So many of us have ideas - ideas we think would change the world. So few of us actually see these ideas through. Why? Most of the times, we don’t know how.
Well, if Jobs wouldn’t have met Wozniak, what would he have done? Would he have reached where he did?
In 2012, I had an idea - what if there was an assistant that helps you shop online collaboratively, exactly like you do offline. Something like this -
I thought it was a great idea. Trouble was, I was in the first year of college and I didn’t know the first thing about how to build something like this.
This quickly became a recurring pattern. I had lots of ideas I wanted to build but I didn’t know how. It is raining a lot? What if there was a bicycle that looked like a small car? Need to get up to unlock the door every time someone knocks? What if there was a pulley system that opened the latch for you when you pull on a rope? Find computers too dumb? What if there was an assistant that understood everything you said?
If you strictly go by how Steve Jobs got his ideas to life, you would find a significant impact of Steve Wozniak in the early days. Woz was truly a genius. In the later days, you would find phrases like “reality distortion field” and “sphere of influence”. Basically, Jobs would dazzle you into building things for him.
I didn’t have a Wozniak1. As for dazzling people, that was a tool I spent some time developing (and that we will talk about in a future post) but it became clear to me that not knowing how to build things was going to be a big handicap.
In the dorm rooms of every single computer science student of our college, lurked aspiring founders, cajoling them to build out some idea. I didn’t want to be one of those founders.
In this post, we will talk about 2 big ideas that changed how I looked at technicality2. We won’t go into how to pick up a new skill (which is a related subject) since I am still figuring that out. Instead, we will dig deeper into some mental blocks that I had to set aside and that I have seen plague a lot of people around me.
Exhibiting vs being
I worked for an early-stage startup for a couple of years after college. At the end of each year, we used to have an annual performance assessment cycle. The founder would talk to all of my colleagues, collate feedback and deliver it to me.
Each year, he would tell me you need to go deeper into tech. I would nod. I knew exactly what he meant. But I kept telling myself - you are just learning how to get through the technicality. This isn’t your strength. You are not going to be great at this.
Since I kept telling myself this, I never got better.
Years rolled by. I moved to a slightly larger company. A similar performance review took place but my manager conveyed feedback in a slightly different way.
He said - “you need to exhibit this….”.
Exhibit.
Demonstrate.
The use of that specific word changed everything for me. Suddenly, this feedback didn’t get attached to who I was as a person. In fact, it was never supposed to be about that anyway. Had he said you need to be this, I would have connected it to my identity and that would have triggered an emotional response. But that wording made me realise that it was me who had defined what I could or could not do.
Putting this in the context of learning something new, often, we connect our behaviour to what we consider the core of our personality. We say, I can’t do this because I am a perfectionist, I can’t do that because I am an expert of only this. I can’t do sales. I am not good with hardware. I can’t draw. Things like that. These labels hold us back.
Paul Graham in his essay “Keep your identity small” brings up a similar point, though in a different context -
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
The next time you are struggling to learn something new, look for the labels you attach to yourself and try detaching. If you find that too difficult, tell yourself you just have to “exhibit” this new behaviour. Pretend you are good at it. It works surprisingly well.
It’s worth mentioning that I am not saying you will become the best (being the best at something is a different beast altogether) but at least you will not be at the experts’ mercy to make progress. That might just make all the difference.
What one fool can, another can
I used to read a lot of Richard Dawkins books as a teenager. I loved his explanation of evolution and how all of nature came together. In his book “The Blind Watchmaker”, he wrote a computer program which simulated some aspects of evolution and natural selection. At the end, he put this picture of the kinds of “species” that took birth in his artificial universe. I was blown away.
As soon as I saw it, I wanted to do this too but it felt like a difficult job. I was 16 at the time and barely knew any programming. Surprisingly, in a footnote somewhere within that book, Dawkins addressed how writing such programs overwhelmed him as well. He would simply tell himself -
What one fool can, another can.
That quote somehow struck a cord with me. It trivialises your pursuit. It roughly says - hey, you want to do what this other person who was just like you did? Yeah, you can obviously do it too.
I find that incredibly reassuring.
There is another level of meaning in that quote. All too often, experts make something sound more complicated than it needs to be. You would be surprised how often that turns out to be the case. This is a well researched topic.
I would be remiss if I do not mention Richard Feynman here. The guy was a master of simplifying things. He laid down his technique to learn anything and you know what the key step of that technique is? Teach it to a child. That would force you to shed the jargon and explain the core idea. The great part is, core ideas aren’t all that complicated. We just get scared by all the bells and whistles.
I would go so far as saying that a large part of what we consider “intelligence” is merely dealing well with new things. People I consider to be smart don’t let themselves get overwhelmed too easily. They display a certain fearlessness when faced by new things.
I found feeling overwhelmed to be the biggest detractor for my learning. Since it is an emotional reaction, it is not easy to shed. I keep monitoring the response now though and try to recover as fast as I can.
It all starts with - what one fool can, another can.
So what would Jobs do without a Woz?
Life is a product of logistics. You make do with what you get. No Woz? Jobs would move forward anyway.
P.S. I would really appreciate you sharing these posts with someone you think these would be relevant for. Thanks!
It turns out, Wozniak had a very unique blend of characteristics . The smartest person in your class is not necessarily Woz material. Neither is the most research-inclined person. Woz somehow had so many of the right qualities that having another one of him would be an incredibly rare phenomenon.
I call everything between an idea and its end-product a “technicality” - the rough and tumble you have to go through to build something that can be called finished.