Re-Reflection

In 2009, as I was approaching the end of my Phd program, I wrote a blog post titled, Some Thoughts on Grad School. It described lessons I learned during my time at MIT.

Since then, I’ve received many requests to revisit the theme. Now that I’m a professor — albeit a new one — I thought I’d once again reflect publicly on what I did well and what I wish I’d done better.

With this in mind, I want to offer a pair of thoughts on a topic of particular importance to my path as an academic: complexity.

Thought #1: Avoid Complexity When Seeking Problems

Early in my graduate school experience, I had a mentor named Rachid — a well-known distributed algorithm specialist from EPFL. I learned many things from Rachid. For example, I once asked him for advice on a summer internship I was considering. I made different arguments  about the value of gaining connections and learning about industry.

“If you want my personal opinion,” he replied, “your time is better spent at MIT, preparing the next STOC/SOSP/JACM paper.”

To put this in context: STOC, SOSP, and JACM are acronyms for some of the most elite conferences and journals in the field of computer science. The lesson Rachid offered — which I’ve since strongly embraced — is that in the end, hard results are all that count.

But the Rachid lesson I want to emphasize here is about the danger of complexity. His approach was to always reduce a problem to its purest, most simple form. This is what leads to true understanding of the mathematical reality underlying the issue, he believed. Once you’re armed with this understanding, you can then, and only then, add back details (and the complexity they require) with confidence.

If you want to see this philosophy in action, take a look at this paper I co-authored with Rachid and another graduate student from MIT. The big picture problem that interested us was messy: how do parties work together to solve problems when their only means of communication is a broadcast channel where a malicious adversary can both jam and spoof messages?

You’ll notice in the paper, however, that we immediately reduce this down to the simplest possible expression of what makes this setting difficult: two players, Alice and Bob, trying to communicate a single bit, while a third player, Collin (the collider), tries to disrupt things.

All of the results in the paper build on our deep understanding of this simple three-player game.

(For what it’s worth, the paper has since been cited around 50 times.)

The problem here is that most graduate students tend toward the opposite of this approach. Their biggest fear is that they’ll propose a result and someone more knowledgeable will look at it, declare it “trivial,” and therefore validate their nagging imposter syndrome. Accordingly, students tend to rush to add technical complexity right away, as if a page full of math validates their ability.

This approach is flawed because it’s hard to make an impact in a technical field without deep understanding, and it’s hard to build deep understand of anything that’s not dead simple to describe. This is why the most respected professors are often those who are most likely to interrupt you and say, “slow down, and explain this to me like I don’t understand anything.”

They don’t want equations, they want insight.

Bottom Line: Hold off complexity as long as possible when studying a problem. It will inevitably enter the scene, but the later the entrance, the more insight you’ll develop.

Thought #2: Seek Complexity in Your Technical Skills

My first thought concerned something I think I do pretty well. My second thought concerns something I didn’t do enough as a graduate student, and that I’m only now, painfully, learning to embrace.

The value of a graduate student (not to mention, an assistant professor), I’ve come to realize, is directly proportional to the quantity and complexity of their technical tool kit. If you study algorithms, for example, the more corners of the literature you’ve mastered, and the more mathematical analysis techniques you’re comfortable with, the more problems you’ll be able to solve. And the more problems you’re able to solve, the more likely that you’ll solve some hard ones — the key currency for an academic career.

This thought doesn’t contradict the first thought (though it might seem to). When tackling a problem, you want to start with its simplest expression. To find a good problem and then make sense of its simplest expression, however, you need the most powerful possible combination of knowledge and skills.

The trickiness here is that mastering new knowledge and learning new technical skills is like learning to play a new instrument: it’s difficult, and frustrating, and takes a long time.

All graduate students are forced to develop a basic tool kit due to the deliberate practice required to pass your courses and contribute to your first publications. The students that thrive, however, don’t stop there; they keep pushing themselves to learn more.

I didn’t do nearly enough of this.

It took me two years to get decent at solving a certain class of problems concerning deterministic distributed algorithms (roughly 2004 – 2006). There was then a two year period where I was satisfied to use only this hammer and go seek nails, no matter how hard they became to find.

