Business Insight Zone

A friend used that acronym — a new one for me — in a Twitter conversation recently. It means:

Learned Something New Today

This could be the mantra for many a successful otaku.

Wait, what? Otaku? LSNT? Is this a jargon lesson, or a business blog? (Quick answer: both!)

Otaku is a Japanese term meaning someone “with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga, and video games.” A buff, a nut, an XYZ-head.

The Otaku Scientist

I learned about otaku a couple of weeks ago while I was reading through Mark McGuinness’s fabulous series of posts about Charles Darwin’s creative process. Here’s the key bit from the post “Darwin’s Voyage of Discovery”:

Visiting the Darwin exhibition [at the Natural History Museum in London] was a bit like spending time in the company of a charming but obsessive friend. We all know them — people who never shut up about football or cooking, or who reinterpret every conversation in psychological or political terms. They can be fascinating, but you sometimes wish they would change the subject. I got the impression Darwin hardly ever changed the subject. It seemed to be constantly on his mind. Even he found it wearying — while working on his theory of evolution he used to play billiards every evening, in an attempt to ‘drive the horrid species out of my head’.

The Japanese have a word for this kind of obsessive person – ‘otaku‘. It means something like ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’. A classic otaku has an encyclopaedic knowledge of things like manga comics or technology, but you can also be an otaku about any subject. We’ve seen before on the Lateral Action that obsessive behaviour is often critical to creative achievement – whether in Michelangelo’s countless drawings, Brian Wilson’s marathon recording sessions, or Stanley Kubrick’s mind bogglingly detailed research for his films.

Darwin was clearly an evolution otaku. His curiosity about the natural world combined with the questions he had inherited from past thinkers, leading to the habitual observation, questioning and thinking to which he attributed his success. His obsession manifested firstly in the meticulous observation and collection of specimens during the voyage of the Beagle, and later in the endless hours of study and reflection through which he worked out his theory. The fact that he was an otaku meant he persisted when the dabblers gave up.

The Otaku Coach

This reminds me of something I read a while back about the greatest professional (gridiron) football coach of this generation, Bill Belichick:

“Perhaps his most unheralded virtue, but one that explains plenty to me, is his innate curiosity,” [Belichick's friend Rob] Ingraham wrote in an e-mail message. “Bill wants to know what makes things tick, and when applied to his passion for football, this extends to every facet of the game: ‘What makes this blitz work? How do you counter this blitz? How can you disguise this blitz? How can we vary this blitz? Who can I call tonight to talk blitzes with?’

“You get the picture,” Ingraham added. “No stone goes unturned because his curiosity drives him to learn everything he can, which he then absorbs, thinks about, mixes into the boiling pot with the other ingredients and ultimately prepares to dish out on some poor unsuspecting sap. It’s been said that he’s not Mr. X’s and O’s, but rather Mr. A to Z, the complete package. I believe that his curiosity has been the catalyst in bringing all this together. Not unlike some other accomplished gents throughout history!”

Now, I doubt that Belichick will go down in world history like Darwin or Michelangelo, but the theme is the same: he’s an otaku of football, and a lifetime of studying the game hasn’t dimmed his fire to learn yet more about it.

What about you? Are you an otaku for your passions? Are you committed to LSNT — every day?

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Photo by skycaptaintwo, used under a Creative Commons license.

Category: Innovation & Entrepreneurship, The business brain