We all know Aesop’s fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” in which a hare begins with a natural advantage but fails to live up to his potential. But Aesop has another lesser-known parable called “The Fox and the Hedgehog,” the point of which is this: “The fox knows many small things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing.” As the restless fox roots about exploring a multitude of possibilities, the immobile hedgehog rolls himself up in a single big idea. The story suggests two contrasting cognitive styles. Foxes have different strategies for different problems; they are curious and comfortable with nuance, and they can live with contradictions. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, focus on one big problem, and they reduce it to a quest for a single overarching solution.
In 1779, the English man of letters Samuel Johnson formulated the issue this way: “The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.”1 Indeed, broad thinking and narrow thinking are not mutually exclusive. But which will lead you to a breakthrough, going a thousand miles wide or going a thousand miles deep? Which are you innately, the fox or the hedgehog? The point of this chapter is to suggest that if you want to embrace a hidden habit of genius, be the fox.
Like the fox, geniuses roam widely and are curious in random and sometimes uncontrolled ways. Often their natural inquisitiveness is stronger than their self-discipline, pushing them beyond the borders of their primary area of interest. “It is easy,” said the Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci, “to make oneself universal” (Facile cosa è farsi universale).2 It is if you have that polymath’s far-ranging genius. “My curiosity is interfering with my work!” Einstein lamented in 1915 while trying to finalize his Theory of General Relativity.3 Similarly, as he moves among his electric cars, rocket ships, Hyperloop, solar energy panels, and interest in artificial intelligence, Elon Musk sometimes has difficulty staying “on task.” But this sort of restless searching changes the world.
To illustrate the benefits of cross-border thinking, I start with two very different foxes, one seemingly outrageous, the other staid: Lady Gaga and Ben Franklin.
My name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. I am an Italian-American. I was not born hot, like my mother would have you believe. I, over time, read so many books, watched so many movies, did so much art, met so many sculptors, filmmakers, poets, musicians, sidewalk artists that I invented something that was much stronger than I ever could [have] been on my own.4
Those were Lady Gaga’s opening remarks at a 2015 awards banquet for the arts-education nonprofit Americans for the Arts. Like Mozart, Stefani Germanotta started keyboard lessons at age four and practiced hard to become a skilled classical pianist. In high school she acted in plays and sang with a jazz band and the school chorus. She was an excellent student but not popular. “For a little while,” she has said, “I thought girls were just jealous, which is why they were mean to me. Maybe they were jealous of my fearlessness.”5 “Fearless” is a word frequently used to describe her and other cross-border raiders.
At age seventeen Stefani Germanotta gained early admittance to the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. There she studied not only music but also art history and dramatic writing, yet she dropped out after a year to pursue a career as a songwriter and performance artist. To earn money, she moonlighted as a go-go dancer in Lower East Side bars. Around that time Stefani Germanotta became Lady Gaga, her stage name reportedly inspired by the Queen song “Radio Ga Ga,” which gave her a new identity. Unlike pop “cover” artists, Lady Gaga is an original creator and one who integrates many arts. “It’s all about everything all together—performance art, pop performance art, fashion,” she has said.6 Her innovative 2017 Super Bowl halftime performance had 150 million viewers, the largest live audience in TV history. She has won nine Grammys. In 2019, she was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress, and she won the Academy Award for best original song—the first time someone has been recognized in two such disparate categories. Composer, choreographer, cosmetics creator (Haus of Gaga), fashion designer, actress, record producer, philanthropist, and social activist, Lady Gaga is a transformative pop artist whose shape-shifting and range echo those of Andy Warhol. As she says, “I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.”7
WHO COULD BE MORE DIFFERENT FROM THE FORMER LATE-NIGHT burlesque performer Lady Gaga than the “early to bed, early to rise” Ben Franklin? But Franklin, too, was a polymath with an extraordinary range. Every oddity that Franklin experienced became an object of inquiry: Why does a whirlwind swirl? Why does it take twice as long to sail from London to Philadelphia as it does to sail back? Why does a high-pitched violin sound cause a glass to break? For the curious Franklin, an explanation always lurked beneath the surface. But not too far beneath! A typical fox, Franklin saw no point in digging deep just for the sake of depth. Although he explored a diverse array of interests—physics, astronomy, botany, meteorology, oceanography, and politics—he wanted his pursuits to have practical value, and he ultimately arrived at insights with useful purposes. Here are just a few things his roving mind conceived.
