On the Road
When I was 17, I read On the Road for the first time. Then, I understood that they were doing drugs in the book but I didn’t understand the volume of drugs that they were taking. Today, it’s clear to me that you can drive from California to New York, non-stop, only with a pile of speed in your pocket.
I wanted to be like the guys in the book but without the drugs, I would rush around until I was exhausted. I would fall over, tired, or I would burn out and get the blues for a few weeks until my batteries recharged or I discovered something new-and-exciting to pursue.
Meyers-Briggs
From age 16 to age 35, my Meyers-Briggs changed from INTP to ENTP. I was on the line for all four of the dimensions when I was 16. Today, I’m on the extreme for all but the third “T” dimension.
Looking back, I think the change was related to my mission to be like the Beatniks in On the Road. I was trying to expand my horizons and learn everything I could. You can’t do that if you are introverted. You can’t do that if you are too analytical because you need to take chances.
In school, I wound up reading random books, journals and (later) blogs that I found. I was always looking for a reason – a paper was due – but wound up fascinated by something related to my work but far enough off-topic that it didn’t help me. I wasn’t trying to avoid work because I usually invested more energy into the tangential studies than into the stuff I needed to graduate.
My grades as an undergraduate kind of sucked.
Only Collect
Interestingly, this tendency I had developed was helpful the moment I walked out of school. I’ve never had a job that was related to the degrees I finished. My jobs were all the result of the pursuit of other ideas or information.
Today, I ran across a short article that would have helped me in this journey if I’d seen it years ago. The last paragraph of the article sums up the reason why I wish I had been more disciplined and methodical as I try, in my own way, to “Only Collect”…
Here, there’s one more point I could make: time fine-tunes your collecting habits. You are a predator of sources. Over time, things will start to jump out at you. For a lionness in the savannah on the hunt, the merest movement in the grass is a stimulus to action, but she has learned to distinguish between the random twitches of the landscape and the presence of prey. In the library and the archive, the hunt is as much a matter of skill as of instinct. In short, until you’re an adult lion, jump at everything — even if it turns out just to be a falling leaf, or a totally bizarre interview between George Bernard Shaw and a Saudi Muslim mystic in Mombasa in 1936, which I discovered amidst some otherwise entirely unremarkable magazine articles on the nature of Islam in Southeast Asia.
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