It's bizarre how sometimes things on a similar subject somehow converge, when you get the feeling that the universe is trying to tell you something when you see or hear two (or more) separate, seemingly disjointed experiences and all of a sudden, the combination of those things helps to bring an overall point into crystal clarity. So bear with me.

First Anecdote
The first was a videotaped speech given by Mike Rowe, host of one of my favorite shows, Dirty Jobs at the EG08 Conference. As with most TV personalities giving speeches, he tried to give his audience an idea of what things were like behind the scenes. He went into particular detail about the sheep herding episode (I saw that one) and how he thought that was benign enough, until he was informed ahead of taping that part of his job would be castrating the sheep. So in an attempt to be a good sheep-herder, he researched with the Humane Society the most humane way to castrate a sheep. Without going into too much detail, it involved a very tightly wound rubber band around the affected area. Blood flow is cut off, tissue gradually dies, and the affected area simply falls off.

So, the first day of taping and sheep-herding comes, and it's castration time. Mike, to his horror, watches as his boss for the day, an experienced sheep-herder, whips out a knife, and after castrating one sheep already with it, readies it to do the deed again. Rowe goes "Whoa. I can't do this. Let's do this the right way." The sheep herder says "Like the Humane Society told you?" "Yes," Rowe replies.

The sheep herder gets out the rubber band, applies it, and Rowe watches, horrified again, as the banded sheep, staggers, squeals and falls in obvious distress. Shock changes to disbelief as the sheep where the process was done with the knife happily grazes off in the distance. Rowe then asks how long it takes for the rubber band process to finish.

"About a week," says the sheep-herder.

Update 4/9/09: Rowe's complete presentation at the EG08 conference. He does go into detail about his experience so it's not exactly for the squeamish, but it's a very entertaining speech.

Second Anecdote
Several years back, I used to work for a military school. At the time, I was dating, but at that point not engaged to, my future wife. As far as the job itself went, I thought it was as close to a single guy's dream job as I could get as I was paid to basically exercise from when I got up until when I went to bed. I got this particular assignment because one of the officers heard me speak some very marginal Spanish to a cadet from the Dominican Republic and made an incorrect assumption that I was fluent in Spanish. As a result, I was put in charge of a platoon of 40 "ELI" cadets. ELI stood for English Language Instruction, plebes who came to the school 5 weeks early from many different foreign countries in order to get a crash course in English before the academic year started.

So I get my little platoon and we start working our way through Army Field Manual 22-5 learning D&C (drill n' ceremony, aka marching) and a little contest is proposed by one of the other platoon officers (the school had several groups there ahead of the school year - cadet officer corps, cadets recommended for extra PT, the band, etc.) Take your platoon from the parking lot, and get it to the mess hall using only commands from FM22-5 as efficiently as possible. Winning platoon gets 3 hours of on-post liberty with access to phones. You might as well have told the cadets they were getting a million dollars. Getting to call home is something they are normally not allowed to do. It was winner take all. The losers had extra PT.

Each platoon has a couple upperclassmen cadets as sort of drill sergeants, a platoon leader (like me) and an officer who was either an active but on leave, reserve, or retired military guy from one of the 4 branches. The band had a spit-n-polish Army colonel as did leadership platoon. The PT guys had a gung-ho Marine 2nd lieutenant and my group had a gruff retired Navy chief petty officer. As we watched the other platoons abandon their regular schedule to practice drill endlessly on the sun-baked parade field, we went about our normal schedule. I watched the spit-shine colonel's guys move with expert precision. I watched the Marine rip his cadets new orifices as only a Marine can until compliance, and perfection of movement, was achieved. I looked at my Navy guy who worked at only maintaining the minimum that Navy regs required for grooming and who really did not like drill and I thought to myself, "We should at least practice push-ups to prepare for losing."

Anyhow, the day comes and all 3 platoons are lined up. The go signal is given and each officer starts calling out their commands. "Atten-HUH! Forward-MARCH!" says the colonel. "DOUBLE TIME!!!!" grunts the Marine in an effort to pass the colonel. My platoon, still standing easy, is watching our Navy CPO amble over from his office to the parking lot.

"Nervous Mr. Brennan?"
"Yes sir chief," I replied.
"Watch this," he says.

"Platoon! Atten-SHUN!" The platoon snaps to attention.
"FALL OUT! FALL IN AT THE MESS HALL!"

To make a long story short, a very, very pissed off colonel and lieutenant eventually paid up after re-reading the field manual, and I learned a very important lesson about rules. It's not rules that constrict or frees a person. It's how well you know what the rules say and don't say and how those rules are applied to achieve an end.

The Point (and I do have one)
I read an article recently in the NY Times Op-Ed page called How to Think written by Nicholas Kristoff. I like Kristoff's writing because of the guy's sheer depth and breadth of world experience. I won't rehash the whole article here, but the idea was that expertise is more dependent upon how the individual's mind works rather than what the individual's mind is filled with. And in many ways, I think he is right. As soon as he made this point, and he makes it early in the article thankfully, both of the aforementioned anecdotes popped back into my head. The author of the article mainly uses negative anecdotes to make his point (those supposed financial experts that predicted wrongly, or simply failed to predict, the financial crisis or the seemingly smart people who lost their shirt because they got taken by a ponzi scheme, etc.) but, being an optimist, I prefer the other end of the spectrum.

After Rowe consults the so-called experts, the guy actually in the field shatters a myth in practice what well known organizations had just assumed to be true. The missing element... respect. The sheepherder extended more respect to the recipient of his procedure than the Humane Society extended to the practitioner of the procedure because of a false assumption of the amount of pain inflicted on the animal. I'm pretty confident that this sheepherder was not born with expert castration skills. He started out probably as bumbling as Mike Rowe was but threw out bad practices in favor of the one used now, which ultimately resulted in far less pain to the sheep than the one proposed by the Humane Society.

A Navy chief put one over on two very accomplished superiors simply by making no assumptions and making the rules of the contest work for him by extending freedom where the others imposed restriction that wasn't required in order to accomplish the task at hand. Perhaps the biggest myth exposed in both of these illustrations is that original thinking is not just the realm of the super educated or the stratosphere of IQ scores. The freeing of the mind to think greater thoughts on higher planes can come about simply by admitting it when a preconceived notion is proven false.