The Franklin stove: A metal-lined fireplace that produced more heat and less smoke than an ordinary fireplace.
Bifocals: Why carry two pairs of glasses if one will do?
The lightning rod: Protects a building (and its occupants) by channeling electricity around it.
The glass harmonica: Both Mozart and Beethoven wrote music for his novel three-octave instrument.
Swimming flippers: Undoubtedly one of his most fun and enduring inventions.
The long arm (or grabber): Designed for those who need to reach high places or who can’t bend over.
Medical catheter: The first flexible urinary catheter used in America.
Franklin Gothic type: Named in 1902 to commemorate a font style created by Franklin in 1726.
Daylight saving time: Sets the clock later in the “long days” and thereby, by making sunset later, saves on candles or electricity.
Franklin phonetic alphabet: An alternative alphabet that removed c, j, q, w, x, and y but added four new consonants and two new vowels so as to bring consistency to spelling in the English language.
The gulf stream: Explained the more rapid return voyage to England and the need to sail south when heading west, as well as European winters that are milder than those in the Western Hemisphere.
The public library: Franklin established the first lending library in America, located in Philadelphia.
An extraordinary range of interests! And consider Franklin’s curriculum for the new University of Pennsylvania, which he established in 1749. Whereas Harvard and Yale aimed to graduate clergymen and mandated the study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Franklin thought in terms of worldly entrepreneurs. He required his students to be exposed to “every Thing that is useful” because “Art is long and their Time is short.”8 Faculty appointments assured that priority was given to physics, engineering, and economics, as well as accounting and farming. French, Spanish, and German were also required, because they would be of use in the business world. What Franklin was advocating in 1749 was a general education curriculum with a smattering of preprofessional courses. Franklin’s educational model has since been adopted by many U.S. schools and colleges, setting the precedent for what we now call a liberal arts education, in which “liberal” means a widely ranging curriculum that frees the student from too-early preprofessional specialization.
The movers and shakers of the world seem to embrace a diverse range of skills, perspectives, and habits of mind. Alibaba founder Jack Ma recalls saying to his son in 2015, “You don’t need to be in the top three in your class, being in the middle is fine, so long as your grades aren’t too bad. Only this kind of person [a middle-of-the-road student] has enough free time to learn other skills.”9 The tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban said in a 2017 interview on Business Insider, “I personally think there’s going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data.”10 Lin-Manuel Miranda earned a liberal arts degree, with a theater studies major, at Wesleyan University and then got a job as a seventh-grade English teacher. While on vacation in 2008, he read Ron Chernow’s exhaustive biography of Alexander Hamilton. The combination of his interest in the theater and his interest in political history led to the creation of Hamilton, during the writing of which he said, “I have a lot of apps open in my brain right now.”11 The more broadly based the information in mind, the more likely that disparate ideas are combined.
POLYMATHS HAVE BEEN COMBINING DISPARATE THINGS TO CREATE transformative new ones for millennia. The ancient Egyptians combined the head of a human and the body of a lion to fashion the Sphinx. Archimedes combined a screw and a pipe to produce the Archimedes screw, a machine that can lift water to higher ground, enabling either irrigation or flood relief. Johannes Gutenberg looked at the block-letter stamps used in printing and at a wine press and created the printing press, arguably the most important invention between the wheel and the computer. Cyrus McCormick saw a scythe and a comb and invented the reaper for harvesting crops. Samuel F. B. Morse knew how to send electrical signals over short distances, but seeing teams of relay horses gave him the idea for periodic signal boosters and an effective system of telegraphy. Vincent van Gogh grew up in Holland among textile weavers and throughout his life carried with him a box full of two-colored skeins of wool; about 1885, he thought of combining the striated pairs with the brushstrokes in his paintings, and the result was the ball-like, two-tone swirls we see in works such as The Starry Night (1889).
