by Ty Tashiro
So the same spotlighted focus and obsessive energy that makes awkward people uncomfortable in social situations are the same qualities that can drive their push toward remarkable achievements. As I have alluded to earlier in the book, being awkward is a trade-off. I find it interesting to wonder what one would pick if given the choice, a disposition that allows one to see the bigger picture and easily navigate social life or a spotlighted focus that gives one an advantageous intensity, but that makes social life less intuitive. I don’t think that there is one that is better than the other, but understanding the differences is important for both awkward and non-awkward people alike because when diverse mind-sets combine, the results can be truly extraordinary.
10
GROUNDBREAKING INNOVATION
Our first lessons about extraordinary achievement are about outcasts who accomplish superhuman feats in the face of impossible odds. As kids we hear bedtime stories about the Little Engine That Could or a red-nosed reindeer who used the thing that made him an outcast to save Christmas for everyone. Many grade school kids devour stories about superheroes who are capable of specific abilities. Heroes are secretive about their superpowers and are usually known to most people by their awkward alter egos. There’s the mild-mannered Clark Kent who becomes a Superman, the weak boy Steve Rogers who turns into Captain America, or the nerdy David Banner who morphs into the Incredible Hulk.
Teens want more angst in their stories. They love the paradox in genres like the X-Men that feature superheroes whose unique powers make them societal outcasts until the world is reminded that these same abnormalities are essential to saving the world. Most tales of heroism follow what American scholar Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey. Campbell found that heroes begin with a vague understanding about their special abilities and try to distance themselves from those abilities until a wise mentor comes along who helps the heroes understand them and how to channel them for good. The heroes are exiled or depart from the world they have known to a distant land where they hone their abilities. During this training period, they encounter like-minded people with whom they collectively resolve to take on a seemingly impossible challenge.
The hero’s journey embedded in superhero tales is not just childish imagination. Many of the professional icons adults admire and try to emulate have life stories that follow the same path laid out in the hero’s journey: people from humble beginnings who found a hidden power within themselves, suffered numerous setbacks trying to do good, but ultimately triumphed by bravely harnessing their abilities to overcome improbable odds. There is the Silicon Valley lore about Bill Gates dropping out of school and building Microsoft from his parents’ garage or Steve Jobs, who was exiled by the board of directors at Apple but returned to make Apple into the most valuable company in the world.
One of the interesting qualities about our fictional heroes and real-life heroes is that many of them have a distinctive awkward quality about them. Sometimes it appears as though they overcome their awkwardness to become successful, or they succeed despite their awkwardness, but in modern stories people find something captivating and inspiring about those who feel like they do not fit in, but who harness their unusual strengths and find the courage to persist through tremendous adversity on their way to accomplishing prodigious feats.
It might seem unlikely that so many people who reach prodigious heights share the same story. After all, someone might argue that the journey is irrelevant because the outcome is the same regardless of whether someone awkwardly pushed toward a goal or charmed his or her way to the top. Maybe people resonate with the awkward hero because that’s the narrative arc that best approximates people’s real-life journeys toward prodigious goals. We will see that the research results from studies of extraordinary achievement happen to mirror all of the adversity and extraordinary possibility found in fictional tales about the hero’s journey.
The Future Perfect
TALENTED PEOPLE CAN be perfectionistic about their interests. Once their rage to master is ignited, they become intent on learning everything they can and work tirelessly to hone their skills. In most fields or disciplines, there are structured procedures and systematic steps laid out for novices and intermediates. Math and science are very rule-governed; solo physical activities like tennis or ballet rely on practicing well-known fundamentals; and even creative domains like drawing follow rules about perspective and music comes from well-practiced scales. Awkward people find pleasure in deliberate practice and they enjoy seeing measurable results from their persistent efforts. The early, systematic steps needed to learn a craft are like candy for the awkward mind.
If talented people were fully satisfied by systematically moving along these well-defined paths from novice to expertise, then they would find life to be much easier. But talented people tend to choose areas of interest characterized by vast possibilities. Even in systematic disciplines like science or mathematics, it’s impossible for the elite performers to achieve perfection on a regular basis because the upside is limitless. Science and math are defined by rules and methods, but there are an infinite number of ways those rules and methods can combine, which means that new questions and possibilities are always being raised. In creative endeavors like painting or fiction writing, there are even broader possibilities and pressure to generate work that explores uncharted territory.
Talented people find this kind of limitless possibility exhilarating when it comes to their interests. Most top scientists will admit that they prefer to push for new discoveries instead of replication, advanced mathematicians are most driven by unsolved proofs, and elite athletes want to push beyond the existing standards of excellence. Once talented kids find something they love, the intensity and focus of their spotlighted attention has a way of illuminating unique possibilities.
