A couple of previous blogs got me thinking about transferable-skills and the benefits of multi-skilling. This has been an interest of mine for some time, but I read a couple of books recently that gave me pause for thought.
Range by David Epstein espouses the benefits of being a generalist. Epstein gives many examples of where people have developed mastery from a more generalised approach, from Roger Federer, who apparently played soccer and a range of other sports and focussed relatively late on tennis; to the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian orphanage which produced a group of musicians, known as the figlie di coro, who were virtuoso on a range of instruments.
This is quite similar to Emilie Wapnick’s thinking on multipotentialites, she has a book How to Be Everything, which is brilliantly summarised in her TED talk ‘Why some of us don’t have one true calling’. Wapnick feels that being driven to find one passion does not fit for all people, and she is especially keen on the ‘superpowers’ that can be derived from cultivating a wide range of interests, such as adaptability, and creative ideas generation.
Epstein argues that practice in a specific domain yields benefits only in that domain. That you develop a way of solving the same problem with increasing efficiency. This is okay if you are operating in a “kind” learning environment, that is one where ‘patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and very rapid’. Essentially one where the rules remain relatively static and you get better by increasingly adapting to those rules. The argument is that real world problems require us to learn in a “wicked” environment, that is one where ‘the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.’ To avoid this ‘entrenchment’ we need to ensure we have a varied palette of learning within a domain and also entertain interests outside of our own specific area of expertise.
So we can argue that having multiple interests and skills can make us more adaptable and able to respond to ‘wicked’ problems, but how do we manage a diverse portfolio of skills?
Of course it can be hard to find the time to spread across a diverse range of interests. There is the famous adage popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, that it requires 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in any field. 10,000 hours translates to roughly 2 hours a day, 5 days a week for 20 years!
Wapnick argues that you are better able to develop a unique skill-set, or create a unique position in the marketplace, by being quite good at a range of things and finding a way to combine them, rather than striving to achieve mastery in one specific thing. So what if you don’t want or need to be a master of your chosen craft, just good enough at it? Well here we can look to the Pareto Principle which proposes that you get “80% of the consequences from 20% of the causes”. This was originally applied in quality control where the idea proposed is that if you can solve 20% of your issues (the right 20% of course!) then you can reduce your failure rate by 80%; but it has found many other applications such as economics, sport and even viral transmission in pandemics!
So it’s worth speculating that if it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery then 2,000 hours (20% of 10,000 hours) might well get us 80% of the way there. And let’s not forget this is an exponential relationship, so maybe 400 hours (20% of 20% of 10,000 hours) would get us to 64% mastery, this is just a hour a day for a little more than a year; or even better 80 hours gets us roughly 50% of the way to mastery. Would it be worth spending less than 2 hours a week for just 1 year to get halfway to mastery?
But we should also think about the quality of practice. Deliberate practice with a clear idea of what we are trying to achieve is always going to be better than mindless repetition. Repeating the same thing over and over will have little benefit, as Andres Ericsson (who did the original research behind the 10,000 hours rule, and felt that Gladwell’s book over-simplified it) says: “If you want to improve at chess, you don’t do it by playing chess. You do it with solitary study of the grandmasters’ games.” Or there’s the famous quote (often attributed to Einstein) “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
This got me thinking about cross-training, that often in sport, working on skills, or training in disciplines outside of your own sport, can yield benefits back in your own sport. If you want to run a marathon well, one approach would be to keep running marathons and see if you gradually get better at them, but all serious distance runners will have a programme of training that incorporates a range of different training modes, some long and steady running, some faster speedwork or interval training (akin to the work middle-distance runners do), and lots in-between. This helps develop the runner in a more balanced and rounded way than just grinding out the mileage.
Of course this is a fairly narrow example of ‘cross-training’ in sport. A decathlete has to balance their performance in ten different, but related disciplines, so will find themselves working on strength, or plyometric power, in the gym and away from the track altogether.
