E94: Why Staying in Your Lane Can Kill Your Curiosity with Sheldon Greaves

In this episode of Work Sucks, But I Like It, Sheldon Greaves, author of The Guerrilla Scholar’s Handbook, shares his unconventional approach to work, learning, and building a life around curiosity. Sheldon has worked as a DJ, substitute teacher, musician, tech writer, and ghostwriter, and he discusses why he refuses to limit himself to a single career path. 

We explore guerrilla scholarship, the idea that you don't need a university or traditional academic system to pursue knowledge, how curiosity can be cultivated like a muscle, and why learning doesn't always need to be "productive" or have an immediate practical purpose. 

Sheldon also talks about productivity, career changes, intellectual curiosity, and his philosophy of taking the job that interests you—and moving on when it no longer does. If you've ever felt pressured to pick a lane, wondered whether your interests need to serve a practical purpose, or simply want to build a more curious and interesting life, this conversation offers a different way to think about work, learning, productivity, and success.

Connect:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheldongreaves/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:11

All right, welcome to the Work Sucks But I Like It podcast. Today we have Dr. Sheldon Greaves. He's the author of the Gorilla Scholars Handbook. So while pursuing his doctorate on a shoestring while indulging other interests, he developed a different approach to the to a life of the mind. Sheldon, welcome to the show. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

It's a pleasure to be here. Awesome. Sheldon, define work for us today. Wow. So work is for me whatever I can do that's interesting. I have worked at uh pretty much everything from uh disc jockey to substitute teacher to trainer of spies to itinerant musician. And right now I'm working as a ghostwriter. So yeah, my rule is always take the job that's interesting and don't stick with it when it's no longer interesting. Unless, of course, they lay you off first.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Love that. So that's a very interesting, interesting there, I guess the pun there intended. Um, idea with work, right? So I guess what I what comes to mind is that some people have a lot of interest today, right? Their hobbies, whatever it may be. Can you elaborate on what you mean by anything that is interesting with that definition of work?

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Aaron Powell Yeah. So I like things that engage my thinking, uh, things that introduce me to something that's unfamiliar, maybe a little bit new, but not so new that I'm completely lost and can't make any headway at it. When I went to college, I basically studied things that interested me. I really had a career path kind of in mind, but by the time I got to the end of it, that path had evaporated. So I kind of went all in on, well, let's just try to find something interesting and do it. And that took me down some very unusual paths. I also discovered, while I was working on my doctorate, that there were a lot of other things out there in the world that were just fascinating because, well, here's the thing. My wife and I were both working on a PhD at the same time. So we were a young couple basically putting two kids through college, namely each other. And the way we did it was I would work for a year and she would go to school, and then the next year she would work and I would go to school. And because this was Silicon Valley, business was booming, finding work was not a hard thing to do. So most of the time I was doing like office jobs or tech writing or that sort of thing. But what I discovered was while I'm here at school working on my field, which is ancient Near Eastern studies, so you know, the Middle East, but all the old stuff. Meanwhile, the computer evolution was happening. This is the late 80s, early 90s, and there was just an unbelievable amount of really cool stuff happening. And so alongside our copy of Archaeology magazine, there was Scientific American. You know, I'm working on learning to read clay tablets while I'm also participating in a local seminar on nanotechnology. And what I discovered by the time I got to the end of my doctorate was not only had my the career path that I had envisioned vanished, they were expecting me to pick a lane and stay in it. And I didn't want to do that. That sounded boring. And you know, I the other thing, too, is that if you ask any biologist what's the primary cause of extinction, they'll tell you it's over-specialization. And I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to go down that road. So I had developed this way of doing interesting intellectual work that didn't rely entirely on having the resources of a university. And that's the short definition of gorilla scholarship. And after a number of years of this and having various adventures, I decided to write a book about it. Actually, the book was a very long time in making. I actually started this thing back around 2001, 2002, so I've been at this for a while. But the book came out about a year ago, and it's my way of talking about a new way of working, doing a life of the mind. And you don't have to you don't have to give up your day job, but you can make you can make things a lot more interesting and maybe discover something that no one else knew.