The issue I faced was that my field was moving forward. Randomization was where the interesting new work was being done, and my approach was in danger of becoming dated.

It wasn’t until 2008 that I began the dreary effort of teaching myself probability theory. In this early paper, for example, you can see the beginning of the transition: the majority of the results are deterministic, but they draw on a tentative, randomized sub-routine. (This is where, for example, I reintroduced myself to Dr. Chernoff).

The next year I published this paper, which pushed me forward in my learning, but was also a terrible strain. A significant fraction of its results came from the following process:

• I would get stuck because I didn’t know enough probability theory.
• I would go talk with one of my co-authors, who would reply by filling a white board with a bunch of inequalities.
• I would scramble back to my office and try to recreate the argument from scratch, filling in the details, before it slipped my mind.
• I would return to my co-author to discover that I had fouled up my dependencies in some terrible way that would likely involve the intervention of something called a “Martingale.”

This was pretty brutal. But I learned quite a bit.

I am realizing now, however, that my pace was still too slow. For example, I should have shot past independent probabilities and mastered techniques for bounded dependence. This is a natural — though difficult — next step that I avoided for too long.

Over the past year, I’ve been systematically increasing my pace of skill learning (more on this soon), but if I had committed to this mindset with more purpose back in 2006, I’m embarrassed to think about the extraordinary impact on my work it might have had by now.

Bottom Line: Treat your time as a graduate student like a professional musician treats his or her performance repertoire. If you’re not constantly straining yourself to learn more and perform better, you’re in danger of being left behind.

(Photo by Nietnagel)

Sheryl Sandberg is the COO at Facebook.

Last year she was paid over $30 million dollars in stocks and salary.

This year she was named to Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World list.

But here’s what interests me most: in April she revealed that she leaves work every day by 5:30. She has practiced this habit since she first had kids, but only recently did she build enough confidence to talk publicly about it.

This is a fantastic example of the fixed-schedule productivity philosophy that I’ve long preached. As many have discovered, fixing strong constraints in your working life can paradoxically make your work much stronger (as it forces you to focus on what’s important, which in turn helps you get better at what you do).

E-mailing during every waking hour might make you feel more important, but as Sandberg’s accomplishments verify, it has very little to do with your actual impact.

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Speaking of interesting articles, my friend Elizabeth Saunders has a thought-provoking piece on the Harvard Business Review blog about the different types of passion and their implication for our working lives.

A2 Earns an A

When I first started blogging in 2007, I needed web hosting. I noticed that Merlin Mann had a note on 43 Folders about his happiness working with a company named A2 Hosting. That was good enough for me: I signed up for their introductory package.

That was five years ago and I’ve been nothing but happy with their service ever since.  Now, in a nice bit of circularity, they’ve agreed to sponsor Study Hacks in much the same way they were sponsoring 43 Folders back when I got started with blogging.

So if you’re looking for web hosting, you have my recommendation.

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Community College Success

Speaking of recommendations, I have one more to make. An important segment of my readers is community college students. I like these students because they are often way more pragmatic than their counterparts at four year institutions. They see school as an investment and want to get the most out of the money they put in, and therefore they tend to focus more on the nitty-gritty of their strategies (which I enjoy) and less on whether their major is their passion (which I don’t enjoy).

Anyway, a shortcoming of my student writing is that I’ve never done systematic studies of community college students, so my advice in this area is somewhat tentative.

This is why I am happy to enthusiastically recommend Isa Adney’s new book: Community College Success.

If you’re in community college and are looking for advice tailored to your specific setting, Isa’s book is a great place to start.

The Dune Revelation

In July 2009, I took a trip to San Francisco. At some point, I ended up hiking at a sand-duned nature preserve, not far south from Monterey on Highway 1.

What I remember about this hike is a thought that struck not long into the route. In the summer of 2009, I was two months from defending my PhD dissertation. I had arranged for a post doc after graduation but found the academic market beyond to be uncertain for me and my skills. It was in this context that I had my insight:

Why hadn’t I systematically studied the most successful senior grad students when I first arrived at MIT?