Ordinary mortals combine things, too. George de Mestral (1907–1990), for example, invented Velcro when he realized that the burrs that got stuck to his clothing on a hunting trip could be combined with a new synthetic fiber to form the hook-and-eye material we today call Velcro. Art Fry (b. 1931), an employee at 3M, saw the adhesive capacity of Scotch tape and the usefulness of bookmarkers in his hymnal; one day he put them together and voilà!: the Post-it Note. Lonnie Johnson (b. 1949), who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, needed to design a new heat pump, one that would use water rather than freon; he saw a squirt gun in a swimming pool in his native Alabama and put the squirt gun together with the heat pump. The result: the Super Soaker, today among the bestselling toys in the world. Keep your eyes open.
What enables diverse ideas to coalesce into something original? In 2019, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos commented that in the business world, “The outsized discoveries—the ‘non-linear’ ones—are highly likely to require wandering.”12 Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955), the self-effacing genius behind the World Wide Web, describes the creative process in these words: “Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit.”13 The creative mind does not run along a straight track but rather jumps frenetically in a game of conceptual hopscotch. The more squares in play and the greater the distances, the greater the potential for a combinatorial insight that generates an exceptionally original idea. As Albert Einstein said to a friend in 1901, “It is a glorious feeling to discover the unity of a set of phenomena that seem at first to be completely separate.”14 The writer Vladimir Nabokov saw this as an act of genius, writing in 1974 that genius is “seeing things others don’t see. Or rather the invisible link between things.”15 Combine things.
IN AN INTERVIEW IN WIRED IN 1996, STEVE JOBS SAID, “CREATIVITY is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”16 Although Jobs dropped out of Reed College, he stayed around long enough to audit courses of special interest, including one in calligraphy taught by a Trappist monk. That experience would lead him to pay close attention to the fonts used on the first Macintosh computers, which subsequently became the classical fonts on every Apple computer.17 In 2007, Jobs implemented his most transformative—and profitable—idea when he combined Apple’s mobile music player (iPod) with its new telephone (iPhone). Up to that point the two functions had resided in entirely different bodies. Eventually, Apple created a device that combined camera, calculator, voice recorder, alarm clock, email, news, GPS navigation, music, and—oh, yes—a telephone.
Apple Inc. was founded in a garage in California in 1976 by two guys named Steve: Jobs and Wozniak. Wozniak fashioned the innards of the first Apple computers: hardware, circuit board, and operating system—technical things that Jobs did not fully understand. Jobs focused on the externals: functionality, the user’s experience, and interconnectivity with other devices. It was Jobs who saw the broader picture—that the future in computing would rest with the company that could combine software design with the production of computer hardware. Wozniak was the hedgehog; Jobs was the fox.18 For years the two made a great team. But which genius do we remember today?
As Jobs suggested, most invention comes from observing disparate things and seeing an unexpected relationship between them. We do this in science when we use equations such as E = MC2, for example; and in poetry and everyday speech when we use metaphor and simile. Aristotle considered a metaphor to be something extraordinary: “This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”19 Professor Dedre Gentner of Northwestern University, an expert in analogical thinking, says this about analogies: “Our ability to think relationally is one of the reasons we’re running the planet.”20
Sometimes beneficial relationships exist that we don’t see or fully understand. For example, experts have observed that a broad-based precollege education in art and music will lead to higher scores in standardized tests of math and verbal skills.21 But why? In the case of math and music, at least, there is a hidden connection. Math is patterns of numbers, and, if we look more deeply, music is as well. Music has two primary elements: sound and duration. Pitches and harmonies are measured in precise vibrations (sound waves) per second, and rhythms are set by proportional durations written in time signatures such as 4/4. We all respond to mathematically organized pitch patterns when we enjoy a pleasing melody and to durational patterns when we dance to a consistent beat in exercise class. Music and math are logic-based processes that produce aesthetic satisfaction,22 and many great minds have linked the two. Leonardo da Vinci was a professional-level musician on the viola da braccio, and Galileo, the son of a world-famous music theorist, played the difficult lute. Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” was an excellent violinist and Werner Heisenberg, a Nobel Prize winner who gave us the first formulation of quantum mechanics, a skilled pianist. Max Planck, likewise a Nobel laureate in physics, wrote songs and operas. Albert Einstein, the personification of genius, said that had he not become a physicist, he would have become a musician.23 His favorite composer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Who knew that Mozart was a mathematician? Mozart began to study math around age four, about the time that he first engaged with music.24 His sister, Nannerl, recounted, “In these years he was eager to learn, and whatever his father wrote out for him he pursued immediately with the greatest energy to the point that he would forget about everything else, even music. For example, when he learned arithmetic, he covered table, chairs, walls, indeed the entire floor with numbers.”25 By the time he was a young adult, Mozart had become fascinated with number theory, numerical riddles and puzzles, and gambling. About age twenty-four, he acquired a copy of Joseph Spengler’s Anfangsgründe der Rechenkunst und Algebra (Fundamentals of Arithmetic and Algebra, third edition, 1779) and began a program of self-study, paying special attention to the section “Relationships and Proportions.”
