Always Eat Left Handed: 15 Surprisingly Simple Secrets of Success (2 page)

The play’s most famous line, “if music be the food of love, play on” – describes the passion Orsino has for music, and also the inspiration for the music-filled production I watched that day.  The show had a live keyboard player, banjo, guitar, drums and singing.  Yet one of the most interesting moments came about halfway through the show, at a crucial moment in the plot.

The character of Viola enters, sits on a chair in the middle of the stage and starts playing the cello as the love triangle of the story plays out on stage. It was the sort of moment that happens often when it comes to the world of the arts.  Characters are created around the skills and personalities of the actors who play them. 

Emily Trask, the actress who played Viola, was also a trained cellist.  She has studied dance, can swing from a trapeze and knows how to yodel.  You could easily argue that none of these are really critical to becoming an actress.  In a logical sense, each is a fairly useless skill. 

Yet when it came to landing the coveted part of Viola in this renowned production of 12
^th
Night at the Folger, acting experience was only the beginning.  The story of Emily Trask is an example of how acquiring
useless
knowledge can actually be very
useful
. 

Playing the cello changes everything.

A Man Of Curiosity     

Steve Jobs is famous for many things.  When he passed away, the tributes to his legacy of products and ideas seemed never-ending.  They praised his vision, and his presentation skills, and his ability to simplify big technical challenges.  What most people didn’t talk about was his ability to acquire useless knowledge. 

Like when he dropped out of college and decided to take a calligraphy class to learn about typefaces and print graphic design.  Or when he traveled to India to learn about mysticism and meditation.  Or later when he studied and learned to practice Zen Buddhism.  The story of Steve Jobs isn’t only a story about a visionary inventor.  It is also a story of a man thirsty for knowledge about the world around him.

At its heart, acquiring useless knowledge requires just this one single quality that you often find in visionary leaders like Steve Jobs: a never ending curiosity.

How To Acquire Useless Knowledge

What the stories of both Steve Jobs and Emily Trask illustrate is an ironic truth about acquiring “useless” knowledge.  It can turn out to be the most
useful
thing you can do.  Not only for the knowledge you gain, but for the constant reminder it offers to remain curious about the world. 

Here are three ways that you can start to acquire your own “useless” knowledge:

1. Ask more questions.
     Curious people ask questions in every situation, and most of us grow up doing that as children.  Unfortunately, it is one of those qualities that most of us lose as we move into adulthood.  Reconnecting with that simple skill of asking more questions can not only transform many of the conversations you may have, but it also offers the chance to learn unexpected things.
   
2. Buy unfamiliar magazines.
     A few years ago when I was traveling through South Africa, I picked up a magazine called
   Farmer’s Weekly
   intended for commercial farmers.  One of the stories in the article focused on something the author called the “Amish Paradox” – which refers to the Amish practice of rotating crops and avoiding chemical fertilizers designed to grow larger produce faster.  Instead, they produce smaller fruits and vegetables slower – and their land remains fertile longer.  That lesson has always helped remind me that sometimes you need to give up short term gains to focus on the long term instead. 
   
3. Watch documentary films.
     Ordinarily, I would agree with the usual advice to get off your couch and actually go into the world to learn something.  Yet there is a powerful archive of amazing learning that anyone has access to through the world’s growing population of great documentary films. Some are short and some are longer – but each can take you into a new part of the world or teach you a new skill in a deep and powerful way.  
   

Chapter 2 - Overlap Your Legos

Lesson - Be A Connector

My house is filled with legos. 

And they are not just in a box or in a playroom somewhere either.  The one thing any parent knows is that legos have a habit of spreading.  They hide themselves inside of couches.  They create deadly landmines to step on early in the morning. But despite their ability to travel to inconvenient places, there is still no toy that carries quite so much nostalgia from generation to generation.

