The best innovators will be polyglots

A hypothesis to dramatically increasing the impact of your innovation

In the space of innovation, you’ll hear people preach about things like the lean startup methods, failing early, testing ideas rapidly, etc… And these are all fine, even valuable things to implement, but I’ve been considering something that seems like it could have a compounding effect once you’ve become really good at innovating. And it’s an idea that no one, at least none that I’ve seen, has talked about.

I have to preface first that I’m in the freelance or gig economy space, and I think this particular trait serves the innovators in this industry particularly well. I suspect it might fall on a spectrum of impact depending on which industry you’re in. At any rate, as the freelance industry continues to get bigger, I have a hypothesis that the most renowned innovators in this space will have at least one distinguishing trait. Which is this:

They’ll be polyglots.

This is a term to describe someone who speaks several languages. Maybe 4, but there’s not a specific number attached. In practice, these innovators wills speak a lot of languages. The more the better, and the more widely spoken they are, the better.

So why does it matter to speak another language in the first place as an innovator?

That’s because each country has their own idiosyncrasies as it relates to culture, family, how they think about work, gender roles, etc… And I’m thinking of each culture as a really large, 15 sided puzzle piece. The number itself is irrelevant, it’s only meant to signify the complexity of the culture. Knowing a language opens up the opportunity to live in the place you want to innovate in.

I can’t recall where this video is at, but if I ever do find it again, I’ll put it in here for reference. It was an interview that the CEO of Malt did. His name is Vincent, and he’s French. One of the things he did when growing Malt was he picked up his family and literally moved to Germany, with, if I recall correctly, no connections there. And didn’t speak German.

One of the things he mentioned was that the culture and the people were very different. And he found out that the 0 to 1 method he was planning on executing wasn’t going to follow the same playbook that grew Malt in France. There was something unfamiliar with this new territory, and it was going to require a different strategy.

This isn’t a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Malt was already established and he was moving to establish it somewhere else. But I bring it up because he specifically noted the difference in culture.

The benefit of speaking their language

The advantage is that you have a much higher sensitivity on how to design something that more accurately fits the culture. Thats’s because intimately knowing the people that you create for is no doubt helpful when building businesses or products that benefit them. Knowing their language opens up the opportunity to talk directly to your customers. My hypothesis is that speaking their own language and immersing yourself in their culture is going to give you a massive advantage of intimately knowing this puzzle piece.

And I don’t think it’s that far of a stretch to assume that an identical product in the US could be a flop, but be massively successful in, say, Spain, because the overall circumstances there are simply different.

English as the language of business

Since the world has had to accommodate English speakers so much, the world has been forced to speak it. But there might be some incredible advantages to learning as many languages as possible, especially if you’re English speaking.

Imagine how many barriers this knocks down. You want to build a product for people in Africa? It has to be a lot easier when you speak Arabic or Berber. You want to build a product for people in Thailand? It has to be a lot easier when you speak Thai.

Foreigners love it when English speakers make even a half hearted attempt to learn their language. Now imagine the same person completely learns your language AND culture to build innovative businesses for them. They’d probably just fall on the ground dead.

If your goal is creating impact as an innovator, this seems that this is a great way to go about it. But you have to be really good at what you do first. No sense in learning another language to build mediocre products somewhere else; you’re just making things more difficult for yourself.

Objections

You might be thinking to yourself, “Why can’t you simply do this research at your desk? Other people have documented this stuff, right? You don’t need to do the research to figure it out” Perhaps you could do that. But once you start building a product, you’ll have to communicate with these people at some point.

“Why don’t you just hire a translator?” Also a good point. It’s an efficient way of thinking about it. Why not outsource? The unintended added benefit of speaking the language yourself is that you can talk to the press, do interviews, or talk to your audience directly over social media, and as I mentioned earlier, you can do research with them by yourself. Plus, and I think this is really big, the novelty of an innovator specifically learning a language to innovate for a particular culture is a much cooler story than simply hiring a translator.

It’s that dedication that separates you from the pack, which in turn makes you into an icon. This buzz is what helps bring about new connections and opportunities that probably wouldn’t have presented themselves had you just stayed within your culture, or just had people on your team that spoke the language.

At the end of the day, speaking languages appears to me that it’s a compounding effect in the freelance industry because you’re trying to find a way to bring together a global workforce. And understanding the subtle or not so subtle differences between cultures seems like it would illuminate how you go about building a product that caters to everyone.

Personally, I want to create as much impact in this world as I can. That’s why my mission is to dramatically improve 1 billion people’s quality of life. Even if the impact of knowing a language to develop a product isn’t as beneficial as I think it is, there’s value to be had in the publicity and connections it brings.

- Knowing languages makes it easier to build products for more people.
- This increases your publicity.
- More publicity means more opportunities to increase the speed of your impact.
- The cycle repeats.

You can’t grow infinitely, but you can probably create at least a couple S curves of growth. You get big, and then things taper off. But you learn another language, and the publicity starts all over again. More connections, more opportunities. Then you hit a lull. But you pick up another language and the process happens again.

Here’s essentially my thesis for this post: Polyglots will reap the most rewards in a globalized world because there are essentially no barriers to cross anymore.

You’re exceptional your craft, and now you can build relationships with an increasing amount of people. The more you can speak, the more people you can build for. You’ve now far surpassed every one of your peers, and you experience a level of notoriety that none of them do because you’re being covered by press all around the world. You now get to build for the world in the purest sense because you’ve knocked down this massive language barriers that prevents you in the first place.

This is also beneficial because people are attracted to those obsessed about a mission. There’s something within us humans that wants to latch on the person who making massive leaps and bounds. Just think about how Elon Musk has this cult like following. He’s super cool because he has massive goals, and he works really hard at it, and he meets them. Heck, he wants to make us an interplanetary species. That attracts help.

TL:DR

To recap, I think the most renowned innovators in the gig economy space will by polyglots because this sharpens their sensibilities to understand the complexity of each culture, it this gives them an advantage to develop products that more closely align with the desires of those in a foreign culture. The added benefit is that this drives publicity around the world world which helps you recruit more help, resources, and connections to speed up the process of your impact on the world.