Mastery (33 page)

As previously discussed in
chapter 2
(
here
), Daniel Everett and his family moved to the heart of the Amazon in 1977, to live among people known as the Pirahã. Everett and his wife were missionaries, and their task was to learn the Pirahã language—which was then considered the hardest in the world to decipher—and to translate the Bible into their indigenous tongue.
Slowly, Everett made progress, using the various devices he had been taught in his training in linguistics.

He had studied in depth the works of the great MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, who advocated the idea that all languages are essentially related because grammar itself is hardwired into the human brain, and is part of our genetic code. This would mean that by their nature all languages share the same features. Convinced that Chomsky was correct, Everett worked hard to find these universal features in Pirahã. Over the years of studying it, however, he began to find many exceptions to Chomsky’s theory, and this troubled him.

After much thought, Everett came to the conclusion that the Pirahã language reflected many peculiarities of their life in the jungle. He determined, for instance, that their culture placed a supreme value on “immediacy of experience”—what was not before their eyes did not exist, and therefore there were almost no words or concepts for things outside immediate experience. In elaborating this concept, he theorized that the basic features of all languages are not simply genetic in origin and universal, but that each language has elements that reflect the uniqueness of its culture. Culture plays a larger role than we might imagine in how we think and communicate.

In 2005 he finally felt ready to make all of this public, and had an article published in an anthropology journal that expressed these revolutionary ideas. He expected that his findings might stir up some animated discussion, but he was not prepared at all for what would ensue.

People at MIT (linguists and graduate students) associated with Chomsky began to hound Everett. When he gave a talk at an important symposium at the University of Cambridge about his findings, some of these linguists flew over to attend it. They peppered him with questions meant to poke holes in his ideas and publicly embarrass him. Not ready for this, Everett fumbled and did not handle it well. This continue with subsequent lectures. They zeroed in on any kind of inconsistency in his talk or his writings, and used these inconsistencies to discredit his overall idea. Some of their attacks on him became personal—they publicly called him a charlatan, and questioned his motives. Even Chomsky himself implied that Everett was out for fame and money.

When Everett published his first book,
Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes
, some of these linguists wrote letters to critics who were going to review it, trying to dissuade them from even discussing his material—it was too far below academic standards, they claimed. They went so far as to put pressure on National Public Radio, which was about to do a large segment on Everett. The show was canceled.

At first Everett could not help but become emotional. What his detractors were bringing up in their arguments did not discredit his theory, but
merely revealed some possible weak points. They seemed less interested in the truth and more concerned with making him look bad. Quickly, however, he moved past this emotional stage and began to use these attacks for his own purpose—they forced him to make sure everything he wrote was airtight; they made him rethink and strengthen his arguments. He could hear their possible criticisms in his head, and he addressed them one by one in his subsequent writings. This made him a better writer and thinker, and the controversy they stirred up only increased the sales of
Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes
, winning many converts to his argument in the process. In the end, he came to welcome the attacks of his enemies for how much they had improved his work and toughened him up.

In the course of your life you will be continually encountering fools. There are simply too many to avoid. We can classify people as fools by the following rubric: when it comes to practical life, what should matter is getting long-term results, and getting the work done in as efficient and creative a manner as possible. That should be the supreme value that guides people’s actions. But fools carry with them a different scale of values. They place more importance on short-term matters—grabbing immediate money, getting attention from the public or media, and looking good. They are ruled by their ego and insecurities. They tend to enjoy drama and political intrigue for their own sake. When they criticize, they always emphasize matters that are irrelevant to the overall picture or argument. They are more interested in their career and position than in the truth. You can distinguish them by how little they get done, or by how hard they make it for others to get results. They lack a certain common sense, getting worked up about things that are not really important while ignoring problems that will spell doom in the long term.

The natural tendency with fools is to lower yourself to their level. They annoy you, get under your skin, and draw you into a battle. In the process, you feel petty and confused. You lose a sense of what is really important. You can’t win an argument or get them to see your side or change their behavior, because rationality and results don’t matter to them. You simply waste valuable time and emotional energy.

In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture. All of us have foolish sides, moments in which we lose our heads and think more of our ego or short-term goals. It is human nature. Seeing this foolishness within you, you can then accept it in others. This will allow you to smile at their antics, to tolerate their presence as you would a silly child, and to avoid the madness of trying to change them. It is all part of the human comedy, and it is nothing to get
upset about or lose sleep over. This attitude—“Suffer Fools Gladly”—should be forged in your Apprenticeship Phase, during which you are almost certainly going to encounter this type. If they are causing you trouble, you must neutralize the harm they do by keeping a steady eye on your goals and what is important, and ignoring them if you can. The height of wisdom, however, is to take this even further and to actually exploit their foolishness—using them for material for your work, as examples of things to avoid, or by looking for ways to turn their actions to your advantage. In this way, their foolishness plays into your hands, helping you achieve the kind of practical results they seem to disdain.

