The Five Year Eureka Moment

Daniel Kahneman met Amos Tversky in 1969 when Tversky came to Hebrew University to give a talk.

As Kahneman recalls in his 2011 intellectual biography, Thinking, Fast and Slow,  the two researchers hit it off and decided to pursue a joint project: figuring out if some people had more of an intuitive grasp of statistics than others.

They discovered that the answer, universally, was a resounding “no.”

“Our expert colleagues…greatly exaggerated the likelihood that the original result of an experiment would be successfully replicated,” Kahneman recalls of their results. “They also gave poor advice to a fictitious graduate student about the number of observations she needed to collect.”

“Even statisticians are not good intuitive statisticians,” he concluded.

This small observation led to a bigger idea: perhaps humans are hardwired with cognitive shortcuts to help them make sense of an uncertain world, and perhaps these shortcuts, in certain situations, consistently lead to irrational conclusions.

This hypothesis was profound. At the time, social science believed that humans were fundamentally rational, and only emotion, like fear or anger, could lead us to irrational behavior. Kahneman and Tversky were proposing that humans, on the contrary, were wired for illogic.

To support this view, they gathered over twenty different examples of cognitive shortcuts consistently leading to irrational conclusions. They combined the results into a paper titled “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.”

They published the paper in the journal Science where it has since become one of the most important studies in all of social science. (According to Google Scholar, it’s been cited over 13,500 times since its publication.) The paper formed the foundation for the field of behavioral economics, which won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in 2002 (Tversky had died seven years earlier).

Here’s what caught my attention about this story. This paper — Kahneman and Tversky’s first publication on their theory — came out in 1974, a half decade after they first began pursuing the underlying ideas. In other words, it took them a full five years to refine a rough hunch, through systematic exploration and discussion, into an idea too good to be ignored.

They were, in short, diligent.

The reason I’m telling you about Kahneman and Tversky, however, is that I’m convinced that there must be more to the story…

The Insufficiency of Diligence

Here’s another story of research diligence.

In 2007, as a third year graduate student at MIT, I was studying the application of distributed algorithm theory to the setting of wireless networks. Around this time, my collaborators and I came up with a model for these algorithms that we thought captured something important about wireless communication.

We ended up publishing the following series of peer-reviewed research papers that explored the mathematical limits of this model:

• Gossiping in a Multi-Channel Radio Network: An Oblivious Approach to Coping with Malicious Interference
  by Shlomi Dolev, Seth Gilbert, Rachid Guerraoui, and Calvin Newport
  Proceedings of the International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC). September, 2007.
• Secure Communication Over Radio Channels
  by Shlomi Dolev, Seth Gilbert, Rachid Guerraoui and Calvin Newport
  Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC). August, 2008.
• Interference-Resilient Information Exchange
  by Seth Gilbert, Rachid Guerraoui, Darek Kowalski, and Calvin Newport
  Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM). April, 2009
• The Wireless Synchronization Problem
  by Shlomi Dolev, Seth Gilbert, Rachid Guerraoui, Fabian Kuhn and Calvin Newport
  Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC). August, 2009.
• Leveraging Channel Diversity to Gain Efficiency and Robustness for Wireless Broadcast
  by Shlomi Dolev, Seth Gilbert, Majid Khabbazian and Calvin Newport
  Proceedings of the International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC). September, 2011.

As I write this, we’re currently preparing a new paper on this topic for publication.

Notice: 2007 to 2012 is five years. This is exactly the time it took Kahneman and Tversky to develop their career-defining mega idea, and yet I’m not holding my breath for a call from Stockholm.

(To be fair, this research direction is solid. These papers were all published in high quality, competitive venues, and combined, they have been cited over 100 times. But they’re not the type of results that make a researcher famous.)

Both my team and Kahneman’s team were equally diligent, but one obtained more remarkable results than the other. My question, then, is simple but important: why the difference?

Directed Diligence

My working answer to my simple question is that there’s a key subtlety in leveraging diligence to achieve remarkable results:

The Directed Diligence Theory
It’s not enough to just focus relentlessly on a small number of things (though this is almost always necessary). You must also direct this diligence by simultaneously and systematically exposing yourself to the reality of what’s valuable in the relevant field.

