Who You Are Alone Is the Smaller Half

Graphene is a single sheet of carbon atoms. It is a good conductor. It is not a superconductor.

Stack two sheets of it with one rotated about 1.1 degrees from the other, and it becomes one. Electrical resistance drops to zero.

Nothing was added. No new element, no dopant. Both sheets are the same ordinary material they were before, and neither does this alone. The only thing that changed is the angle between them. Rotate a little further and the effect is gone.

I am not a physicist and I am not going to pretend the physics says anything about people. But I read about it, and it handed me language for something I have believed for a while without being able to say cleanly.

The properties I thought were mine

For most of my life I have evaluated myself as a standalone object. What do I know, what can I build, what am I good at. That is how a resume works, how interviews work, how I was taught to think about getting better. Improve the part, and better outcomes follow.

The framing keeps producing results I cannot explain with it.

I have been on teams where I was clearly the same person I am everywhere else and the work was two or three times better than what I do alone. Not because anyone learned anything new that quarter. And I have been in rooms where I got quieter, slower, and more defensive than I am with my family, doing work I am not proud of, with people who were individually excellent.

The honest reading is that a lot of what I call my ability is not sitting in me. It shows up in a particular pairing and not in others.

We half know this already. When someone says a coworker is difficult, they almost always mean difficult with them. When a friend tells me their partner brings out the worst in them, nobody hears that as a claim about a fixed personal trait. We just do not extend the same reading to ourselves, or to the parts of our lives we are proud of. Those we file as personal properties.

What follows if it is true

It makes judging a person in isolation close to meaningless. You are not measuring the person. You are measuring one pairing, usually the one with yourself, and reporting it as a fact about them.

It redistributes credit and blame. I have carried failures for years that were probably not mine in the way I stored them. Two people can each be functioning fine and produce nothing together, and neither one is defective. That is a real possibility I did not previously allow myself.

It also takes something away. If the good state is relational, you cannot pack it and carry it to the next job, the next city, the next relationship. Whatever you built with those particular people stays with those particular people. You arrive somewhere new as a sheet of ordinary carbon again, and the work has to start over.

And it can be lost without anyone doing anything wrong. There is no villain required. Two people drift a degree or two apart over a few years and the thing that used to be there is simply not there, with both of them still perfectly good material.

The part I do not like

Alignment costs something. It is not free, and it is not the same as getting along.

The arrangements where something real emerges between people are the ones where each person gives up some of their own free movement. You stop optimizing your own path. You wait, you defer, you spend effort on a thing you would not have chosen, you let someone else’s judgment override yours in the places they are better. I have resisted that most of my life, and I framed the resistance as protecting my capability.

I do not think it was. I think I was protecting the smaller half.

None of this means capability is irrelevant. What you can do sets the ceiling. But how you are aligned with the people around you decides how much of the space under that ceiling you will ever actually reach, and I now think it is the more sensitive of the two by a wide margin, and by far the more neglected.

One degree, in the right direction, changed what carbon is capable of. I keep coming back to how small that is.

Reference

• Cao, Fatemi, Fang, Watanabe, Taniguchi, Kaxiras & Jarillo-Herrero, Unconventional superconductivity in magic-angle graphene superlattices (Nature, 2018). The general field is called twistronics, and the patterns that form when two lattices overlap at a slight angle are called moiré superlattices.