Superpowers are for the movies
Being intentional is a fully human activity that is not "super"
I will never forget the night that I almost gave up playing the bass guitar forever. It was around 1995, and I had been playing for about five years. I was in the middle of my Ph.D. program at Vanderbilt and didn’t have a lot of time to practice. But I liked to play, had developed a bit of skill, and started paying attention to other bassists for inspiration. One of those was Victor Wooten.
At the time, he played with Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, playing an unclassifiable mix of jazz and progressive bluegrass. The group played live around Nashville frequently, and one night I went to check them out. The video below is not from that performance but Victor spent the whole night doing stuff like this:
I don’t have the words to describe how impossibly virtuosic this is. It’s on a level that you could reasonably call superhuman. The thing about experiencing the superhuman is that it’s not necessarily inspiring. In fact, I felt defeated walking out of the auditorium that night. I could practice for 23 hours a day, 7 days a week for the rest of my life and never get close to this level of playing. So what was the point of picking up my bass anymore?
I’m bringing this up because in academia, we can see people doing good things with their lives and careers and it hits us the way I was hit that night at the Flecktones show: It’s some kind of superpower and you either have it or you don’t, and if you don’t then you never will. My message to you today is: That’s not how it is.
Superpowers do not exist
Sometimes in meetings or workshops, the facilitator will play this game where they ask you: What is your superpower? You are supposed to respond with something that’s profound or amusing: My superpower is gratitude. Or, I can explain complex things in a way anyone can understand. Or (if you’re a programmer) I can talk to computers. Or, I can make the most amazing coffee on the planet.
I really dislike1 this particular facilitation game for two reasons. First, it’s totally cliched — it’s almost expected now at every icebreaker or opening workshop session, and is not nearly as funny or profound as facilitators think. But more importantly, I dislike it because it’s not honest. It’s not honest, because while it’s perfectly great to have gratitude, communicate complex ideas, program computers, or make exceptionally good coffee, these are not superpowers and they are not done by superhumans. They are instead human activities, done by regular humans, and done with focus, heart, and persistence.
The last time I was in a workshop where this game was played, my reply was: I don’t have superpowers because there is no such thing as a superpower except in the movies and in comic books. I’m just a normal human trying to do the best I can. A buzzkill, maybe. But I refuse to believe that anything I do or have ever done has been the result of a mutation or gamma radiation or being born on a planet with a different-colored sun.
Back to Victor Wooten: At first I was convinced that he was an alien or a mutant, because how else can you explain what he can do? Over time I learned that he is not superhuman and his bass skills, while extraordinary, are not superhuman: He is a regular human operating at peak human performance. The same is true for others whose abilities seem beyond our reach: Nobel-winning scientists, elite athletes, best-selling authors. None of them are superhuman. If they are like superheroes at all, they are akin to Hawkeye or Batman who rely on a combination of training, intellect, technology, and sheer determination and who have spent countless hours training to operate at their level.
Every instance of high performance, whether it’s mind-blowing bass solos or high-impact research or even just managing your time and attention so that you’re not grading on the weekends, looks like a superpower at first, but only because of the distance between you and the performance. Time, practice, and focus reveals the essential non-super humanness of it all2. In fact, think about your students: To them, you appear superhuman, with your advanced degree and academic position. And yet we were once in their exact position.
Things that look like superpowers but aren’t
When you look at some of the practices I write about on this blog, or see others who are taking those practices and making them work — so that weekends are grading-free, life and work are well integrated, and everything is pervaded with a sense of purpose — it can look superhuman, unattainable. But really, it isn’t. Here are some aspects of intentional academia (small “i”, small “a”) that look like superpowers but really aren’t:
Organization. It does not take superhuman abilities to keep your physical and digital spaces organized — by which I mean that the location of items is aligned with their meaning. That’s stolen from David Allen, who said that "You are disorganized if you need something somewhere that you don't have or have something somewhere that you don't need." What it does take is a system for knowing where to put things, and the disciplined habit of putting things in the right places. This is not always easy but it is not beyond the reach of any person. I would say that what’s closer to a superpower, is having a totally disorganized office and still being able somehow to find things in it. See this post from the GTD for Academics series for what a functioning system can look like.
Inbox Zero. Zeroing out one’s inbox on a regular basis — if not the number of emails in it, then at least the amount of pull it exerts on your attention — seems unattainable if you have a four- or even five- or six-digit number of emails in that inbox. And no doubt, it’s hard work to do an initial clearing of a super-sized inbox. But people do it all the time (I did it, 15 years ago when I first discovered GTD) and you can too. It’s hard but not complicated: It just takes adherence to a workable system of capturing, clarifying, and organizing and habitually running this system regularly.
Saying no. If you are used to defaulting to “yes” to every opportunity or request, no matter how off-the-rails or impractical it may be, then you might think that a person who can say “no” and get away with it is living a charmed life, or has incredible privilege, or possibly mind control powers. But just like all the others, this is an ability that can be practiced by anyone — and should be practiced by everyone. Saying “no” is the ultimate productivity “hack”. It has to be done carefully and sometimes cannot be done; but this is not to say that it’s impossible or always inappropriate. People do it all the time, and suffer no retaliation, and in fact go on to have the headspace to do even better work and find greater satisfaction.
There are many others, and none of them are superpowers. That’s because only superhumans have superpowers, and there are no superhumans: Only normal humans like you and me, doing ordinary things with intention.
Now You Do It
Play the game with yourself: What is your superpower? Or, what is the superpower of someone you look up to or admire?
Then get to the bottom of that “superpower” by identifying the “origin story”: How did you get your “superpower”? Or how did that other person get theirs? Can you identify the progression of practice, intention, and focus that led to this “superpower”? Can you figure out the system that was used?
Convince yourself based on the answers to #2 that it’s not “super” after all, and revel in the humanness of it.
And if you ever find yourself in some absurd workshop or icebreaker where you’re asked for your “superpower” — resist. Share your work from above.
“Hate” is the word I originally wrote, and while that’s maybe too strong, it’s not totally wrong either. I have a strict “no bullshit, no buzzwords” policy and almost every little game that facilitators make you play in a meeting or workshop, because that’s what they learned in facilitator school, violates that policy. The “what is your superpower” game especially so.
If there is one intellectual skill that, to me, actually looks like a superpower, it’s the ability to do complex data analysis: Taking a big, messy set of data and then cleaning it up and using it to arrive at deep insights and meaningful stories. It seems like magic when experts do it (and I am no expert!). But even this is a learned skill that any person can pick up if they are willing to put in the work. It also seems like one of those rare skills that actually improve by osmosis: If you just spend enough time around good data analysis you will begin to acquire some skill at it yourself.
Robert, I share your dislike of silly icebreakers... But also I worry that you may be taking the term "superpower" too literally. I think most people use it more metaphorically, not meaning that it's a strictly inborn trait or that they are one of only five beings in the world that can do the thing. I have personally found it very very helpful to define my own "superpowers" in that metaphorical sense. For example, I sometimes say that my superpower is getting stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. I don't mean that I've always been great at it or that I don't need to practice or that nobody is better at this than I am; what I mean is that, through a combination of innate ability, extensive training, and ferocious persistence, I can coax a publishable paper out of meager data more often than most other people. This is distinct, for example, from other aspects of publishing such as being technically skilled in innovating methods or collecting the data. By having this clarity about what I'm great at, and what I'm merely OK at, I can collaborate more effectively with people with complementary "superpowers."