Figure 9.1 is just one of many of Mozart’s musical sketches in which his desire to work with numerical patterns eclipsed his desire to compose music. Look carefully, and bear with me for a moment. Mozart selected five numbers: 2, 3, 5, 6, and 28. From those he took all three-number combinations (2, 3, and 5 or 3, 5, and 6, for example) and placed them in a column to the right side of the page, identifying the column with the Italian abbreviation tern, which stands for ternario, or “group of three.” Then he did the same with all possible two-number combinations (again, ten are possible). He called the process amb, short for the Italian ambedue, meaning “both.” At some point Mozart looked over his two columns and, working in a way akin to that of a modern number theorist, had an insight: the sum of all possible ten pairs of numbers (176) taken from a five-number set is equal to four times the sum of the five numbers within the set (2 + 3 + 5 + 6 + 28 = 44), and the sum of all ten three-number possibilities within the set of five (264) is six times the sum of the five numbers of the set. This is true for any set of five numbers (try it). But Mozart wasn’t finished; he began to play with retrograding patterns of numbers: 1936:484:1936 and 44:176:264:484:264:176:44. As his obsessive calculations show, Mozart was deeply interested in numerical relationships. Not coincidentally, listeners over the centuries have commented on the “perfect proportions” in Mozart’s music, Einstein calling them “a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.”26 Here the observation of Berkeley psychologist Donald MacKinnon can be applied to the arts as well as the sciences: “Some of the most creative scientific achievements have been accomplished by men who, trained in one field, enter upon another.”27 You need to cross-train.
FIGURE 9.1: While working out an erudite three-voice fugue during 1782, Mozart broke off to engage in mathematical computations (Mozart, Skb 1782j, recto, National Library, Vienna).
Vienna, National Library, Mozart Skb 1782j: Craig Wright
PABLO PICASSO, ANOTHER BRILLIANT POLYMATH, FAMOUSLY SAID, “I do not borrow, I steal!” And like the thieving fox, Picasso “stole” from everywhere, taking from seventeenth-century old masters as well as from the junkyard. He would combine an idea in his head with an image or object he saw to create something radically new. An old bicycle seat and handlebars might be combined with a childhood memory of a bullfight to form a modernist sculpture. Picasso’s mind was energized by external appropriation, and what he stole, he did not intend to return.
FIGURE 9.2: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a thunderbolt of modernism wrought in part by the artist’s exposure to African masks and in part by a new awareness of the art of Paul Cézanne (Museum of Modern Art, New York).
Peter Barritt: Alamy Stock Photo
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; Figure 9.2) is arguably the most important painting of the twentieth century, the first work of Cubism and the opening salvo in the onslaught of modern art. In Les Demoiselles, two new external experiences combined in Picasso’s mind. First, in 1907, Picasso confronted the work of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) in a retrospective exhibition of that artist at the Petit Palais in Paris; there he saw a new kind of painting, one that exploited simple forms, two-dimensional planes, and geometric shapes. Later that same year, Picasso discovered African masks at the musty Museum of Ethnography at the Trocadéro, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.28 The exposure to Cézanne brought a new awareness of the power of pure form in art. The African masks did the same but added an element of primal terror. Seeing the masks was a defining moment for Picasso: “I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, with the masks, the redskin dolls, the dusty mannequins—Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that day.”29 Picasso combined those two visual elements with his own psychic intensity and thereby changed the course of art history.
