they can build a narrative into it and say Here's why I switched here's what I
learned and what so what's the
actual can you recap to me what the actual finding was I mean that was that was
pretty much it that across a half
million members that the strongest
predictor of who was going to go on to become a future executive um was uh the
number of different job functions
that they' worked across in industry in a specific industry in Industry so not
changing Industries not changing
Industries although changing Industries there was a bunch of lower level stuff
and changing Industries was useful at
times also but to be an executive in
a particular industry lots of job functions across that across an industry
and does that mean different
departments within that industry they characterize job functions you have to be
doing something fundamentally different okay
so give me an example I mean let's
say I think probably the easiest one is where you go from being a a a a
performer or a
good performer to being someone
who's managing other performers right classic one doesn't have to be
progression
though because but that's I think a
very a very simple one right or in my industry it'd be like going from writing
to editing would for sure be one
which is kind of a mix of writing and and managing but that's the side step in
your industry and side step yep for
sure I mean some people would well I guess it depends some people would would
view
that and in some places it's going
up but i' a side step the other thing I found which was uh pretty shocking was
the in the part of your book where
you start talking about some of the dangers of specialism and you referenced a
study that found cardiac patients were less
likely to die if they were they were
admitted to a hospital yeah when the doctors were away we can tie in a few of
the things we've been talking about
to uh uh cardiac s to surgery here so so this was this study so I think because
I'm I'm conscious when I write about
dangers specialization hugely important obviously and in medicine it would be
crazy to say that specialization in
medicine increasing specialization hasn't been both inevitable and beneficial
in many
ways but the point I was trying to
make is that it's also an underrecognized double-edged sword to the point where
these two Harvard Le studies found that
if you're checked in to a teaching
hospital with certain cardiac conditions on the dates of a national Cardiology
convention when the most esteemed
Specialists are away you're less likely to die that that makes no sense right
that's suboptimal outcome and and
the conclusion was that's because these researchers or these these
surgeons have done the same
procedure so many times that they will continue to do
it even if it's not the right
solution to the problem or if data shows that it doesn't work anymore and so
this called
the einstellung effect in Psychology
where you've done you've solved a problem a certain way so many times that you
will continue solving problems that
way even if the problem has changed
or if new data emerges that shows it's not the right solution so it's not to
say those people aren't important but they
are human and so they fall prey to
the Ein stong effect that's again why you want some of this this mixture and to
tyion surgery you know we've also
been talking about distraction and focus one of those same researchers did some
work
that showed that if you have a
surgical procedure and this this research looked at 980,000
procedures that if you have a
procedure on the surgeon's birthday you're more likely to die
within the 30 days after the
surgical procedure and they attribute it to the increased distractions that the
surgeon
is having on their birthday they
don't know whether it's external or internal distraction um but you might not
want to
have your again and you know and
this these are not huge effects but over a large number of
people it makes a difference and if
yeah gosh that's terrifying so you one of the things I've
come to learn today really is that
knowledge is a double-edged sword like deep knowledge on one thing really is a
double-edged sword it will be your
making but in the long term it might
also be your breaking yeah and that really resonates with me because as we
started the conversation with
there's a lot of things that I'm like really knowledgeable about and know a lot
about and in fact that's my biggest curse and
I have to find a way to basically
self-d disrupt myself continually and always assume that I am wrong and not not
always assume I'm wrong always
assume that there's a significant possibility that I'm wrong today and maybe
yesterday
I was correct but today I could be
entirely wrong um I mean I've changed my mind about like fundamental beliefs I
had you know when I was younger and
it's weird to think I mean like I was a grad student
environmental sciences and I was
firmly of the belief that uh environmental
preservation and technological
progress were at odds and I feel completely the opposite now you know I think
there are
technological things we can do that
ruin the environment but I actually think the salvation of the environment
requires technological progress It's just like
fundamental beliefs about the world
so I think we should be open to that updating and from a career perspective you
know if artificial super intelligence and