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Oh, that's Sheldon. So I'm very curious because I've heard the term gorilla in a lot of different places, like gorilla warfare, gorilla marketing, right? So I guess why gorilla? I guess I never heard why gorilla.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

You've kind of you've kind of touched on it. Gorilla is kind of a synonym in those contexts for unconventional. And so that's kind of that's kind of where I'm going with it. So gorilla scholarship would involve, for instance, looking in places for information that other people wouldn't look, finding that odd, odd scrap of information, that document, that living history source that no one else knows about. It's also about crossing boundaries that I'm talking about like disciplinary boundaries that most people in academia wouldn't do. You stay in your lane if you go out of your lane. In fact, I have a section in my book about one of my professors who refused to stay in his lane, and he was literally forced into early retirement over that. But at the same time, he also ended up making some very significant contributions in fields that you wouldn't expect. He was he was hired for his knowledge of Central Asia and the Uzbek language. But he ended up making some very significant contributions in the field of aviation and aviation history. So go figure, you know. But that's not what he was hired to do. But, you know, I I s I would say that his intellectual life was a roaring success on account of that.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

So I guess, Sheldon, like I just keep thinking of like, I guess, you know, an employee that's stuck in their job, right? And we're they're told to stay in their lane, right? And we all want this sort of idea of autonomy, right? This control of what we do, kind of where we steer the ship. What do you recommend? I guess how did what was that realization you had? You kind of talked about it in college, right? You kind of evaporated was your term, right? I guess what were sort of the clues, the things that you needed to do to realize that you could become autonomous, I guess, if you will.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

Well, what gave me that realization was that when I wasn't formally registered in college, I didn't have access to the university library. I didn't have as much access to my professors as I would have had, or my fellow students, but I was still expected to keep up in my field. So what I had to do was I had to find other resources. I had to find other ways of learning what was going on. And sometimes that involved going to some kind of unusual places. So, for instance, there was this Catholic seminary that was very close to where we lived, and I didn't know this, but I discovered they have a library. And a lot of the stuff that I needed turned out to be there. Another thing that I did was my spouse was going to Stanford. I was going to Berkeley, and she finagled, well, there was this crazy thing where if you weren't a Stanford student or a Stanford whatever, you could use the library, you could get a library card, but it cost $500 for a card. Well, that was stupid. That is stupid. However, in the same building, there was also a government documents repository that is supposed to be free and open to the public. So I go to the gate and, you know, where they they're supposed to let you in, and they said, Do you have a library card? No, I'm here to use the repository. Okay, so they'd let me in. Well, the depository was on the left, I'd go to the right straight into the stacks, you know. You know. So you kind of find ways to work around stuff like this. Uh the other thing I discovered was that the local public library, interlibrary loan, can work miracles. They can find stuff that you wouldn't even imagine. In fact, most public libraries have resources that the general public has no idea are even there. Uh, you know, go make friends with your local reference librarian. They can they can put you in tough in touch with stuff that that even Google doesn't know about.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

So Sheldon, I like this. Yeah, no. So yeah, I love how like, you know, you not that you like cheated the system, but let's go back to that employee that's really stuck in their job, right? They're told to stay left, told to stay left, right? And you were like, no, the stuff is right. So how did you overcome that fear to make that decision to say, hey, I'm not breaking any tremendous laws here or anything? And how did you f I guess how walk us through that, that kind of thought process, what happened?

SPEAKER_00 9:52

I suppose the short answer is that my curiosity overrode my common sense. Uh, you know, there uh curi curiosity is something that we are, of course, all born with, and it gradually gets beaten out of us, you know. You can you can get it back. It can be cultivated, it's like any other muscle. You can work it, you can strengthen it. I was fortunate enough to marry uh a woman who is at least as curious about the world as I am. Her field is classic, so ancient Greek and Latin, but she also has a passion for dragonflies. So she's one of these people who finds a dragonfly wing on the ground, and from the pattern of the veins, she can tell you what genus it's from. You know, that kind of that kind of thing. Uh we lived in New England for a while, and I I think she was probably on a first-name basis with every dragonfly south of Boston.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

That's so funny.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

And that kind of inspired me. Uh the other thing, too, is that you just have to allow yourself to say it's okay to look at something other than what you're doing, other than what they're paying you to do. The funny thing is, there's almost a feeling of disloyalty, you know. And it's okay to overcome that, you know. It's okay to cheer for another team if your team sucks, you know. And and that uh uh that is very liberating. And frankly, I end I found myself doing it because it's a lot more fun.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

I love that. So, Sheldon, one of the things we like to say on the show is that success is not a matter of good luck, it's good skills. So you kind of talked about how curiosity sort of fades, right? Maybe with age, maybe with whatever. How did you you kind of talked a little bit, but I want you to really be specific for the audience here. How did you build this skill of being so curious?

