In this essay (8 min read):
Why being clueless (to a point) might be your secret weapon
What the zombie apocalypse can teach you about information overload
Why successful entrepreneurs think like beginners
One of my favorite quotes comes from the last issue of the Good Earth magazine.
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
Steve Jobs quoted it.
Others have riffed on it.
Like David Hieatt and the motto for his community The DO Lectures:
“Stay Curious.”
Well, I’d like to submit my own take on this.
Stay clueless.
We all start clueless. The trick is how to stay that way.
Sometimes, I’m not sure how I made it through high school.
I went to a Catholic high school for 2 years. When I was a sophomore, I was in 7 classes, 7 clubs, and played two sports at the same time. I got about 4 hrs. of sleep a night.
Believe it or not, the school told all the parents this was pretty normal for their students.
If you asked me about high school, I’d tell you I had a lot of fun, but mostly I spent my time studying. And I was really, really tired. All the time.
Apparently, I was #7 out of 200 in my class. My dad found out somehow.
I didn’t actually know we had class rankings.
It’s fitting my dad found this out, because he’s a big part of the reason I did well in high school. (In addition to the fact that my mom homeschooled me prior to this and did a pretty darn good job).
He figured out my sports’ schedule. Drove me to practices and games. Got me to class at 7:00 a.m. Saved all my awards and records.
I’m glad he did, because I had no idea what was going on.
Every given week, I was so busy, I was just focused on the test at hand.
One example of my lack of awareness still makes me laugh.
I remember winning a bunch of medals for an academic decathlon. One was for art. As a testament to how disorganized and busy I was, I didn’t realize that there was a book of all the artwork, separate from the main study materials. So, I simply memorized descriptions and analyses of paintings, without ever seeing the artwork.
Why didn’t I just Google the artwork? Well… I was pretty new to the internet, and this simply never occurred to me. It was only after the test that I found the book of all the paintings, buried under a stack of other school papers.
In short, I was clueless. A regular Peter Parker.
Over time, I’ve learned to be a bit more organized. (Just a bit). And I’ve realized that a little long-term planning goes a long way.
But I still think there’s a lesson here. Sometimes youthful exuberance, a nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic, and a short-term view of life’s challenges can pay off.
Everyone’s talking about how to be an expert.
But the future belongs to the clueless.
If you’re clueless about how hard it will be, you might actually stick with it until you succeed.
Let me show you. Fast forward to when I was 22.
A few years after college, I ended up overseeing an online high school program. When I started, we had about 400 students and 8 or 9 courses.
We hadn’t made a profit in 6 years, and I was given a year to turn things around. When I left 3 years later, we had 1600 students and about 48 courses.
Looking back, I had no idea what I was doing. Or, at least, it felt like that sometimes.
In those 3 years, I interviewed over 325 teachers. I distinctly remember that first year of hiring new course developers. In particular, I remember hiring for Spanish 1.
We didn’t know how to hire a course developer, let alone for a language we didn’t speak. So we came up with a list of questions that took about 2 hrs. to get through.
Literally. The interviews lasted about 2 hrs. long. It was insane.
The funniest part was when we finally found the guy we liked, we knew within 5 minutes he was the right person for the job. But… we still did the full 2 hr. Interview. It didn’t feel right to give different length interviews for all the candidates. So we stuck with the plan.
After this round of hiring, I said enough was enough. We got it down to a list of questions we could get through in 30-60 min. Or 15 min. for particularly bad candidates.
In retrospect, doing 2 hr. interviews was hilarious. So bad it’s almost unthinkable.
I guess that’s what happens when you’re 22 years old and have no idea how to hire people.
But it wasn’t all bad.
You see, the thing is, we had youthful energy and naïveté. And this worked in our favor.
It meant we were too dumb to realize how unlikely it was for us to succeed.
I’m not against planning. When I applied for the job, I spent all weekend in my office writing out a 5 year plan on my whiteboard.
But if I’d known I’d need to hire over a hundred people, write an HR manual from scratch, write legal contracts, fire people I’d known for years, lead a migration to a new learning management system, and help redesign our customer-facing website….
Well, I would have been a lot more scared. Sometimes, it’s better not to know the future.