like some new form of free energy
does everything better than us then it does and we'll have to reorient life in
some pretty dramatic ways uh but until then I
think we need to dispense with the
idea that you can live in a world where you did a period of training for most
of us
and then you're just going to
benefit off only that training for the rest of your life you don't have to keep
relearning we have a closing tradition
on this podcast David where the last
yeah I know I love this tradition I want to do it to like my friends when they
come over interesting the last guest leaves a
question for the next guest
interesting oh boy it's so funny watching people's body language when I open
this book they
start to get quite nervous and it's
so funny I've asked I don't know [ __ ] [ __ ] 100 questions
today and it's when I
come to this question that people
take the longest time to answer so I'm like these questions just better than my
questions um no some reason people get
nervous those other questions are
things that are so top of mind for me that there's it's like a choice between
which of the three things that are in my mind
should I spit out this is like yeah
this is very different yeah uh what's your favorite sandwich I'm joking imagine
if
that was it after all I'm going to
get off easy no it's much more difficult than that the question is what what is
your biggest fear and how
The Dangers Of
Specialism
do you plan to face it I have
a tendency that I think in some ways
is
good um and fits with some of the
things I've said but in some ways is bad to want to start things over a lot and
sometimes that means burning them
down even if they're going well and in the past I think I had that tendency
with
some of my personal relationships to
I couldn't accept something going well
and it had to change or get better
and that led me to sometimes I think burn
down some personal relationships in
ways that I'm embarrassed of that I
regret um and I see this even in my
own work where I actually value it because I end up doing all these new novel
things
but it's almost like I can't and
it's good because like after my first book they're like brand yourself as a
sports Gene guy I'm like no that's dead to me
now it's dead to me before it's even
published it's dead to me and that led me to do these other interesting things
but I sometimes worry that I have
this like pathologic why can't I just accept this
is this thing is good um and and let
it be good and it worries me much less in
my work life it worries me a little
in my work life that I'll always want to burn something down and start over but
it does worry me there but I have a more
of a fear of it in the context of
like friendships because I know what I've done in the past I think I'm better
with
it now but thinking about the values
I have in my life going forward I don't
want you know several relationships
that were hugely important to
me uh went away for things that were
preventable because I was like if it's
not perfect burn it down and I think
that was a really destructive impulse
um what is that in you what is that
where does that come from I don't know I think it's like this feeling of always
want to be in becoming like this
feeling of starting over and improving that I find intoxicating um but I don't
think that
has to apply to to personal
relationships uh and so a value that I
really want to work on I read this
this book that kind of influenced me about philosophy and it's centered what's
called narrative values these values
that are objectively across cultures
things that people value so it's could be like heroism right loyalty people
value that other country and that
you are subjectively attracted to and one of the ones that I think is valued in
a lot
of cultures that I'm attracted to
but that I've not been good at is forgiveness and so my project is that's
a narrative value I want to start
building into my story to be a more forgiving person because it's not it's I'm
not good at it uh and I need to get
good at it and I'm afraid that I
won't get good at it but I really want to well we learn don't we and that's um
that's
much of what is what is at the very
heart of your work how to become better at learning and you've clearly
demonstrated that you're learning in
that regard I think much of the
first the first step in learning is figuring out that we have a problem or some
something to solve as you said with
your experiments book and your books are so unbelievably wonderful because they
present a completely original
challenging unconventional approach
to solving problems and you you do go at a lot of the things that many of us
have
accepted as narratives in our life
and if we've accepted them as narratives and they're false then they're
probably in some way doing us a dis service in the
short or long term and that's why I
find your work so wonderfully important because in many respects it is that
counternarrative to a lot of the
things that we've accepted and you do go the extra mile even though it probably
gives
you a headache I'm sure because a
lot of authors that I speak to don't go the extra mile to figure out um if if
what
we're being told is true and
ultimately that's a means to an end and the end is to allow all of us to live
more
optimized fulfilled and happy and
productive lives in whatever domain in whatever definition we class those words
0 Comments