Once someone discovers new possibilities, they have to set their sights on a long-term goal to achieve. At a young age, talented people think differently about the future, and you can hear it in the way they speak about their aspirations. Most kids talk about the future in the simple future tense, which implies an isolated act that will occur. For example, someone using the simple future tense would say, “I will be a great chemistry student,” or “I will go swim later today.” But talented children are more likely to use a rarely used tense called the future perfect, which conveys that something will occur, but only after other things occur.
“If I do a better job of showing my work, then I may become a better chemistry student,” or “I will get up at five A.M. to do my chores, then I can go swimming.” It’s a subtle but important grammatical variation that reflects an unusual amount of intellectual complexity for children. Prodigious children recognize the details along the way to lofty goals that are farther down the road.
For people who are beset by a rage to master, there’s a natural tension in their narrative. This tension is drawn between their perfectionistic nature and their desire to achieve outcomes that are nearly impossible to perfect. If one spends too much time thinking about the impossibility of an outcome it’s debilitating, but talented people tend to start along their paths by putting their heads down and shining their spotlighted focus on following a path of detailed goals one step at a time.
The Comfort of Expertise
EXPERTS DEVELOP KNOWLEDGE and skills that are superior to those of the average person in their field. Experts have vast knowledge, they think about problems at a deeper level of analysis, and they are faster at implementing effective solutions. They show an insatiable curiosity for knowledge in their field, they have an unusual ability to store this information in their memory, and they use this vast store of knowledge to see connections between the elements of complex problems.
Experts can have a calming presence on groups when the group faces steep challenges. The cool execution that experts display under duress is a paradox for people who know them well because experts have restless minds. When giftedness researchers look at what type of person is most likely t
o attain expertise, they find that they are those who have a razor-sharp focus and are prone to becoming obsessive about their work.
We want doctors, airline pilots, financial planners, and commanders-in-chief who are experts at what they do because the costs of poor choices carry heavily weighted consequences. Experts do not have to be told what to do, they see what needs to be done and they take effective action to thoroughly solve problems. Given the outsize value of expertise, it’s no surprise that our educational culture aims to develop expertise and companies devote extensive resources to recruiting or developing expertise.
Organizations are increasingly interested in assessing their students’ or employees’ progress toward expertise with metrics. Public schools’ funding levels rely on their students’ performance on standardized tests. Business schools increasingly emphasize coursework about assessing return-on-investment, how employees contribute to the quarterly bottom line with quantifiable metrics about their daily or weekly performance.
One of the advantages of metrics is that they force organizations to use future-perfect language to define their goals. Organizations have to clearly define what they want in the long run, but also need to specify the essential steps to reach those lofty goals. When metrics work well, people know what they are expected to do, they are more consistent about meeting those expectations, and they are fairly rewarded.
Metrics can be a powerful tool for setting standards for expertise, but when organizations focus too narrowly on measurable results they can create a culture that limits and frustrates their highest potential members. Talented students will shoot for straight-A grades, work to build a long resume for entry to top schools, and practice to maximize their performance on standardized tests. Talented young employees will work tirelessly to master the tasks prescribed by the evaluation plans, whether that’s becoming a whiz at Excel or someone who is capable of developing more efficient work flow.
Once their growing expertise eventually pushes them to the tail end of the bell curve, in this confined space they begin to grow restless. When people driven by a rage to master feel like they have been expert for too long, they appear agitated in the confines of well-defined organizational criteria, like petulant children who have been in their car seat for too long. Talented people love challenges and many of them see expertise as a state that is fun for a few weeks and then they need something new to tackle. But their restlessness can feel like discontent to an outsider and raise concerns about whether the talented person can ever be happy.
Winning the Innovation Lottery
DEAN SIMONTON IS a distinguished professor of psychology from the University of California, Davis, who has spent decades studying talent and prodigious achievement. Simonton has found that many talented individuals do not see expertise as an end point, but rather as a stop along the way to other destinations. Talented people aspire to groundbreaking innovations that will redefine their field or challenge existing standards of excellence. Examples of groundbreaking innovation are easy to see in hindsight, such as Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s vision for a website called Google .com, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway play Hamilton, or the way Bill and Melinda Gates have thought about philanthropy. These innovators not only contributed creative ideas that were valuable, but fundamentally shifted their fields and sometimes changed our cultural fabric.
To maximize the potential of their most talented members, organizations can start by posing the question, What are talented people trying to master? While most people are focused on expertise, talented individuals’ focus is oriented elsewhere. They see expertise as a necessary step, but it’s a checkpoint along the way as they rage to find groundbreaking innovations. It’s a venerable aspiration, but even the most talented individuals find that innovative ideas are tough to come by and getting people to buy a worthwhile innovation presents a whole different set of challenges.
