Awkward

by Ty Tashiro

  Even if someone manages to discover the right combination of ideas, he needs to hope that the world is ready to adopt a different way of doing things, then she needs to effectively communicate her innovation to a broad audience. For the awkward innovator, this can be the biggest challenge of all.

  During our discussion about talent, I have focused on awkward people’s obsessive interests, but of course social challenges are also an important part of the awkward disposition. For awkward innovators who stall when they need to communicate their ideas to others, it’s like they finally cracked the code for the safe that holds the innovative idea, and then discover that there is a second safe inside the first safe. Many awkward people find that effectively communicating their idea can be harder than discovering a scientific breakthrough or inventing the product.

  Awkward people can hope that the value of their innovations is readily apparent to everyone else, but that’s almost never the case. In business start-ups, consider all of the stakeholders who need to buy into an innovative idea for those start-ups to survive. Investors, employees, regulators, and of course customers need to be convinced that an idea is valuable enough to get behind. Henry Blodget wrote in a 2013 Business Insider article that the chances of a start-up succeeding could be estimated from data provided by Y Combinator, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious incubators for start-ups. Blodget estimates that less than 10 percent of Y Combinator start-ups are successful within five years, which is a staggering percentage considering that less than 5 percent of startups are accepted into Y Combinator in the first place.

  In the world of books, even the most talented authors can spend decades waiting for publishers or audiences to resonate with the message they are trying to communicate. A few examples of well-known authors’ initial rejections from publishing houses include Stephen King’s thirty rejections for his first novel, Carrie; J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel was rejected twelve times; Gone with the Wind was rejected thirty-eight times; and C. S. Lewis accumulated a staggering eight hundred rejections during the course of his literary career.

  We could continue down this glum path of insurmountable odds, but I’ll try to refrain from going on in too much detail for too long. I think these examples can inspire something other than demoralization. The most interesting question to ask is, “Why would these people keep trying to succeed?” The narratives we hear about the .00001 percent of people who achieve groundbreaking innovation are inspiring, but for the majority of people passionately pursuing a new way of doing things, the reality is that their path is so difficult and so long that continuing down the path can seem unreasonable or downright foolish to others.

  But what if someone was built to survive in exactly this type of treacherous environment? What if someone’s gaze was not trained on the insurmountable odds, but rather directed elsewhere, trained intently on the small chances of creating something extraordinary? Someone would need to enjoy systematically marching through the thousands or millions of ideas, possess an unusual passion for the work, and repeatedly try combinations in the face of failure. It would also help if they had a razor-sharp focus so as not to become distracted from the work and a natural tendency to pay only passing attention to the criticisms of the doubters and the haters. When it comes to taking on visions with the odds stacked against me, I like my chances with an awkward person or two by my side.

  Imperfect Brilliance

  ALL OF US need to be inspired. We need stories like the fictional tales of superheroes overcoming evil or real-life heroes rising against tremendous odds because they inspire hope and remind us about what is possible through character strengths like persistence and bravery. But if you look closely at the details of the hero’s arc, there are valuable details about the challenges of realizing prodigious achievements in real life.

  In heroic tales, talent is a mixed blessing. Protagonists are usually loners whose differences make it harder for them to fit in and they have trouble figuring out how to do more good than harm with their abilities. In most stories, the complications that accompany unique ability inevitably present protagonists with a tempting choice to relinquish their talent.

  Awkward people who also possess a tremendous amount of talent will tell you that they would sacrifice some of their intellectual or creative abilities if they could more easily fit in with others. Not once have I heard one of my awkward students or awkward clients say otherwise. Unique abilities can actually make it harder for people to find their place to belong and their obsessive energy can easily spin out of control. Talented people can become so narrowly focused and intensely driven in their careers that their personal lives and the people in them slowly fade away. Talent also inspires visions of one day achieving groundbreaking innovation, but the odds are small that anyone will ever achieve that kind of breakthrough. The world can handle only so many revolutions at once.

  Talented people tend to be perfectionistic, but the lives of talented people are far from perfect. It’s not to say that their circumstances are worse than anyone else’s or that they deserve a disproportionate amount of empathy, but rather, it’s helpful for all of us when we recognize that everyone’s struggles are different and are open to understanding these unique challenges.

  In high school, even though I no longer sat next to Kellie Kimpton, I continued taking Spanish classes. My Spanish teacher, Mr. Martinez, was my favorite teacher and he taught me a great deal. One of the most valuable lessons he imparted to me was how to think about what was going on around me. Mr. Martinez taught me how to conjugate verbs in the present tense to describe what is happening at the moment, the simple future to describe what would happen, and the future perfect to describe what would happen before another thing happened. Mr. Martinez also taught us about a tense that we do not formally use in English. The past imperfect allows you to communicate something that happened in the past as the result of an ongoing, habitual action that may have spanned months or years.

