The Inner Game of Objectivity
I always wanted to be useful and I love any challenge, so I took on whatever bosses threw at me, which was often the stuff that others had the sense to say “no” to. I had a boss tell me, “You are a great utility infielder, I can put you anywhere and you will succeed, but if you specialized in one thing you could be an expert rather than just a team player.” That was probably the best insight I’ve ever heard. The trouble is, I don’t want to do one thing, I want to do everything, and I want everything to be done better!
I’ve taken on a variety of roles, and each time I threw myself into learning what I didn’t know. That challenge to develop new competence and be up on things sparked my mind and gave me insight into problems that someone who had 5 or more years doing it had stopped noticing or stopped caring about long ago. Bring someone who is sharp, motivated, and new to a job and they will outperform the crusty turf protectors. People who adapt and adjust also adapt and reinvent business- it’s a drive to make possibilities a reality.
Ignorance about the job market imagines that there is a talent gap when it is a gap in imagination. The LAST thing you want to do is hire someone who has done the exact job before. Neuroscientists have proven that when you take on a new challenge or must learn something new everything improves! The blood flow to your brain, your memory functions, your determination, your attitude! You are more driven and healthier the bigger your challenge.
When I am in a new situation, I need to collaborate and share, which has a positive impact on company culture. Hard-line job prerequisites may seem like common sense or just text to make a job requisition look more complete, but they are a cancer that kills candidates and businesses alike.
Are there truly specialist roles in business? Sure. Are they as common as it seems from job postings? Heck no. Someone with 5 or more years in a related business can figure out almost any role in a month. If what I say is true- then it shifts the focus back to character values, aptitude, and initiative, which is where evaluating candidates should be.
What do you often get with someone who is going from been-there-done-that to been-there-done-that again? Apathy, turf-protection, a sense of privilege, and ego.
We’ve had a learning revolution in the efficiency with which anyone can learn new things, big new things, and often do it online during spare time. It is crazy to think that not having experience with some tool or task that defines how a job is done today should disqualify a person from legitimate candidacy for that job. I’m sure if she gets on the shortlist for an interview, she can learn that tool over the weekend through an online course, so eliminating her now based on perishable job requirements is…irrational.
I’ve been contracting for the last month training a front-end for one of the major LLM AI models. I enjoy it, and it requires precision, learning from feedback, and learning a new field called prompt engineering. I’ve been a very high-scoring worker and our pay is based on the quality of the tasks we complete. I like it because I asked for a chance for 9 months in this space and was assumed to not be able to cut it, and now that I am fairly assessed, I am more than cutting it.
So, maybe our assumptions about others are just so much noise and aren’t even accurate? Maybe allowing subjective assumptions to determine who gets work is about as antiquated as slavery, vocational apprenticeships, or pre-suffragette democracy. In many cases, you don’t know until you see how a person performs. If you allow it, you likely have surprises in store, both good and bad.
I’ve been working with AI every day and I consume everything I can read or listen to about it. Each of us wonders if it will be a positive from our own, selfish perspective. Am I doomed to live marginally for the rest of my life? At a late point in my career, after leading the launch of over a dozen software products and services, I hit reset and went back to school and built models with machine learning and Python from the ground up, because I have this desire to know everything! Yet I spent most of the past 9 months having my job applications ignored, as though I couldn’t have really learned anything working so independently! Or perhaps it was an assumption that I am too old to learn new tricks, but that might be my own wrong assumption, so I don’t go there.
AI does not inhibit creativity; it simply reduces the drudgery of all the foundational stuff that is part of any creative task. I can have the AI build that for me, provide the clay, and I will do the final sculpting. There are some that see individual workers as the enemy of a profitable business and perhaps AI is a new weapon in the automation arsenal, but that attitude is over a century old. It does not work with 7.65 billion people on this planet. The big challenges we face can only be solved once we stop denying either the great mass and diversity of humanity or the relentless march of innovation through technology.
The latest advances in AI are more reason for the Blue Ocean outlook that the challenge in front of us is much more about collaboration and creativity than it is about some zero-sum competition over scarce resources. In sports, the biggest competitor any of us has is the weakness in our own thinking. Decades ago, as a tennis player and skier, I read “The Inner Game of Tennis”, and it blew my mind. When we master our inner voice, the external competition becomes simple. That message has been said in new ways by new voices, but it is essentially the same. Find peace on the inside, and then peace on the outside becomes possible, and it leads to intuitive, efficient action.
Let’s use this inflection point to throw off superstition and assumption and build momentum for more enlightened approaches.