Kahneman and Tversky’s diligence, for example, was directed by their understanding, as psychology professors, that the model they were pursuing was a radical departure from an orthodoxy that had started to show strain. The field was looking for new models and they knew they were on to one possibility.

In my last post, I offered Steve Martin as another example of diligence breeding remarkability. When you read his memoir, you find a similar direction to his focus. Martin studied comedy like an academic anthropologist, picking apart what was doing well and what was becoming dated. His deep understanding of the evolution of comedy in the 1970s directed his diligence toward real results.

Returning to my own example, it was only a few years ago that I began to internalize this lesson. Just because an idea was interesting to me, I now accepted, was not enough by itself to justify diligent pursuit.

So I made a change to my research method…

Notice in my list above of publications on this topic, there is a two year gap between 2009 and 2011. What happened in these years? I left my theory group to become a postdoc in a systems group that focused on making real world wireless networks better.

This was not an easy transition for a theoretician.  I had spent the previous five years working primarily on whiteboards, proving theorems. My first day in the systems group, by contrast, I found that someone had left a toolbox on my desk. A toolbox!

This was a different world.

But here’s the thing: I learned a lot about how real wireless networks work and what the people who build them actually worry about. Since that experience, and my continued extensive interaction with systems researchers, I’ve noticed my diligent work on wireless network theory has begun to drift toward increasingly interesting shores. In a grant application I submitted this past fall, for example, I was able to detail a trio of serious problems from real wireless networks that my style of theory now has the potential of seriously solving.

It might take another five years before I’ll know if this new experiment in directed diligence pans out. But it already feels right.

Conclusion

Remarkable accomplishment requires a remarkable amount of focus; this much is clear. But focus without grounded direction is unlikely to hit the sweet spot.

The key observation, however, is that this directed diligence approach is not about figuring out in advance what you were meant to do or identifying a can’t miss idea. It’s instead about coupling your diligence with continued exposure to what real value looks like. You won’t start out knowing exactly where your story is heading, but you can have confidence that you’ll end up with the right sort of ending.

(Photo by moriza)

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This post is part of my series on the diligence hypothesis, which proposes that focusing relentlessly on a small number of things for a large amount of time is a key strategy for crafting a remarkable life. Previous posts on this topic include:

• Closing Your Interests Opens More Interesting Opportunities: The Power of Diligence in Creating a Remarkable Life

See also my related series on the deliberate practice hypothesis.

The Banjo Player

Steve Martin made the comments around twenty minutes into his 2007 interview with Charlie Rose. They were talking about how Martin learned the banjo.

“In high school, I couldn’t play an instrument,” Martin admits.

“I remember getting my first banjo, and reading the book saying ‘this is how you play the C chord,’ and I put my fingers down to play the C chord and I couldn’t tell the difference.”

“But I told myself,” he continued, “just stick with this, just keep playing, and one day you’ll have been playing for 40 years, and at this point, you’ll know how to play.”

Learning banjo is not easy, especially at a time and place (1960′s California) where banjo lessons were not a possibility. Martin’s technique was to take Earl Scruggs records and slow them down from 33 RPM to 16 RPM. He would then tune down the banjo to match the slower speed and start picking out the notes, painstakingly, one by one.

Years later, Martin began to integrate the banjo into his act.

“The reason I played [banjo] on stage,” he explained in an ABC interview, “is because…I thought it’s probably good to show the audience I can do something that looks hard, because this act looks like I’m just making it up.”

As he kept playing and practicing he got better.

In 2009, Martin released his first album, “The Crow.” It won a Grammy. (Last month he was nominated for his second Grammy.)

This was 50 years after Martin picked up his first Banjo — not far off from the 40 years he had predicted as a teenager it would take him to “know how to play.”

Martin’s Diligence

One of the things that has always impressed me about Steve Martin is his diligence. In his memoir, Born Standing Up, he emphasizes this theme — defining diligence not just in terms of persistence, but also in the ability to ignore unrelated pursuits.

Martin was, of course, being facetious when he pepped himself up with the idea that it would only take 40 years to get good at the banjo (he was playing at a high-level in his act within 5 – 10 years of starting his training), but this statement reflects a deeper truth: getting good at something is not to be taken lightly; it’s a pursuit measured in years, not weeks.

