Study Hacks

Microsoft Doesn’t Care About Clubs

In college, I spent a lot of time writing. I started as a humor columnist for the student newspaper and a staff writer for the campus humor magazine – the venerable Dartmouth Jack’O Lantern, whose previous staff members include Dr. Seuss (Dartmouth class of ‘25). I eventually worked myself up to become editor-in-chief.

My senior year, a few months after reaching the apex of college humor writing career, I interviewed for a competitive project manager position at Microsoft. After surviving the resume screen and two rounds of interviews at Dartmouth, I was flown out to Redmond, where I went through six more rounds of interviewing.

Guess how many times my impressive, time-consuming extracurricular activity was discussed?

Zero times.

I didn’t mind, because I didn’t expect it to be mentioned. I had worked on the Jacko because, from an early age, I had an unhealthy obsession with the tradition of Ivy League humor magazines. I wrote for the Jacko because I loved it. It had no effect on my job hunting.

A Dangerous Idea

This article proposes a dangerous idea: Outside of a few exceptions, college extracurriculars are of minor importance to your efforts to find a job after graduation. There is no benefit to be gained by suffering through an overwhelming load of activities at the college level.

Below, I briefly explain, to the best of my understanding, the role activities play in the job hunting process. I’ll then cover graduate and professional school admissions, and conclude with a recommendation for how to better integrate extracurriculars into your college life.

How to Get Hired

For many jobs, the hiring process proceeds as follows:

1. Your grades, where you went to school, and to a lesser extent, your major, are used to decide whether or not you’re someone they might want to hire.
2. If you pass the above screen, you’ll be interviewed. If the job is in finance, consulting, or is at a famous tech firm like Microsoft or Google, there will be a formal series of interviews to test your ability to think on your feet. If it’s a smaller firm, the interview will be more informal. The goal is to see if you can express yourself well, seem like a good person, understand their business, and, in general, are not a jerk.
3. A hiring decision is made.

What role do activities play in the above? A minor one.

As mentioned in my story, the mega-firms don’t care. They’ll rely on their own battery of brutal interrogations to test your mettle. For other companies, your activities, at best, add a little bit of personality color. It’s nice, but not nearly as important as your grades, where you went to school, and your interview performance.

For example, it helps to have done something outside of classes, as the absence of any activities will make you seem boring and anti-social. It might also give you a bit of a boost to have a leadership role in a club, because this shows that you can manage people. Google, I’ve heard, likes people who did something quirky, because they think this makes their workplace more innovative.

But there are minor nudges: like having a good handshake, or making good small talk at the beginning of an interview. The key point is that having a huge slate of demanding activities — unlike, for example, when applying to college — does not make this nudge stronger.

(Certainly, there are some exceptions. If you want to be a journalist, it matters that you work yourself up to an editorial position in your campus paper. This is tough. Similarly, if you’re at Harvard, and want to write for The Simpsons, put your focus on the Lampoon. But I’ll assume if you’re going for one of these types of jobs you already know what you need to do.)

Other Factors that Count

Other factors, of course, are also important to get hired. Many industries like to see relevant work experience. If you want to be a banker, for example, it’s important that you try to intern in the field during your summer breaks. Similarly, if you want to work in development, intern at your college’s development office.

And to be honest, a large number of you will likely find your first job either through a personal connection or a previous internship with the company. Again, your activities don’t enter the equation.

Graduate and Professional Schools

What about graduate school? As we’ve discussed before, all that matters for graduate school is that you did research. The professors who make the decisions don’t care about non-research related activities. I was at MIT for a year before my advisor figured out I had written a book.

For medical school, you do need to prove that you know what medicine is really about, and you are not just applying because your mom likes the idea of a doctor in the family. This means some sort of involvement in medicine-related fields — be it research, internships, or volunteering. Many applicants do this during their summers.

For law school, it’s all about having high enough grades and LSAT scores.

The Implications

Remember this mantra: college is not high school. There are no admissions officers in your future who are going to pour over your extracurricular activities and come up with a subjective score that will determine whether or not you get to move on to the next stage. What you do outside of your classes will play only a minor role in landing a job after graduation. And doing lots of hard things will probably not add an appreciable advantage over doing one or two things you really liked.

