Today I noticed a curious fact. In the course of a single weekend I did the following: I caught two snakes, set up the video projector, ran a numerical simulation program, explained chaos and stellar evolution to a group of college kids, showed the working of a GPS to some family friends, set up some astronomy software on a PC, copied some programs onto a floppy for a retired army officer, monitored our network for potential hackers, explained the workings of an optical telescope to some students going for the International Astronomical Olympiad, helped my guide with reading data on a CDROM and explained a trekking route to a friend going on a trek. None of these are activities requiring any great skill or knowledge on my part. But there lies the curious fact. Why did I have to do all these things? There was no one else around me who could have done even one of these things. I was not simply the best person for each of these jobs, I was the only person. If I had not been present every one of these events would not have occured or would have taken a significantly different turn.
Let me now turn this around on its head. What was there that I wanted to do for which I needed help from others ? I needed the cooks in the canteen to cook my meals for me. I needed my guide to help me with some research work. I needed help from one person during the snake catching operation. Otherwise, I needed no one. Actually there is no one in this list whose presence was imperative. I could still have done all these things but it would have taken longer. My level of (inter) dependence is not large. (I have not referred to many people on whom I have systemic dependence, like computer manufacturers, electricians, farmers, luck and God, because these elements are common to everyone around me and their use was not locally critical to me, in a temporal sense.)
All this is a clear pointer to how I am different from those around me. All I have to do do is to proclaim myself an expert on something or the other (which I sometimes do). For example, I could proclaim myself to be an expert snake catcher. Once that deed is done, other people respond in one of two ways. They either blindly accept my expertise or criticize me saying that I don't know what I am talking about, without actually trying to learn enough about snakes to verify my statements on snake catching. So what results ? If I am available, then I am called out to catch snakes whenever one is spotted and people standing around decide that that it is better caught than killed. I have once been woken up at 3 a.m. to catch a snake in the kitchen. If the snake is successfully caught, there is wide admiration of the specimen. If I pass it around, people handle it then hand it back to me. Someone who has handled the snake for a long time is bound to ask ``Is it poisonous ?''. This attitude really scares me. It stems from confusion in people minds about my motivation in snake catching. I do not catch snakes because I like catching them. My only desire is that snakes not be killed wantonly, and if my catching them is the most straightforward way to achieve that, then so be it. People with the second attitude have a more condescending view of the event. They say the same thing they said the last time a snake was caught, laugh loudly and walk off. No one seems to realize that there is a third alternative: They can borrow my net anytime they want and try to catch the snake themselves. They can learn more about snakes, the same way I did.
Most people have an attitude different from mine. If they desire something (eg. catching a poisonous snake) all they do is look for the nearest person who can provide this service. If such a person is not available, they promptly change the problem definition. Is there someone available who can kill the snake ? If the answer to this is also negative, then some more redefinition is in order. Can I run away from the snake somehow ? Why is our security staff so incompetent? We truly live in a super specialized society.
My train of thought when faced with a problem is: how should I best solve this problem without help from others? If I am not currently the best man around for the job, am I at least adequate? If not, how much time will I take to come to the adequate level required for solving the problem? Is the solution to the problem a life and death situation so that I must take help from others, at once?
Both attitudes have their flaws. Mine because I can never do the things I want to do, because I fritter away my time, doing trivial work for others and reinventing the wheel, when I try to do everything by myself. People following the other path suffer too, because of either their excessive dependence on people like me, because things do not work out the way they would like to when people like me are not available.
Effective pursuit of goals demands that more people be what I call COMPETITIVE GENERALISTS - People who want to do things themselves, who seek help from others as equals (or less euphemistically, competitors), who criticize others loudly and vociferously in subjects in which they feel qualified to do so , but keep their mouth shut otherwise. Basically why cant everyone be like me ?