This diligence defined Martin’s path.

He spent decades focused intensely on his act, which meant two things: banjo and jokes.

After reaching the peak of the live comedy world in the 1970s he turned his attention for years to making movies.

Then he spent years working on fiction writing.

More recently he’s returned back to his banjo.

If you collapse Martin’s skills into a flat list, he sounds like a Renaissance man, but if you take a snapshot of any particular point of his life, you’ll encounter relentless, longterm focus on a very small number of things.

Diligence Versus the World

I’m reintroducing this idea of diligence because I keep encountering it in the stories of people with remarkable lives and yet almost never see it mentioned in the online community where Study Hacks lives.

And this is a problem.

We’ve created this fantasy world where everyone is just 30 days of courage boosting exercises and life hacks away from living an amazing life.

But when you study people like Martin, who really do live remarkable lives, you almost always encounter stretches of years and years dedicated to honing craft.

Part of the resistance to diligence comes from the following two common complaints:

1. I don’t love any one thing enough to pursue it with such dedication.
2. I like to keep my options open.

These complaints, it’s important to realize, are built on shaky ground.

To counter the first worry, recall that the idea of pre-existing passion, as I’ve argued many times, has almost no scientific backing. Martin, for example, with his commitment to diligence, could have created a remarkable life based on any number of different pursuits.

He ended up playing banjo because Pete Seeger was big at the time, and ended up in comedy because, when he was young, his parents moved to a town next to Disneyland, where Martin landed a job that surrounded him by professional performers.

If his parents had instead moved to Cape Canaveral, Martin may have become an important rocket scientist.

If they had moved to the Lower East Side, we’d probably know Martin today primarily as a novelist.

When it comes to passion, the what is often much less important than the how.

The worry about keeping options open is even more groundless. I have a new book coming out in September (its title, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, also comes from  Martin). I’ll talk more about this project later, but one of the things I discuss in the book is that when you study the evidence, it’s clear that you’re not likely to encounter real interesting opportunities in your life until after you’re really good at something.

If you avoid focus because you want to keep your options open, you’re likely accomplishing the opposite. Getting good is a prerequisite to encountering options worth pursuing.

For these reasons, I think diligence is a subject we should explore in more depth. We just finished a long series on the deliberate practice hypothesis, which turned out to be an important pattern in the Grand Theory of Remarkability we’ve been exploring here on Study Hacks. I’m guessing that this emerging diligence hypothesis will end up the next important pattern uncovered by this effort. But we have a lot of work to do to better understand how and why this strategy works.

Stay tuned…

(Photo by lincolnblues)

The following line is from an e-mail I recently received from Georgetown’s HR department. It references “GMS,” the slick new database system they installed to unify all employee services:

Please remember to log in to GMS a few times each day to check your Workfeed for any items requiring your attention and/or approval.

Among the tenure-track faculty, the message was a source of amusement: the idea that professors at a research university should be checking with the HR department several times a day, just in case there is some administrative task waiting for them to complete, runs counter to everything we’ve ever been taught about how people succeed in academia.

I’m mentioning this note here, however, because I saw it as an example of a deeper principle currently shaping the American knowledge work environment — a principle with destructive consequences.

The Convenience Principe

Motivating this request from Georgetown HR was convenience. If every employee checked in daily with that department, a lot of the administrative processes required to operate a large university would run more smoothly. This would make peoples’ lives easier, therefore the policy is justified.

I argue that this convenience principle is at the core of how knowledge work organizations decide which work habits to keep and which to discard, especially when these habits involve technology.

Consider, to give a more general example, e-mail. There are no shortage of strong arguments that living your day in your inbox prevents long, uninterrupted thought, which in turn greatly reduces the value of what you produce and the rate at which your skills improve.

Nicholas Carr almost won a Pulitzer last year for his book on this phenomenon, The Shallows, which was based on his earlier Atlantic article, titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.

So why hasn’t there been any major changes to how American organizations use e-mail? The convenience principle stops them.

If you subscribe to this principle, all it takes to argue back against a critic like Carr is a list of examples where restricting e-mail in any way would lead to inconvenience.

