Seth Godin was recently afforded the privilege of seeing the uber geek in action. He noted it in his journal, like an ethologist in the field.
I sat next to Cory at a conference today. It was like playing basketball next to Michael Jordan. Cory was looking at more than 30 screens a minute. He was bouncing from his mail to his calendar to a travel site and then back. His fingers were a blur as he processed inbound mail, visiting more than a dozen sites in the amount of time it took for my neck to cramp up. I’m very fast, but Cory is in a different league entirely. Rereading this, I can see I’m not doing it justice. I wish I had a video…
Ashley Richards ponders how one might source such a person.
So once you realize that you need people that can do that, how do hire for it? How do you suss out in an interview that someone is capable of doing all this and still keep their sanity? You can’t train someone to do this. Either they have the ability to do it or they don’t.
I wonder if Cory turns off his email and IM and such when he’s writing fiction. God, I hope so. It would scare me to know otherwise.
