Keep your door open.

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? When you think about a lot of the famous people you know who've done great, important creative work, they're usually singular people, or at least it appears that way very often.

[00:00:32] You know, Nobel prizes are not often won jointly, for example, it's given to a person. And yet I would think, I do think, in fact that, the best kind of ideas, the best kind of problems that lead to really important good work comes from collaboration.[00:01:00]

[00:01:00] Having someone to bounce your ideas off of is so, so important. I, I, I feel like I can't even like underscore how important it is. You can be the smartest person in the world, but if you don't have someone to interact with, bounce ideas off of, to learn from and see a different perspective from, you're not gonna be able to do as good work or any good work as you could if you did have that collaborator, and I use that term loosely – sometimes.

[00:01:35] it's not that you're collaborating with a specific person. It's more about, mmm, the concept of keeping your door open, which is one of the concepts from this really famous talk by this computer scientist called Richard Hamming, and it's probably one of my favorite very old talks that originally blew my mind and made me think about [00:02:00] deep work before Deep Work was even a term that was coined.

[00:02:05] And you know, in this talk, he talks about how there's all these scientists that work at the lab that he worked at – Bell Labs – and they keep their doors shut and they get a lot more done in the short term, but the scientists who kept their doors open, they were far more distracted, but the exposure they had to other people and problems and perspectives led them to create and work on far more important work in the long term, which I think is what we ultimately want more of, right?

[00:02:49] Productivity for the sake of productivity is not quite as rewarding as productivity in service of an impactful, important project. [00:03:00] And you know, it's the same thing that we talk about when we talk about like diversity. Diversity in thought, diversity in teams. Because when you take a lot of different perspectives and you put them together, you build something that is greater in the sum of its.

[00:03:18] something new, something more, and it's just, it's not really possible to do that in a vacuum. Yes, you often do need to go into isolation or in a quiet space to actually create a lot of that work, but before that, after that, maybe sometimes in between that time, that space, that phase, you still need to interact with other people.

[00:03:49] You need to experience other perspectives, other angles, other thoughts, other ideas, which will ultimately enrich [00:04:00] and, you know, uh, empower you to create something that you couldn't have created otherwise. This is something that I also touched on in a previous episode when we talked about, you know, the generalist versus the specialist versus the specialized generalist.

[00:04:20] Having exposure to other people is a good thing, long term, provided you still are able to carve out time to do something with these ideas and thoughts that you have. You know, you do need some kind of balance. That is a little bit about what has been on my mind. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.