Study Hacks

The Berlin Study

In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin. They came to study the violinists.

As described in their subsequent publication in Psychological Review, the researchers asked the academy’s music professors to help them identify a set of stand out violin players — the students who the professors believed would go onto careers as professional performers.

We’ll call this group the elite players.

For a point of comparison, they also selected a group of students from the school’s education department. These were students who were on track to become music teachers. They were serious about violin, but as their professors explained, their ability was not in the same league as the first group.

We’ll call this group the average players.

The three researchers subjected their subjects to a series of in-depth interviews. They then gave them diaries which divided each 24-hour period into 50 minute chunks, and sent them home to keep a careful log of how they spent their time.

Flush with data, the researchers went to work trying to answer a fundamental question: Why are the elite players better than the average players?

The obvious guess is that the elite players are more dedicated to their craft. That is, they’re willing to put in the long,Tiger Mom-style hours required to get good, while the average players are off goofing around and enjoying life.

The data, as it turns out, had a different story to tell…

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The Age of Productivity

September 8, 2008 was an important date in the world of self-improvement writing. Yet almost no one knows this.

To understand what happened on this date we should return, briefly, to 2004 — the early days of blogging. It was then that a web programmer named Merlin Mann stumbled onto a powerful formula: blogging about becoming more productive. He called his site 43 Folders, a tribute to the tickler file from David Allen’s Getting Things Done system.

43 Folders’ timing was good. A new generation of tech-savvy knowledge workers needed help navigating a work environment defined by information overflow, and Mann offered them a tantalizing promise: with the right combination of high-tech productivity tools, you could find your way into a utopian state where work becomes effortless.

Especially if you used a Mac.

In 2005, when Clive Thompson wrote his famous “Meet the Life Hackers” feature for The New York Times Magazine, he quoted Mann as a spokesperson of the new tech-driven self-improvement movement.

43 Folders’ subscriber count shot past the 100,000 mark and Mann was able to quit his programming job and support himself full time with his writing.

This was, to use my own terminology, the birth of The Age of Productivity. Mann paved the way to a powerful ecosystem of blogs that focused on how to become more efficient.

Gawker Media’s Lifehacker blog became its most popular site, eventually cracking Technorati’s top 10 list. Lifehack.org became a major force. Leo Babuta paid off his credit card debt with an ebook that merged Getting Things Done with Zen philosophy.

This was a good time to be telling the world how to become more productive.

But then we get to September of 2008.

The Post-Productivity World

It was on the eighth day of this month that Mann posted an odd little essay on his personal blog. He titled it “Better.”

It was the tantrum of a talented writer whose pursuit of readers had led him astray. He expressed frustration with the superficiality of online writing, calling it “a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness [and] makebelieve insight.”

“All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better,” he wrote. “Everything better. Better, better.”

The impact on 43 Folders was immediate. That same day, Mann posted a short note on 43 Folders saying that the site was no longer a “blog about productivity.” He would, instead, help people embrace the hard work of “making something that you love — and making it better.”

I rarely hear people mention the 43 Folders transformation, which may have to do with the fact that soon after Mann had his first child which turned his attentions understandably elsewhere.

But its impact, I argue, was profound.

Survey the current landscape of self-improvement blogs. It’s no longer popular to post about productivity pr0n. The idea that all that stands between you and workplace bliss is the right OmniFocus configuration no longer holds its allure.

The Age of Productivity began its decline around the time Mann, its Prometheus, turned his back on it. We are now in a new age, one in which the big picture trumps the small. What matters in this new age is your work philosophy — not your systems.

• Mann’s new work philosophy, for example, focuses on creating excellent things that you care about.
• My Career Craftsman philosophy, to name another example, focuses on becoming excellent to provide the capital needed to shape a compelling career.
• Tim Ferriss, by contrast, rethought what currencies matter, moving emphasize from money to time — with profound effect.
• While Leo Babuta has quietly and effectively molded Zen Habits in the spearhead of the Minimalist movement, perhaps the most successful of the recent re-imaginings of work.

