When I moved to New York City in my twenties, I was determined to forge a career as a working artist. In that Darwinian pool of ambition, the most successful artists were the ones who could generate a dependable stream of original work. They seemed to always be developing multiple ideas simultaneously. It was tempting to believe they were the ones who came into this world blessed with some unearthly natural talents, as someone might inherit a certain eye color or blood type. As it turns out, they didn’t receive some rare gift from the gods, or a crate of secret scrolls, or a muse shackled to the radiator of their studio apartment. The prolific artists were just curious people who had a knack for noticing connections in the world around them, and a dedication to developing those connections to find out where they might lead. They started their process by making connections.
Some years later I discovered a love for the capital markets and, in particular, the psychology that makes people value some things more than other things. I noticed that although a loaf of bread is mostly just flour, water, yeast, and salt, some loaves could command 20 bucks at the grocery store, while others would go stale on the shelf if their prices rose above two. What makes one loaf more valuable than another? Or one car or one phone or fizzy drink or magazine subscription? At the end of the day, the answer is related to the way consumers connect the product in question to some impact on their life, real or perceived. Again, it’s about making connections.
In the investment world, I have had the good fortune to work with professional money managers who forged luxurious careers by being the ones who spotted trends before others. Being among the first to invest in those trends, they benefited when others caught on, invested their funds in turn, and drove up the price of their investments. On Wall Street, as in other places, there’s a premium for being the first to make a connection.
Many of the Fortune 500 companies got their start by linking a solution to some market need. In the early 20th century, Henry Ford set out to make car ownership affordable, creating the Model T, and helping to not only fuel the economy but also birth that societal structure known as the suburb, complete with its picket fences, tidy lawns, and garden gnomes. Cars made suburban sprawl a possibility, or possibly, an inevitability.
From a business perspective, Ford’s push to democratize car ownership also led to innovations in manufacturing. If the Model T was going to be affordable enough for average people to buy, it had to be manufactured economically. So, instead of employing workers to assemble entire vehicles one at a time, Ford introduced the concept of assembly-line production. This cut costs and improved output. It scrapped the need to transport heavy car parts to a single area of the plant for assembly. Additionally, since workers focused on single areas of production, they could develop their skills, speed, and specialization, making them more efficient and making their work more consistent. Ford linked affordability to manufacturing efficiency.
IBM saw there was a nascent market for personal computers, deviated from its focus on large mainframe devices, and released its DOS-based IBM PC (which had a whopping 16 kilobytes of total memory). The Sony corporation, seeing that music lovers wanted a convenient way to take their music on a walk, created the Walkman. Netflix, upon noticing increasing feasibility for in-home video streaming, pivoted from the traditional DVD-by-mail business model. The common link in these companies was their ability to change strategy to meet changing consumer lifestyles.
As I began working in research, I noticed clients would pay handsomely for someone to tell them what they didn’t know. It turns out that having your blind spots revealed is valuable. It gives you a greater context for your decision making and helps to answer the question, should we go full steam ahead or change course? In business, the consultants who really command the Midas touch are those who not only alert the client to some new information, but also advise on how to monetize that knowledge.
Success in so many fields hinges on being able to make connections. Strategic planners, journalists, research scientists, business consultants, attorneys, detectives, doctors, first responders, and more, all these occupations involve making links and acting upon them. In fact, there seem to be more vocations that rely on making connections than those that don’t.
Keep in mind, however, not all links are singular links. Not all links create a transformative result. A singular link is a connection that births a unique outcome, an outcome that is fundamentally different from its constituent parts. Folding sushi into a seaweed wrap and calling it a sushi burrito is not a singular link. It’s sushi wrapped in seaweed. Taking a plastic spoon and adding some teeth is not a singular link, it’s just a spork. Making a cowboy movie in Italy and calling it a spaghetti western isn’t a singular link, it’s just a different kind of cowboy movie.
Singular links are more rare and more powerful when they occur. They may be surprising, inspiring, or shocking.
If you take some household bleach and mix it with ammonia, you create chlorine gas. And if you’re not wearing a respirator, that’s a singular link that can kill you.
If you take a copper penny, touch it to a galvanized nail, and immerse them in lemon juice, you create an electrical current. This is a singular link that can illuminate an LED light bulb. Go ahead and try it!
Our ancestors created a singular link when they discovered that a piece of flint struck with pyrite would create sparks. These sparks could ignite tinder and create controlled fire, possibly the most consequential discovery in human development.
Bleach plus ammonia equals chlorine gas. Copper plus zinc plus lemon juice equals electricity. Flint plus pyrite plus tinder equals fire. These are the formulas for singular links.
Sometimes the symbol of a light bulb is used to portray an idea or a discovery. I wonder, if a light bulb symbolizes a regular connection, what symbol would convey an extraordinary connection like a singular link? I think a fitting symbol is the “exploding head” emoji that symbolizes the phrase, “mind blown!”
