Prolog

As Microsoft quickly found out to its chagrin, associating with Seinfeld in this day and age, may not be that fashionable. But hey, i am no Microsoft and I love Seinfeld. The inspiration for the post’s title comes from a super Seinfeld episode called the Soup Nazi.  In an earlier post, we covered how to build passion.  While passion goes a long way, we need some mechanism to build expertise in a certain area.

The Yoghurt Nazi

As I thought about this, I was struck by Priya Raju’s deeply formed opinion about Yoghurt (Curd). She looks at the texture, color, the level of sourness etc and only if it met her standards, she would consume it. I jocularly refer to her as the Yoghurt Nazi after the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld who has a zillion rules.  As for me, i have no taste in Yoghurt and would be okay with anything as long as it is yoghurt. However, i am very opinionated about which vegetable should be added to what kind of dish. I am the Food Nazi. My grandfather was a gourmet and i would like to think i have inherited some of his genes. Whereas Priya Raju didn’t have such opinions about food except that it taste good. Interestingly, she would try a lot of different cuisines effortlessly and spot trends, i found myself, slightly more reluctant to try newer cuisines.

Sound of Music

Then i started to look at tastes in music and i found another interesting thing. While i had a strong opinion about what is good music, i generally tended to experiment and discover newer genres of music, I found Priya Raju had a greater ability to say which is great music and she didn’t experiment as much as I do with music.  I also observed similar patterns in taste for movies.

The Taste Spectrum

Then I had several discussions with Priya Raju and we realized that to have a good taste in something you need to have a certain degree of expertise and a certain degree of enthusiasm for it.  We then proceeded to categorize people and plotted the diagram above that i call the Taste Spectrum.  On the X axis expertise going from -5 to +5 and Y axis is enthusiasm going from -5 to +5.

1. Nazis – these are people who have high expertise and slightly less enthusiasm than the trendspotters (see below). Expert critics, connoisseurs, gourmets would belong here.
2. Trendspotters – these have slightly less expertise compared to Nazis but have a higher degree of enthusiasm compared to them so they try more new stuff and may be the first ones to spot new trends.
3. Normal – these have medium level of expertise and medium level of enthusiasm.  If you take music as an example, many people would be in this category – everyone likes music for the most part.
4. Indifferent – these have zero expertise and zero enthusiasm. They simply don’t care about the stuff.
5. Rigid – these have some medium level of expertise but their enthusiasm is medium negative.  They will hold onto what they have tried and liked and won’t try new things that easily.
6. Bad Taste – these have a great level of enthusiasm but medium negative expertise. They may enthusiastically choose the wrong things.
7. Finicky – these have both medium negative expertise and medium negative enthusiasm. They don’t have expertise to discern and won’t try new things as well.
8. Haters – they have poor expertise and poor enthusiasm. they simply hate the stuff.

The Taste Zones

Once we plotted the spectrum, we could see 3 broad zones emerging

1. the love zone – Normal, Trendspotters and Nazi. They really like the stuff and this group as a collective has the greatest level of enthusiasm and expertise – these are the talented boys/gals.
2. the hate zone – finicky, haters. They have crossed over to the other side. the talent-free club.
3. The middle zone – indifferent, rigid, bad taste. They have potential to move to either side depending on how they develop their open-mindedness or their abilities.

Taste Translates

Overall, what we find is that, if we can develop our taste in one area, we can quite easily translate that into areas where our professional success may depend upon.  All of us belong in the love zone in atleast one thing – music, movies, yoghurt , food, travel. If we can develop that area and become a Nazi in that, we can then transfer that ability to other areas that matter in our professional lives.

Epilog

What do you all think? What are you a Nazi in?