Simonton has found that groundbreaking innovations are often the product of people combining existing concepts or ideas in unusual ways. All of us have random combinations of ideas, but most of the time these combinations result in nothing useful or original. Sometimes the iterations of random collisions between ideas running around someone’s head produces a winning combination, which is the first step to affecting groundbreaking innovations. Although breakthroughs are never guaranteed, Simonton’s research findings can help us be methodical about increasing our odds of finding useful and innovative ideas.
Someone trying to unlock innovative discoveries is like someone trying to get into a safe that holds valuable information. Imagine the safe you are trying to crack has an electronic keypad and the code to the safe has two buttons, a two-digit code, and the numbers cannot be repeated. That safe would be easy to crack because there are only two possible combinations (1 and 2 or 2 and 1). If you needed to crack a three-button safe with a three-digit code, then that would be a little harder because there would be six possible combinations. But the number of combinations grows exponentially, which means that once there are more than three buttons the safe becomes much harder to crack. A safe with five buttons and a five-digit code produces 120 possible combinations and a twelve-digit code with twelve buttons yields more than 479 million combinations. When people try to figure out how to combine multiple facts and ideas to solve a problem, the sheer number of possible combinations of those facts and ideas can make the problem extremely difficult to crack.
People striving for groundbreaking innovation need to constantly be mindful about striking a balance between complexity versus simplicity. If they consider too few factors they may not have an opportunity to generate the right combination of ideas, but considering too many ideas can make the task too complex to solve. Simonton finds that talented people intentionally seek out ideas that appear tangential to their primary area of interest because they understand that diverse ideas are the fuel for innovative combinations.
Consider artificial intelligence computers that are built to combine data and ideas and evaluate the value of millions of possible combinations. Artificial intelligence machines are overly rational or systematic, which is why computer scientists intentionally program them to introduce random information into the process. In the same way, talented people need to find a systematic way to introduce new experiences and ideas that fall outside of their core areas of interest and that might seem illogical at first glance.
A classic example of combinatorial innovation comes from Steve Jobs, who was an abrasive brand of awkward. As a young man Jobs decided to attend calligraphy classes at College of the Redwoods, which seems like an endeavor unrelated to someone on a path to technological innovation. But Jobs recalled in a commencement speech at Stanford University years later that learning the nonlinear rules of calligraphy, such as the nonlinear aesthetics of unequal spacing between letters, helped inspire Jobs’s emphasis on beautiful design. Apple’s innovation home runs with elegant design helped drive their meteoric rise and changed the role of technology in most people’s daily lives.
Later, when Jobs became the majority shareholder at Pixar, he met Ed Catmull, another prodigious innovator who merged two divergent disciplines. As a kid, Catmull had a passionate interest in animated films, but he decided to pursue a more practical route at the University of Utah, where he majored in computer engineering. In the 1970s, Catmull studied with Ivan Sutherland, who was one of the leading trailblazers in computer graphics, and this experience inspired collisions between his interest in animation and computer science. Catmull had a novel idea to create a movie animated by computer instead of the traditional hand-drawn method. The outcome was a revolutionary method of animated storytelling that was brought to life in Academy Award–winning Pixar films. The innovation also influenced other fields like gaming, which have introduced beautiful graphics and compelling story lines as an integral part of their products.
Although innovation often comes through the collision of diverse ideas, sometimes it comes from simply being willing to look at an existing fi
eld with a different perspective. Michael Lewis captured this type of detail-oriented innovative thinking in his book The Big Short, which is a true story about a rogue group of financial experts who foresaw the looming housing credit bubble in the mid-2000s. The awkward force was strong with these rogue investors, and their awkward nature oriented their attention toward details instead of the big picture. While the rest of the financial community saw mortgage securities that had been rated “AAA” (high quality, low risk), Lewis’s awkward protagonists trained their spotlighted focus on the thousands of risky subprime loans in these mortgage-backed securities.
With obsessive energy they marched through details that failed to capture other people’s attention. As they began to combine these details they discovered a stark reality: the U.S. economy was on the verge of a crash that would happen when home owners inevitably began to default on their subprime mortgages. In 2009 when their prophecy came to fruition, this awkward bunch of rogue investors captured returns in excess of a billion dollars as the rest of the financial world went south. Their breakthrough came from a willingness to see a stark truth composed of a million tiny details.
The timing of groundbreaking innovation is random or what Simonton calls a stochastic process. Sometimes people reach valuable combinations early in their process, like lottery balls that happen to fall into place for someone who bought their first lottery ticket. Talented people typically labor for years or decades if they do have a breakthrough moment and the hard truth is that even among talented people who strive for groundbreaking innovation, most will never realize their vision. Professor Winner and others find that the most common outcome for talented kids is expertise, which makes them remarkable contributors to their organizations.