Learn what you are good at

Cross-scientific work is in some ways one of the buzzwords of our times. And for good reason: meeting other scientists gives a lot of new ideas and teaches things you’d never come across inside the walls of your department. And the same goes for business, too. It never hurts to get a sense of what else is out there, what you still don’t know but would want to. Just now, I’ve realized there’s another, very important, reason to be with people from other fields.

It teaches you what you’re good at.

If you’re even a semi-pro in something, chances are you spend a lot of time with people from the same field, industry or whatever the classification. Chances are that you have a passion to improve your skills. And if you want to improve, who do you look up to? The best of your field, of course.

This all can often result losing sight of how good you actually are in doing that thing in reality. Humans are notoriously bad in judging their skills subjectively. I’m sure a lot of people have heard the joke (well, it's really a piece of research¹) that all drivers think they are better than average. But it doesn’t work only that way: we often underestimate our skills, too. This happens especially in situations where the reference group (i.e. the people that surronund you most often when doing that activity) is more proficient than your average Joe.

This happens to people in sports. They spend years training for something, and after quitting on the pro level it can be hard to realize how good they can be compared to regular citizens. The same goes for studying: I often feel very inadequate about my math skills, since our university happens to be a technical one, hence housing hundreds of very bright people who seem to eat Riemann-Cauchy equations for breakfast. But I once came across a language student, and suddenly found out there’s a lot of math that I’m good at. And she found out, too, that speaking six languages is a big deal.

For this reason alone, I recommend from the bottom of my heart to go out there and meet people. Knowing what you don’t know is important for your development. But knowing what you do know is as important for your belief in yourself.


¹  McCormick, “Comparative perceptions of driver ability— A confirmation and expansion,” Accident Analysis & Prevention 18 (June 1986): 205-208.

How Startups Differ: Dreams of an Employee

The other day I was thinking about what separates us humans from animals. I won't go through the whole discussion that happened inside my head, but only the result: dreams. Animals have needs: eat, sleep, reproduce. Repeat ad infinitum, or at least until you die. We are a bit more complex in this respect. We have dreams and thereby goals which are ends in themselves. Someone might claim that all the wants and goals we have eventually collapse into the previously mentioned biological goals. I'm not so sure - I can't see somebody looking for a career in formal logic reduced to his biology. At face value it makes more sense to accept his want to understand logic as an end, not as a means to impress the ladies.

As the previous anecdote shows, dreams can play an important part in our careers. It’s not just the normal professions of a doctor, firefighter or a police officer that have dreams as their fuel. I’m very confident that any profession or job can have the same quality. This does not necessarily mean that the sales clerk has a dream of being a sales clerk, but he or she may dream of being a respected, trustworthy individual who eventually progresses at the workplace and then ending up as a sales manager in another company. Who you want to be is everything to who you are today.

If I think about the stereotypical large company or organization, dreams don’t seem to be of exactly very high importance there. You have a job, and your development goals are to be linked to your proficiency in that task. What, you want to improve, only to leave your post here? Not going to happen! Now, companies have training programs. Some of them even ask about your career goals. But this is not enough. A person is not just a career. Career goals cannot operate in isolation of all your other goals. I say it’s time to move from a paradigm, in which the employee is a repository of skills and knowledge, to a paradigm, in which he is a holistic person with dreams outside his career, too.

This is something at which startups excel. Everybody has heard the standard comments about the dynamic nature of startups and how they penetrate even the tiniest niches in the market. Well, sure, the Titanic hardly maneuvers in the same way as a speedboat – they are very unlike in size. But it still doesn’t mean you can’t feel good and whole in both.

What I’ve gathered from the startup experiences of my friends is that the startup culture is very multifaceted and you’re generally approached with interest. People are keen about stories or narratives, which explain who you are, what you want and why. In a large corporation gatherings can at worst be at the “I’m Jack, an accountant” –level. I mean, defining yourself by your position or profession is hardly the best way. I’d guess this has a lot to do with the fact startups rarely have very strongly identified or differentiated employees- everybody does everything. There’s no chance to identify with a role you don’t have. But still, even though we have roles in larger organizations, we don’t have to identify ourselves primarily through those. It would make sense to define ourselves through ourselves. And to do that, we need to make room for dreams.

Tolerance is not binary

Following these discussions between social conservatives and liberals has made me think. Ever since the True Finns stomped to a landslide victory at the election, talk of immigration, culture issues and tolerance have been plentiful. That’s a good thing.

However, there has been a thing that regularly drives me to the boundaries of approvable behavior. The thing is the current concept of tolerance (or permissiveness, if you will). The current discussion has mainly revolved around trying to distinguish the tolerant from the intolerant. The idea seems to be that you are either tolerant, or you are intolerant. Liberals and conservatives have joined the fray from both sides eagerly. If it weren’t for our modern legal system, I’m quite sure advocates from both sides would have been burnt at the stake. The liberals are claiming to be tolerant for being more positive about immigration, gay marriage, or whatever the issue at hand. Painting their side as the tolerant essentially implies that conservatives are the intolerant. That, of course, is often an euphemism for ‘a bunch of crazy skinhead thugs’, as most of you probably have realized. Just don’t think conservatives get off the hook, either. A common argument is that since liberals don’t tolerate the intolerance of conservatives, they are intolerant themselves. This plays into the conservatives’ hands by implying that since the liberals are the intolerant, the conservatives must be the tolerant. If we stick to a definition that labels tolerance as “allowing any opinion one doesn’t like” we get exactly this kind of paradox hassle. 

Both above strategies rest on the assumption of binary tolerance: you are either tolerant or you’re not. Since the parties disagree about some things, and don’t agree on what is tolerable, it must follow that one of them (i.e. the others) are the intolerant. From the liberal’s perspective the conservatives are socially intolerant – and from the conservative point vice versa. Tolerance functions as a useful weapon to bash your opponent with – after all, nobody in the audience wants to be intolerant, do they?

Now, this whole mess started because of a bad variable class: tolerance as a binary variable. In retrospect it should be obvious it is not such, rather tolerance ought be cast as a continuum. There are very few binary variables in our personalities, and I can’t see a reason why tolerance would be an exception. To give an example, consider kindness, for example. Is that person nice or not? I’m sure people would agree that some of us are kinder than others. But still, it’s not as if there are only two classes of people: kind and unkind. Oh no, there’s everything in between, too. The same should go for tolerance, too. Most of the people I’ve met are rather tolerant of others, yet most of us wouldn’t be ok with everything. For some, the limit is gay marriage, for others it’s something else. But for most of us, such a limit exists. A tolerance of anything and everything is hardly a sound basis for a society.

A good reason to throw away this stupid binary tolerance definition would be the hope of having actual discussions. Instead of going around shouting intolerant! – essentially the equal of heretic 500 years ago – we could be having proper talks about who can tolerate what, and why there are differences. The realization that we all are more or less tolerant would hinder the division into two camps. There are very few problems that can actually be solved with a us-vs-them rhetoric.

It’s time to stop using the 0/1 scale. Even turning it into just a 0-5 scale would help.