As a father of two boys, I have the continual chance to teach and watch as my own kids learn to play with legos and build towers or spaceships.  The easiest way to start is by building a tower.  Every kid begins by stacking one lego on top of another and going as high as they can.  The problem with a tower is that it’s usually pretty unstable.  Go too high, and the whole thing falls and breaks. 

There is a trick, though, that can stabilize just about anything you make with legos.  You need to overlap them. When you do that, you can build a foundation that won’t break apart. You get stability.  At some point, this is the secret every kid needs to learn in order to build something with legos that will last. 

Overlapping legos changes everything.

The Connector Test

The Tipping Point
is one of the best selling books of all time.  In it, author Malcolm Gladwell tries to explain the social psychology behind why certain ideas catch on and how they reach that moment when they “tip” to influence large numbers of people.  To inspire these “social epidemics,” as he calls them, typically takes people from three personality types: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. 

To find those he calls Connectors, he conducted a simple test.  He found about 400 people of varying ages and asked them to look through a random list of about 250 popular surnames and identify how many of them were shared by someone they knew.  In this way, he scored the social connectedness of individuals based on the number of people they knew personally. 

This may seem like an outdated test more than a decade after
The Tipping Point
was published.  In our age of Facebook friends, virtual connections and expanding social networks – it may seem that The Connector Test is no longer relevant.  Or is it?

Why Science Says You Can Only Have 150 Friends

Throughout history anthropologists studying everything from college students to the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies have found that most groups tend to even out at about 150 members.  In fact, around the time that
The Tipping Point
was published, an anthropologist named Robin Dunbar began studying how a group of English people decided whom to send Christmas cards to and found that the number averaged to nearly 150.  From this finding and years of additional research, he proposed that 150 was the number of close friends anyone might have at any given moment.   

Whether or not you agree with “Dunbar’s Number” (as it is now called), it does describe a fundamental human principle which you may already have experienced in your own life – that we can only build real and authentic relationships with a limited number of people.  Above all else, that’s why we need to become and spend time with connectors. 

The connectors are people who help introduce members of one group to another.  Connectors make building relationships with between others a priority.  They are the human equivalent of overlapping legos.  Most of all, connectors believe that success is less about who you know and more about who knows you. 

How To Become A Connector

So when it comes to honing your own skills to be a better connector, what can you do?  The first thing to remember is that people are not born as connectors.  It is a skill that anyone can learn.  Here are a few ways that you could become a better connector and build better relationships yourself in the process:

1. Think like a matchmaker.
     Professional matchmakers spend time getting to know the people they work with.  They understand their motivations and their philosophy of the world.  The aim is to get enough connection so they can find another person who has similar motivations.  Connecting requires a similar skill set.  When you spot similarities, making connections can be a proactive thing.  You don’t need to wait for someone to ask.  If a connection makes sense, you can make it happen.
   
2. Solve problems with introductions.
     Often the people you meet will be struggling with some type of big challenge.  It may be that they need a new member of their team.  Or they are trying to coordinate a cross country move with their family.  We all have daily struggles that we grapple with.  One of the best ways to make powerful connections is to think of yourself in every moment as a problem solver.  If you can put someone who needs help together with another person who can provide the help – it is a powerful connection that people will remember.
   
3. Get out of the way.
    Sometimes the best connections require only an introduction and nothing more.  Knowing when to get out of the way and let great conversations happen without you is one of the hardest skills to learn.  It can feel like you’re being left out.  But connections take on their own life, and the truth is that you need to be prepared for some of them to happen without you.  There’s nothing wrong with that. 
   

Chapter 3 - Wear Jeans

Lesson - Prepare For Serendipity

In many creative industries, the long standing belief is that there are two kinds of people: suits and creatives.  The “suits” handle the money and manage the accounts.  The “creatives” wear jeans (or whatever they want), come up with the big ideas and deliver on them.

It is no coincidence that they are described by what they wear.  We often are.  Over my career in marketing, I have worked at some of the biggest advertising agencies in the world.  Across multiple jobs in multiple countries, I often alternated between dual roles.  For some clients, I was the suit.  For others, I was the creative. 