My advice:

1. Join a small number of activities that interest you and that surround you with interesting people.
2. Don’t do a large number of activities.
3. If you ever feel stressed or overwhelmed by extracurricular obligations: cut back! Their is no reason for activities to cause you hardship. Their main purpose is a source of happiness for you.

This lesson is tough for some to swallow. The lingering impact of the college admissions process is hard to shake. But you must. It’s okay not to feel overwhelmed. It’s okay to actually have free time. It’s okay to simplify and try a life that’s a little more zen. Your future bosses simply don’t care about that extra volunteer gig you are trying to squeeze into your schedule. So let it go. Make your extracurriculars, as tough as this may be, about you — not some vague plan for what you want to achieve down the road.

I’m interested in your thoughts? Are you a college student that feels overwhelmed with activities? If so, why do you think you are doing so much?

E-mail Zero Redux

Two weeks ago, I introduced E-mail Zero, the concept of living life with no e-mail. The motivation was to investigate innovative ways to combat the stress and lack of focus caused by living in your inbox. My case study was MIT professor Alan Lightman, who though very busy and important, communicates solely by phone, mail, and in-person meetings.

Thanks to Mike Brown, over at the BrownStudies blog, I’ve found another fascinating E-mail Zero case study to share. I’m talking about Stanford Professor Donald Knuth, arguably the world’s most important living computer science personality (my advisor, no small shakes herself, recently won the “Knuth Prize,” a major honor). Professor Knuth is perhaps best known for his famed series: The Art of Computer Programming (named by American Scientist as one of the best twelve physical-science monographs of the century.)

On his official Stanford web site, Professor Knuth notes:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

He continues with a rationale for his decision:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

The argument here is obvious. But still, nonetheless, powerful. For some jobs, e-mail hinders your ability to perform at your peak. In such situations, it would seem, as Professor Knuth has concluded, you might have an professional obligation to stop using highly distracting electronic communication.

But wait! The good professor is the author of famous textbooks, and he is famously diligent about tracking down bugs (he rewards any reported bug with $2.56 — one hexadecimal dollar). He also plays a major role in the computer science community and is constantly, I imagine, in contact with all sorts of famous people and powerful academics and members of the media. He has to stay in touch with tons of people all the time!

No worries. He’s got that covered:

On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode — like, one day every three months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol’ snail mail and send a letter to the following address…

But wait again! What if someone requires an urgent response? Again, he’s a step ahead:

I have a wonderful secretary who looks at the incoming mail and separates out anything that she knows I’ve been looking forward to seeing urgently. Everything else goes into a buffer storage area, which I empty periodically.

Okay, but what about us poor computer science students, with a textbook bug to report. We’re not going to take the time to buy stamps and envelopes — which none of us own. Once again, Professor Knuth has us covered:

My secretary prints out all messages addressed to taocp@cs.stanford.edu or knuth-bug@cs.stanford.edu, so that I can reply with written comments when I have a chance.

Two important things to notice here. First, these are specialty addresses. “tacop” is an abbreviation for his book, and “knuth-bug” is specifically for reporting mistakes in his book. Therefore, these e-mail addresses — which get printed and added to his snail mail pile — can be used only to ask a question about his book or report a bug. Anything else — as he clearly goes on to state — is discarded.

Knuth’s Two E-mail Lessons

Professor Knuth offers two important insights for our E-mail Zero discussion:

