Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age

by Marty Neumeier

  Increase your sensitivity. What makes artists different from non-artists is their ability to make subtle distinctions between outcomes. This takes place in the associative phase of learning, after you’ve mastered the basics of your discipline. But it doesn’t happen by itself. You need to consciously identify the nuances that separate the great from the merely good.

  Stretch your boundaries. Personal growth demands that you constantly aim beyond your capabilities. When someone says he’s had 15 years of experience, you wonder if he’s actually had one year of experience 15 times. Masterful practitioners are those who constantly stretch into new areas, even at the risk of failure. When Alexander Bell was imagining the telephone, he talked to an electricity expert named Professor Joseph Henry. Bell told Henry he didn’t have the electrical knowledge to bring the invention into existence. The professor replied, “Get it.”

  Customize your metaskills. For purposes of this book, I’ve focused on five abilities I feel are missing from our current educational models. But the metaskill of learning requires that you develop a personalized list to address your own situation and the requirements of your discipline. For example, Dr. Gerald Grow of Florida A&M University offers this list of six metaskills for budding journalists: clarity, compassion, commitment, context, creativity, and centeredness. What are the metaskills that will drive success for you?

  Feed your desire. I once asked my mentor, painter Robert Overby, what he thought was the secret of creative success. He said, “The Big Want.” It’s the burning desire that can’t be extinguished with failure, lack of sleep, lack of money, or loss of friends. When you want something so bad you’ll never give up, no matter what kind of setbacks you encounter, success will eventually surrender to you. The Big Want is not a hardship. It’s the vision that carries you forward, and all you have to do is keep it alive.

  Scare yourself. Courage is not the same as fearlessness. Instead, it’s the ability to move ahead despite your fear. When you confront your demons, you often find they’re more mirage than monster, and you advance by leaps and bounds. Every day your to-do list should contain this item: “Scare self.”

  Practice. There’s practice, and then there’s practice. Deliberate practice is the only kind that makes a difference. Training a skill involves performing an action over and over, deliberately and mindfully, until it becomes part of your muscle memory. Only then can you move on to higher levels of creativity and nuance. Shortly after Michelangelo died, a scrap of paper was found in his studio that contained a note to his assistant: “Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.” Practice is the scaffolding of magic.

  Though these principles may seem demanding, you can probably conquer the ones you need in several years. That’s not long in the context of a career. And as you begin to absorb their lessons, you’ll find yourself quickly scaling the heights of mastery.

  Climbing the bridge

  One way to think about career learning is to conceive it as a bridge that’s built on a series of spreading columns. Each column represents a path that leads from a specific skill at the bottom up to more general skills at the top. The base of each column is craft knowledge, the entry level for your journey upward. From there you acquire disciplinary knowledge, the skillset that qualifies you as a competent professional. Higher up is domain knowledge, a broader understanding of the environment in which you practice your discipline. And at the very top is universal knowledge.

  Universal knowledge is the level that connects all the domains, including all their supporting disciplines and crafts. It’s domain-independent, meaning that the same knowledge is applicable to any skill you care to learn. There’s no express elevator to universal knowledge. The only way to reach it is by working your way up from the bottom, tier by tier. Once you get there, however, it’s fairly easy to move across to new domains, where you can drill down into the supporting disciplines and crafts from a position of experience. Here are some stories to illustrate this.

  On her fifth attempt, a young accountant finally passes the CPA exam. Her craft skills are minimal, but they’re enough to land her a job with a good firm. Within a few years she demonstrates a solid understanding of the laws and procedures governing state and federal income taxes, and gains fluency with QuickBooks and other tools of the trade. As her confidence grows, her domain knowledge lets her reimagine the tax accounting business. She takes over a small firm and transforms it by applying new processes and cutting-edge technology cobbled together from reading, seminars, workshops, and conferences. Soon after this, she decides to sell the firm and reinvent herself. With the benefit of generalized knowledge, she’s able to move directly across into a CEO position with an exciting electronics firm. Today she smiles when she thinks about her CPA exam.

  In middle school, a boy becomes a Guitar Hero expert. He borrows a beat-up Stratocaster, and begins learning riffs and chord sequences by imitating what he hears on recordings. In a few years he gets a job with a bar band, where he’s exposed to a variety of genres and quickly expands his repertoire. By now he can play just about anything after hearing it once or twice. He learns to combine musical ideas, invent his own, and even compose whole songs from scratch. His latest band begins performing and recording his original music, during which time he learns the business side of rock and roll. He takes up other instruments, including piano, bass, and drums, and makes the deliberate move of learning musical notation. This frees him to write and arrange music for other groups. He then embarks on a successful career as a composer, creating music for movies, commercials, and well-known artists. Lovingly displayed on his studio wall is his old Guitar Hero controller.

