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The High Return Activity of Raising Others' Ambitions

This is the title of a Tyler Cowen blog post that I've thought about a lot recently. It applies to coaching, but I also think it has broader relevance to our day-to-day lives and encounters.

Here's the salient paragraph from Cowen:

Cowen uses an example he saw frequently as head of graduate admissions at George Mason to illustrate his point. Often students pursuing PhDs and future academic careers would present their plan to obtain a Master's degree before continuing onto their PhD, but Cowen would inform them that a Master's degree was unnecessary in these cases and that the students could go directly into the PhD program. The insight and nudge from Cowen saved the students precious time and money and accelerated their path to achieving their career goals.

What Cowen proposes doesn't require a lofty admissions job or even a specific form of expertise (although both might be helpful in certain cases).

Instead what he reveals is a very lopsided ratio of effort to impact. As Cowen notes, it cost him relatively little to point a fact out, but the impact on the student was dramatic.

The level of effort required might be so minimal, in fact, that we might not even recognize the opportunity when it appears. In many cases we probably underestimate our ability to help. We certainly underestimate the impact that our curiosity alone can have on another person.

We all have someone in our lives facing a big decision, confronting a challenge, or adventuring a new path. In those instances we don't control the outcome, but we can perform the significant act (regardless of outcome) of expressing genuine curiosity, asking questions to elicit better understanding, and, with any luck, adding some fuel to the fire.

Sometimes all it takes is a change in perspective to help accelerate someone's path to a desired destination.

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