Recently Pip Coburn circulated a note on the importance of finding the right balance of challenge for your skill level to avoid boredom and frustration. He noted the linkage to Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow, something that's fascinated me for some time as finding states of flow is important to me.1
The note made me think about levels of frustration and feelings of 'stupidity' one can have. For some time I've identified types of stupidity with one being very useful and perhaps necessary in science. Here's my response:
It’s fascinating to think about these things. Your comment on loving the work - “absolutely loving” it - is so important.
I think it’s important finding a field that no one can possibly master but, at the same time, know parts of it well enough to find where you may have a bit of success in if you apply yourself. As a beginning grad student I had no idea how hard it is to do research. It’s much more difficult than the most demanding courses as it’s an immersion into the unknown. Some people just give up and find easier paths. I find it useful to think about how to be productively stupid.
’Stupid’ is an unfortunate word, but I haven’t found anything better. Productive stupidity isn’t the relative stupidity you may feel in a a class where the other students are doing very well. It’s also not where someone who happens to be very bright is working in an area that doesn’t use their talents. (Stephen Hawking would have been a terrible point guard in the NBA even though the position demands strategic and tactical thinking.) Rather it’s a kind of existential fact .. an absolute stupidity. It puts you in the position of being ignorant by choice (here I use 'ignorant' in the 19th century sense - realizing there's an area you don't know much about and choosing to pursue it). So it’s fine to have failures here and there as you try to find your way. And sometimes, something wonderful is found. The process can generate serendipity. Of course you end up doing many less challenging things as part of the process. They’re often rewarding, but it’s amazing when you find something totally new. It’s what drives a lot of people.
I’ve had some great conversations with people who push their fields and hear the same thing with different words. Yo-Yo Ma, Sarah Pavan (beach volleyball Olympian), a number of physicists and mathematicians as well as several artists.2 The words were different, but the paths were very familiar.
There’s another piece to this. Bringing together a very diverse set of people who excel at productive stupidity is something of an amplifier. Often there are interesting hints and even keys that you never would have thought of. That and it’s often a lot of fun.
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1 Years ago I attended a talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Afterwards I had a few questions including "how do you pronounce your name? He said this is good enough for Americans:
Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high
2 There are many others who probably do something like this .. these are just the people I've talked about it with.
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