Join the Circus, Type Dvorak and Go Free

You have to pity people who don't know how to type. There are fewer and fewer such creatures around nowadays, but once in a while you spot one. While others sit staring endlessly at the screen, looking for just the right word, they sit staring endlessly at the keyboard, looking for just the right letter.

It's pathetic, of course. But what's most pathetic about it is that it isn't their fault. As trivia freaks among us know, the standard "Qwerty" keyboard was designed for a specific reason. In manual typewriters, keys struck too quickly in sequence would often get stuck in each other. The designer of Qwerty handled the problem by placing keys in positions that slowed down people's typing. In other words, the keyboard is designed to be as inefficient and difficult as possible. By now, of course, Qwerty has outlived its usefulness by at least thirty years. And there in fact exists an alternative to the Qwerty keyboard, called the Dvorak--a keyboard in which letters have been placed to maximize speed and efficiency for those writing in English. Why hasn't it caught on?

The problem is called path-dependency. It breaks the cardinal rule of economics, that inefficiencies in a product will eventually be weeded out if there is adequate competition. Unfortunately, once a path has been established for a certain technology or process to develop, it becomes difficult to break out of that mold--even though the mold itself may actually be a hindrance.

Just as you have to pity people who don't know how to type, you sort of have to pity people who, when graduating, have no interest in going into law, medicine, academia, public service or business. The vast majority of Harvard graduates in recent years have taken one of these five paths. These are obviously great choices if one wants to be a lawyer, doctor, scholar, civil servant or financier. But for hundreds of undecided students, choosing one of these five options is a lot like getting stuck with the least efficient keyboard in the world. What makes them attractive is that they have relatively clear paths and definite entry points. Applying to law school might not be a piece of cake, but it sure is easier than joining the circus.

By now, the idea that path-dependency affects career decisions is old and tired. But unfortunately, path-dependency's effects are not limited to our careers. It touches almost everything we do. Imagine that you go into the dining hall for dinner and find that nothing served that evening suits your tastes. You could make yourself some sort of extensive salad-bar concoction, or bake yourself a tuna melt in the microwave or go out for dinner instead. But those options require more time, more money, more ingenuity--and the dining hall's shake'n'bake chicken is sitting right there waiting for you. It's as initially inefficient to make your own food as it is to learn to type on Dvorak. As long as you don't care too much about what you eat, the path of least resistance is the obvious choice--even though the food won't be as good.

Or imagine that it's a friend's birthday. You take her out to dinner or drinks, or invite a bunch of people over for a party. Parties, dinner dates and drinks are all lots of fun. But there are all sorts of fun things that you could do in addition, or instead. You could put a huge piece of paper on her wall and have people scribble things about her on it with magic markers, either while she's there or before she arrives, or make a collage of photos of her and her friends. You could take her "trick or treating," traveling from one friend's room to another collecting gifts or little cards or tributes and gathering people as you go before ending up at a traditional party or bar en masse. You could take her ice-skating or to a cooking class. Or give her something, anything, that is truly particular to her. Yet the only thing that most people think of doing is taking the person out to dinner and buying them drinks. Like the Qwerty keyboard, it does its job, even though the results may be less than they could have been. The simplest, clearest path of least resistance is the obvious choice; lack of mass motivation to learn Dvorak or plan a more interesting celebration takes care of the rest.

On a deeper level, path-dependency affects the way we think about everything. Think, for example, of a mistake you've made or bad experience you've had. As a child, you may have been trained to think of your bad experiences or mistakes as "learning experiences." That way, you don't have to conceive of those experiences as outright losses. But consider for a moment: have you ever actually learned anything from a "learning experience"? Or, more precisely, have you ever actually avoided doing the same thing twice because you "learned" from your mistake? People tend to make the same mistakes again and again. Bad experiences add to our lives, but not necessarily because we learn from them. It's just that it's simpler and more pleasant to think of them as "learning experiences" than to think of them as failures. And there you have it: someone else's conception of your own experiences, regardless of how useless it might be, has become the default.

This doesn't necessarily mean that you should cast away your plans for law school and join the circus (though a large proportion of those who apply to law school each year might very well be happier in the company of dancing bears). But it does mean that it's worth it, at least once in a while, to consider why we end up doing things the way we do them. Is it because we really like what we're doing, or because it's just easier--and because we're indifferent enough that we'd rather just eliminate our indecision in the simplest possible way? The greatest hindrance to achievement is not lack of intelligence, but rather the failure to be imaginative, to make commitments and take risks.

In my English class a few days ago, a professor returned midterm papers to his students, who were mostly juniors and seniors. Before returning our papers, the professor told us that all of them were very good; they had made their points and argued them well, and he had graded them accordingly. Yet he was disappointed with them nonetheless. Why? It seems that no one in the class had, as he put it, taken any risks. Not a single sentence in any of the papers, he said, had been two or three words long; few, if any, of the papers really could have been distinguished by their style from anybody else's.

We students were surprised. Here we had given the professor exactly what he had asked for, and it wasn't enough. But that was the point. Being successful doesn't mean meeting people's expectations. It means ignoring them, and thereby surpassing them.

My paper was one of those that had merely met the expectations, and its good grade gave me no delight. Right now I'm thinking about going to see what that Dvorak keyboard is all about--and maybe checking out the circus.

Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.