1. Some jobs are performed better without e-mail.
   Professor Knuth is quite insightful to notice that for some jobs — such as those that require long periods of concentration — on the whole, e-mail can do more damage than good. Sure, it’s convenient for some things, but it scuttles your primary professional purpose. When contemplating the E-mail Zero lifestyle, ask yourself the following two questions: What do I do that makes me most valuable? Would e-mail make me better or worse at this primary role? A simple idea. But as mentioned, powerful in its implications.
2. E-mail can be processed like snail mail.
   Professor Knuth was savvy to realize that certain groups he wanted to hear from — i.e., young people finding bugs in his books — would probably only communicate via e-mail. Having the messages printed and added to a snail mail inbox is a great way to keep these avenues alive without the distraction of a checkable electronic inbox. Of course, most of us don’t have a secretary to handle this printing. But I imagine that this is a perfect place for a part-time, out-sourced virtual personal assistant (VPA). Tim Ferriss, for example, talks frequently about his VPA who manages his e-mail and forwards him the most important messages. Imagine, instead, having a VPA paid only to check your inbox once a week. He filters out the obvious spam, discards messages that match some rules you provided, and then prints, scans, and sends you a PDF of the rest. Once a week (a month? every three months?) you can print the PDFs and sort them with your snail mail. Worried about urgent communication? Have your assistant sort these out and send them in a separate PDF that you print and process every week.

I’m just thinking out loud here. But we have to give Professor Knuth credit for giving us some outstanding new insight into the different roles e-mail might play in a hyper-efficient, hyper-focused work style.

Who else do you know that does or would benefit from the E-mail Zero lifestyle?

(photo from StanfordAlumni.org)

To Start or Not to Start

Three weeks ago I published a controversial post titled: Getting Started is Overrated. My basic point: If you want to become truly impressive, you have to focus on a small number of things, for a long period of time, to the exclusion of other activities. I don’t like the “just get started” approach to accomplishment because it makes exclusive focus difficult. As Steve Martin taught us, getting good enough to reap major rewards requires incredible dedication. Jumping at every project that catches your attention derails such monastic devotion. Instead, I suggested, you should resist starting — resist until you are absolutely sure that a pursuit is perfect for you. Only then will you able to give it the longterm dedication required. Anything less wastes time.

As you can read in the comments to the original article andin Ben Casnocha’s response, this post generated a lot of discussion. Some people agreed. For example, Stella said:

Great post! Having worked for a large multinational travel agency that forced the Culture of Start down my throat for many years, I have become very skeptical of the Richard Branson type of entrepreneur. Over the years, I have had many business and investment ideas that I’m so glad I never got around to

On the other hand, many others disagreed, such as Grad Hacker:

Starting is often the best form of research, and how do you develop a passion without starting something?

And Ben, who noted:

Some tasks give feedback faster if undertaken right away in a small dose as opposed to analyzing it from afar. Take Cal’s examples: If you want to become a writer, sure you can talk to writers and study the profession, but is there a better way to understand whether writing girds your loins than actually putting pen to paper?

The odd loin reference aside, we are faced here with a clear dilemma: who is right? I was struggling with a good answer — I see wisdom in both points of view — when a real gift came along; a gift delivered from my friend Scott Young, who recently posted a insightful dissection of this issue. His approach brings clarity to a confusing situation.

It goes as follows…

Separating Experiments From Goals

Scott makes the following observation:

I like to separate my pursuits into two broader categories: experiments and goals. Experiments are the activities you take with almost zero commitment… Goals are beyond the stage of experimenting. This is when you’ve had enough experience in an area that you want to accomplish something important within it.

Be careful about getting caught in the middle-zone. This is an area which is no longer an experiment, but you don’t have the focus and commitment to achieve anything meaningful. [Having] lots of activities in this middle-zone means you’re wasting a lot of energy that could be better spent achieving something important or finding new opportunities.

Right on, Scott! I think this model captures the best of both sides of the getting started debate. It’s okay to have both high-value goals — which require focus to the exclusion of other high-value goals — and small, low-commitment experiments — which require a small amount of time and are used only to explore. The real insight is to note that separation is key. The danger is letting an experiment reach a “middle-zone” in which it starts sapping time and energy away from your high-value goals but is still not producing meaningful results.

