Art is The New Science

I studied in a missionary school run by the Ramakrishna Mission – a residential one, in the barren and backward hinterlands of Bengal, quite far away, in the 80s standards, from my home in Calcutta. As expected, we were always under the tight noose of the monks. More than the discipline, what appeared quite intolerable to many was the fact that arts, sports, athletics, music, elocution, dramatics, creative writing, reading non-academic books in library, meditation and even a course on Indian culture were compulsory, apart from of course the normal academics. I would hate the sports and the athletics but looked forward to the music classes. Given my oratory skills I felt ashamed of myself and looked at my friends, who spoke so well in the debates and elocutions, with awe. Indian culture was something that was hated by all. Dramatics was fun. The library class soon became a pursuit for evading the librarian and procuring books deemed inappropriate at our age. Overtime, we all got tired of coming up with newer excuses to dodge the classes we hated and I started landing up on time for the morning athletics and someone we all felt shouldn’t ever sing, just to make sure that the birds didn’t get frightened in a serene afternoon, started attending the music classes regularly, much to our horror.

Few years later, when I was doing my engineering, again at a place quite disconnected from the rest of the world, in an institute established on the lines of Shantiniketan, the word university founded by the universal educationist, philosopher and poet laurel Rabindranath Tagore, upholding the tradition of the Indian style of all-round education, most of us had the same predicament. The English and Economics classes were the most hated and very few people participated in the socio cultural activities, which were no longer compulsory. Not many of us developed much appreciation for liberal arts, or got into the habit of reading non-academic books. The logic was very simple – we had chosen engineering only because we either hated arts or were not good at it.

A quarter century later, when I look around and try to figure out which of my friends have really “excelled”, I do recall what we would be reminded every day in school – that Vivekananda wanted education to be all-round and that education is the manifestation of the perfection already in us, and so on. It was indeed true that the ones who were very active in socio cultural activities or sports or had a very good hold on language or had multiple hobbies have actually “excelled” better than the ones who were only into academics. The ace swimmer of our hostel during engineering leads a bank in Singapore. The best elocutionist in our school, who would always get the highest scores in English and Hindi, has been into a series of very successful startups in the Bay Area. The one who still amazes me with the number of books he keeps on reading regularly is an accomplished fashion designer and heads the apparel division of a very famous brand in India. I can go on and on. I’m sure they would all feel indebted to the monks of our school and the founders of the Indian Institute of Technology for imbibing in them, though forcibly at times, the habit of reading books and taking interest in multiple things, especially various forms of liberal arts and sports.

And this is not for no reason.

Michael Simmons, an award-winning social entrepreneur and bestselling author, in a well-researched article, People Who Have “Too Many Interests” Are More Likely To Be Successful According To Research, sums it up very well in the title. Citing various examples and researches he harps on the importance of the same three things our monks had imbibed in us – (1) continuous learning through reading books, (2) being a polymath with interests in multiple things and (3) appreciating various forms of art. He points out, Barack Obama read an hour a day while in office, Warren Buffett invested 80% of his time in reading and thinking throughout his career, Bill Gates read a book a week and took a yearly two-week reading vacation throughout his entire career.

Warren Buffett has pinpointed the key to his success this way: Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.

Larry Page has been known to spend time talking in depth with everyone from Google janitors to nuclear fusion scientists, always on the lookout for what he can learn from them.

Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” 

Not learning at least five hours per week (the five-hour rule) is the smoking of the 21st century, Simmons infers. He cites from the book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, by Charles Murray, most widely known as the co-author of The Bell Curve. The study of the most significant scientists in all of history uncover that 15 of the 20 – the likes of Newton, Galileo, Aristotle, Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, Laplace, Faraday, Pasteur, Ptolemy, Hooke, Leibniz, Euler, Darwin, Maxwell, etc. — were all polymaths.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Feynman, Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marie Curie – are/were all polymaths.

The father of Modern Indian Science, Jagadish Chandra Bose, was perhaps one of the most illustrious polymaths in the recent times. An acclaimed physicist – he was the first person in the world to have successfully demonstrated the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves, thus making him the inventor of radio/wireless communication – his interests soon turned away from electromagnetic waves to response phenomena in plants; this included studies of the effects of electromagnetic radiation on plants, a topical field today. He was also an archaeologist and one of the earliest writers of science fiction in India, apart from being the founder of the Bose Institute, one of the oldest multi-disciplinary research institutes of India.

Very recently, one of the recipients of 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, Abhijit Banerjee, is also a great chef, who could very well go ahead and win the Australian Master Chef, humors his brother.

10+ academic studies find a correlation between the number of interests/competencies someone develops and their creative impact.

Simmons gives few advantages of being a Polymath.

Advantage 1: Creating an atypical combination of two or more skills you’re merely competent in can lead to a world-class skill set.