Every year, a small number of computer science students at MIT easily generate multiple job offers while the rest have to sweat the process. What do these students do differently from the others? It’s a basic question and yet almost no one arriving in Cambridge seeks an answer. We instead carve out our paths blindly, sticking our heads up only at the end to see if we’ve stumbled anywhere near our destination.

I ended up fine, landing a great tenure track position at Georgetown, but the 2009 version of myself did not have this certainty, and my failure to more systematically plan for my arrival on this market suddenly seemed a glaring omission.

The $100 Startup

This 2009 experience came back to me earlier this week as I read an advance copy of Chris Guillebeau’s new book: The $100 Startup. In this book, Chris tackles a topic made popular by Tim Ferris: how to build a lifestyle business in a digital age.

Lots of people are enamored by the idea of having a business that requires little investment and yet supports you financially while injecting flexibility into your life.

What sets Chris’s book apart, however, is that he was not content inventing a bullet-point system that simply sounds good. He instead systematically studied people who had actually made these types of businesses work. He started with a survey of 1500 such entrepreneurs which he then narrowed down to 100-200 that he interviewed in more detail. He lists them by name in his appendix.

The result is often messier than the internally-consistent, inspiration-boosting acronmyized systems of competing books and blogs, but the advice come across with an authenticity that’s rare for this topic.

Put another way: Chris did with his interest in lifestyle businesses what I should have done as a grad student with my interest in becoming a professor. The only plan he was interested in was a plan grounded in reality.

The Big Question

I’m telling these stories because they inspire an important question: Why do so few people do what Chris did? Most of us are content, it seems, to work hard and build complicated systems, but we avoid basing our efforts on a reality-based assessment of what really matters.

And I think I finally have an explanation…

The Pseudo-Striving Hypothesis

Why do so many ambitious people approach their quest for remarkability in the way I approached grad school, and not in the way Chris Guillebeau approached lifestyle entrepreneurship? Here’s my tentative explanation:

The Pseudo-Striving Hypothesis
It’s significantly more pleasant to pursue a goal with a plan entirely of our own construction, then to use a plan based on a systematic study of what actually works. The former allows us to pseudo-strive, experiencing the  fulfillment of busyness and complex planning while avoiding any of the uncomfortable, deliberate, often harsh difficulties that populate plans of the latter type.

For example…

• For the aspiring writer, embracing National Novel Writing Month is pseudo-striving. It feels good to sit down every morning and throw a few hundred words on a page. But the reality of writing would tell you that getting your fiction chops to a publishable level requires the training that comes only in the form of writing for someone else — be it an MFA classroom or edited publication. You need the fear of rejection to push your writing skills. Then you still need to experience that rejection time and again during the period where your skills are just starting to improve. It’s much easier to sit on your deck with your MacBook and a cup of coffee and applaud yourself for your dedication.
• For the aspiring grad student, seeking research ideas that fall comfortably within the scope of what you already know how to do, and then trying to convince other people that your work is important, is pseudo-striving. Reflecting on my experience, I notice now that academia is much more likely to reward the strategy of spending the 12 – 24 months of deliberate practice necessary to master an important emerging field. This is really hard. But those who persist end up doing work with impact.
• For the aspiring lifestyle designer, dedicating hours to e-mail auto-responders, WordPress widgets, and social network engineering is also pseduo-striving. It gives you lots to do, nothing is really judged a success or failure, and nothing is really hard, but you feel engaged and active. It’s quite pleasent. Many of the successful entrepreneurs from Chris’s book, by contrast, had a reality-based fixation on actually making real money from real people before doing anything else (be it leaving their job or optimizing a web site). This is less pleasant, because you might fail time and again to convince people to give you their money, but ultimately it’s all that matters, so that’s where your initial energy should be focused.

Conclusion

When it comes to constructing a remarkable life, I’m increasingly convinced that pseudo-striving is a common trap with devastating consequences. It lulls you into a rhythm of busyness and complexity that might have very little to do with real accomplishment.