Almost every day I saw proof that what you wear describes your role to the people around you.  Yet this lesson was about more than just dressing for success or wearing a suit to an interview.  Anyone can tell you to do that (and it is still good advice). 

When I first moved from Australia to America after working in advertising for five years, my idea of dressing for success meant wearing expensive jeans and some kind of designer shirt.  For a pitch, I might wear a sports coat. 

For the team managing the conservative Washington DC office of the large agency where I’d started in 2004, though, dressing for success meant wearing a suit and sometimes even a tie.*  In that office, creatives and suits both wore suits. 

I wore jeans anyway. 

At least, I did right up until I had “the talk” with HR – accompanied by the promise that if I wore jeans to work one more time, I would promptly be fired.

The Myth Of The Tie

So I stopped wearing jeans.  I needed the job. 

Then I retreated into my office, shut the door and focused on my work.  I delivered on the projects I needed to deliver.  I called the meetings I needed to call.  But I lost something I had in my previous jobs.  I lost the moments of random excited creativity.  I lost some of that energy. 

A few months later, I started working with several team members based in the New York office of the same company.  In New York, people wore what they wanted.  They created freely and their office was designed to encourage and inspire.  More importantly, creative people stayed and worked there for far longer.  They were happier. 

When I went to New York, I usually wore jeans.  My clothes reflected my day, but they also became an interesting metric for a separate and equally important element of success: serendipity. 

As I became more comfortable – I felt more free to think differently.  I didn’t feel the need to schedule meetings for every interaction.  I could be inspired by conversations.  But couldn’t all of this have happened if I had worn a tie too?  For me, in that environment – the clear answer was no. 

Wearing jeans helped me make unexpected connections.  It helped me to more easily be myself.

Wearing jeans changes everything.

Of course, as an advertising guy working on creative solutions – jeans were my “uniform.”  That doesn’t have to be the case for everyone.  Your version of jeans could be anything.  It may even be a doctor’s coat.

The Doctor Coat Effect

Last year a team of researchers at Northwestern University
published a study
in the
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
where they found that students who believed they were wearing a doctor’s coat exhibited a heightened sense of attention than those who believed they were not.  Both groups had on the same coat. 

This “Doctor’s Coat Effect” is easy to believe when you imagine the days in your own life when you feel more or less confident based on the clothes that you have chosen to wear.  The interesting side effect of this clothing-induced self confidence is that it has an impact on how other people see you and choose to interact with you. 

How To Prepare For Serendipity

Is success really about wearing jeans on Wall Street?  Not really.  Instead it is just a symbol of the fact that how you choose to look can impact the serendipity of conversations that you have and your mindset towards having those conversations. So how can you increase your chances of having more of those moments?  Here are three suggestions that should help:

1. Show your approachability.
     The biggest effect that clothing has on first impressions can be to give someone else a sense of whether they might be able to start a conversation with you or not.  Serendipity comes partially from your ability to remain open to having new conversations with unfamiliar people on unexpected topics.  The clothes may be one small factor, but they do have the ability to offer a much needed first step.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
   
2. Dress for the situation, not the code.
     No matter how much I may have disliked wearing a tie, if I had a big pitch meeting with a governmental organization or a top tier bank – I usually wore a tie.  Not only was it a standard requirement of the situation, but also my audience was likely to see it as a sign of disrespect if I did not.  Strict dress codes are fine for school uniforms or situations where you have a team uniform you need to adopt.  For more open business cultures, the most important thing is to focus on the situation instead.
   
3. Find a way to share your personality.
   One of my big mistakes when following the no jean mandate was letting that affect my opportunity to express myself.  No matter what situation you happen to be in, or what dress codes you need to adhere to – there is always an opportunity to express a part of yourself.  And the best connections you make or conversations you have may come from those choices above anything else.