Here is English professor Ben Yagado, in the pages of The New York Times, arguing against John Freeman’s 2009 book, The Tyranny of E-mail:

“[Freeman] writes that ‘one of the biggest generators of excess mail is a medium-size message sent to a group of people, which then causes a pinball effect’…And the problem is? In [my inbox right now such a discussion is going on]: I asked a question and got helpful responses. Freeman says what I should have done is ‘pick up the phone.’ Really? Take the time to make 50 separate calls?”

This is a typical argument from convenience: Yagado’s dismisses Freeman’s broad critique of e-mail because he has a specific example where e-mail made something easier. Case closed!

This principle is also common in discussions of social media. Two years ago, I wrote an article about college students quitting Facebook to improve the quality of their schoolwork. Many other students have since written me with similar tales.

In most of these cases the students were in serious trouble due to constant distraction.

The student profiled in my article, for example, was named Daniel. He decided to quit Facebook after falling to a 2.95 G.P.A.

His friends, however, were aghast at his decision to leave the social network and argued strongly against the action. Their airtight case? Certain activities, such as finding out about parties, would become less convenient.

The convenience principle is so ingrained in our culture that Daniel’s friends believed that their argument that something would become less convenient was unimpeachable. Daniel, for his part, ignored them. He missed a few invitations, but not many. His G.P.A. jumped to a 3.95.

The Net Value Principle

Due to its ubiquity, it’s easy to see the convenience principle as self-evident. I argue that it’s actually contrived and harmful.

To understand this perspective, let’s contrast it to an alternative. The goal of any knowledge work organization (or student, which is really just a one-person knowledge work firm) is to produce information that is rare and valuable. With this in mind, consider the net value principle of selecting work habits. This principle says that the adoption of a work habit should be based solely on its net effect on the value produced by the organization.

This principle also sounds obvious, but when you dive deeper into its implications you’ll find that it often conflicts with the conclusions of the convenience principle. The reason for this conflict is that convenience often has nothing to do with value.

Indeed, producing value can often be a quite inconvenient process for those involved…

Case Study: A Software Company Without E-mail

Here’s a hypothetical scenario, imagine a software shop that decides its programmers should not have e-mail. To flesh out the hypothetical, we need a few more details on how they manage without this technology:

• To handle the administrative details needed to run a business, imagine the firm hires a dedicated administrative coordinator to stop by each programmer’s office once a week to gather any needed information and promulgate any new policies.
• Also imagine that projects are managed with project management software. This allows team members to keep track of who is working on what, report bugs, and keep track of the project status.

From the perspective of the convenience principle, this e-mail policy is a disaster. It’s substantially easier for the HR department to send out a quick e-mail whenever they need information from employees or need to announce a new policy. In fact, there are times when an announcement really needs to be made right away and can’t wait until the weekly one-on-one meetings are done. Handling such cases would be really inconvenient.

The same inconveniences hold for interaction among programmers. When a question arises it is incredibly easy to immediately shoot off an e-mail. This gets the questions out of your mind and abdicates your responsibility to keep track of it. Furthermore, if you’re in an e-mail culture of quick response it means you can expect the instant gratification of receiving the information you need when you need it. Without e-mail, it might take hours to resolve such issues. This is also really annoying. There could even be cases where this holds up progress on a project.

From the perspective of the net value principle, however, this e-mail policy might be a big win. The net value principle doesn’t care if a policy makes employees’ lives less convenient or occasionally holds up projects. It’s relentless concern is with the bottom line. If forcing programmers to work in monastic focus leads to a net increase in their abilities and therefore a net increase in the value of their code, then it is worth doing.

Similarly, the net value principle would tell Ben Yagado, the e-mail apologist quoted above, that unless his sole job responsibility is to gather responses to questions from large groups of people, that particular convenience of e-mail is irrelevant. The only question that should matter to him is whether e-mail, as he currently uses it, leads to a net increase or decrease of the value of the scholarship he produces as a professor.

If it leads to a net decrease, he needs to change — even if he can no longer conduct quick polls of friends.

The net value principle would also remind the friends of Facebook-free Daniel that whether or not they can come up with specific things that Facebook makes easier is irrelevant. Daniel should care about his overall experience as a student. Reducing his study time and stress, and increasing his G.P.A to a 3.95, turns out to be a big win when weighed against the downside of occasionally requiring his friends to forward him a missed invitation.