Then there’s CrossFit, a sometimes controversial fitness community, but the basic philosophy of preparing athletes for a range of challenges by adopting a broad definition of fitness is sound. CrossFit incorporates elements intended to develop stamina and endurance, strength and power, and agility; but also flexibility, balance, coordination and accuracy. The idea is that, on balance, CrossFit athletes are better prepared for whatever physical challenge they may be faced with, they might not have the fastest 10km time, or the highest maximum bench-press, but they will probably be able to lift more weight than a distance runner, or run further and faster than a weight lifter, the idea is than on average they come out on top. And the CrossFit training mantra that “routine is the enemy” is one that is applicable to any kind of training (avoiding the Einstein definition of insanity!).
So CrossFit is intended to prepare athletes for physical challenges, but what if we are training for life in general? The challenges life throws at us are not just physical, but mental and emotional as well. And balanced people have strengths across all of those elements: “Mens sana in corpore sano” “a sound mind in a sound body” and all that.
As I’ve said before, the samurai from ancient Japan were fearsome warriors, but they would also practice some form of expressive art, they would write haiku, practice calligraphy, or origami, or ikebana (flower arranging), this brought balance to the samurai. And then there’s the concept of the renaissance man (or person), like Leonardo Da Vinci or Leon Battista Alberti, who was an architect, and artist and a mathematician, and was also a fine athlete who could reputedly jump over a man’s head! These men were equal parts artist, philosopher, scientist, engineer, and athlete.
So perhaps training for life ought to include mental and emotional workouts as well as physical ones. Workouts for body, mind and soul, so: lift weights, but also play chess, and read poetry; go running, solve sudoku, listen to music; swim, learn a language, paint a picture. It’s like we’re training for life’s Krypton Factor, a classic game show with tests of things like mental agility, observation and memory, response, and physical ability (and in the original series, creativity as well).
But now I wonder if it is possible to completely separate Battista’s work as an architect from his work as a mathematician, or whether Da Vinci’s studies of anatomy and engineering were helpful in his art. The point is there is crossover, cross-training if you like, between different areas of interest can have some surprising benefits. And not everything fits into neat boxes. Sure, you might say that solving crossword puzzles is exercise for your mind; and writing a poem or a short story might be good exercise for your soul. But often the lines are blurred, so solving a Rubik’s cube might be considered a mental exercise, but I do it for relaxation, and I also use them to create mosaic art, so it could be an activity for my mind and soul?
Some other examples might include:
- Orienteering – mind and body
- Yoga – body and soul
- Origami – mind and soul
I wonder where these activities would fit on a Venn diagram of body-mind-soul? Or where they might fit in a three-dimensional space with axes of body, mind and soul?
Developing ourselves as humans, training for life in a balanced way, could be about looking for things that challenge our mind, things that strengthen our bodies, and things that enliven our souls; but maybe a more holistic approach would be to look for activities which stimulate all of those things, things which sit nearer the centre of the body-mind-soul Venn diagram.
This leads me finally to Ikigai, another Japanese concept which means “a reason for being”. This is another lovely looking Venn diagram, this time we are looking to find that thing which sits at the union of what we love, what we are good at, what the world needs, and (perhaps optionally) what we can get paid for. This balance point is your Ikigai, your life’s purpose.
And balance is the key isn’t it? Too much of anything is bad for you, and most things in life require some balance, work/life, effort/outcome, heart/head, challenge/comfort, static/dynamic, simplicity/complexity, order/chaos… innocence and experience. Happiness, I think, lies in finding that balance, or rather all of those balances, a kind of balance of balances, or meta-balance. Of course finding balance across many apparent contradictions can be difficult, especially in a dynamic world and when we as individuals (and everyone around us) keep changing as well. But this brings me back to the start, developing ourselves as multi-skilled, multi-interested people gives us more tools to deal with a changing world and the more wide and diverse experience we gather the better we are able to find that balance. I’m going to finish with some words of wisdom from Ernő Rubik on the beauty of contradictions and balance and finding connections: “I believe the contradictions are not opposites to be resolved, but counterpoints to be embraced. Rather than becoming frustrated by what seems irreconcilable in a contradiction, the better option is to appreciate that a contradiction helps us make connections we may never have considered.”