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thehipperelement:

This is a cool article about the unexpected connection between talent in music and talent in tech.

My Dad and I were both musicians “on the side”. He is a doctor, and we have often noticed how many doctors had some sort of musical skills. When I took music in university, many musicians were also good at mathematics. These might seem like weird combinations of “creative” and “analytical” thinking, but it’s not as weird as you might think.

According to the linked article, the connection might be related to learning systems, rather than rules.

The connection between music and tech (or medicine) — as the article says — might be an ability to see the “big picture” of things. The patterns. The structure. The reason why the parts exist.

While many people just learn things by repeating what they have seen, the great people learn the underlying architecture of these things so they can improvise and be creative within that structure.

From the article:

“Michael Belton, vice president of research and development at the cybersecurity company Optiv, has a theory why. “You’re talking about languages,” says Belton, “Mathematics and languages are intertwined.” A musician who’s able to adeptly compose a song has a grasp of musical language. They’re able to apply the concepts they learned to manipulate something new. And this skill is exactly what security professionals do. “If you’re trying to write an exploit,” Belton says, “you’re stepping back and thinking, ‘Here’s a piece of software and here’s what it does.’”

It might not be obvious how this is related to the types of stuff I normally write about (design, UX, products, etc.). But psychologically, this is much bigger than music and cybersecurity. 

And I wouldn’t call it an “ability”. It’s more of a perspective.

In music, or math, or tech, or design… you can either learn things as if they are rules, or you can learn things as if they are examples of bigger structures. The thing is, music is really boring if you only learn to execute the music in front of you, so everybody approaches music as if the rules were made to be broken.

The real fun happens when you write your own music or interpret the notes in your own way. That’s the difference between a symphony pianist and someone playing Billy Joel’s greatest hits on a cruise ship.

When you do an A/B test and the red links beat the blue links, you can either decide that red links are better than blue links as a rule, or you can decide that red links were better than blue links this time, based on the elements of the rest of the design around them.

If you’re new to UX then the difference might not be that obvious. But after 10 years of using one of those perspectives, the difference is huge.

You will either become good at following rules (boring), or you will have learned how to experiment with the patterns of the past (innovation).

People that learn rules will be totally confused if blue links ever beat red links but people who are learning patterns or systems will realize that the relationship between the background color and the link color matters more than the actual color of the links themselves.

In technology, however, it is easy to forget that you’re allowed to write your own music… it’s easy to focus on making things “right” instead of innovating.

The linked article takes a more practical approach to this subject, talking about hiring tech talent. It even points out that “technical competence” is actually less important than the way job candidates think. (It amazes me that this is news to anyone, but I digress…)

But more importantly, as the article tries to say: the key is to understand how your ideas fit into the big picture. Not just whether they look like the other shit that’s popular right now.

(Source: thehipperelement)