These days we’re constantly being encouraged to strictly prioritize our lives. Warren Buffet says we can get to the top by saying no to almost everything. We practice being purposeful and focus on our mantra. You have a crystal-clear mission statement for your life etched in your brain, right? Where do you see yourself in ten years? Dabbling is a sign of inexperience and a lack of professionalism. The ability to do one thing well is more important than being average at many.
But is it true that success comes through limiting the activities we engage in and saying no?
Shakespeare, Einstein, and Picasso
When Shakespeare was working on Hamlet and Macbeth, two of the undisputed classics of theatrical history, he also wrote a play called the Merry Wives of Windsor, which was a flop considered by most critics to be the worst play of his entire career. Einstein was simultaneously working on five different theories in 1905, one of which was the first version of the Theory of Relativity. He published five scientific articles that year, the first four of which came in a period of only four months. Didn’t he know how to focus on one thing at a time? Picasso produced 20,000 paintings over his career. How many of those were considered world-class, and how many were failures?
When we look at the peaks in various fields over time, it turns out that exceptionally creative people actually tend to have more bad ideas than their colleagues, numerically speaking. How is it possible that these geniuses who have left us these fantastic products, scientific breakthroughs, and artistic masterpieces screwed up more than their rivals? The answer is simple: they did more than the others. When you have a lot of ideas, there’s plenty of room for bad ones.
Often, we think that we need to come up with one good idea and that progress means refining that one thing. Dabbling is naïve and takes energy away from our real purpose. In workshops, we see a concrete example of this when participants try to avoid contributing any bad ideas. After all, we all want to seem insightful. But then the total number of ideas suffers. It’s as if we’re searching for a needle in a haystack and believe that any sidetracks we take will add to the amount of hay and make finding the needle more difficult. But I believe the opposite is true: when we create opportunities for less focused exploration, the number of needles in the haystack increases, driving up the chances of finding one.
I don’t think that Einstein would have made his breakthroughs if he had been forced to focus on one theory at a time. Maybe Hamlet and Macbeth never would have been Shakespeare’s best plays if he hadn’t been working on a failed comedy at the same time. The fact that Einstein and Shakespeare were doing more than one thing at a time was key.
“But Perttu, I am not Shakespeare, Einstein, or Picasso. Does it apply to me?” Of course! If someone is both a promising coder and a painter, from an employability perspective we might encourage them to focus more on coding than on painting. But I think it’s critical for them to paint as much as possible, in addition to coding, because that may end up being the added value they bring as an employee. Painting makes a coder special. We need artists who are good at writing code. We need poets who are excellent data analysts. Even if your day job is writing code or processing and analyzing data, you can see yourself in more ways than one. You can be an artist, too.
The Takeaway
We need to seek variety in our personal growth, support each other through different stages of life and learning, and develop overlapping, mutually supportive roles. In the future, there will be new roles, new jobs, and they will require us to continue to refine our self-images. It isn’t either-or, it’s both-and. Different roles are not mutually exclusive; they complete us.
Flexibility is one’s identity and allowing for different self-images will be a necessity as the world changes. Instead of trying to become something, it would be better to try to be something. In the future, we will have new roles that we will need to experience as our own. Many of us are forced to have multiple professional identities in the rise of the gig economy. We may also be faced with roles and jobs that don’t even exist yet.
We cannot know what will be required of us in the future, so it will be good to stay receptive and develop ourselves in as many different ways as possible. Your self-image, your character, and the roles that combine to form your perspective on the world are constantly changing. Hopefully, none of us will get stuck and we will all continue to diversify over time.
Whenever someone encourages you to focus on one thing, they’re guiding you into a pigeonhole. You’d think that Elon Musk and his innovations in mobile payments, electric cars, rockets, tunnels, and implanted brain microchips would have proved how wrongheaded that is. A person’s capacity is not reduced by jumping into new, different projects. On the contrary, when we see someone tackling many different things at once, they deserve our admiration, not skepticism. You shouldn’t necessarily do anything that you don’t want to do. But if you’re not sure what you want or what you’re looking for, then you should do everything.