After thinking about this model for a few days, I want to add a few thoughts of my own:

1. Make a distinction between achievements and habits. This discussion becomes clearer when we separate out our lifestyle habits, such as fitness, reading, social events, and even minor hobbies, like biking or joining a kickball team. These all fall under the category of enjoying your life. They don’t compete with your high-value goals. You can identify them by the following two features: (1) they aren’t meant to provide large rewards; (2) their primary purpose is your day to day happiness. When I say “don’t get started,” I’m not talking about these habits. Jump in and out of these as much as you like.
2. Use experiments to explore potential new high-value goals. Unlike habits, experiments exist for the sole purpose of investigating whether a given pursuit might be worth transforming into a high-value goal. As many of you pointed out, jumping in and trying something, at a low, non-committal level, can be a good way to investigate whether or not to commit to that goal in the longterm.
3. Keep experiments obligation-free. The easiest way to have an experiment slide into that dangerous middle-zone is to have it start generating regular time obligations. The best experiments require time only at your discretion. You can, if you want, stop at the spur of the moment or put it aside for 6 months without any negative consequences. For example: Don’t experiment with becoming a journalist by taking a demanding, 20 hour-a-week copy editor position with your college newspaper. Instead, work on submitting some unsolicited op-eds. Only once you’re ready to really commit should you jump into the time-consuming, obligation-heavy entry-level work.
4. Stop experimenting once your goal slots are filled. This is perhaps the hardest advice for people to hear. Once you’ve settled on the 1-3 high-value goals that you want to commit to (the number depends on your situation, a student, for example, can support more high-value goals than a first-year investment banker), stop experimenting. Your attention needs to be focused on getting good at your long-term pursuits. Even though experimenting with new pursuits is more fun. You should only start experimenting again if you complete one of your high-value goals or start to really question whether you should replace one.
5. Experimenting within the confines of a high-value goal, however, is always allowed. I must add a crucial distinction that I think caused some havoc in the discussion over at Ben’s blog. Within the confines of a given high-value goal, experimenting is good. Expose yourself to randomness. Try lots of different angles to make progress. Anyone who achieved something very impressive will probably credit at least some serendipity along the way. The key, however, is that this random moment happened — usually — after they had committed themselves to the general direction. For example, if you want to start a business, you might want to experiment, at first, with several small ideas and random networking events. This all falls under the rubric of your entrepreneur goal. Don’t, however, spend three months taking a screenwriting course. That would be an unrelated experiment.

I find this topic fascinating. But there are, as we’ve seen already, uncountable variations and issues that arise. This is, roughly, what has worked so far for me. But I’m curious: what are your thoughts on the balance between exploring and making it big?

Lightman Lives Lightly

At first glance, Alan Lightman is the poster boy for a fast-paced, turbo-charged lifestyle. He’s currently an adjunct professor of Humanities, Creative Writing, and Physics at MIT, where, among other feats, he introduced the Institute’s first undergraduate writing requirement and founded a science writing graduate program.

Professor Lightman is perhaps best known for his writing, including the bestselling book Einstein’s Dreams. His essays on science and life have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and, basically, every other impressive literary publication on the planet.

When you read Professor Lightman’s biography, it’s hard not to imagine the prototypical gung-ho celebrity intellectual, glued to his blackberry, making moves, and ping-ponging messages with movers and shakers well into the night. One can only guess how many messages clog his inbox. 10,000? That’s chump change for the average busy professor. A better guess might be closer to 50,000!

But then you look a little closer at his official web site and notice a curious note:

I do not use e-mail, but you can reach me at my MIT office: [address removed], telephone: [number removed]

If anyone could make an argument that he had to have e-mail, it would be Alan Lightman. Think about it. He has to communicate constantly with students and his colleagues. He also has to zip around manuscripts and magazine articles. And what about keeping in touch with all of his high-power friends and fans? Imagine all the cool opportunities that he’s missing by shutting off the electronic spigot.

But here’s the thing: he’s busier than you and me, yet he’s doing just fine without e-mail. It hasn’t stopped him from accomplishing his professional goals or living an interesting life.

With this in mind, I implore you to shut the door, pull the blinds, and ask yourself, softly, the following question…

What would happen if you lived life without e-mail?

A Powerful Thought Experiment

I’ve been obsessed, recently, by this insidious little thought experiment. Over time, I’ve come to believe that for a significant cross section of society, life without e-mail would not only be possible, but would also reduce stress and not really cause any serious impact on their daily life or professional productivity.

First, however, let’s note who this probably doesn’t apply to: people with bosses. As has been often discussed, e-mail is asymmetrical. It’s easier to send e-mails than to receive them. Bosses want their lives to be easier at your expense. Ergo: you have to answer e-mail.