I’m not sure why our instincts lead us to flee reality-based planned, but they do. The more explicitly we recognize the difference between pseudo-striving and the messy difficulty of real world accomplishment, the better, I hope, we can refocus our efforts onto what matters.

(Photo by rooksbane)

Feeling Low on Flow

In a trio of recent articles, I emphasized that flow is dangerous (see here and here and here). It feels good, so we’re tempted to seek it out, but it doesn’t actually help us get better: the key process in creating a remarkable life.

Most of you liked this concept, while a few of you thought I had missed the boat. Here’s an example of the latter sentiment:

I disagree with [your] point. Flow is the experience of being lost in one’s effort. That can easily happen when one is highly challenged and enjoying the intense effort.

There was also quite a bit of discussion on what, exactly, “flow” means, with enough different points of view presented that I soon felt that the whole issue was becoming muddied and difficult to wade through.

Then someone sent me an article penned by Anders Ericsson — the psychologist who innovated the study of how we get better by introducing the idea of deliberate practice. In this article, which was published in 2007 in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ericsson addresses the difference between flow and deliberate practice:

It is clear that skilled individuals can sometimes experience highly enjoyable states (‘‘flow’’ as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) during their performance. These states are, however, incompatible with deliberate practice, in which individuals engage in a (typically planned) training activity aimed at reaching a level just beyond the currently attainable level of performance by engaging in full concentration, analysis after feedback, and repetitions with refinement.

In other words, the feeling of flow is different than the feeling of getting better. If all you seek is flow, then you’re not going to get better. There is no avoiding the deliberate strain of real improvement. (This is not the say, however, that you should not seek flow in addition to deliberate practice as a strategy to recharge, or experience it as unavoidable when you put your deliberately honed skills to use.)

Ericsson concludes by echoing a warning familiar to Study Hacks readers:

The commonly held but empirically unsupported notion that some uniquely “talented” individuals can attain superior performance in a given domain without much practice appears to be a destructive myth that could discourage people from investing the necessary efforts to reach expert levels of performance.

He said it. Not me.

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This post is part of my series on the deliberate practice hypothesis, which claims that applying the principles of deliberate practice to the world of knowledge work is a key strategy for building a remarkable working life.

Previous posts:

• The Satisfying Strain of Learning Hard Material
• Beyond Flow
• How I Used Deliberate Practice to Ace my Computer Science Final
• Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player
• Is Talent Underrated? Making Sense of a Recent Attack on Practice
• Perfectionism as Practice: Steve Jobs and the Art of Getting Good
• Complicate the Formula: John McPhee’s Deliberate Practice Strategy
• If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers

(Photo by Kofoed)

A Deliberate Morning

This morning I finished my notes for an upcoming lecture in my graduate-level theory of computation course.

There are two points I wanted to make about these notes…

1. The process of creating them is very hard. On average, it takes me between 2.5 to 3 hours to prepare a lecture. This preparation requires that I work with absolutely zero distractions as the material is too difficult to be internalized if my attention is divided in any way. Furthermore, the work is not particularly pleasant. Learning things that are this hard does not put you in a flow state. It instead puts you in a state of strain, similar to what is experienced by a musician learning a new technique.
2. I have gotten better at this process. The lecture I prepared today was the twenty-first such lecture I have prepared this semester. The earliest lectures were a struggle in the sense that my mind rebelled at the strain required and lobbied aggressively for  distraction. This morning, by contrast, I was able to slip into this hard work with little friction, tolerate the strain for three consecutive hours, then come out on the other side feeling a sense of satisfaction.

Recently, we have been discussing the deliberate practice hypothesis, which argues that knowledge workers can experience big jumps in value if they apply deliberate practice techniques to their work. My three-month experiment in timed, forced concentration provides a nice case study of this idea. I am now better at mastering hard concepts than I was before. The mental acuity developed from this practice translates over to the research side of my job, helping me more efficiently understand existing results and more deeply explore my own ideas.

To toss the ball back in your court, imagine what would happen if you replaced “graduate-level theory of computation” with a prohibitively complicated but exceptionally valuable topic in your own field, and then tackled it with the same persistence…

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This post is part of my series on the deliberate practice hypothesis, which claims that applying the principles of deliberate practice to the world of knowledge work is a key strategy for building a remarkable working life.

