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I’m a voracious learner – curious about everything and always at risk of disappearing down any number of fascinating rabbit holes.
A couple of years ago I started a new morning routine (shout out to Hal Elrod’s Miracle Morning). Since then I have started most days with some quiet reading and have increased my reading ten fold. This practice feeds my curiosity, educates me on a wide variety of topics, and has become one of the most enjoyable parts of my day.
This week I am reading Tim Ferriss’ Tribe of Mentors, and this morning’s insight came from one of the mentors featured in this book: Vitalik Buterin, who is the creator of Ethereum, and the co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. His recommendation is simple yet powerful:
“Be interdisciplinary. In my case, I follow quite a bit of research in computer science, cryptography, mechanism design, economics, politics, and other social sciences, and the interactions between these fields tend to very often inform strategic and protocol decisions.”
I love this advice, and it is a powerful force in innovation. It reminds me of one of my favourite innovation stories that was shared by Greg Satell in this article in Harvard Business Review:
“One of the best innovation stories I’ve ever heard came to me from a senior executive at a leading tech firm. Apparently, his company had won a million-dollar contract to design a sensor that could detect pollutants at very small concentrations underwater. It was an unusually complex problem, so the firm set up a team of crack microchip designers, and they started putting their heads together.
About 45 minutes into their first working session, the marine biologist assigned to their team walked in with a bag of clams and set them on the table. Seeing the confused looks of the chip designers, he explained that clams can detect pollutants at just a few parts per million, and when that happens, they open their shells.
As it turned out, they didn’t really need a fancy chip to detect pollutants — just a simple one that could alert the system to clams opening their shells. “They saved $999,000 and ate the clams for dinner,” the executive told me.”
Do you have any great examples of the power of being interdisciplinary?
I’d love to hear them.
First published on Pam Rebecca.