  When someone achieves something extraordinary, what we see in this era of well-manicured social media posts and two-minute YouTube video are end points. We see the trophy held, the keynote speech, the selfie of someone looking fancy and put together. When we witness these moments, there is a tendency to engage in what psychologists call a hindsight bias, which is essentially when people say, “I knew it all along, I knew that she would win a championship one day,” or “I knew from the first day I met him that he would win a lifetime achievement award. It was inevitable.” But if someone has risen to heights where they have challenged the status quo, then it’s almost always because they labored for years, in the least glorious circumstances imaginable, to push their talents to higher levels.

  There are times during the years it takes to accrue the knowledge and practice necessary to achieve at high levels that people can look, for lack of a more diplomatic word, foolish. Talented people can appear foolish to others because those who become innovative have a propensity for experimentation and it’s not a perfect science. So they try things that fail miserably and when they do it can be so bewildering to others who try to understand what would motivate someone to try something so outlandish. To others, the talented person in the making will look at times like they have lost their minds.

  The talent we observe during groundbreaking moments is a highly concentrated version of what happens when people apply unwavering drive to an already exceptional level of ability. But the road to prodigious achievement is not a straight line; in fact people spend a tremendous amount of time literally spinning themselves in circles as they look for new routes or new ideas. The scientist who spins her head around a problem during late nights in her laboratory or the ballerina who stays after practice because she is determined to improve her pirouette, these people are making the sacrifices and putting in the extra effort necessary to get somewhere no one has been before. We would do well as a society not to glorify talent, but rather to nurture talented kids with a realistic perspective about the potential and pitfa
lls they might anticipate.

  My Spanish class with Mr. Martinez was a small group of ten students and we were an unusually tight-knit bunch. When Mr. Martinez taught us the past imperfect, he did something that was both innovative and meaningful while setting up our class conversation using the past imperfect. He asked us to talk about something a friend or family member had accomplished, something remarkable that was a result of their persistent efforts from the past. My classmates shared surprisingly personal stories.

  Some students talked about family members who were the first to graduate from college or friends who had overcome tough home environments. Others talked about the sacrifices their immigrant parents had made to give their kids better opportunities in life. None of the stories was the same, but they were all inspiring tales about people who had reached new heights based on their life experience, and by doing so, lifted up those around them through their sheer determination.

  The ten students in that class seemed to represent the main social groups of most high schools in the United States, including the head cheerleader, a football star, a punk rocker with purple hair, and an awkward person or two. We looked like a high school movie cliché. What I realized in that moment was that once we got past the surface, there were common aspirations and fears that ran through each person’s narrative. There was something about speaking of people we admired in the past imperfect that made us recognize how much other people had continually sacrificed to kindly help us along in life.

  From my perspective, I also realized that my classmates’ stories were built on a bedrock of meaningful details, small, but significant acts that their loved ones performed over the course of years. When people became emotional, it was when they recalled habitual details like a mother waking up every morning at four-thirty for seventeen years to provide for her children or an older sibling who patiently helped a dyslexic student for years until she learned to read at grade level.

  Through the shared wisdom in that classroom, I saw with brilliant clarity that the beauty of our social relationships is not about social awkwardness or social skill, but rather comes from our kind attention to thousands of social details.

  AFTERWORD

  Authors develop a relationship with their books. I know that sounds strange, but even the most systematic authors will tell you that books take on a life of their own. Authors try to communicate their ideas through pages of a manuscript. Months later when they revisit those pages to begin the editing process, the book offers new perspectives that were not apparent to the authors who created those pages. It’s like the relationship people have with a city where they once lived. When they return to their beloved city and familiar places that are full of nostalgia, there is something about the collision of the familiarity from one’s past life with one’s present life that creates new insights.

  As I started the previous chapter, I started looping back to earlier chapters I had not read in months. Doing so stirred an unusual degree of self-reflection within me. As I read about my Mr. Fuji wrestling fiasco, my mouthful of Kellie Kimpton’s hair on the dance floor, or my memories about a friend who has passed, I reexperienced the gravitas of an awkward disposition that I had spent so much of my life trying to unload, but also felt new insights about how my awkwardness had shaped my life for the better.

  In the end, life has worked out well. I have been blessed with a generous and nurturing group of friends and family, who remained loyal through my most awkward stretches. My family and mentors have helped me pursue a career that I find challenging and that allows me to absorb myself in systematic investigations about broad topics such as what makes romantic relationships work or the advantages that might result from being someone who is socially awkward. In matters of work and play, I feel grateful for how everything has turned out.