Productivity, of course, is still important. Most mature work philosophies require that you can organize what’s on your plate. But when you’re guided by a philosophy, this organization becomes the easy part. Your drive to accomplish what you believe needs to be accomplished has a way of sweeping away the ineffective.

It’s hard to judge an era while still in the middle of it, but from all accounts I think this Age of Workplace Philosopher represents an exciting shift in our thinking about work and happiness. The more seriously we struggle with the question of “What defines a good working life?”, the better off we are. (And I mean “seriously struggle;” falling back to a vague, unverified cliche, like “follow your passion!”, no longer holds water in this new age.)

I miss 43 Folders, and am still hoping that Mann will soon return to more regular updates on how his new philosophical outlook is taking shape. In the meantime, I’ll continue to struggle away with the growing number of other writers who have taken up Mann’s call to move our online conversation, dare I say it, productively forward.

(Photo by zen)

Excuse this abuse of the blog for personal reasons, but…

I’m looking for a computer science PhD student for next fall.

If you’re planning on graduate school, and want to make an impact with your research, and are interested in learning firsthand the Cal Newport approach to work and life, contact me at my Georgetown address: cnewport [at] cs.georgetown.edu

You can find out more about my work here and see past publications here.

I don’t accept paid advertisements. I do, however, have a standing offer to write a short, honest post about a student-oriented product if the company is willing to donate to a charity of my choice. (See here for more details.)

Citelighter recently took me up on my offer by donating money to Bottom Line, a great Boston-based organization that helps more students get access to college. I spent a morning looking over the Citelighter product, and here’s what I liked…

• I have a high threshold for integrating technology into my study processes because I find that most services are more trouble to setup and use than sticking with a simpler low-tech alternative. Citelighter is one of the few technologies that passes my threshold.
• In short, it allows you to highlight any text you can view in your browser and then stores it along with the relevant citation. If it can’t find all of the information it needs for the citation, it asks you to fill in what’s missing. (Once anyone has filled in the missing information, however, everyone benefits.)
• Must crucially, this works for Google Books (click the plain text link to get the text you’re viewing into a highlightable form).
• When you’re done, you can export all the citations you found into whatever format you want. (Word, Google Docs, etc.)
• Bottom line: I hate how much time goes into tracking down and formatting citations. For many students, this service will help.

This video explains things better than I can…

A Common Query

Earlier this fall I received an e-mail from a rising freshman at Yale. It read, in part:

As college draws nearer, I am growing increasingly concerned about what I’m going to do with my life.

Most of the people around me seem to think that the safest route for me is to go pre-med, because it is a well-defined path that leads to a stable career.

The thing is, I don’t really want to do pre-med. But I don’t know what else I want to do with my life. What should I do?

I get this question enough that I thought it worthwhile to share my response (put into bullet point format for readability). I’m hoping the new college students among you will find something relevant here…

My Response

• Don’t go pre-med.
• Instead: table the question of your future until the start of your sophomore year.
• During your freshman year, take core courses and use your leftover electives to sample more exotic subjects. Try out a few activities to find out which seem interesting and, more importantly, which offer the most compelling opportunities to someone willing to pay it a lot of attention.
• Then, at the start of your sophomore year, make some choices: Choose one major (not two, not three). Choose one or two extracurricular areas to focus on (not three, not four). Then attack these small number of things with a large amount of time and attention. Become excellent at them.
• At this point, put aside any doubts about whether you made the right choices. Always move forward. Never look back and wonder.
• As you know, I don’t believe in pre-existing passions. In my experience, there is no right or wrong major or activity waiting out there for you to discover. There are, however, right or wrong reasons for pursuing something.
• Motivational psychology tells us that what matters in a pursuit is the loci of control. If you’re going after something because you sampled it and you found it interesting, that’s a good enough reason for your mind to get on board and provide the motivation and engagement you need for a good, successful student career.  If you’re going after something only because “most of the people” around you thought it sounded safe, that is, from a psychological point of view, a disastrous reason. You’re in for unhappiness at best and deep procrastination at worst.

To summarize: First take some time to see what’s out there, second make your own choices (but don’t sweat them), and then third go big without reservations.