Previous posts:

• Beyond Flow
• How I Used Deliberate Practice to Ace my Computer Science Final
• Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player
• Is Talent Underrated? Making Sense of a Recent Attack on Practice
• Perfectionism as Practice: Steve Jobs and the Art of Getting Good
• Complicate the Formula: John McPhee’s Deliberate Practice Strategy
• If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers

The Chess Master and the Economist

A reader recently sent me an interesting interview with Ken Rogoff, a hotshot economics professor at Harvard.

As a young man, Rogoff was a world-class chess player. He eventually translated his ability to grad school where he studied economics with a focus, naturally enough, on game theory. What caught my attention in Rogoff’s interview was his dedication to diligence.

Even two interests, in Rogoff’s thinking, represented one too many:

[A]t graduate school he became convinced that dividing his attention meant that both his chess and his economics were suffering. He had to make a decision. [He chose economics.] “Part of my strategy of moving on was to give it up completely. I don’t play chess casually…Not unless it’s incredibly rude to decline playing.”

He elaborates:

“Being very good at anything involves being somewhat addicted.”

Bottom line: I am increasingly stricken by the yawning gap that exists between the feel-good, follow your passion, be the change you want to see-style chatter that fills the online world, and the reality of how people actually end up making a true impact.

(Image by jojoivika)

Professorial Exodus

Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which I did for many years after college, I learned to recognize a curious ritual. Come June, the academic offices of Harvard and MIT would clear out as a significant fraction of these schools’ professors decamped to New Hampshire, Maine, and, for the more remuneratively famous among them, Martha’s Vineyard.

Some professors I knew would fall off the radar completely, while others would shift to three day a week schedules. But come summer time, you couldn’t take it for granted that a professor would be on campus.

Interestingly, the biggest predictor of a professor leaving was status: the more important a person’s work, the more comfortable they were taking time off. Here’s my hypothesis: once they built confidence in their understanding of value — how to identify what really matters and what it really takes to produce it — they gained the confidence required to push everything else aside.

Are You Busy or Valuable?

When the weather turns nice, as it has been recently down here in DC, I remember this Cambridge ritual. It reminds me of an important point: creating value is unrelated to busyness. When you find yourself — as I sometimes do — working long hours, day after day, reacting and e-mailing and hatching schemes, it’s useful to remember that you’re working more than some of the world’s most respected and impactful thinkers.

The hard part, of course, is that it’s easier to be busy than it is to be valuable — but this shouldn’t stop us from every once and a while taking advantage of a nice day to shut things down and spend a few hours trying to figure out the difference.

(Photo by Christopher Wisker)

A Career Crossroads

In the early winter of 2004, I was a senior at Dartmouth College and in the fortunate position of having two good job offers.

The first was from Microsoft. It paid, by 2004 standards, about as much as you could possibly earn right out of college (around $85,000 in cash and stock per year).

The second offer was to join the computer science PhD program at MIT. It paid considerably less (around $28,000 in stipend) but promised near complete freedom (MIT is quite unstructured and entrepreneurial).

I had no clear preference for which job to take — they both seemed exciting. But in my effort to make a decision, I stumbled on a key tool in the career craftsman toolbox.

Follow a Lifestyle, Not a Passion

In my last post, I argued that the right way to build a remarkable life is to first identify the traits that define your vision of “remarkable,” then pursue only jobs that will reward you with these traits if and when you master rare and valuable skills.

But here’s the snag: what if you don’t know what these traits are?

This is a problem common to students and recent graduates — those who have not yet had enough life experience to figure out what’s possible and what resonates.

This was also my situation as I pondered my competing offers in the fall of 2004. At the time, I was ambitious and optimistic, and had a great sense of potential, but I was also clueless about how best to direct this energy.

This is what I did…

Bargain Shopping Careers

Both jobs, I determined, would reward me well if I built up career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills.

At Microsoft, if you stand out, you gain the ability to acquire some desirable career traits. If you make it to project leader on a hot product, for example, you can have impact, recognition, creativity, and low-level autonomy (i.e., freedom from a direct boss dictating your day to day).