Conclusion

For a long time, I’ve been frustrated with the conversation surrounding distraction and productivity in modern knowledge work. Everyone wrings their hands, but the lack of action is stunning (I can’t think of any other social movement where there is so much consensus that something harmful is happening and yet so little systemic action taken in response).

The hypothesis I’m posing with this essay is that the problem lies in our focus in this conversation. We are discussing the superficial — specific habits we don’t like — when we need to be discussing the underlying principles that keep pushing us back to these habits.

Such an approach can lead to real insight. We might decide with confidence, for example, that in some organizations some supremely distracting habits lead to increased value. While in other organizations, we might find similar confidence in eliminating technologies that make life easier but output weaker.

The point is that we would gain a meaningful way to explore these options and ultimately take meaningful action when needed.

(Photo by The Other Dan)

In more detail, he’s looking for the following two types of people:

1. Those who set out to follow their passion and were disappointed.
2. Those who discovered the more complicated reality of how people actually end up loving what you do (for example…)

If either (or both) describes you, and you’re interested in being interviewed for a major national newspaper, e-mail me a brief summary of your story at author [at] calnewport.com and put “[Interview]“ in the subject line. (I’m interested in reading your stories as well.)

As a side note, it’s nice to see that the skepticism about passion that we’ve expressed for years here on Study Hacks is starting to gain traction…

A reader recently sent me a link to this fascinating Reddit thread. It’s titled:”I’m not as smart as I thought I was,” and it features a high school senior worried that his intellectual abilities are lacking.

Over 700 people wrote comments in response. One of the top comments was from an MIT graduate who had struggled with and then overcame similar feelings of inadequacy when he first arrived in Cambridge.

Below, I’ve reproduced key passages from his note (edited slightly), as I think he has something important to say — for both students and graduates — about the psychological complexity of the quest to become so good they can’t ignore you…

The people who fail to graduate from MIT, fail because they come in, encounter problems that are harder than anything they’ve had to do before, and not knowing how to look for help or how to go about wrestling those problems, burn out.

The students who are successful, by contrast, look at that challenge, wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and then begin to take steps hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge their inadequacies. They don’t blame their lack of intelligence, they blame their lack of motivation.

During my freshman year, I almost failed out of differential equations.  I was able to recover and go on to be very successful in my studies. When I was a senior, I would sit down with the freshmen in my dorm and show them the same things that had been shown to me, and I would watch them struggle with the same feelings, and overcome them. By the time I graduated MIT, I had become the person I looked up to when I first got in.

You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not you will burn out. It’s scary to acknowledge that it’s a decision because it puts the onus on you to to do something about it, but it’s empowering because it means there is something you can do about it.

So do it.

Earlier this week, after three days of trying, I proved an interesting theorem. I was studying a certain type of scheduling problem in graphs. I was finally able to prove that without lots of knowledge about the graph no algorithm can solve the problem fast.

This morning I set out to extend this result. I wanted to know what happens if you have more knowledge. After about an hour, I had a partial answer: If the graph is small in a certain way there is an algorithm that can solve the problem fast — I know this because I found it.

Unfortunately, for more general structures I couldn’t make the math play nice. I had a hazy intuition, but attempt after attempt to make it concrete failed. I couldn’t hold the pieces straight in my head. (See here for more on the style of problem I’m talking about here.)

After another 3 – 4 hours I had to stop for the day.

Between Flow and Tedium…

My experience this morning was not flow.

I was not lost in the experience. Nor did I feel “spontaneous joy.”  On the contrary, I found myself waging battle with my attention, forcing it back again and again to the complexities I was trying to sort through.

My mind was pitching every possible distraction as an alternative to working on that problem, and I don’t blame it — it was a draining effort that in evolutionary terms must seem a waste of perfectly good glucose.

At the same time, however, the work wasn’t annoying or tedious. I ended the day exhausted but fulfilled.

I’m telling you this story in reaction to the comments generated by my recent post on deliberate practice. In that post, I noted that the practice habits of expert piano players are tough — not likely to generate the immersive, enjoyable state that defines flow.

