Why Cross-Pollination Is A Crucial Element When Acquiring Talent
Stick to what you know. That's what we're told when we're trying to acquire a skill. And yet, talented are not as focused at you'd believe. If anything, they cross-pollinate their knowledge.
Turn on your radio and listen to the music.Do you find anything familiar between one song and the next?
Well, Paul Wolfe (who's a bass guitarist) did.
In his research, he found about 30 common chord progressions used in around 80% of the music you hear.
And what was interesting was that for every chord progression he looked at, there were examples of Beatles tunes that used them. In their early days, the chord progressions were what you'd find in more straightforward music. But as they got more sophisticated, the chord progressions got increasingly complex. The factor that made the Beatles unique—namely, their songwriting—was based directly on their exposure to lots of different chord progressions and styles of music.
And this is the key to talent: a mix of abilities.
So what is this mix of abilities? Look around you at a large number of very talented people, and you notice they're exceedingly good at not just one thing. Einstein was recognised as a great physicist, but he was an outstanding violinist as well (and probably made good soup). Correspondingly, if you look at someone like Leonardo Da Vinci, he was a sculptor, painter, and probably made delicious soup as well.
Creativity is nothing but two disconnected concepts merged together.
What's common among many talented people is a mix of abilities.
This mix enables them to acquire more talent (yes, acquire) and create an incredibly creative atmosphere. The more they dabble in other fields, the more you find they start getting good at a range of abilities. And this talent acquisition mainly happens because you're able to take the concepts from one field and apply them to another.
Creativity is nothing but two disconnected concepts.
When you think about something creative or new, it's just someone who's taken two unrelated concepts and put them together.
That's what the Beatles did.
Books go on and on about the fact that the Beatles played 10,000 hours of music and hence were geniuses. Sure, but what made them better wasn't the pure hours but the mix. When they did their stint in Hamburg, they played all types of music. And it's this experimenting and mixing one with the other that enables them to come up with a third, a fourth and a fifth—in short, creativity. And so, while the Beatles got a ton of talent in music, the same concept applies to Leonardo, who took his skills to several other fields.
But aren't talented people talented because they were talented in the first place?
No, they're not. Your brain was not designed to do Photoshop, or play the guitar, or dance. Evolution doesn't allow such luxuries because Photoshop didn't exist thirty years ago and may not exist in thirty years. And for the brain to have to implant that learning into your evolutionary process somehow would be a waste of resources. Instead, the brain recognises patterns. And to play the guitar, you have to follow one pattern and use quite another pattern to get good control over Photoshop. They're different disciplines that require your brain to process the information in quite different ways. When people get into a ton of fields, these patterns cross-pollinate.
Now the merely-smart person suddenly becomes a genius.
But does this mean that you "have to" cross-pollinate?
Yes. Experts in any field have hundreds, if not thousands, of ways of doing their job. Their brains are a warren of cross-pollinated concepts that enable experts to apply their skills quickly and efficiently. An expert could be within a single field, or they could cross several fields (like Leonardo did) and still dominate those fields.
And you don't have to be an intellectual genius to experience this factor of cross-pollination.
You can eat one type of potato chips, and after a while, if you've eaten enough, you'll become an expert in the taste, texture, flavour etc. However, if you spend a ton of time eating various types of chips, you can still develop enough expertise to become a chip expert. This recognition factor is how you figure out whether a particular set of chips are your favourite or not. And so, if you can become an expert in chips, yes, you can become an expert in anything.
You can indeed cross-pollinate within your field or cross-pollinate across different domains.
And that's how talent emerges.
Try it and experience it for yourself.
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