I‘ve spent a majority of my life trying to resolve a mismatch of my ambitions and my practicality. When you have such a wide variety of interests that span across multiple disciplines, from art to science and psychology, and it comes time to pick a career path, you’re left with a couple options.
(1) pick out one of your interests and hope that, on a knife’s edge, you manage to pick the one that will satisfy you. This is often the life advice that people give. And there’s some merit to it. Passion is not something that you have or don’t have. It’s something you cultivate. I have experienced working at a job or doing something that I initially had no interest in to discover something that I liked about it. Or even if I didn’t, over time I grew to love certain aspects of it. I built a partnership with my coworkers. I gained a sense of pride from what I could accomplish, even if the cause held no merit to me. But I’ve also had the opposite happen to me. Sometimes at the same time. Doing something that drained me over time and held little to no hold on me.
Or (2) try to do everything and most likely crash and burn in the process. Multitasking is feasible, but difficult, unproductive, and potentially destructive. I could come up with example after example of how this works, but that might be another post.
Left with these two options, one might think that for some people (me) there is no good path to go down. And maybe there isn’t. But there’s a third option to try, which is to pick a skill (or a couple of skills) that span across all your interests. And for me, I think adaptability is that very skill. Required for anyone that wants to be innovative.
Innovation is a tricky subject. It might not be completely obvious how one would go about being more innovative over time. Perhaps it is something that is almost easy to do when you are young. But as you get old, being innovative becomes far more difficult. You’ve seen the ways of the past and you know what works. It is therefore tempting to fall into the trap of continuing the cycle of that which worked in the past in perpetuity. Unable to see the potential of new ideas and technology and they interact with the world they work in. Being young(ish), But still old enough to be able to observe this pattern in myself. I want to plan ahead for how I’m going to continue to be innovative as the forces of the conventional ways of doing things become stronger. If only there was some way I could continue to be adaptable. Do
There isn’t a college major for adaptability. And it’s hard to find ways of studying it directly. But I have a couple ideas for how I can learn this skill indirectly. For example; have you ever heard the term, “when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” That term is usually used as a negative, but I think I can use it to my advantage. By finding things, and using whatever information I can to learn how to be more adaptable.
I’m sure there are ways to learn it directly, and I will pursue those as well. Which is the subject of a later blog post. But I think there’s value in finding ways to search outside and find things that you can bring home. As I’m writing this, I am in the genesis of going to school to study Data Science. And I’m doing that for much the same reason I’m studying adaptability.
I’ve got a fascination with how large sets of data interact with the systems that govern our lives. I think understanding these systems is a major opportunity for innovation. And being able to take advantage of this opportunity is going to require being able to operate in a dynamic environment. To both see the big picture and the smaller parts and how they interact. Working in an environment where you are crossing disciplines.
I could also learn about psychology. Understand how the mind operates in different environments and how to manipulate it. I might learn more about design. Not just on a superficial level. But understand the way design affects us, and what it means for our world and our actions. And on and on…
One could come up with an infinite list of things that, in some way, relate back to an ability to maintain adaptability. I have no doubt there will be a lot of duds. And I think I’m fine with that. Not because I like duds, but because if there’s one thing that life has taught me. It’s that it’s better to try and fail than to never try at all.
Whatever path I go down. There is no way that being more adaptable is going to hurt me along the way. There may be other things that I can do that would be more effective, but it does not therefore mean that I should wait for the perfect opportunity for action. And whatever action I do take in the future. Being adaptable will bring me closer to it.