The skills and finesse one needs to do just about any job well are about all one needs to do just about anything. The difficulty is in figuring out precisely what that anything might be. That’s where we all get stuck, except for a odd few people who either because of some weird luck or insight, or perhaps even mental derangement, do something different, and in a way that may be almost shocking to most of us, perhaps even inspire self-loathing for not doing the same.
There is a lot of talk about how they are the true leaders of the world, the makers, who steer the course of history in ways even our political leaders cannot, and we often wonder how they got that way. What one thing did they have to their advantage that other did not have? Family money? An amazing mentor? Very often we find there’s no one answer.
When you look for what may have made the difference, it surely wasn’t certifications or any kind of well-trodden path in pursuit of mere competence. It’s more likely they weren’t following anything that resembles common sense at all, but uncovering a path as they went, picking up their skill set and ideas as if by a chaotic trust in their own enthusiasm. And perhaps it was all mere luck, since for every Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, there are likely thousands of others we’ve never heard of, with perhaps equally good or better ideas, but who never bumped into the right people, or whose experiments failed and and never succeeded, who went unnoticed for other reasons. Perhaps it’s just that they didn’t play dirty enough, didn’t have the enormous charisma and socio-pathological traits to bring their work to the attention of millions of people.
You can take a number of these masters of reality and reverse engineer how they got where they did by digging into their personal histories. There are endless reams of books claiming to have the power to help you attain, at least in part, the cognitive prowess of Leonardo DaVinci, Nikola Tesla, Einstein, all the iconic masterminds of the past centuries. You are taught to practice visualizing the way time passes when riding on a photon at the speed of light (which is generally the speed photon’s travel at), or how to build and run objects in one’s head. And all of these things are great practices, I honestly believe they could help you become more intelligent, but one does not become Einstein by repeating what Einstein did. Einstein, of course, may have done similar exercises, though what he did that led him to inch out and away from the masses who were essentially doing the same thing, was he followed his own curiosity and questions into unknown regions most of us don’t ever consider traveling. But how did he know to trust those impulses, and how do we learn from his experience.
Maybe we don’t. Or maybe it’s more obvious than we think. The poet John Keats observed something very interesting about William Shakespeare, something he believed was the essential trait of his greatest, and something that I try to keep in mind whenever I find myself asking that last question. It is what he called Negative Capability, or an ability to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.”
And though living in that kind of ambiguity seems the opposite of what science teaches us, as well as our hunger for certainty, for measurable results and answered questions, it is that extended state of unknowing that scientists and innovators alike tend to live in. And it is something to keep in mind when conducting ourselves through our careers as workaholic makers of change, as well as the minutia of our every day choices.