  I’m not entirely sure why my life has worked out so well. I can think about the ways that pro-social attitudes or how my deliberate practice to meet minor social expectations eventually turned into social proficiency, but I do not understand my social life as a smooth, flowing narrative. Awkward people make sense of things with a bottom-up process, which means that realizations happen abruptly for them, like a chemical reaction that reaches a threshold for changing colors or igniting in an explosion. Awkward people are prone to being surprised, which can manifest as rude awakenings when outcomes are bad or as a magical event when outcomes are good.

  When I first embarked on this book, my friend Andie once asked me if I wished that I had not been awkward. It was a thought-provoking question, one that I contemplated for quite some time, but eventually I realized that I am largely grateful for my awkwardness. Although there have been many instances when I dearly wish that social life was more intuitive and I am guilt-ridden by the times my awkwardness has caused trouble for other people, I also think that being awkward can be humbling and I think that it can instill a particular kind of empathy for others who do not fit the traditional societal mold.

  Awkward people often feel like the social world is too chaotic to be systemized, but we have seen throughout this book that social science can help us unearth some reasonable and predictable social rules. The scientific method helps bring order to chaos, allows us to see relationships between ideas, and even helps us to predict what might happen. The social science we have suggests that awkward people have a spotlighted focus that shines narrowly and brightly on specific areas of interest. Awkward individuals default to focusing on their specific areas of interest, which tend to be nonsocial interests, and this means that they are prone to missing social cues that are obvious to others. When awkward people’s behaviors deviate from minor social expectations, others interpret those deviations as small signs that someone might not be on board with the collective goals and values of the group and that’s where the trouble begins.

  But the science of why we’re awkward can also be applied to help awkward people think about where to intentionally train their gaze in social situations, tells us why social graces are an important mechanism to master, and provides a rough road map about how likable people think about social life. My hope is that the data and theory available at this point might provide a structure for awkward individuals who are looking for some traction and rough maps for navigating social life. Social science can never tell a certain person exactly how to handle every situation, but it can provide some guidance for people to craft their own path that is necessarily unique to each individual.

  Awkward people do not need to become popular or maintain dozens of friendships. The happiest people focus on forging a handful of gratifying social ties as the centerpiece of their lives. Awkward people need to devote the same concentrated focus to their social relationships that they would give to their work or other areas of nonsocial interest. When people are mutually committed to being fair, kind, and loyal, then the psychological weight of their ties grows exponentially, and it exerts the kind of gravitational pull necessary to keep awkward people passionately pursuing groundbreaking innovation in a stable orbit.

  Awkward people are not better than anyone else, they are simply different. Although they may have abilities or dispositions that give them great potential in some areas, awkward individuals are challenged by social situations that come naturally to most people. Awkward people do not deserve some sort of special treatment, but they can certainly benefit from some patience, an open-minded approach to their quirks, and support for the things they want to achieve in life. It’s the same thing that any of us want, awkward or not.

  The theories and scientific findings we have reviewed in the previous chapters give us a way to understand why people are awkward and how they can redirect their attention to better understand and manage social situations. But logic and theory only take one so far. “If-then” rules about how to handle various social situations and generally accepted rules of etiquette are still subject to unpredictability because they are being applied to humans, who are variable in nature. In human interactions, one plus one does not alway
s equal two and combining two elements does not always produce the same compound. It’s this variability in the human condition that makes people maddening and wonderful.

  The history of psychology suggests that there are many routes to a meaningful and happy life and there’s good reason to be suspicious of anyone who espouses a one-size-fits-all approach to social or emotional fulfillment. But one of the most consistent findings in psychology is that a meaningful and happy life is strongly associated with the quality of people’s social relationships.

  I see now that the best things in life have come from the unpredictable and subtle acts of kindness and loyalty that have far exceeded anything I could have reasonably imagined. When I have had the presence of mind to purposefully direct my spotlighted attention toward important details about other people, I have found that I am pulled toward a sense of belonging that delightfully pushes the limits of my emotional capacity.

  While the unpredictable elements of social life can be frustrating for me, the most meaningful moments in my life have involved people acting in unpredictable ways. Life is full of people who defy our expectations, whether parents with remarkable patience, a teacher who helps you to see clearly, the kind words of a Spanish girl, a friend who embodies the power of being pro-social, or a teacher who helps you see the future in a new way. When we set our sharp focus on these remarkable people who grace our lives, when we appreciate the ways they exceed our expectations in the most unexpected ways, that’s when we begin to see in brilliant detail how awesome this life can be.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my agent, Laurie Abkemeier, for “getting me,” and for her generous support and direction. I have been lucky to have three insightful editors, Deb Brody, Cara Bedick, and Cassie Jones, who expanded my perspective throughout the evolution of this book.