Many of the commenters protested. As one reader asked: “Unless you’re actually having fun [with your work], why do it?”

I think these commenters are worried about the conclusion that work should create suffering. Here’s the thing: I agree with their concerns, and this was not the point I was trying to make

On reflection, I think the readers’ confusion stems from our inability to talk about practice in a more nuanced manner. Put plainly, the knowledge work community does not yet have the right vocabulary for describing the type of experience I had this morning — an experience that is not suffering, but then again is not immersive flow either.

Work shouldn’t suck.

But it shouldn’t feel like play either.

The deliberate practice hypothesis demands that we learn to recognize (and embrace) that curious zone found somewhere in between.

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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:

• 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 Deliberate Student

I just received the e-mail reproduced below from a computer science major who successfully applied the deliberate practice hypothesis to his academic work.

This is good food for thought for students home for Christmas break. As you think about your fall and make plans for your spring, remind yourself of the following essential truth:

When it comes to studying, there’s a huge difference between doing work and doing useful work. If you’re not putting a lot of thought into navigating this distinction, you’re probably mired in the former.

On to the e-mail…

The Piano Player Confessions

I recently received a message from an accomplished piano player. Let’s call him Jeremy.

This is someone who majored in piano performance at music school, where he was one of the top two students in the major. He won state-level competitions throughout his college career.

Jeremy wrote in response to my recent article on the surprisingly relaxed lives of elite musicians. He told me that post agreed with his experience.

“I, and the other strong students in my department, did practice less than the weaker students,” he said.

He then went on to explain exactly what he and the other strong students did differently as compared to their less accomplished peers.

I reproduced his explanation below (I added the headings and edited the text slightly), as I think it offers profound insight into the difference between the type of work most of us do and what it actually takes to become so good they can’t ignore you.

As you read Jeremy’s strategies, ask yourself what it would mean to apply these same ideas to your livelihood, be it as a writer, programmer, consultant, student, or professor. When I performed this exercise I was embarrassed by the gap between what I should be doing (if I want to maximize my ability), and what I actually do.

Good food for thought as we roll toward a new year…

Jeremy’s Strategies for Becoming Excellent…

• Strategy #1: Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy.
  “The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.”
• Strategy #2: To Master a Skill, Master Something Harder.
  “Strong pianists find clever ways to ‘complicate’ the difficult parts of their music. If we have problem playing something with clarity, we complicate by playing the passage with alternating accent patterns. If we have problems with speed, we confound the rhythms.”
• Strategy #3: Systematically Eliminate Weakness.
  “Strong pianists know our weaknesses and use them to create strength. I have sharp ears, but I am not as in touch with the physical component of piano playing. So, I practice on a mute keyboard.”
• Strategy #4: Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness.
  “Weak pianists make music a reactive  task, not a creative task. They start, and react to their performance, fixing problems as they go along. Strong pianists, on the other hand, have an image of what a perfect performance should be like that includes all of the relevant senses. Before we sit down, we know what the piece needs to feel, sound, and even look like in excruciating detail. In performance, weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists move towards a perfect mental image.”

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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:

• 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 Simple Tower

My friend Chris Guillebeau just published his latest manifesto. It’s called The Tower.

In the manifesto, Chris asks: “what truly matters?”

“The purpose of life,” he eventually answers, ” is to create something meaningful that will endure after we’re gone.”

What caught my attention today was an article Chris wrote promoting The Tower. It was a parable about a farmer who realizes that a simple life in his fields — a life devoid of distraction and undue stress — was not enough.

“Deep inside his soul,” Chris writes, “the farmer wanted a challenge.”

It’s not just the content of Chris’s article that interests me, but also where he posted it: on Leo Babuta’s minimalism blog, Zen Habits.

Whether or not this was his intention, Chris hit upon a crucial tension in our corner of the self improvement world.

To understand this tension, keep in mind that Zen Habits is the flagship of the powerful minimalist movement. This is a movement that rejects stuff and busyness; it drives people to give away junk they don’t need,  stop acquiring, and live cheaply, which in turn lets them step away from overly-demanding jobs, debt, and long commutes.

It’s most visible proponents have gone so far as to move into tiny houses that they build by hand and that can be pulled around on a trailer.