SPEAKER_00 11:57

A lot of it had to do with the jobs that I was doing when I wasn't in school. So one of the jobs that I had that really kind of helped me rekindle this was I got a job for an educational software company that was working on stuff for kids. We were doing software that covered historical topics, English grammar, basic math. And that kind of got me back into some other things that were just things that I had enjoyed when I was younger but had kind of forgotten about. Another thing, too, and again, I credit my w- my wife for this, she suggested one night that we go and attend uh a lecture that was being put on by the local Peninsula Astronomical Society, these astronomy geeks, and it turned out to be really interesting about some of the stuff that was happening. Halley's Comet was back in the neighborhood back then, and we thought, wow, this is this is kind of cool. And that led us to do some other things with them. We eventually joined the organization. On some weekends, we'd go out to these dark hills where they had their own observatory and we'd look at whatever, whatever was visible. And another thing that kind of helped me was that when I was a kid, I was very passionate about science. And this was because the year before I was born, Sputnik went up and it scared the hell out of us. And so the following year, the year I was born, President Eisenhower signed the Defense and Education Act, which poured out funding for education that would normally be reserved for the Pentagon, because he had this crazy idea that an educated citizenry was a matter of national security. So by the time I hit first grade, all those lovely, lovely tools were waiting for me. And I had a ball in K through 12. And science was a big deal. I kind of got off of that because math and I have a kind of a disagreement. It's kind of my white whale, you know. But I found myself kind of getting back into it with all the Silicon Valley stuff that was going on. And you just there was something in the air that knowledge and information, it was revolutionary, it was going to change everything. And we could we were all very optimistic. Uh, this is before, you know, big money came along and crushed it all. But the atmosphere helped. You know, there was just this feeling that a lot of great things were going on and you wanted to stay on top of it just because it was so freaking cool.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

That's awesome. So I love a couple things there, Sheldon. You know, you went to like kind of call them random talks to be inspired. You know, some people look at that as not being productive, right? We're again, like you were talking earlier, like we're told to stay in our lanes. Because what would you say to like someone who said that to you? What would what would you say? You know, I guess it depends on the context, but what are your first thoughts of like saying I'm gonna go to this random talk? It's not related to my field or my job or whatever. What would you say?

SPEAKER_00 15:19

I would say productive for who? Hmm, you know? So much of our of our education is geared towards being productive for somebody else. That's for sure. And I hate that. Absolutely. I want to be productive for me. I want to I want to be someone who is aware enough of the world that I can kind of read the world and see what's going on in the world. And people who do that I find to be a lot more interesting. You know, you can be accomplished, you can buy accomplishments, you can spend money and go see the pyramids or uh, you know, run with the the bulls or go to this conference or that conference. That's being accomplished. Being interesting is different. It's it's where you take those things and you make them part of yourself and they inform you. They're not not just postcards in a drawer. Or Instagram posts, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I think I just dated myself there. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

That's okay. No, I'm gonna add to that and make it modern for sure. I guess, Sheldon, I really want to dive into this concept of approach to a life of the mind. What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00 16:37

I guess yeah, elaborate on that, please. Aaron Powell Sure. Well, okay. The first thing is that we are learning machines. You know, uh we are always taking in information, whether you're standing in the checkout line looking at the latest tabloid or reading the Odyssey in the original Greek. You know, we're always we're always doing that sort of thing. It's just sort of who we are and what we do. So why not do it deliberatively? I think of it people will say, oh, I'm on a diet. Well, that does that doesn't tell me anything. Everybody is on a diet. Some diets are just more deliberative than others. So as long as you're in the business of soaking in information and l seeing the world around you, why not be deliberate about it? Because if you s if you are attentive and thoughtful and you find ways to take what you learn and kind of chew it over and make it part of you, it makes you interesting. And it makes the world more interesting and it makes it a lot more fun, you know, where you can look at something and say, Wow, I I think I understand what that is, or hear about someone and go, oh yeah, that connects to so-and-so, and just have this general awareness. For example, my my my spouse was we were at a we were at a party and she was talking to a gentleman who was an old uh old school CIA officer, and he was talking about where he started back in the 50s uh in Vietnam, and he had to learn French. And he started to say, and the reason I learned French was, and my wife goes, oh, French Indochina. And he goes, Oh, how did you know that? I I collect stamps, you know. So, you know, you just never know where these things are going to pop up, and and it it it's fun. Learning is funny. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

So one of the things, Sheldon, I like studying, you know, I love what you're saying because I remember back in college, I went to school for material science engineering, but I love going to lectures on philosophy, lectures in psychology, lectures in biology. And one of the things that I kind of dabbled into was philosophy of mind. So you're talking about, and I guess I kind of come from the camp of free will versus determinist, right? And you're shaking your head. Perfect. So I guess what are your thoughts in terms of like, again, a life of the mind? You're implying that we have this sense of free will.

