Some people are farmers, some are hunters. Some people excel at routine tasks, making small incremental improvements, minimizing risks while maximizing returns. Others are better at recognizing patterns, focusing for long periods of time in pursuit of a goal, reacting suddenly and effectively in chaotic situations, taking risks.
The “hunters and farmers” metaphor has been around for a couple of decades but I stumbled across it just the other day in blog a post by Seth Godin. Godin muddies things with a couple of bad examples that confuse consumer behavior with personality type. Marketers have long made a distinction between low-involvement purchases (impulse shopping at Zappos) and high-involvement purchases (expensive large scale technology) and adjusted their pitches accordingly. It’s probably more accurate to say that hunters and farmers treat low-involvement and high-involvement purchases differently. A farmer will make an impulse purchase (breath mints) if it helps him avoid risk (offending his date). A hunter will spend a long time researching a high involvement purchase, yet she will be willing to accept more uncertainty than the farmer if the potential for reward is high.
But let’s not talk about marketing. Let’s talk about survival.
The modern world is optimized for routine work, farming if you will. While Thom Hartmann‘s metaphor of hunters and farmers might not be good science it does help construct an alternative narrative for people who are easily bored with the way most of the world works. The question for hunter-types is “how do I engage my natural instincts in a work-a-day world?”
Some hunter types have found a way to engage their inner drives by going into the sales profession. Others seek creative jobs. Still others just suffer.
Despite the fact that Hartmann has invested a good deal of effort in helping hunter-types find success, I’m surprised that there are very few resources targeted to hunters on the web. For instance, Merlin talks an awful lot about dealing distraction – a problem for hunters in a farmer’s world. But he doesn’t seem to have much to offer the hunter who wants to optimize his or her inner drives.
While this video blog from Howard Rheingold gives you more than you wanted to know about the matter, I believe it poses a good first step for frustrated hunter-types. Rheingold flips Merlin’s question “how do you screen out distraction?” and rewords it in a way that is more helpful to hunters – where do you want to focus your attention?
Photo by Charles Fred
