#142 - Specialization is for insects

Part 1 of 2 on what it means to spend a life wandering

It’s a December afternoon. I’m sitting in my living room, my straightened-out legs making a bridge between the couch and the coffee table, with the laptop balanced on it, when the thought occurs to me: I’ve been here before.

I’m reading an email. It has got a party popper, a beach umbrella, and a coconut tree emoji. It’s a happy email. But I’m not really reading anything because my eyes have lost focus. I’m only picking out words—not words strung together in sentences but disjointed words that float up on my laptop screen and settle themselves in thought clouds.

A modest re-imagination of how my mind arranged the words in the email from HR

Is the email from HR begging me to go on holiday? It’s an unusual request alright, but that’s only what it seems on the surface. What’s different and inviting goes deeper. I’ve been here before. 

***

It’s August from earlier in the year. My three-year-old daughter is sitting on my lap. It’s our first time on a train. We have a side-lower berth, the best kind of seat on a train. Outside, verdant green rushes past. Lulled by the unending longway of lush, Mayu has fallen asleep in my arms, leaving me to wander. I read. Words about our tendency to weigh the return on investment of the time we spend on virtually everything. We bring a lens of utility to our every choice, the author accuses us. This lens is the water in which we, like the fish, swim. It is fused with our reality. We use it without being aware. Wait, what?

Before I can string another thought, my mind leaps back—

***

Late 2021. I’m sitting across someone I heard on a podcast and reached out to. Aditya Sehgal has just left Reckitt after twenty-seven years, as President of the nutrition vertical in China. 

I’m at the time working on a smart writing assistant for scientists, bringing up a one-year-old with my wife, and trying to build a reading habit that would help me level up at work. 

‘I read what I feel like,’ Aditya says to me.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I read whatever feels interesting.’

‘But—’

I see a furrowed brow.

‘How do you put to use what you read?’

‘I don’t read with the intention of putting things to use. I just read.’ 

***

2023. I’ve gathered a small community that wants to learn to think through decisions better. When I ask the group what they care about, I’m hoping for a collective shout for curiosity. After all, I write a newsletter called Curiosity > Certainty and it’s through the newsletter that I have gotten to know most of them.

What I hear back is more sobering, more practical. ‘Give us tools and frameworks,’ they all say. 

***

Back to that August day by the train window with my daughter on my lap. This is what I’m reading: 

In the utilitarian logic of Silicon Valley, servile work is the only kind of valuable work. Captured as I was inside this city, I used to feel guilty whenever I used my “productive time” on anything other than what could turn a profit. 

I guess people don’t wander much any more. When they do, it is with the firm intention of making that wandering count. 

Reading as a means to being better at job.

Understanding decision-making as a means to have more impact on business.

Weekend break as a means to be more productive on weekdays.

Why would you call any of this wandering? That was what was most striking about that Friday email. 

‘Why do we need to disconnect?’ I say out loud. ‘So that we can recharge ourselves. Why unwind? So that we can return energized. It is like taking a break is a means to an end. We take a break so that we can be more productive after.’

I’ve broken my stream of thought. I’ve spoken my mind. Now, my teammates are looking at me from the other side of the screen.

‘I find this email striking, I guess, not because it asks me to rethink my relationship with work by asking me to get away from work. It is interesting because it solidifies that exact relationship, while convinced that it has done the opposite.’

‘I never thought about it like that,’ someone in the virtual room goes.

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Why (not) to wander?

A polymath is a person of wide knowledge. Breadth of knowledge comes from variety in interests. A polymath is, therefore, naturally curious. 

Robin Hanson, an economist, computer scientist, social scientist, author polymath himself, writes:

Seen as a production rather than a consumption strategy, polymathing is mainly looking for and building on connections one finds between distant intellectual areas. And while I haven’t seen data to confirm it, my personal experience suggests a hypothesis: polymaths peak later in life.

Why? 

Because our key intellectual strategy of looking for connections between areas should work better as we learn more areas. And I feel like I see this in my own life.

[...]