SPEAKER_00 19:20

I I think it's I think it's appropriate to act as if we have free will. Aaron Powell I love that. Very academic answer. I love that. Yeah. Hey, you know, as uh as as a recovering academic, I still have the uh the ability to spend three pages just clearing my throat. Yeah. You know? So Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

But I guess for I love that. So, Sheldon, for listeners that aren't quite familiar with you know, free will and determinism, why is it important to have free will in the context of what you're saying?

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Well, it it forces us to be deliberate. Uh it forces us to think about why we're doing what we're doing, even if it's already determined. I I think it just is a lot more interesting and a lot more a lot healthier. You know, uh I uh you know, the the whole unexamined life is not worth living kind of thing. There's a real truth there. And yeah, sometimes examining your life is is not all that great. I mean, when you get to be my age, if you don't have a few moments, uh a few memories that make you cringe hard, you know, you haven't been paying attention.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Yeah. Well, that's yeah. So that's where I want to go next, Sheldon. So this is the work sucks, but I like it podcasts, right? So, like you said, not everything is always interesting. There are times that are not so interesting, right? So what is one thing that has sucked with the work that you're doing, and what are you doing to make it not suck today?

SPEAKER_00 20:47

Aaron Powell Well, the uh one of the the the difficulties that I'm that I have right now is that I'm, as I said, I'm working as a ghostwriter for a gentleman, and we're working on a novel, but this particular gentleman has some difficulty. Uh he he he doesn't really understand the genre of the novel. And it's it's been kind of a struggle to help him understand things like plot and character development and dramatic tension and these sorts of things. Um it's it's it's gradually sinking in, but it can be a bit tedious, you know, having to go back over and over and and until finally, oh, okay, I think I get it. Well, you almost get it. Let's try again, you know. That that can be hard. It's also uh the all the other thing too is that I'm not writing my book, I'm writing his book. You know, and it would be nice if I could write my book. I've already written a book, it would be nice to write another one. And if I can think of something to write about, I will.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

But just out of curiosity curiosity, Sheldon, why did that guy ask you? To write his book. And he doesn't know what plot is and all that. Maybe that's why he's asking you.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Well, no, the this actually was an interesting thing. I have a co-author that I'm working with, actually someone I knew in high school. And she and her husband were working on this with this guy. And about a year ago, her husband very unexpectedly passed away. And so sh she had heard that I was kind of bouncing around looking for something to do, and she contacted me and said, Hey, would you like to help me with this? Well, I I hadn't really done fiction writing before, unless you count some marketing copy that I wrote once. But uh she asked me, and I thought, well, this sounds like uh something new, something different. So I said, sure. And we've been at this for together working on this for about a year, and it has been despite some of the some of the frustrations, it has been an interesting thing for me because I've learned a lot about the actual craft of fiction. I know how to read fiction, but I've had to learn how to write it. And that's a that's a different process.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

What if like how to make life interesting? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Pretty broad topic, yeah. For sure, right. What would be the subtitle on that? But yeah, it just kind of got me Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Maybe how to make like life interesting when you're on a budget, you know.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Yeah, oh there you go. All right.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Yeah, because you know, well, that's one of the things with with my life has been marked by long periods of low income or no income. That's kind of a downside. But you know, the funny thing is I keep a journal, I keep a very detailed journal, and I have for a very long time. And going back through those journals, one of the things I discovered, kind of to my dismay, is that those periods of un or underemployment turned out to be some of the more productive times in my career, you know?

SPEAKER_01 24:14

So I love that. Well, speaking about your writing, Sheldon, you are the author of the Gorilla Scholars Handbook. If Member, if the audience wants to, you know, check it out, what is one thing that they would take away from your book?

SPEAKER_00 24:29

I think there's a quote that I have at the very beginning of the book, and it kind of encapsulates the whole the whole philosophy behind what I'm attempting to do here, and I'm gonna see if I can find it. Yes, this is by uh Stephen J. Gould, and he writes, I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Oh, wow. So yeah. That's that's kind of the spirit of the book in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

I love that. If uh listeners want to pick up that book, where's a good place for them to land?

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Aaron Ross Powell You can find it on Barnes Noble, you can find it on Amazon, uh ThriftBooks has it. Uh you can probably order it through your local independent bookstore. It is available through uh Ingram and the other major distributors. It's available in hardback, softback, uh electronic, and audiobook. So, you know, whatever your favorite format. And you can also check out what I'm noodling over at the moment on my Substack, uh the Gorilla Scholar.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Nice. Awesome. We'll put those links in the description. Sheldon, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much. Thank you. I've enjoyed being here. Awesome. Thank you.

unknown 26:08

And there's a win for the blows across the plains, and it seems