Advantage 2: Most creative breakthroughs come via atypical combinations of skills. The paper, Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact has found that an analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests: The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work. “There’s a very longstanding idea that the creation of a new thing is about putting existing things together in a new way,” says Jones, an associate professor of management and strategy and the faculty director of the Kellogg Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative. “That is, combinations are the key material of creative insight.” Even Isaac Newton famously proclaimed, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Most of the newer areas of research are actually multi-disciplinary in nature. A welfare project like autonomous response to queries by Indian farmers in their language of choice would involve in-depth skills in diverse fields like comparative linguistics (to identify the correct dialect and language), psychology (to understand the mental state of the speaker and respond sensitively), history (to appreciate the historical and cultural nuances), apart from advanced AI/ML enabled technologies for speech recognition, translation and finding the right answers to the questions asked. Real-time remote surgery is one of the many talked about usages of 5G – anyone could guess the number of disciplines involved in making this happen.

Advantage 3: It future-proofs your career. “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive,” said Darwin, “but those who can best manage change.”

Advantage 4: It sets you up to solve more complex problems.

The HBR article, Research: CEOs with Diverse Networks Create Higher Firm Value, points out that diverse network would give CEOs access to diverse sets of knowledge, which can lead to novel ideas and willingness to tackle innovative projects. Heterogeneous social ties would increase a CEO’s ability to obtain a network of foreign contacts and identify good business opportunities. What this finding implies is that, apart from the conventional ways of learning – through books, schools, teachers, etc. – it’s also important to learn through diverse social interaction, mingling with all types of people around, traveling to new places and understanding new cultures and peoples. It’s no wonder that both Narendranath Dutta and Mohandas Gandhi had undertaken a painstaking journey across India to understand the peoples and cultures of their country, before they became Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi, two of the most successful leaders of modern India from two different walks of life. In Sanskrit, there’s a name to the seeker of wisdom through traveling and interacting with people – parivrajak.

Now that we understand the importance of multiple interests and diverse knowledge, let’s see which all domains seem to be more relevant and useful in the coming days.

In another HBR article, Liberal Arts in the Data Age, the author says, “From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today’s biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context—something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do. Call it the revenge of the film, history, and philosophy nerds.”

The author cites three books in this context. Scott Hartley, the author of the first one, The Fuzzy And The Techie, first heard the terms fuzzy and techie while studying political science at Stanford University. If you majored in the humanities or social sciences, you were a fuzzy. If you majored in the computer sciences, you were a techie. But in his brilliantly contrarian book, Hartley reveals the counterintuitive reality of business today: it’s actually the fuzzies – not the techies – who are playing the key roles in developing the most creative and successful new business ideas. They are often the ones who understand the life issues that need solving and offer the best approaches for doing so. It is they who are bringing context to code, and ethics to algorithms. They also bring the management and communication skills, the soft skills that are so vital to spurring growth. If we want to prepare students to solve large-scale human problems, Hartley argues, we must push them to widen, not narrow, their education and interests. He ticks off a long list of successful tech leaders who hold degrees in the humanities: Jack Ma, Alibaba – English, Susan Wojcicki, YouTube – History and Literature, Brian Chesky, Airbnb – Fine Arts. Steve Jobs is of course the most prolific one in this long list.

In the second book, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities, the authors Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, professors of the Humanities and Economics, respectively, at the Northwestern University, argue that when economic models fall short, they do so for want of human understanding. The solution is literature, they say. They suggest that economists could gain wisdom from reading great novelists, who have a deeper insight into people than social scientists do. Nothing could be more true than this. Quite a bit of Gandhi’s understanding of humanity and the crystallization of his concepts of nonviolence is influenced by Tolstoy, especially his novel War and Peace. Same holds true for many of Tagore’s novels, especially Gora, in the context of people’s understanding and reaction to Gandhi’s Satyagraha. Novelists are among the best observers and teachers about peoples and their cultures.

Finally, in the last book Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm, the author Christian Madsbjerg argues that unless companies take pains to understand the human beings represented in their data sets, they risk losing touch with the markets they’re serving. He says the deep cultural knowledge businesses need comes not from numbers-driven market research but from a humanities-driven study of texts, languages, and people.

In this context it’s quite relevant that the Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who studied computer science, philosophy and psychology, but said a course in theatre taught her a lesson she uses daily in technology product development. On the stage, she said, the playwright has to explicitly explain what’s happening, or leave it to the audience to understand implicitly.

The HBR article, The Best Leaders See Things That Others Don’t. Art Can Help, says the real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes. Art, it turns out, can be an important tool to change how leaders see their work.

“Study the science of art,” said Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the greatest medieval polymaths. “Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

“The greatest scientists are artists as well,” said Einstein, who was also a violinist and would carry his violin everywhere he went.

Steve Jobs perhaps made the most important concluding remarks about the importance of art. “Technology alone is not enough,” he said. “It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.”

It might not be an overstatement that what we’ve been talking about is actually a retelling of what Vivekananda had said more than a hundred years back: What we want is to see the man who is harmoniously developed great in heart, great in mind, [great in deed]… We want the man whose heart feels intensely the miseries and sorrows of the world… And [we want] the man who not only can feel but can find the meaning of things, who delves deeply into the heart of nature and understanding. [We want] the man who will not even stop there, [but] who wants to work out [the feeling and meaning by actual deeds]. Such a combination of head, heart, and hand is what we want.

A great combination of “head, heart, and hand” is the essence of an all-round education, that makes a great leader, a great CEO.