When I seek concrete examples of things, I have a far larger library to draw on, and I find closer, better examples more easily. And when I ponder a puzzle, I can find many more analogies and kinds of explanations to consider. 

Polymaths bloom late. Blooming late sucks. 

Think back to Aditya Sehgal. The man, who read as he pleased, taught me the randomest of things. Make your presentations imperfect in all the insignificant parts so that you invite people to point out those minor mistakes and feel better about themselves and be more participatory. You turn them from combatants to collaborators.

He probably found this principle echoed in disciplines that were otherwise unrelated. He reasoned that if experts across domains all agreed on this one thing, without knowing of the others who believed the same, the idea must have legs.

And it does, it did. Here are two areas I can vouch for. 

1️⃣Managing people - Admit to your mistakes and show that you’re vulnerable and you’ll see those around you trust you more and reciprocate.

2️⃣Storytelling - Don’t tell straight-line success stories where you’re the hero through and through. Show your foibles while building stories of your success. 

Aditya Sehgal, the curious savant, had spent the last 27 years building his library. Those years taught him that the boundaries around domains that we take so seriously are arbitrary. He was the exception.

Reason #1 to not wander: It is expensive. 

Wandering around can be hard to justify. There is no accepted finish line. No patrons who encourage you to wander around at their expense. You would be stopped in your tracks by the first gatekeeper. Few establishments, if any, are evangelists of randomness.   

‘You must be familiar with my work–Vitruvian Man and The Last Supper. But of late I’ve been fascinated by nature—I’m splitting my time between studying birds’ wings and how water swirls around rocks.’ said a young Leonardo da Vinci to Francesco del Giocondo, the wealthy Florentine silk merchant. 

‘Good for you. How will that help you draw my wife?’

‘I’ve to find myself to find my art.’

‘Then better find out and tell me. Or else I’m giving this one to Michelangelo. He promises a better turnaround time.’

If you’ve an appetite for the new and the different and you like to keep your terrain wide, you’ll be more useful than others at solving, as Robin Hanson says, ‘broad hard-to-classify problems.’ If you understand light and shadow, you’ll be able to produce masterpieces like the Mona Lisa.

By definition, broad hard-to-classify problems tend to be not well-defined or easily commoditized. So, what are you good at exactly?

Reason #2: You will struggle for an elevator pitch. 

And that’s just the unkind establishment that keeps asking you for a label. There’s another unsavory aspect for those who believe in play as the best way to learn.

Here’s David Epstein, author of the best-selling book Range, throwing a light on the pursuit of the murky:

…I moved from a traditional media career to a role driven by my personal curiosity. Combine capacious curiosity with not having a manager, and suddenly figuring out what the heck to work on is a massive challenge.

If you’re not used to wandering, wandering can feel like being lost. I used to do this thing where, like serial entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal below, I would come at a topic from different places. A few weeks into learning how to learn, for example, my guilt would be pushing the roof. Curiosity is the luxury of the privileged, I would lament to myself and go back to my weekly to-do list.

Reason #3: Your lack of discipline will burn you out. The guilt of not producing tangibly will eat you up.

Enough said. Though I wouldn’t count any of these reasons as a deal breaker. The truth I suspect is both murkier and hiding in plain sight.

👉Our enemy is our almost compulsive tendency to make the next step a step up, and not a step down.

To explain this, let me pull out a mountain-climbing analogy from a 2009 piece by a16z’s Chris Dixon. I believe the analogy has aged well. It is called quite literally ‘Climbing the Wrong Hill’:

A classic problem in computer science is hill climbing. Imagine you are dropped at a random spot on a hilly terrain, where you can only see a few feet in each direction (assume it’s foggy or something). The goal is to get to the highest hill.

Consider the simplest algorithm. At any given moment, take a step in the direction that takes you higher. The risk with this method is if you happen to start near the lower hill, you’ll end up at the top of that lower hill, not the top of the tallest hill.

