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The Value of Incompetence
You can be either curious or arrogant, but not both
At work, I meet with a different person for lunch every day. I also usually have one-on-one meetings with one or two other people throughout the day. All of my lunches are scheduled out until mid-July, about four months into the future. Sometimes I send an invitation for one of these far-in-the-future lunches and the person I’m scheduling with seems incredulous: “I have no idea what I’ll be doing in July!” Some people seem to think it’s weird, other people seem to believe that I’m trying to appear self-important (as if I’m saying, “I can only fit you in with four month’s notice”), still others seem to think that I’m ultra-organized. The truth is none of that. I just enjoy meeting with people and there are only about 20 lunchtimes in a month.
I particularly like meeting with intelligent and knowledgable people. I recently met with a very senior engineer and I was able to ask him about a diverse array of topics that I had been wondering about. He was able to explain everything to me so that I could understand. I have long suspected that if someone isn’t able to explain a concept so that it’s understandable to a child, then they haven’t really understood it themselves. We even had a great riffing session about possible future directions for programmable artificial intelligence accelerators…