But wait a minute: Isn’t “stealing” things, as did Picasso, illegal? Not if you combine the object with original material of your own and thereby create something new and transformative. Picasso put real newspapers and other copyrighted objects into his collage art, and no one sued. Warhol incorporated images of Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Elvis, Marilyn, and Ma into his art, and they didn’t go to court to stop him. You, too, can be a creative fox. Just be sure that, pursuant to the Fair Use Doctrine of the 1976 Copyright Law of the United States, you are repurposing and transforming the “stolen” work for social or cultural benefit.30
CHARLES DARWIN WAS TOO MUCH OF A GENTLEMAN TO STEAL ANYTHING. But he did combine two disparate theories circulating in the early nineteenth century: the transmutational theory of evolution and the Malthusian theory of population. Transmutation, as propounded by Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) and more clearly by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), held that species evolved over time as they adapted to local environments, then passed their acquired traits on to the next generation;31 Malthusian population theory posited that humans would grow in uncontrollable numbers unless limited by the “beneficial” effects of famine, disease, and war. Charles Darwin had studied the writings of his grandfather and of Lamarck both before and during college in Edinburgh. But not until after his voyage on the Beagle (1831–1836) around the Galápagos Islands did he happen to read Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. At that point, genius Darwin appears to have experienced a combinative “eureka” moment.32
In October 1838, that is fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.33
That theory, of course, was what we now call Darwinian evolution, one based on a genetic advantage, or “natural selection.”34 No theory was more potentially explosive for both science and theology than Darwin’s “brutalist” model: that only those animals lucky enough to have the right genes for a particular environment will survive. Yet for another twenty years, Darwin continued to verify and fine-tune his big idea. Finally, in 1859, he came forth with On the Origin of Species.
So what does this make Darwin, fox or hedgehog? Presumably the latter: Darwin relentlessly pursued one great big idea, maybe the biggest of them all. But recall Jeff Bezos’s observation that creative ideas come from “wandering.” Possibly no Victorian had wandered more and seen more things than Charles Darwin had. In 1831, he left the comparative comfort of England on the Beagle for uncharted territories, eventually circumnavigating the globe. But unlike the sailors on the Beagle, he got off the ship to make land excursions across the plains of Patagonia, into the Amazon rain forest, and up the rocks of the Andes, during which time he saw, ate, and was bitten by almost every species imaginable. In fact, during his five-year voyage “on” the Beagle, he spent two-thirds of his time on land, prowling around like a fox.35 By the end, he had become a pluralist—a zoologist, botanist, geologist, and paleontologist of the first order. Darwin was a fox in hedgehog’s clothing.
SOMETIMES A FOX FALLS INTO A HEDGEHOG’S HOLE. THAT HAPPENED to the far-ranging Thomas Edison while he was looking to build out an electrical system to connect and supply power to all of North America. Having invented a long-burning light bulb in 1879, Edison now needed wall sockets and circuits, power lines, transformers, and power generators to light those bulbs.36 But which mode of electrical current to use, direct or alternating? DC is good for lower voltages and short distances, AC for high voltages and long distances. Edison, fresh off the success of the light bulb, bet the farm on DC. In February 1881, he left his rural Menlo Park research lab and moved his family and the manufacturing center of Edison Electric to lower Manhattan. There his men tunneled deep beneath the streets to lay conduits for DC current (Figure 9.3).
But Edison had blundered. DC is not an effective means by which to wire a large city or a nation because it requires expensive generators to create new current about every half mile, depending on the load. To build out his capital-intensive DC system, Edison needed money and decided to sell progressively larger amounts of his Edison Electric stock to J. P. Morgan and his partners, who, within a decade, had ousted Edison and turned Edison Electric first into Edison General Electric and then simply into General Electric.37 With Edison no longer in control, J. P. Morgan and General Electric switched to AC.
