I’m no fan of tobacco companies or their advertising tactics, but I liked the following story.

When the head of a mammoth [advertising] agency solicited the Camel Cigarette account, he promised to assign thirty copywriters to it, but the canny head of R. J. Reynolds replied, “How about one good one?” Then he gave his account to a young copywriter called Bill Esty, in whose agency it has remained for twenty-eight years.

One really good person can accomplish more than thirty who aren’t so good, especially in creative work.

Source: Confessions of an Advertising Man

 

Three or four very short stories on the difficulty of learning to use simple things. Depends whether you count the last section as a story.

* * *

When I was taking freshman physics and we were stuck on a problem, the professor would say “Well, F = ma.”

True, but absolutely useless. Yes, we know that F = ma. (Force equals mass times acceleration.) Nobody thought “Oh, that’s it. I was thinking F = ma². That explains everything.” Newton’s laws are simple (in a sense) but subtle to apply. The difficult part isn’t the abstract principles but their application to concrete problems.

* * *

The heart of Bayesian statistics is not much more complicated than F = ma. Its the statement that

posterior ∝ likelihood × prior.

It takes a few years to learn how to apply that equation well. And when people try to help, their advice sounds about as useless as “Well, F = ma.”

* * *

Learning to use Unix was hard. When I asked for help getting started, a lab assistant said “Go read the man pages.” That’s about as hostile as saying “Want to learn English? Read a dictionary.” Fortunately I knew other people who were helpful. One of them told me about the book.

But still, it took a while to get the gestalt of Unix. I knew how to use a handful of utilities, and kept thinking everything would be fine once I knew maybe 10x as many utilities. Then one day I was talking with a friend who seemed fluent working with Unix. I asked him how he did a few things and realized he used the same tools I did, but used them better. It was almost as if he’d said “I just use F = ma” except when he said it things clicked.

* * *

The motivation for this post, the thing that brought these stories to mind, was listening to a podcast. The show had some good advice, things that I know I need to do, but nothing I hadn’t heard many times before. The hard part is working out what the particulars mean for me personally.

It often takes someone else to help us see what’s right in front of us. I’m grateful for the people who have helped me work out the particulars of things I was convinced of but couldn’t see how to apply. Sometimes I have the pleasure of being able to do that for someone else.

“If it were easy, someone would have done it.” Maybe not.

Maybe the thing is indeed easy, and has been done before. Then someone was the first to do it. The warning that it had been done before didn’t apply to this person, even though it would apply to the subsequent people with the same idea.

This reminds me of the story of two economists walking down the street. They notice a $20 bill on the sidewalk and the first asks “Aren’t you going to pick it up?” The second replies “No, it’s not really there. If it were, someone would have picked it up by now.”

Sometimes a solution is easy, but nobody has had the audacity to try it. Or maybe circumstances have changed so that something is easy now that hasn’t been before.

Sometimes a solution is easy for you, if not for many others. See how much less credible the opening sentence sounds with for you inserted: “If it were easy for you, someone would have done it.”

I was listening to a classic music station yesterday, and I heard the story of a professional pianist whose hand was injured in an accident. He then started learning trumpet and two years later he was a professional trumpeter. I didn’t catch the musician’s name.

I was not surprised that a professional in one instrument could become a professional in another, but I was surprised that he did it in only two years. It probably helped that he was no longer able to play piano; I imagine if he wanted to learn trumpet in addition to piano he would not have become so proficient so quickly.

If you go by the rule of thumb that it takes about 10 years to master anything, this professional pianist was 80% of the way to becoming a professional trumpeter before he touched a trumpet. Or to put it another way, 80% of being a professional musician who plays trumpet is becoming a professional musician.

Transferable skills are more difficult to acquire and more valuable than the context in which they’re exercised.

Related posts

• Professional volunteers
• Doing good work with bad tools

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard about how Mozart would compose entire musical scores in his head and only write them down once they were finished. Even authors who stress that creativity requires false starts and hard work have said that Mozart may have been an exception. But maybe he wasn’t.

In his new book How to Fly a Horse, Kevin Ashton says that the Mozart story above is a myth based on a forged letter. According to Ashton,

Mozart’s real letters—to his father, to his sister, and to others—reveal his true creative process. He was exceptionally talented, but he did not write by magic. He sketched his compositions, revised them, and sometimes got stuck. He could not work without a piano or harpsichord. He would set work aside and return to it later. … Masterpieces did not come to him complete in uninterrupted streams of imagination, nor without an instrument, nor did he write them whole and unchanged. The letter is not only forged, it is false.

Related posts

• Mozart and Blue Rondo à la Turk
• Don’t try to be God, try to be Shakespeare

 

From Freeman Dyson:

Economic forecasting is useful for predicting the future up to about ten years ahead. Beyond ten years the quantitative changes which the forecast accesses are usually sidetracked or made irrelevant by qualitative changes in the rules of the game. Qualitative changes are produced by human cleverness … or by human stupidity … Neither cleverness nor stupidity are predictable.

Source: Infinite in All Directions, Chapter 10, Engineers’ Dreams.