Weekly Reads: Multidisciplinary Advantage, Narrative Traps, and Strategic Thinking
Ideas for developing unique advantages, questioning narratives, and improving decision-making.
Three pieces I read this week that are worth sharing:
Being the (Pareto) Best in the World
It is extremely difficult to be the best in the world at any specific skill. As you climb the expertise ladder, progress becomes exponentially harder. But there's another path to excellence: being multidisciplinary.
If you're great at one thing, very good at another, decent at a third, and interested in many others, you might be the only person on the planet with that exact combination.
The world has plenty of opportunities. The overexploited ones require just a few skills. The underexploited ones hide in high-dimensional corners where few people combine the right interests. This explains why interdisciplinary work has a reputation for unusual returns. It's why diversity helps when building teams.
The lesson? Don't shut down your other interests. Widen your scope. You don't need to allocate time uniformly, but maintain that long tail of curiosities while staying expert in your main thing.
The Narrative Fallacy
We're only comfortable when the world makes sense. When we encounter something new, we rush to explain it. We don't need much convincing because we want to feel like we know. Stories and narratives work because they satisfy this basic human need. As a result, we live in a world ruled by narratives and memes, where truth only matters in small corners.
Several factors make this worse. Plausible stories sound true. We default to believing what we hear instead of questioning. Most interpretations can't be measured or reproduced. People get away with bad predictions because we have short memories. We forget track records. There's no cost to making wrong predictions, so there's no corrective mechanism.
Even scientific research falls into this trap. We decide what results we want before starting. We ignore uninteresting findings. We invest more in ideas we like. We cherry-pick supporting examples.
The fix is simple but hard: be more skeptical of anything protected by an elegant story. Seek empirical evidence instead. In research, approach problems from an interrogative perspective rather than chasing imagined answers.
Humans are not automatically strategic
At one point in my life, I was doing nothing. When I decided to start doing things, my natural approach was brute force. Keep trying whatever comes to mind until something works. Take action immediately because thinking feels like laziness.
The common factor was flatness in thinking. I didn't think about what I should do, what to work on, or how the next year should look. This creates a bigger problem. We make major life decisions on a whim, then spend decades bearing the consequences. This happens regardless of intelligence level. We're simply not built for recognizing and selecting effective long-term strategies.
The solution requires building better habits around goals. Ask what you're trying to achieve. Figure out how you'd know if you achieved it. Gather that information. Test different approaches systematically. Track what works and what doesn't. Split your energy between exploring new methods and exploiting the best ones you've found.
Most importantly, make sure your goal is actually your goal. That you coherently want it.