Minimalism is a powerful idea. Clutter and demands in our lives leads to clutter and demands in our minds, which in turn leads to stress and unhappiness (c.f., Winifred Gallagher’s under-appreciated book, Rapt). And if our current cultural situation is anything, it’s cluttered.

But Chris’s post highlights the achilles heel of minimalism. We are also wired to make an impact (c.f., Victor Frankl). Once distraction is cleared from our lives something meaningful needs to fill the vacuum.

When I browse the most pure of the minimalism blogs, like Tammy Strobel’s compulsively readable Rowdy Kittens, this background attraction toward legacy pulls at my attention. I crave simplicity. But I also crave challenge.

Bringing together these two cravings, in my humble opinion, might be one of the most original and effective ideas to come out of our piece of the web; a point of convergence that the different schools of advice blogging — lifestyle design, minimalism, the passionistas, evidence-based success strategists — are all blindly evolving towards; perhaps even a grand unified theory of building a happy life in modern America.

Of course, I’ve been nibbling around the edges of this convergence for years here on Study Hacks.

My student readers have had my mantra drilled into their head time and again: Do less. But do the very small number of things you do very well.

My readers in the career world are increasingly hearing a variant of this theme: Choose one thing to do really, really well, then leverage this value to take control of your career.

There is, however, a lot of work to be done to advance this convergence. (For one thing, I can’t hold a candle to Leo or Tammy’s ability to evoke the contentment of simplicity.) Which is why I was happy to see Chris stroll over to Leo’s world, admire the uncluttered view, and then ask, “now what?”

(Image from Rowdy Kittens, taken by Tammy Strobel.)

Project Problems

Earlier today I answered an e-mail from an undergraduate at a well-known college.

She was studying neuroscience. A true believer in the Study Hacks student canon, she had pared down her commitments so she could focus her attention on her major and a related research position.

But then came the second paragraph: “I have a new project that I want to put together,” she said. “Something about the neuropathology of abnormal psychology.”

She admitted that she was having trouble with this ambition because no one at her school did behavioral neuroscience research.

“But I really want to get involved in that area,” she emphasized. “How do I find someone to work with me? I’m stuck.”

I told her to abandon the idea.

The Necessity of Depth

I’m telling this story because my advice emphasizes a deeper principle that I find myself frequently teaching the students I work with: successful projects are born out of depth.

When you dedicate the bulk of your attention to a small number of things, working persistently to become so good they can’t ignore you, this builds depth. When you have reached sufficient depth, you begin to encounter possibilities for impressive, exciting projects. (High school students should see my most recent book for advice on making this happen at a young age.)

By contrast, when you come up with a project from scratch, in a field where you have little standing, you’re essentially filling in an aspirational Mad Libs — a worthless combination of vague directions and outcomes.

For example…

• Declaring out of the blue, “I want to help [group X] gain more [thing they have limited access to],” is meaningless, equivalent to saying “I want to make the world better!” or “rainbows are nice!”
• On the other hand, going to work for an organization that actually helps that group gain that resource, and learning the intricacies of their world, paying your dues, then eventually introducing some innovations from within: that’s the foundation for then going on to launch a fantastic project on your own.

Returning to our sample student from above, I told her to ignore her Mad Libs project and instead double down her efforts on the research she was already conducting. If she could become so good she couldn’t be ignored in that well-established context, fantastic opportunities would come her way — opportunities that would be every bit as rich as her fantasy project.

Beyond Thinking Differently

My wording in this post is harsh, but this is a purposeful strategy.

In my experience, students have been taught to place way too much importance on having the courage to follow their passions and change the world, and not nearly enough importance on having the persistence to first build the needed ability to both find concrete projects that matter and accomplish them.

“Think different,” they’re told, without also being told about the decades it took Steve Jobs to build the experience — often through failure — needed to  transform Apple into the innovative company it became in the last two decades.

With this in mind, I use harshness to snap my student readers into a new way of thinking. I want these students to be wildly successful (which is why I’ve written three books on the subject and personally correspond with over a thousand of them per year.)

This particular piece of tough love happens to be one of the most important tactics in my arsenal for helping them achieve this goal.

(Photo by knitguy)