4 ms·
It feels like independent mindedness and conventional mindedness is a false dichotomy and that most people are somewhere between each depending on the subject a
by meheleventyone 6y ago
It feels like independent mindedness and conventional mindedness is a false dichotomy and that most people are somewhere between each depending on the subject and context.
Moreover if you subscribe to the dichotomy you're probably doing a poor job of creating an environment that encourages people to be independent minded.
At the organizational level it feels completely normal that it will become more conventional within it's own bubble as it grows. Companies are mostly trying to move in one direction and having lots of independent people off doing their own thing runs counter to that. Other similar structures follow this pattern as well. Part of it is cultural norms developing but part of it is recognizing that a company is very much exerting pressure on the people that work within it. Which is probably why founders find it easier to talk to other founders as they both have the luxury of the freedom to think independently within this context as they are steering the company itself.
You see this with attempts at internal startups or R&D teams where independence is encouraged but it's impossible or hard to spin anything out of them because you end up bumping back into the company pressures trying to do so. You're basically asked to "go do something amazing" ... "but not like that!"
Personally I love small companies primarily for the autonomy it provides and as a designer really value applying myself to different problems. So I get the joy of independence but I think I'm fairly conventional on other topics.
- andi999 6y agoThis reminds me, a long time ago I saw a couple of videos of Steve Jobs at a retreat for Next Computers (in the early phase of the company); now can only find an edited version. I was surprised to see how market analysis his argumentation was driven; while they created something great, he didnt sound independent minded but more like subject to his customers.
- hinkley 6y agoI think if you pick apart Jobs’ vision statements, you can infer that he decided long ago on a type of customer he wanted to sell products to, as did Bill Gates. While it’s news to me that he was numbers driven, I’m not necessarily surprised. Those numbers didn’t make him pander (much), while in other hands numbers often do.
- hnracer 6y agoIt's a spectrum and I'm not sure that Paul would dispute that, he might define the bottom 60 percent of the spectrum as "conventional-minded" and the top five percent as "independent-minded", especially if we think this trait increases superlinearly as we move up the quantile distribution. This dichotomization lowers the resolution but can work practically
- meheleventyone 6y agoRight but it's not even a single spectrum. It varies by topic and context. You can be an independent thinker in some regards but highly conventional in others. As others have pointed out this essay is actually highly conventional for a certain point of view. So whether you're viewed as a conventional or independent minded person is also a subjective factor of the community around you.