My initial thought was quite similar to Schreiber's, and the difficulty associated with building a short robot to play this game.
I do not know him well, but it seems like he strives for Excellence, and tries to inspire others to use passion to foster excellence.
He previous linked to a professor of his that had an incredibly
inspirational (though also potentially slightly depressing) talk about why most of us will fail to have a great career due to not chasing passions and striving to be great at something.
Karthik has also given many
talks about being great at a couple things being better than ok or so-so at a lot of things. Being great at the LOW Bar, and just the LOW BAR is a pretty low bar indeed. Most will need to be proficient with at least one more thing, and being able to do the low bar makes most other tasks significantly more difficult. This ultimately pushes teams into the compromised position of just being OK, or worse, bad at so many other tasks, but having invested enough effort at those tasks that they will flounder going after them. Floundering at several things squashes enthusiasm of which Karthik believes is very important to success.
This was an awful loft of assumptions and memory, so I reviewed
his TEDx over lunch.
Assumptions verified during this talk:
Importance of passion-check
Better to be awesome at something than mediocre at a broad field (accounting...)- check
Now, I recommend paying close attention to the end of this talk as he quotes Micheal Jordan.
“Limits, like fear, is often an illusion”
Karthik could be creating an illusion that he is terrified just to make sure that everyone checks their assumptions to remember the reasons for going after the LOW BAR. I believe the young-ones consider this a form of benevolent
"Trolling". Car Nack has a tendency to do this with some of his predictions.
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My belief is he truly is terrified of a field of
Mediocrity.