But what about the entrepreneurs or academics or writers or freelance consultants among you? Though your knee-jerk reaction might be “That’s impossible! My clients/collegauges/students/editors would never abide an e-mail free me!”, on closer examination, your situation just might be more flexible than you first believed…

Problems and Solutions

Let’s extend the thought experiment by facing our worst fears. What would become a problem if you were to lose e-mail? How might we fix it?

• Lose touch with friends. This one’s easy. E-mail is poor way to keep up with close friends. Many people, myself included, tend to have a call rotation that keeps us up to date with everyone worth pinging.
• My clients demand access. Yes. But this doesn’t have to mean e-mail access. Back in the good ‘ole days when I ran my own dot-com, we made good use of a regular phone check-in schedule and a sophisticated extranet that gave our clients the ability to check in on daily progress. At the time, this was crucial, because I was attending high school, and was a varsity athlete with daily practice, which meant that I was literally away from e-mail from 7 am to 5 pm most weekdays. They adapted.
• E-mail is the best way to send files. Register a files@<yourname>.com e-mail address. Give this to people that need to send you a file. You can check it when you know a specific file is being sent. Of course, never actually respond to any e-mails sent to this address.
• Too many people won’t go through the hassle of calling me, but they would have sent an e-mail. I’ll be missing out on this communication. Good! This filters communication down to the truly important.
• My business requires me to handle a constant stream of requests and queries from customers (or students). Build a custom web site form that allows your customers (or students) to specify:
  • the type of request,
  • a description of the request, and
  • a list of actions, if any, they require from you.

  If you want an example of such a form in action, check out the contact pages deployed by some of the more popular productivity blogs. (For example: 43 Folders.) If they insist that e-mail is the best way to contact them, build into your system the ability to do one-way e-mail. That is, to send a message, from the control panel of your request submission system, to an e-mail address, and have the reply-to address be set to something fake. You can automatically append a standard signature of the form: “please do not reply to this e-mail. If you require further information, you can…” (If you need to process a huge quantity of such requests, consider a professional grade ticket system of the type used by system administrators.)

• I’ll be left out of discussions driven by messages that are cc’d to multiple people. Very good! These are time wasters. If someone wants to put something on your plate they have to take the time to get in touch with you by phone, or in person, and explain, clearly, what is needed. If they need to check in on an ongoing project, the same holds: phone or in person. The result: less ambiguous crap. More focus.
• In general, I’m going to miss out on some communication. That’s fine. We don’t need to communicate as much as we do now.
• The editors/agents/clients I need to contact are only available on e-mail. Not true. People read letters and answer the phone. You just don’t want to make the effort.
• Regardless of what you say above, I can think hard and come up with some work, or clients, or opportunity that would be impossible without e-mail. I’m sure such things exist. Don’t do those things.

The Benefits

The benefits that arise in this thought experiment are two-fold: (1) less crap; and (2) more focus. You still accomplish the important stuff, but also free yourself from all the small, or annoying, or unnecessary, or, worst of all, ambiguous requests that eat up so much of our day. Perhaps even more profound, imagine the focus you could achieve if there was no inbox to check. Instead, you just worked until you finished what you needed to, then shut down the computer, and got down to the business of living life.

The Implication

I don’t know what to make of this thought experiment. Should we really turn back the clock on such a powerful innovation? Would we really want to? I don’t know. But Professor Lightman’s example does make one thing clear: regardless of how you personally feel, the e-mail zero lifestyle is possible. If you live in your inbox, it’s a choice you’re making; a choice you could reverse.

For the students among you, this is something to keep in mind as you plan your ideal life after college…

The (Dangerous) Art of the Start

Attend any talk given by an entrepreneur and you’ll hear some variation of the following:

The most important thing you can do is to get started!

This advice has percolated from its origin in business self-help to the wider productivity blogging community. You’ve heard it before: Do you want to become a writer? Start writing! Do you want to become fit? Join a gym today! Do you want to become a big-time blogger? Start posting ASAP! If you don’t start, you’re weak! You’re afraid of success!