As Jesus once said, “Sufficient for the day is the evil therein.”
Plan for tomorrow. Focus on today.
To illustrate this point, I’d like to share an example from literature. A few years ago, I gave myself permission to read whatever I wanted, even if it seemed dumb to other people.
So, I decided to read World War Z.
It’s actually a pretty clever book about all the ways humans might respond to a zombie apocalypse, covering journalists, filmmakers, soldiers, and rednecks all trying to survive in different ways.
There’s a scene from the book that has stayed with me for several years, because it’s directly applicable to most things in life.
A group of U.S. marines are given high-tech gear to help them fight, including head’s up displays that feature digital scans showing all the incoming zombies. Much like the speed limit gauge projected on some cars’ windshields.
In the book, the marines are perfectly confident shooting the zombies right in front of them. But when they look at their head’s up displays and see hordes of zombies stretching for miles, they panic. The soldiers break and run.
Sometimes, too much information is a bad thing.
By all means, have a 5 year plan. But don’t try to solve 5 years of problems all at once.
Sometimes it’s better to just worry about the zombie right in front of you.
There’s a fine line between being clueless and being a billionaire.
Before we go, I’d like to share one more story of a high school student for you.
When Richard Branson was 15, he dropped out of school and started Student Magazine, a magazine covering mental and sexual health, education, culture, and all kinds of other issues he thought young people needed to understand.
Before he dropped out, he got the magazine started by selling ads via his school’s payphone to large corporations. Their ad space payments (for a nonexistent magazine) paid for the first issue.
He went on to found the Virgin empire, complete with Virgin Records, Virgin Airlines, Virgin Mobile, and many other brands.
When he founded Virgin Airlines in 1984, he leased a single used 747 for one flight route between London and New York. The terms of the lease agreement with Boeing allowed him to return the plane at the end of the first year if he couldn’t get the business to work.
Clueless, but not stupid.
His attitude of youthful recklessness, clever experimentation, and a sense of naïveté about the world of business fueled him on his path to becoming a billionaire and one of the most recognizable faces in business.
Is dropping out of high school to start a magazine a well-informed move? Not really.
But it’s not the worst move either.
Stay open-minded. Stay a beginner. Stay clueless.
There’s a concept in Zen Buddhism called “The beginner’s mind.”
In the 1970s, Shunryu Suzuki popularized this idea in the West with this book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. It contained this quote:
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
The problem with becoming an expert is that as you learn more and grow in wisdom, it’s easy to start closing doors and possibilities. Ideally, you want the wisdom of the old, combined with the openness of the young.
Don’t be like me in high school and memorize descriptions of paintings.
But, as we all grow older and advance in our careers, I hope you don’t give up a small sense of your youthful naïveté, confidence, and exuberance.
Dropping out of high school to start a magazine at 15 is foolhardy.
Running an online high school at 22 is unreasonable.
Yet fortune follows the bold. And there’s something beautiful about the beginner’s mind.
Old sages will sometimes hesitate to go where young warriors will.
But, to quote the first issue of Richard Branson’s Student Magazine… “The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all.”
Stay curious enough to keep learning.
Stay a beginner long enough to admit you don’t have all the answers.
Stay brave enough to start before you can see the end.
Stay focused on today’s work instead of tomorrow’s problems.
Stay clueless.
Want to read more like this?
Here’s a few of my favorites:
I love the "stay clueless" slogan. I think all of us are so sick of the experts and gurus, and we're desperate for open-minded conversations where we all don't act so certain of everything.
Love the essay--especially the point about the Marines and not looking too far into the future. As an aside, that is something we (Marines) train for. Stay in the moment.
You may want to check the 1968 NASA Longitudinal Study on Creativity by Dr. George Land and Beth Jarman. Also known as the Paper Clip Test. Average adult comes up with 10-15 traditional uses for a paper clip. Divergent thinkers--think kids who don't know better--ask questions like "Can the paper clip be made of foam, or be 20ft tall, or be made of ice?" which opens up thousands of options.
5-year-olds score at the 98% level of creative genius.
Adults (280,00 in sample) score at 2%
Great essay. I look forward to reading more.