REVERSAL

While studying for his PhD at Harvard University in Computer Science, Paul Graham (b. 1964) discovered something about himself: he had a profound distaste for any kind of politicking or social maneuvering. (For more on Graham, see
here
.) He was not good at it, and it irritated him to no end to be dragged into situations in which others behaved manipulatively. His brief encounter with politics within the department convinced him he was not cut out for a life in academia. This lesson became strengthened a few years later when he went to work for a software company. Almost everything they did was irrational—firing the original tech people, making a salesperson the head of the company, creating too long a time between releases of new products. All of these bad choices came about because in a group, politics and ego often trump sound decision making.

Unable to tolerate this, he came up with his own solution: as much as possible, he would avoid any environment that involved politicking. This meant sticking to doing startups on the smallest scale—a constraint that made him disciplined and creative. Later, when he founded
Y Combinator
, a kind of apprenticeship system for tech startups, he could not prevent the company from growing in size—it was too successful. His solution was twofold: One, he had his wife and partner in the company, Jessica Livingston, handle all of the tricky social situations, since she possessed a high level of social intelligence. Two, he maintained a very loose, non-bureaucratic structure to the company.

If, like Graham, you simply do not have the patience that is required for managing and mastering the more subtle and manipulative sides of human nature, then your best answer is to keep yourself away from those situations as best as possible. This will rule out working in groups larger than a handful of people—above a certain number, political considerations
inevitably rise to the surface. This means working for yourself or on very small startups.

Even still, it is generally wise to try to gain the rudiments of social intelligence—to be able to read and recognize the sharks, and to charm and disarm difficult people. The reason is that no matter how hard you might try to avoid situations that call for such knowledge, the world is one large teeming court of intrigue, and it will inevitably pull you in. Your conscious attempt to opt out of the system will retard your apprenticeship in social intelligence and can make you vulnerable to the worst forms of naïveté, with all of the disasters that are likely to ensue.

It is a great folly to hope that other men will harmonize with us; I have never hoped this. I have always regarded each man as an independent individual, whom I endeavored to understand with all his peculiarities, but from whom I desired no further sympathy. In this way have I been enabled to converse with every man, and thus alone is produced the knowledge of various characters and the dexterity necessary for the conduct of life.

—J
OHANN
W
OLFGANG VON
G
OETHE

V

AWAKEN THE
DIMENSIONAL MIND:
THE CREATIVE-ACTIVE

As you accumulate more skills and internalize the rules that govern your field, your mind will want to become more active, seeking to use this knowledge in ways that are more suited to your inclinations. What will impede this natural creative dynamic from flourishing is not a lack of talent, but your attitude. Feeling anxious and insecure, you will tend to turn conservative with your knowledge, preferring to fit into the group and sticking to the procedures you have learned. Instead, you must force yourself in the opposite direction. As you emerge from your apprenticeship, you must become increasingly bold. Instead of feeling complacent about what you know, you must expand your knowledge to related fields, giving your mind fuel to make new associations between different ideas. You must experiment and look at problems from all possible angles. As your thinking grows more fluid your mind will become increasingly dimensional, seeing more and more aspects of reality. In the end, you will turn against the very rules you have internalized, shaping and reforming them to suit your spirit. Such originality will bring you to the heights of power.

THE SECOND TRANSFORMATION

From the moment he was born, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) was surrounded by music. His father, Leopold, was a violinist and composer in the court of Salzburg, Austria, as well as a music instructor. All during the day, Wolfgang would hear Leopold and his students practicing in the house. In 1759, his seven-year-old sister Maria Anna began taking piano lessons from their father. She showed great promise and practiced at all hours. Wolfgang, enchanted by the simple melodies that she played, began to hum along to the music; he would sometimes sit at the family’s harpsichord and try to imitate what his sister had played. Leopold could soon detect something unusual in his son. For a three-year-old, the child had a remarkable memory for melody and an impeccable sense of rhythm, all without having had any instruction.

Although he had never attempted to teach someone so young, Leopold decided to begin teaching piano to Wolfgang when he turned four, and after only a few sessions he realized the boy had other interesting qualities. Wolfgang listened more deeply than other students, his mind and body completely absorbed in the music. With such intensity of focus, he learned more quickly than other children. Once when he was five years old, he stole a rather complicated exercise meant for Maria Anna, and within thirty minutes he could play it with ease. He had heard Maria Anna practice the piece, and remembering it vividly, the moment he saw the notes on the page he could rapidly reproduce the music.

This remarkable focus had its roots in something that Leopold saw almost from the beginning—the boy had an intense love of music itself. His eyes would light up with excitement the moment Leopold laid out a new
challenging piece for him to conquer. If the piece was new and hard to figure out, he would attack it day and night with such tenacity that it would soon become part of his repertoire. At night, his parents would have to force him to stop practicing and send him to bed. This love of practice only seemed to increase with the years. When it came time to play with other children, he would find a way to transform a simple game into something that involved music. His favorite game, however, was to take some piece he had been playing and improvise on it, giving it a personal flair that was quite charming and inventive.