Here’s the problem: I completely disagree with this common advice. I think an instinct for getting started cripples your chance at long-term success. And I suggest that, on the contrary, you should develop rigorous thresholds that any pursuit must overcome before it can induce action.

Allow me to explain why…

The Origin of the Cult of the Start

If you talk to an accomplished speaker, especially one with a focus on entrepreneurship, he’ll tell you his “get started” message is crucial. Indeed, one of the biggest frustrations faced by speakers in this circuit is how often they meet young people who are psyched to start a business, but then allow, over time, for their enthusiasm to fade without ever taking action.

These speakers counter this effect by drilling the importance of starting. “Do anything!”, they yell. “Send one e-mail, check out one book, register one domain name!” The theory is that even the smallest action can overcome some mythical initial resistance, and help build an inescapable momentum toward business nirvana.

But is getting started right away always the best option?

Survivor Bias

In his convention-busting book, Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb preaches the danger of survivor bias — a common fallacy in which we emulate people who succeeded without considering those who used similar techniques but failed. Taleb uses the example of The Millionaire Next Door, a popular finance guide in which the authors interviewed a large group of millionaires. As Taleb points out, the habits of these millionaires — accumulating wealth through spartan living and aggressive investments — should not be emulated unless one can determine how many more people followed a similar strategy but failed to hit it big.

Perhaps a more poignant example would be to find and interview the 10 people in the country who had the biggest and fastest overall increase to their finances in the last year. Guess who would dominate this list? Lottery winners. Ignoring the survivor bias, one could conclude: the people who get richest fastest all invested heavily in lottery tickets, so that’s what I should do too!

The same, of course, can be applied to an entrepreneur, or anyone, really, who had success in a glamorous pursuit. To the winner, their path seems straightforward. It was just a matter of putting in the time and the results followed. To someone in this position, it can be incredibly frustrating to watch people denying themselves similar success simply because they’re afraid to get started.

But the survivor bias lurks…

For every successful entrepreneur, or writer, or blogger, or actor, there are dozens of others who did get started but then flamed out. Some people lack the right talents. For many more, the pursuit, once past that initial stage of generic, heady enthusiasm, simply lost its attraction and their interest waned.

The Saturation Method

I have observed many people who have had long-term success in an impressive pursuit. I have also observed many people who went after such successes yet failed. I hope by combining both outcomes — success and failure — I can identify a predictor of the former that will remain free of the taint of survivor bias.

In short, I’ve noticed that people who succeed in an impressive pursuit are those who:

• Established, over time, a deep emotional conviction that they want to follow that pursuit.
• Have built an exhaustive understanding of the relevant world, why some succeed and others don’t, and exactly what type of action is required.

This takes time. Often it requires a long period of saturation, in which the person returns again and again to the world, meeting people and reading about it and trying little experiments to get a feel for its reality. This period will be at least a month. It might last years.

Steve Martin’s Diligence

Steve Martin noted that the key to becoming really good at something (so good that they can’t ignore you), is diligence, which he defines as effort over time to the exclusion of other pursuits. This is why people who ultimately succeed in a pursuit go through such a long period of vetting before they begin — if you’re not 100% convinced and ready to tackle something, potentially for years, to the exclusions of the hundreds of interesting new ideas that will pop up along the way, you’ll probably fizzle out well before reaping any reward.

The Art of Not Starting

This reality brings me back to my original point: try not to get started. If you translate every burst of enthusiasm into action, you’re going to waste time. More dangerous, you’re going to hobble your chances of succeeding in any pursuit, as the constant influx of new activity prevents you from achieving a Steve Martin-style diligence.

My advice: resist starting. Spend lots of time learning about different pursuits, but put off action until an idea begins to haunt your daydreams and refuses to be dislodged from your aspirational psyche. Then, and only then, should you reluctantly take that first step, one of what’s sure to be many, many more before you get to where you want.

Related Posts

• Dangerous Ideas: Action is Overrated
  
• The Steve Martin Method: A Master Comedian’s Advice for Becoming Famous
• The Einstein Principle: Accomplish More By Doing Less
• Getting to the Point of “I Can Do This!” (via. Ben Casnocha)