12/40 - Piece By Piece
One of the most important skills to develop is the ability to not only see what is there, but what could become. I was reminded of this most recently last year when Josh Wolfe tweeted about the investing themes and thesis of Lux Capital regarding scientific instrumentation and what they call "the tech of science." One of the replies to the tweet was referencing a Fast Company article from 2002 that said:
On to the experiment. Imagine four scenarios: someone skiing, someone power-boating, someone bicycling, and a boy playing with a toy tank. Break down each domain into its component parts: For skiing, there would be snow, chairlifts, skis, hot chocolate, and so on. Within their domain, the parts have directly identifiable relationships with one another. But scramble together the parts from the four domains, and suddenly it's hard to determine any relationships at all. We are thrown into chaos.
Now, Spinney instructs, take one part from each scene: From skiing, select the skis; from power boating, the motor; from bicycling, the handlebars; and from the boy with his toy tank, the treads. What do these elements have to do with one another? At first, seemingly nothing because we still think of them in terms of their original domains. But bring the parts together, and you've used your creative pattern-recognition skills to build ... a snowmobile.
"A winner," Boyd concluded, "is someone who can build snowmobiles ... when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change."
I'd never been more excited to see something come across my screen. That specific Twitter interaction sent me down one of the best rabbit holes of my life and dictated a lot of what I read and watched for months on end.
Chaos is most frequently present when the norms of society are being challenged. When the pieces that were previously put into place in a certain and predictable order are seemingly all of a sudden disconnected from the pieces they most recently were associated. When the givens in life are now up for grabs.
- You'll be close with your family of origin, geographically and emotionally.
- College is necessary to move forward in the world.
- You'll use what you learned in college in your career.
- You'll work for the same company for decades at a time.
- You'll work in the same industry for most of your career.
- Buying a home is an important life event.
- The government works.
- You can trust institutions.
- The United States is the greatest country in the world.
- Politicians should be respected.
Sometimes, those pieces get bumped and show how fragile their construction was. And just like that, the idea that they aren't what they might seem creeps into your mind. The collective belief that they're wonderful forces in our lives gets questioned and you realize that maybe there wasn't that much strength to their positioning beyond a collective decision to have faith in the story and not challenge the status quo.
Growing up with boxes and boxes of Legos was a wonderful proving ground for what I called "Snowmobile University." All of the Legos that we had in our closet all used to be well designed and diagramed sets of Legos that were sold to construct a specific thing. After building the thing that had instructions to follow, it would be played with for a little while as it was constructed. But the most fun came in taking it all a part and finding new ways to remix those pieces with other pieces from other sets and making something totally new.
Not needing something to be what the instructions say it is supposed to be but being able to build from your imagination of what could be is one of the most valuable skills I think I have and learned at an early age.
