217: Adam Quiney, part 1: Leadership for the Smartest Person in the Room
Adam studies brilliant people and leadership. There are many leadership coaches and researchers. If you like me and my way of doing things, which is geeky, you might be geeky yourself. You probably like leadership too.
We get to his research results about halfway through the conversation. He focuses on helping people like you and me understand and improve leadership. In this conversation we focus on blind spots, among other topics, but his in particular. But Adam’s focus and specialty on brilliance emerges. He’s vulnerable and open.
I recorded this conversation almost a year and a half ago, so you can hear I hadn’t developed a voice yet. Still, some meaningful nuggets from both of us, in fact some points I haven’t shared in a while, like, regarding blind spots, nature not losing track of any molecules.
Back then I hadn’t yet learned to see when people talk about people as their environment, they’re playing it safe. We all know acting on the environment starts hard. So I was glad he moved to bruised apples that would get thrown away. I don’t accept that imperfect looking apples are materially lowering quality of life. After a while, supermarket apples look weird. Farmers market ones look less uniform but have more flavor.
Most environmental action is like choosing the apples corporate buyers don’t. They don’t fit someone else’s values, but they tend to taste better and cost less. After you get used to them, the old ones look weird, even creepy in their uniformity and too much shinyness.