But you’re curious. You’ll wonder about what it is like at the summit of the highest peak. You’ll look around, meander in a way that hopefully gets you closer to the absolute summit. As you do so, you’ll have to square off the desire to beat a new path with the need to be constantly moving up. Dixon adds: 

People tend to systematically overvalue near term over long term rewards. This effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people. Their ambition seems to make it hard for them to forgo the nearby upward step.

The more vertical meters you’ve clocked on your current hill, the harder it will be for you to give up all that and go all the way back down just so that you can make a fresh try at the highest peak. Oh, the pain of committing yourself to this terrible loss. The fear of never reaching the top. You’re human, after all. 

---

These are the words from author and entrepreneur Kahlil Corazo that incepted a new thought in me on that August day on the train.

In the utilitarian logic of Silicon Valley, servile work is the only kind of valuable work. Captured as I was inside this city, I used to feel guilty whenever I used my “productive time” on anything other than what could turn a profit. This guilt clearly comes from the morality of utility. This partnership of technology and the free market has undoubtedly produced a lot of good. Yet the emptiness I felt despite this abundance shows that my desires are much bigger than what the useful good can fill.

Emptiness is a sticky companion. On the couch or at the table, in the bedroom or boardroom, it tends to not leave your side. It makes you you feel put upon. 

Children know how to avoid it altogether. You and I did too. Somewhere along the way, the desire to be practical swallowed the desire to be curious. The fun stopped, life took over, reputation and prestige kept us awake. 

We stopped wondering. We stopped wandering. Some, like Bruce Lee, continued. 

Bruce Lee learned several martial art forms, which led him to come up with Jeet Kune Do, a ‘hybrid martial arts philosophy drawn from different combat disciplines that is sometimes credited with paving the way for modern mixed martial arts.’ That’s not all. He learned philosophy and liked to philosophize. 

If you’ve read a Bruce Lee quote of note, you probably must’ve gone what the heck, at least the first time. That was my reaction too. 

One of tens of Bruce Lee quotes; none about being an actor or making a movie

Naval Ravikant is another figure known to ‘combine things you’re not supposed to combine’. He reasons:

…because at some level all humans are broad. We’re all multivariate but we get summarized in pithy ways in our lives. And at some deep level we know that’s not true, right?

[...]

Like the model of life that the ancients had—the Greeks, the Romans right—where you would start out and when you’re young you’re just, like, going to school then you’re going to war, then you’re running a business, then you’re supposed to serve in the senate or the government then you become a philosopher there’s sort of this arc to life where you try your hand at everything and as one of my friends says specialization is for insects.

I know what you’re thinking. Of course, Mukesh Bansal, Bruce Lee, and Naval Ravikant are pathologically curious. It is easier for them. 

Or maybe you and I have got it all backward. Maybe it is an extreme form of wandering that led these people to the summits they reached.

Naval Ravikant was raised by a single mother who used the neighborhood public library as a day-care center for her young son. She would instruct a pre-teen Ravikant to station himself in the library after school and not come out until it closed. So he ‘read everything until he ran out of things to read.’ 

Looking ahead, it is impossible to connect the dots. Looking back, it is clear. The difference between the two views is just one thing: curiosity over time.

Chasing curiosity is a long climb. You’ve gotta love the climb above everything else.

In Part 2 next week, I’ll discuss strategies to be insatiably curious and what being curious may look like. Until then…

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👋Hi, I’m Satyajit. Welcome to my newsletter that picks apart the messiness of decision-making about business, careers, and life.

I’ve recently put out a playbook for middle managers to guide them through common yet tricky managerial situations. It has been received well and so I’ve been encouraged by a friend who has been here and done this to do a Zoom masterclass on building a champion team. Tentatively, it’s on March 14. I’ll put out details in next week’s issue (or earlier), so keep an eye on your inbox. I write for you all and I hope I’ve earned your trust, so I would be delighted to see you sign up and show up for the session.

🙏For those curious, here are a few rabbit holes from today: 

Polymaths are late bloomers.

Why do I quote Robin Hanson so extensively for this piece?

The piece that expanded the meaning of utility for me

David Epstein chats

Naval Ravikant’s words of wisdom

Climbing the wrong hill