Last March, Bijoy Goswami and I sat down for a fascinating (and lengthy) conversation about mental models and bootstrapping at Progress Coffee on Austin’s East Side. The interview was recorded and transcribed, and we’ve broken it up into a four-part series for the blog.
While preparing it for publication, Bijoy and I both felt it was important to stress that the chief mental model being explained here, that of the Maven-Relater-Evangelist, may or may not be useful to you in understanding your own place in the world. The point is not to take Bijoy’s model, or anyone else’s, and indiscriminately apply it to your own life. The point is rather to start thinking about how you might create models to better understand your own path in life.
- Sarah
(This interview is cross-posted from the Austin Social Media Club website.)
You were talking about dance partners earlier. I’m assuming those people were often relaters.
dance partners
Or mavens. Yes, exactly. They were the complementary energy. Evangelists tended to be more of my friends, but we weren’t getting anything done because we were stepping all over each other. Whereas a maven or a relater, and more often mavens, because their strength was my minor, I could relate to them. But it wasn’t my deal, my core thing. One of my favorite examples is we had a teacher who was having us do Shakespeare creative projects. It was the morning it was due, and we’re waiting in front of the class for it to start, and I go, “I know, I’ll do a one-man King Lear.” So I’m writing it, I start Act I, I’m busily working on this thing, and my tall friend John Barden walks up to me, he says “hey, Bijoy.” And I’m like “yeah John,” kind of, can’t you see I’m busy?
Doing your one-man King Lear…
He goes, “what are you doing for your creative project?” I go, “I’m doing a one-man King Lear!” He goes, “wanna make it a two-man?” And I looked up and went, “Oh my god! Totally!” And we blew this thing out, it was the most hilarious project that I’d done, we ended up doing it at the theater in the school. The funny part was it was years later, and I did a short play called Mystic Cab, and then I turned it into a short film. Same thing. I decided to do a one-man, one act play. This was like five years ago. And I had been working on this thing and it was a total mess. I’m driving downtown and my friend Kurt calls me and he says, “what are you doing?” I said, “I’m working on this thing, I signed up for Frontera Fest. I’m so screwed because five days from now I’m gonna have to present something, do 25 minutes of a play, and I’ve got nothing.” And he says, “I’ll do it with you.” And I said “oh my god, that would be so great.” And then I thought, why didn’t I think to ask him? Because he had some free time, he’s a theater guy. Right?
So now, have you learned? I mean now do you reach out?
Now, after 17 bonks on the head from the universe? (laughter). Yeah, I look at all my projects as collaborations now. And I think “who’s my dance partner, or dance partners?” within anything that I’m doing. The book I wrote was written with Dave Walperg. The film I made was with Neil Johannsen. Bootstrap was one big collaboration. And I constantly go okay, my job is to reduce down into my thing and to create the space for others.
Now, one interesting caveat: I have a strong minor energy. Some people are very much on the points of the triangle. They’re like hard core mavens, hard core relater, hard core evangelist. Some of us are major-minors. We have a strong minor. Then we’ve got to reconcile within ourselves how those two integrate and don’t kill each other. I’ve had another journey, which is I was essentially outsourcing my maven to other people, and my internal maven was kind of pissed. Like, “hello dude, I’m here, I’m a maven.” And when the evangelist essentially took people off a cliff with my tech start-up, the maven said, “look, go in the corner, I’m gonna show you what’s up.” And in a sense these last number of years have been a maven exercise. My maven energy has been dominant in terms of building these models. And he showed my evangelist energy, “guess what, that’s my contribution. Yeah there’s these great mavens and relaters, and maybe even other evangelists that we want to partner with, but what you need to evangelize are these models. These are the creations that I’m coming up with, so now let’s work together.” So that’s another interesting self-reconciliation.
I find the choice of maven interesting, because I guess in my head there’s a little bit of a disconnect. I think of a maven as a proselytizer. But you think of a maven as a learner? or as a thinker?
An expert, yes.
An expert. Alright.
I mean these are just words, so you end up having to pick some word.
I’m just trying to understand the model a little bit better. And I think I do, but we have jumped so into it that I want to clarify it at this point. An evangelist is definitely your proselytizer, that’s definitely the person who is the leader, brings people together…
"Bono, not the Edge"
Bono, not The Edge. You know, The Edge is the maven, Bono is the evangelist. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. You see these pairs.
And the relater? Where does the relater fit in? The relater feels like a third wheel to me, in your model. And that’s because you’re probably describing yourself that way.
That’s where I’m sitting, yeah. I live in that region of the world. The relater is the glue. The relater is, if we have the human fabric as the title of the book, the relater is the weaver of the human fabric. What they do is, mavens pick an area of the world and they study it. Relaters pick people. For relaters, people are the thing. And people are this infinite puzzle, and they’re just so interested in people. Oh my gosh, your journey, and how’s your day, and all this stuff. What they’re gathering data on is this entity called a person. And where they are. And then you should really talk to this person. My youngest brother is a total relater. and I have these great relaters in my world, and I look at what they do, and it’s incredible. It’s sometimes really frustrating, because as a maven or an evangelist you don’t think of a person as a universe unto themselves. but a relater does. So they’ll sit there and if you say, tell me about Joe, they’ll go oh, you know, and 20 minutes later you’ve got a soliloquy on Joe. And I’m like no, don’t tell me that much. What they’re doing, and this is the interesting thing, is I always used to draw the triangle as maven, evangelist, relater, like that…
Maven at the top.
Maven at the top. I didn’t know why. But I learned later that a model is already communicating information when you place the pieces. so my friend Tina, who did the book cover, she has a company called Spoon Bend, it’s a graphic design marketing company. She took the triangle and she tipped it. and she also did three paintings that illustrated the energies of these three. she tipped it forward, and all of a sudden it all made sense. because the evangelist was on the ground, pulling the triangle. the maven was stepping up on the top. and the relater was in the back, connecting, making sure everything is good, but taking a quiet role. That’s the thing with relaters is you can tell who the mavens are, you can tell who the evangelists are, the relaters are in the background. they’re the unseen third. But really each of these two resolves the duality for the other. So when the maven and the relater have a conflict, the evangelist can come in there and broker that discussion. because all of their energies are in a tight triangle like that. so, relaters are incredibly important.
Societies also fall into the triangle. Think of America: evangelist-maven. Right? I mean our dominant is we’re evangelists out here, we’re the Wild West, those are our heroes. Relaters don’t get much play here. Whereas in Japan, that’s a relater-maven culture. What’s Japan all about? It’s how you treat each other, how you interact. Whenever you’re looking for a culture’s energy, look at what they formalize. Germany: mavens. Uber-mavens.
You mentioned Hong Kong. Did you grow up in Hong Kong?
Yeah.
So how would you describe Hong Kong?
Hong Kong at night
Oh, evangelist. Very clearly. Which is interesting. Hong Kong and Singapore have an interesting relationship, because Singapore to me is maven, Hong Kong is very evangelist, and I always thought the obvious thing for them was to hook up and start, you know, getting all the business people in Hong Kong talking to the inventors and technologists in Singapore. That would be my economic prescription.
This is Part II of a four-part series. Part I can be found here. Parts III and IV will follow over the next two days.
Bijoy’s Amazon list of suggested reading material on mental models can be found here.
