Find a Smart Partner

I heard James Watson, co-inventor of DNA, interviewed by Roy Eisenhardt for the City Arts and Lectures series right around the release of his book, Avoid Boring People. One of his lessons learned from a life in science, he said, was to work with a smart partner. He said he didn’t like being alone. He found that he always needed help. And science, at that time, was a frontier. You don’t want to find yourself in New Guinea alone, he joked.

For me, those words were tremendously powerful, although I had no real experience to verify the truth of them at the time. But this year, I’ve come to think of those few short sentences as some of the most profound I’ve heard as I’ve increasingly focused on my work and attributed professional successes and failures to the relationships I have with others. Maybe I don’t get out much or maybe I fell in love with Watson’s idea of partnership and then created a use for it, but whatever the reason, I have come to think of partnership and collaboration as the most important part of my life. No one person can really be their own power source, and if they manage it for a time, they won’t do it successfully forever.

I highly recommend reading Watson’s book and listening to his City Arts and Lectures interview.