FIGURE 9.3: Detail from an illustration from the June 21, 1882, Harper’s Weekly captioned “The electric light in houses—laying the tubes for wires in the streets of New York.” Edison chose to bury the wires underground rather than string them on poles.
Alpha Stock: Alamy Stock Photo
Tunnel vision is often the result of “sunk cost syndrome.” Edison had gone so deeply, and at such expense, into a single solution that it seemed impossible to admit defeat and change course. The problem for a genius like Edison is to recognize the moment at which grit and perseverance must yield to common sense. But the foxy Edison had more than one interest. He would go on to make a commercial success out of an array of diverse practical products, not only the light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture but also the public address system, hearing aid, talking doll, and even the prefabricated cement house.
THE OVERCONFIDENCE OF THE EXPERT, ALONG WITH THE SUNK cost syndrome, had caused the Wizard of Menlo Park to fail in this case by ignoring other possible solutions. “Cognitive entrenchment can limit creative problem solving if the expert fails to look beyond his existing schemas for new ways to tackle a challenge,” said David Robson in his 2019 book, The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes.38 The hedgehog can’t see the forest for the trees. On the other hand, often the fox roots around so brazenly that he doesn’t see the danger in the forest. How many times have you said to yourself, “If only I’d known what I was getting into, I wouldn’t have gone there!” The creativity specialist Donald MacKinnon explained why lack of expertise can be a good thing: “The expert, all too often, ‘knows’ both on theoretical grounds and on the basis of empirical findings that certain things are not so or just cannot be done. The naive novice ventures what the expert would never attempt, and often enough succeeds.”39 MacKinnon’s exhortation: Don’t be the blinkered hedgehog. Do what the farsighted fox Nikola Tesla urged: have the boldness of ignorance.40
Economists such as the Nobel Prize−winning Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) and Philip Tetlock (Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction) agree. They point out that narrowly focused experts, no matter how famous, do less well than wide-ranging generalists when it comes to predicting the future and solving the problems of tomorrow.41 Tetlock’s work inspired a four-year competition between teams of U.S. intelligence analysts demonstrating that widely read foreign language− speaking generalists make better predictions than do narrow experts in matters of world affairs.42 Recent studies have also shown that Nobel Prize−winning scientists were nearly three times as likely to engage in a fine arts activity as were their less distinguished colleagues, with music being the most frequently chosen pursuit.43 Similarly, they are twenty-two times as likely to get engaged in amateur performance activities, such as acting, dancing, or doing magic.
U.S. politicians, however, are slow to get the message, at least with regard to education. Governors and state legislatures are linking education to “employability,” as reported in articles such as “A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Spending.”44 Some colleges are doing away with majors in classics and art history.45 Even liberal president Barack Obama recently took a jab at the “useless” liberal arts.46
The geniuses of this chapter, however, teach a different lesson. They instruct us to wander widely, combine things, cross-train, be fearless, keep our eyes open, avoid sunk cost syndrome, and have the boldness of ignorance. They also implicitly caution us against thinking that education must lead immediately to that job of a lifetime. In the 1920s, a tech engineer’s “half-life of knowledge” was thirty-five years; in the 1960s, it was a decade; and today it is five years at most.47 The lesson for all of us is: stay nimble. Educators in the Tech Ed field are coming to believe that as we move from job to job, now at the rate of one new position every five years, what will be needed is access to college-level short courses across a wide range of subjects over the duration of a lifetime, the “sixty-year curriculum,” as it is called.48
In 2011, Steve Jobs said that for technology to be truly brilliant, it must be coupled with artistry. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” he said. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”49 Thus, aspirational young people majoring in the STEM fields would do well to heed the advice of the Nobel laureate/violinist Albert Einstein, who, in a talk in 1950, disparaged specialization and concluded, “Every serious scientific worker is painfully conscious of this involuntary relegation to an ever-narrowing sphere of knowledge, which threatens to deprive the investigator of his broad horizon and degrades him to the level of a mechanic.”50 We all need hedgehogs to fix the things we dearly love, but to create a new and improved world, better call Mr. Fox.