  A socially challenged Trekkie reads voraciously about anything technical. He does math for kicks, thinks his college classmates are stupid, and can’t seem to get a job. He finally gets hired as a bug hunter for a software firm. While not exactly his dream job, it lets him distinguish himself from the hundred or so programmers in his group. He begins to realize that there are other smart people in the world, and that “smart” comes in different flavors. He gets a chance to manage a small team of developers working on a pilot application for mobile computing. It doesn’t go well. The other members resent his abrupt manner and become frustrated with his lack of people skills. Over the years he grapples with this problem, consciously focusing on communication, group dynamics, and marketing theory. Eventually he leads a team that invents a language translation application. It becomes the standard system for simultaneous translation, which opens up millions of new channels for commerce, culture, and idea sharing around the world.

  The simplified bridge model is useful because it emphasizes how leaders in any field are more effective when they bring the requisite craft and disciplinary knowledge with them. I’m always suspicious of job applicants who define themselves as “concept people.” Concepts about what? Based on what? Who’s going to execute these concepts? A concept is only as valuable as the knowledge, experience, and skills behind it. Real idea people are those who have paid their dues at the bottom of the bridge, where the crucial details are tested, refined, and proven.

  Yet the top of the bridge is where evolutionary progress is made. This is the level where domains are joined, ideas are shared across disciplines, and vocabularies are cross-translated in ways that invigorate art, science, business, and education. Biologist E.O. Wilson uses the word consilience to describe this phenomenon. It literally means “a jumping together” of knowledge from different fields of endeavor.

  The pathway to the top is not a ladder but a lattice. It’s made up of people and opportunities that offer multiple routes for learning, advancement, and contribution. There’s no predetermined course, no guided tour, no golden ticket. It’s up to you to choose your steps.

  Creativity loves company

  You can be a genius all by yourself, but a genius without a community is less powerful than a genius within a latticework of kindred spirits. As with any kind of lattice, whether physical, chemi
cal, or social, it’s the connections between the parts that determine the collective power of the whole, and therefore its value to the parts.

  In social networks, there’s a qualitative difference between bridging and bonding. Bridging, to paraphrase political scientist Robert Putnam, is the process of making friends with like-spirited people, people with different views and skills but similar ethics and goals. Bonding, in contrast, is making friends with like-minded people—people of the same political party, the same religion, the same nationality, the same age group, or the same race. Both kinds of connections, bridging and bonding, are necessary to be successful and happy. But bridging is the activity that brings the highest rewards, and the one that pushes society forward. Social bridging and career bridging run in parallel.

  Social bridging makes use of what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls “weak ties.” He found that weak ties between groups can be stronger than the strong ties within groups. If you’re seeking new information or fresh insights, you need to look beyond your clique, since a clique is a closed system that acts more like a mirror than a window. For example, the workers at Google are a fairly diverse group of people, but they spend a lot of time together at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley, reading the same great books, eating together in the same great cafeterias, working on the same fascinating problems. When CEO Larry Page was asked what he thought the biggest threat to his company was, he replied: “Google.”

  The antidote to the clique is to open the window. Connect with groups outside your own. Put yourself in the way of meeting like-spirited people, not just like-minded people. This is the underlying principle of social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, which facilitate weak ties with people outside your group. It’s also the driving force behind social venues like Fritz Haeg’s Sundown Schoolhouse in Los Angeles, where filmmakers, technologists, and other professionals freely share their knowledge, and the Secret Science Club in Brooklyn, where everyone is welcome and speakers are paid in “beer and applause.”

  There’s a popular saying that came from a Frank Sinatra song. It goes: If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. While this may be flattering to New Yorkers, the opposite is more likely to be true: If you can’t make it somewhere else, you can probably make it in New York. Large populations provide the social and business networks necessary for professional success, especially when the profession is highly specialized, or the professional has rarefied skills. You can perform in musicals in the state of Nebraska, but you’ll learn much faster on the stages of New York.

  Moreover, studies show that people are often happier in social networks. Happiness appears to be contagious. When one person is contented, their friends have a 25% greater chance of being contented themselves. People near the center of the network tend to grow happier over time than those at the periphery. This shouldn’t be surprising, since people in networks tend to share knowledge more frequently than loners. When you continually give away what you know, you learn to replenish your knowledge as you go, and you also benefit from the knowledge of others. People who hoard knowledge simply don’t get much knowledge back. “He who receives an idea from me,” said Thomas Jefferson, “receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine receives lite without darkening me.” Jefferson would have been right at home with social media. (Especially with that funky spelling.)

  Yet the strong ties that exist within groups can also be powerful, especially when you’re trying to accomplish a creative task that demands a high degree of both skill and collaboration. Frank Stephenson, the designer of the BMW Mini and the Fiat 500, is proudest of his work on the McLaren MP4, since the tight-knit design team was able to create a cohesive look for the body styling. “A lot of times when you get a car out there,” he said, “it looks like you had somebody working on the front, somebody working on the sides, and somebody working on the back—and they were all mad at each other.”