(Photo by CanWeBowlPlease)

Two High Achievers

Alisa Weilerstein is my age. She’s a cello player and she just won a MacArthur “genius” grant for her “adventurous” playing.

Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, just won a Nobel Prize for his work measuring the universe’s expansion.

It’s easy to admire such high accomplishments from a distance. For those of us with low self-esteem, we can dismissively conclude that some people are just born brilliant, and should be admired much in the way we admire natural beauty or a lush head of hair. For those of us who are more Type A, we can instead derive a hazy sense of inspiration: “That’s what I need do,” we think, “something huge!”

I find it more productive, however, to dig a little deeper.

In an interview with The New York Times, for example, Weilerstein pushes back against the idea that she was born a musical prodigy.

“Obviously there is natural talent,” she said. “But you accomplish things only by working extremely hard.”

This echoes what has been found again and again in the deliberate practice literature: the best musicians, athletes, and chess players, among other group of high accomplishers, really do out work everyone else.

For those in the Type A camp, by contrast, a recent interview with Reiss pushes back on the idea that it’s enough to simply wait for your breakthrough idea.

When talking about the inspiration that led to his Nobel, Reiss emphasized that his breakthrough was based on the fact that “I am always thinking about how to measure the universe.” It was this complete immersion in the problem — something that persisted over years and years — that laid the foundation for his innovations in parallax measurement.

The conclusion for the Type A’s: if you want to do something big, talk is cheap, it’s more important to get started down the long road to mastery.

Bottom Line: Obviously these quotes are just scratching the surface of the deeper stories lurking behind the headlines, but they emphasize my basic point: I find high achievers to be incredibly inspiring and instructive, but only when I get into the details of their stories. When admired from afar, they provide little value. I think it’s important that we keep discussing how to understand the high achievers we encounter, because becoming adept at reality-based deconstruction of these stories seems to be a key strategy in any quest to become remarkable.

In Search of Excellence

By any reasonable measure, Atul Gawande is an expert surgeon. He trained at some of the country’s most elite medical institutions and has performed over two thousand operations.

But he could be better.

As Gawande notes in his latest New Yorker feature, he recently brought a coach into his operating room to find places where he could improve. The coach turned up no shortage of suggestions.

“One twenty-minute discussion [with my coach] gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years,” he admits.

The premise of Gawande’s article — the idea that brought him to the extreme step of hiring his own surgical coach — is that most of us are lousy at becoming excellent.

Athletes and musicians know that deliberate practice is the foundation for excellence, and that this style of practice requires a ruthless focus on your shortcomings, which in turn requires coaching. The rest of us, however, tend to flee the discomfort of such directed criticism as soon as we’ve acquired the bare minimum of credentials that allows us to adopt the moniker of “expert.” We wield any foundation of skill — even if skimpy — like a shield against the discomfort required to acquire more.

To Gawande’s reasoning, this is a problem. In many fields, from teaching, to programming, to marketing, we could be a lot better than we are — if only we were willing to let down our guard and embrace guidance on where we still need work.

“This is tricky,” admits Gawande. “Human beings resist exposure and critique; our brains are well defended”

In the context our our ongoing Career Craftsman discussion, this article piqued my interest. The idea of hiring a coach for a knowledge worker position sounds radical.  But what if the positive results were equally momentous?

I’m pondering…

(Photo by the ALA)

The Irrepressible Erez

If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to return for the moment to my obsession with Erez Lieberman. As you might recall, Lieberman is a rising star in the science world. He’s currently a fellow at Harvard’s elite Society of Fellows and a visiting faculty member at Google. He was selected for the Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 list, his work has been featured on the front page of the The New York Times, and the NIH just gave him a $2.5 million New Innovators grant.

When Lieberman’s stint as a Harvard fellow is over, he’ll have his choice of academic positions.

In other words, Erez Lieberman is remarkable, and this makes him interesting to us — not just those of us who happen to be grad students or professors, but to anyone who is interested in my Career Craftsman philosophy, which posits that becoming so good they can’t ignore you is the foundation for building a working life you love.

With all this in mind, I thought it useful to dive deeper into Lieberman’s story and see what insights I could uncover…

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