In an academic track, however, I determined that mastering rare and valuable skills would offer an even wider variety of such traits to choose from. If I made a name in the world of research, not only is impact, recognition, and creativity available, but so is a much, much higher degree of autonomy (successful professors are able to craft any number of exotic work setups). It also would allow for the possibility of taking a leave to start a company as well as continuing with my writing (I had just submitted the manuscript for my first book).

I didn’t know which traits I ultimately wanted in my career, but I appreciated that MIT would offer me more options for the career capital I generated. So I turned down Bill Gates and went to work — ironically — in the Bill Gates Tower at MIT.

The Value Rule

The main idea captured by this story is simple:

The Value Rule
When in doubt about which specific desirable traits you want to pursue in your working life, choose the available job option that offers the greatest variety of these traits in exchange for career capital.

Keep in mind, the availability of these traits are irrelevant if you don’t first build up capital by mastering rare and valuable skills — no one gives away such value just because you feel “passionate” about it. But as you advance in this quest to become so good they can’t ignore you, and along the way add sophistication to your value system, it’s likely that you will — as I do now — appreciate the greater flexibility this rule adds to your career crafting process.

(Photo by madelinetosh)

A Nervous Sophomore

The following question came from a sophomore finance major at a well-known state university:

I have read and heard that entry-level investment bankers have to work long hours doing meaningless grunt work assigned by bosses (sometimes portrayed as evil)…How can your career craftsman philosophy be applied to high stakes fields such as finance?

This reader believed in my career philosophy and was perfectly happy to sidestep the flawed idea that he should “follow his passion.” But the option of heading into investment banking — a popular choice for his major at his university — was making him nervous.  The requirements for standing out in this field seemed brutal and he wasn’t inspired by the rewards you can obtain for banking stardom (more respect and money in exchange for more work hours and stress).

I told him not to become an investment banker.

Here’s why…

Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning

The goal of my career philosophy is to craft a remarkable working life. The definition of “remarkable,” however, differs for different people.

One one extreme, it might capture a life of power and respect, where you’re at the center of important matters. While on another, it might capture a life of exotic travel with a minimum of work and a maximum of adventure.

Something most such visions have in common is that they contain traits that are rare and valuable. If you want them, therefore, you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. This requires that you stop daydreaming about a perfect job that will make you instantly happy, and instead focus on becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

There are a tremendous number of different ways to build up this career capital, which is why I don’t put much emphasis on what specific job you take.

This being said, however, the example from our nervous sophomore above emphasizes an important nuance: not all jobs produce the type of capital you need.

If, for example, your vision involves working four hours a week from a beach, the capital obtained from an investment bank is not the right type of capital for the career traits you seek.

If your vision instead involves impacting major world events, then banking capital can serve you well.

When I talked with our sophomore from above, I learned that his definition of “remarkable” — which emphasized autonomy — was not easily acquirable with banking capital, which is why I advised him to head in a different direction. For other students with other definitions, I might have advised the opposite.

It might seem like “pursuing your definition of a remarkable life” is quite similar to “following your passion,” but for most people, it’s not. A vision for a life well-lived tends to be broad and ambiguous — touching on major distinctions in lifestyle not specific industries or types of work. These are statements of values not commitments to economic sectors.

The following, for example, fit naturally in a definition of a remarkable life:

• A desire for time affluence.
• A desire for influence and recognition.
• A desire for playing a deep, meaningful role in your family and community.
• A desire to be known for creativity or to have an impact on the world of ideas.
• A desire to be free of financial concerns.
• A desire for adventure.
• A desire for minimalism (less stuff, less obligations, less mental clutter).

The first list describes general traits of a life well-lived. The second list describes specific strategies for obtaining these traits. My career advice thinks you should be obstinate in protecting the former while not caring much at all about the latter. You need to know where generally you want to go, but you shouldn’t get too obsessed about the uncountably many different routes that can get you there.

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For more musing on this topic, see my 2008 post on lifestyle-centric career planning.

(Photo by DigiDragon)