Leaping the Gap Between Idea and Practice

My time with Pardis Sabeti convinced me that career capital is necessary to identify a good mission. But even as this understanding solidified, a nagging thought kept spoiling my intellectual satisfaction: Why don’t I have a personal mission-driven career?

When I met Pardis, I had a PhD in computer science from MIT and close to two dozen peer-reviewed publications to my name. I’d given talks on my work all over the world, from Rio to Bologna to Zurich. In other words, I had accumulated career capital, and this capital allowed me to identify many potential missions relevant to my skills. I even had a written record of these brainstorms, as I always keep an idea notebook with me. On March 13, 2011, for example, I recorded the possibility of focusing my career on a new style of distributed algorithm theory that was just emerging—the study of algorithms in communication graphs with unrestrained topology changes. I could, I noted, immerse myself in its development much in the same way the early proponents of chaos theory did in their field back in the early 1980s.

But this brings me back to my nagging question. I had notebooks filled with potential missions, yet I had resisted devoting myself to any one in particular. And I’m not alone in this reluctance to act. Many people have lots of career capital, and can therefore identify a variety of different potential missions for their work, but few actually build their career around such missions. It seems, therefore, that there’s more to this career tactic than simply getting to the cutting edge. Once you have the capital required to identify a mission, you must still figure out how to put the mission into practice. If you don’t have a trusted strategy for making this leap from idea to execution, then like me and so many others, you’ll probably avoid the leap altogether.

This chapter is the first of two that investigate people who have successfully made this leap. My goal for these investigations is to find specific strategies that take you from big idea to big results—the type of strategies that can transform the missions in my notebooks from being merely ideas to becoming the foundation of an attention-catching career. We’ll start with the story of a brash young archaeologist from a small town in Southeast Texas: someone who discovered a systematic strategy for deploying a bold mission in a field famous for its conformity.