Knowing a little about a lot of things
My water heater stopped working this week. As I live in Bangalore, it’s impossible to live without a heater. So I immediately booked an appointment from the Urban Company app to fix the heater. This service was listed under electrical appliances & rightfully an electrician came to our home. He looked at the heater, and the electric ports, and said all seemed to work fine. He pointed us to touch the water from the outlet pipe of the water heater, and it boiling hot. He mentioned that there is an issue with the plumbing work in the bathroom & not the heater itself. So he asked us to book an appointment for a plumber to fix the issue.
We were convinced & we called the plumber. The plumber came and he checked the pine lines & the tap. Again, the same answer, he said there seemed to be no issues with the plumbing either. The water was flowing through the pipe, but it just wasn’t hot. He immediately asked us to call an electrician to fix the heater. Something was missing.
Then I showed the plumber that the water from the heater outlet was hot but somehow it didn’t reach the tap. Then he started to look deeper. That’s when he found out that the hot water tap had 2 inlets to it, one from the water heater in the bathroom & the other from the solar heater on the terrace. The valve for the solar heater was open, thus the water was cold (no sun only in Bangalore). We just closed the solar heater valve & everything was fixed.
The electrician came & just checked the water heater. The plumber came & just check if the water was flowing. Both worked fine, but someone had to communicate the information from both sides & synthesise them to arrive at the solution. That’s when I was thinking about the value of knowing a little about a lot of things.
There are a lot of problems that happen at the intersection of fields & not just within one particular field. You need a leader or a synthesiser to understand various fields to solve the problem. This reminds me of the wonderful clip from All In Podcast where David Friedberg talks about leaders vs managers.
Managers don’t look beyond their departments to take decisions, they are worried only about their problems. But leaders are the ones who synthesise information from various departments and make a decision that’s right for the whole organisation. Leaders who delegate top-level decision-making to any specific department will fail as a leader.
This is not just true for taking decisions but also true for coming up with new ideas/solutions to problems. When you start to know more about a lot of things, you try to bring ideas from various fields into yours. This is where the magic happens. Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus & Andril, was talking about the exact same thing in this podcast. He mentions that the most impactful work he did was from going horizontal than going deep into one single thing:
That’s why I believe that there is beauty in knowing a little about a lot of things :)