  I was hiking one day when I saw another hiker with a T-shirt that said: “Small animals make first paths.” That seemed like an apt metaphor for innovation. Most of the world’s breakthroughs have been the work of small companies or small teams, working closely together with a shared vision for changing the world. We know Apple as a company with thousands of designers on the payroll, but the company’s key products were conceived by a small, intimate team, working closely in a small space with great tools.

  Talent isn’t something we have, but something we do. We can believe we have talent in private, but we can’t prove it unless we exercise it in public. Excellence thrives in a network.

  Unplugging

  To be creative, whether alone or in a group, you need the ability to pay attention. “Paying attention” is the right phrase, because it costs something to focus on a task, or a train of thought, or another person’s words. The price of attention is psychic energy. Most of us can pay attention to a difficult task for a few seconds or a few minutes, but it’s real work to stay focused much longer than that. Our minds tend to wander, looking for an escape. We can almost feel our brain squirming in its seat.

  This attention deficit isn’t new, but it seems to have gotten worse during the Industrial Age. As life sped up, our attention spans got shorter. Now we have a situation called continuous partial attention, meaning that our consciousness is so fragmented, so chopped up and balkanized that the pieces are nearly unusable. We hope that somehow the bits and bytes of partial attention will reconnect, like data packets over the Internet. But they rarely do. We’re left with partial thoughts, partial experiences, and partial understandings.

  This is the trap of the always-on, always-on-ya culture. Mobile computing offers a built-in escape from sustained focus. At the same time, it provides a ready excuse for avoiding conversation with the strangers, neighbors, and colleagues who might expand our thinking. If we’re always on, then our creative brains are always off. Creativity requires sustained concentration, the ability to stick with a problem long enough to get beyond shallow, multiple-choice answers. Instagram, the photo-sharing program, makes you feel creative when you apply “artistic” filters to your images, but it’s multiple-choice artistry. The real artistry was in the design of the business model. The users are merely components.

  Does this sound critical? It should. This is the road that leads to robotic people instead of humanlike robots. A recent New York Times article reported the story of a 14-year-old girl at Woodside High School, in California, who sends and receives 27,000 texts per month, “her fingers clicking at a blistering pace” as she holds up to seven conversations at a time. “I can text one person while talking on the phone to someone else,” she says.

  Once we get past our admiration for anyone who can develop such arcane skills, we can see this is not so much a skill as an addiction. With her day taken up with texting, it’s unlikely that she has time for focused schoolwork or homework, much less quiet reflection. In fact, there’s a good chance she’s even uncomfortable being alone with her thoughts. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders even has a new term for it: Internet use disorder.

  “When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a device,” says Sherry Turkle, psychology professor at MIT. “Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure.” We believe constant communication will make us feel less lonely, she says, but the opposite is true. “If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely.” Psychologist put some of this down to “FOMO,” or the “fear of missing out.” It’s a flammable mixture of anxiety, inadequacy, and irritation that can flare up while using Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, or Instagram.

  Some people blame the situation on information overload. Technology pundit Clay Shirky disagrees: “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” The traditional boundaries built into our social norms have been breached by technology, and we haven’t figured out where to build new boundaries. We’re still in the gee-whiz phase of social media, in which eve
rything is exciting and seductive. Yet creativity and self-directed learning demands that we periodically wall ourselves off from the always-on culture, so we can spend quality time with our thoughts.

  “Without solitude,” said Picasso, “no serious work is possible.” Leonardo found the same thing to be true. By all accounts he was a highly social creature—dressing in the latest fashions, hobnobbing with royalty, attending and designing glittery social events—but he would also disappear for weeks a time, completely incommunicado, to pursue a line of questioning without interruption. Steve Wozniak, designer of the original Macintosh, said that “most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone.”

  You can’t switch off the world. But you can block it out while you work. You can carve out quiet time to work things through by yourself, so that when you return to the world you have something deep and pure to show for it. Working alone doesn’t mean being lonely. It doesn’t even mean being alone. But it does mean paying attention, listening to your own voice, and listening to the voices of others with sustained focus. Only when you’ve mastered this skill can you embark on the long journey of creative self-discovery.

  The scenic road to you

  There’s no set route to self-mastery. You can’t print out directions from MapQuest or follow the instructions of your GPS device. There’s no app for that. You can’t ask Siri. The only voice that really matters is the little voice in your head, the one telling you to take this opportunity, avoid that trap, wait and see on that situation. In the pursuit of mastery, as in the geometry of nature, there are no straight lines—only curving, broken, sketchy, or tentative ones. The kind of learning that feeds your talent requires that you go the long way instead of taking the shortcut. As Jaron Lanier said, “Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith.”