From the Archives: Keep Tinkering | Dave Look

From Escape Velocity episode 1.

Transcript lightly edited for readability. Timestamps refer to the excerpt.



[0:00] Tracey Halvorsen: How do you prioritize your time, and why is it important to you to keep some of these other aspects of your life in the mix?

[0:13] Dave Look: Yeah, it's a great question. I was pondering it a bit, even just thinking about having this conversation. Prioritization is really hard for me.

[0:27] Dave Look: Shell, my wife, used to say my hobby was hobbies, and that I just like to try everything. So, the lockpick set's a great example. There was a day I was like, I want to learn how to pick locks. So I ordered a bunch of lockpick stuff and just tried it. And those things come up over time for me. So prioritization has been something that I continue to work towards.

[0:54] Dave Look: But as you mentioned, the Four Thousand Weeks book, reading that book and a couple others, From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, it just helped me try to rethink about my time and the fact that I don't have an unlimited amount of time to do every single thing I want to do. And at some point I have to choose what are the highest priorities to me. And the other thing that it helped me see is that those priorities can shift over time.

[1:26] Dave Look: So, like I said, Krav Maga over the last year has been a huge priority for me, but it isn't just about Krav Maga. It's about my health, physical health, mental health, longevity. I think about it as something that is a 40-year thing. It's not just about this last year. It's about how healthy will I be in 40 years as much as it is how healthy will I be this year.

[1:55] Dave Look: So that helps me to, as I start to think about my priorities, I try to say: how does this thing that I'm prioritizing have multiple impacts on my life or the life of my family? Obviously spending time with my son is both edifying for myself and for him and his future. So when I can double up on the value of a priority, that certainly helps.

[2:22] Tracey Halvorsen: Yeah, well, I mean, you need to be able to kick some elk or bear ass in the woods, so I can also see why that is a...

[2:31] Dave Look: I don't know if I'm going to fight a bear.

[2:35] Tracey Halvorsen: Well, if you had to, at least you would have some idea of maybe how to protect yourself.

[2:43] Dave Look: I don't know. We don't do a lot of bear fights in class. Now, taking a bat away from somebody, or a knife or a gun, we do that. There's no bear fighting.

[2:54] Tracey Halvorsen: I mean, Bear Maga needs to be a spinoff. But I wanted to go back to what you said. Shell jokes that your hobby is hobbies.

[3:04] Tracey Halvorsen: I think a lot of times we beat ourselves up for having hobby addiction or shiny object syndrome. But I'm curious. I think there's so much value in taking deep dives into completely new things, even if they have no direct correlation to your work or your personal life. It's like, yeah, I'm going to become a lockpicking amateur expert. Well, that may come in handy one day, let's hope not.

[3:38] Tracey Halvorsen: But I think that some aspect of that new process, learning something new, researching something new, doing something new physically especially, does impact your brain and your neuroplasticity and your ability to make new connections. So I'm curious what your perspective is on that.

[4:00] Dave Look: Well, I think, I don't remember where I read this, but I feel like I read a study several years ago that was talking about technology and the future of work. And it was saying essentially that the people that would be able to thrive in the new world with tech, and this was really before AI became the buzzword and the common term, were people that were going to be able to look across multiple domains and connect ideas from them.

[4:31] Dave Look: And I don't know that that was ever my intention, but when I look back at my life, that has been something that I've been grateful to have experienced, which is: I like to figure out how things work. I like to take things apart. I like to rebuild them. I like to do that in different domains. So whether it's a computer or a car or whatever that thing might be, I've sort of always had a tinkering mentality.

[5:00] Dave Look: And I think that same thing applies to the way we manage our calendar, the way we run meetings. If we're not tinkering, if we're not taking it apart and putting it back together, and we're just doing the same thing over and over and over again, I think we lose some of that spark of creativity that we have as humans. You and I talk about that often, which is: we are creative beings and we need to be continuing to create.

[5:28] Dave Look: So all that to say, I think getting to start to play with different ideas from different domains, I don't know, there's just a beautiful intersection of that.

[5:41] Dave Look: A simple, great example was there was a research paper written, I forget who wrote it, but it was talking about jazz and improv in jazz and how that applies to leadership. And I think those types of connections, to say: look at music and the way that a jazz ensemble can trade leadership back and forth. And look at how that can apply to an organization or a small team or, in my team's case, we're building complex web applications and products.

[6:15] Dave Look: So how do we trade the lead in the same way a jazz ensemble would? I think those types of connections across different domains is wonderful.