An Old Town Wander

Earlier this evening, I explored the cobbled lanes of Zurich’s old town center. Switzerland is infamous for shutting down on Sundays — a legacy of a rigid Protestant past — and tonight didn’t disappoint; I often had whole streets to myself: the fading sun lighting the Renaissance-style row houses in the same way it has for hundreds of years, stretching back to when the city was still run by the guilds.

The scene, naturally, infused me with a sense of timeliness. I imagined the craftsman and apprentices who honed their skills in this late-medieval industrial center, and this got me thinking…

The Lost Craftsman

Craftsmanship fascinates me.

In his eponymous treatise on the subject, Yale Professor Richard Sennett calls craftsmanship “an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.” The craft culture in pre-industrial Zurich, as it did throughout the history of skilled labor, provided apprentices a way to harness this desire, and use it to transform the slow, uncomfortable mental labor of getting better, into something noble and welcomed.

Sennett notes, for example, that the ancient Greeks saw their master craftsman god, Hephaestus, as a bringer of peace and civilization, saying: “Craft and community, for the early Greeks, [were] indissociable.” Getting good wasn’t just a sage financial strategy for the Greeks, it was woven into the fabric of their civilization.

Here’s my concern: We’ve lost much of this craft culture.

Students, for example, maintain an antagonistic relationship with their school work and the mental strain it demands. They fall back on the pressure of a deadline or impending college admissions decision to force them into reluctant engagement with the material — a recipe for burnouts.

The same issue plagues the modern workplace, where work is reduced to fuel for a task completion system and we fear ambiguity or scale in projects. After a while, we require the constant low-dose dopamine drip of e-mail and profile checking to limp through the endeavor.

Hephaestus, we can agree, would be pissed about this current state of affairs.

The Craftsman in the Cubicle

I’m mentioning this topic now because it’s one that has been sloshing around in my head for the past few months. I’m curious about what it would take to rebuild a sophisticated craftsman culture in academic and post-grad life — the goal being to repair our relationship with the difficult work of getting good.

Over the next few weeks, the blog might get somewhat chaotic with the news and events surrounding my new book release. (The book, by the way, touches on this philosophy.) In the meantime, I wanted to leave this thought to marinate.

We’ll return to it soon.

(Photo by swisscan)

The Maverick 

Esther Duflo, a professor of economics at MIT, discovered her life’s mission in graduate school. It started with a class taught by Abhijit Banerjee, a pioneer in the field of development economics. Duflo ended that semester with a clear vision: when helping the world’s poor, rigorous and controlled experiments can be used to determine which programs work and which fail.

Other thinkers had toyed with this idea, but Duflo boasts, as Ian Parker notes in his recent New Yorker profile, “[a] faith in redistribution…[and] the optimistic notion that tomorrow might turn our better than today.”

This confidence translated into an ability to conceive and then execute development experiments on an unprecedented scale. Her dissertation, titled “Three Essays in Empirical Development Economics,” became a standard in the field. As Parker reports, Duflo received offers from every top economics department in the country, with the exception of Stanford. In 2003, she co-founded a Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which has since conducted over 200 empirical development experiments. In 2004, she was made a full professor at MIT. In 2009, she won a MacArthur Genius Grant.

When reflecting on Duflo’s life, it’s clear that her mission is the foundation for her rapid success. Lots of young economists work very hard, and many have more technical ability than Duflo, whose accomplishments are more logistical than mathematical. But she focused her attention on a worthy mission, which accelerated her, to an almost ridiculous speed, along the path to becoming so good they couldn’t ignore her.

I’m fascinated by the concept of a life mission,which I define as devoting the bulk of your professional energies toward an under-served but unambiguously useful cause. As Duflo’s story emphasizes, missions can help spawn a remarkable life.

But the closer you look at the concept, the murkier it becomes…

The Dreamer

Contrast Duflo’s story to one from my own experience. In April, I received an e-mail from a college junior. She admitted a fascination with polymaths — people who develop great skills in multiple unrelated subject areas. “It popped into my head,” she told me, ”that maybe I could do the research, identify patterns and commonalities, and then compile what I found about polymaths through history into a book.”

She was excited about the project, which had the makings of a mission, and asked for my advice.  After hearing Duflo’s story, you might assume that I was quick with encouragement.

I wasn’t.

I pointed her instead toward my article on becoming a non-fiction writer. Even a casual read of this piece makes it clear that an academic study of polymaths is not a topic that a first time, college-aged writer can expect to publish.

Pre-Conditions for Purpose 

Was what different about Duflo as compared to the undergraduate? Experience. When you dig deeper into Duflo’s story, you notice that she crystallized her vision toward the end of an economics PhD program. When she heard Banerjee talk about development economics, she had the foundation of experience needed to identify the real opportunity being presented. She also had the competence to envision immediate action that would generate concrete results. (As a senior graduate student searching for a thesis topic, Duflo had the resources necessary to begin conducting experiments and publishing the results where they would be read by important people.)

The undergrad, by contrast, didn’t have the foundation to realistically turn her interest into a book. The plan she proposed to me, which involved 10 hours of writing per week over the upcoming summer, would likely, unfortunately, be a waste of time.  

This is what complicates the mission to find a mission. On the one hand, to discover them (and recognize them), you need a non-conformist’s confidence and a dedication to exploration. Duflo, for example, was a notorious searcher. Among other acts of defiance, she took time off in the middle of her studies to go work on practical economic problems in Moscow (where she met Jeffery Sachs). When she took Banerjee’s class she was actively seeking an outlet for her intellectual energies. 

On the other hand, this sense of exploration has to be backed with competence in the relevant field. And developing this competence has a decidedly unexciting, conformist feel to it — a process replete with hard focus and resistance to distraction.

This is the challenge facing those in search of professional purpose: the need to balance a myopic focus on getting good with a regular infusion of exploration and a sense of possibility. There’s no magical balance, I suspect, but instead a need to constantly shift and adjust your approach; covering lots of diverse territory while still obsessively tending your forward momentum.

(Photo by alicepopkorn)

The Shane Black Effect 

The story is a Hollywood classic. At the age of 23, two years after graduating from UCLA with a theater degree, and eager for a source of income while waiting for his acting break, Shane Black decided to try screenwriting. He penned a buddy cop flick, featuring a deranged lead seeking redemption. He gave it the type of clipped, masculine title popular in the mid-80s blockbuster era: Lethal Weapon. The script was scooped up mega-producer Joel Silver for a quarter million dollars, catapulting Black into screenwriting stardom. Within a decade, after earning a then record $4 million for The Long Kiss Goodbye, he became the highest paid writer in the industry,

Black’s story, and those like it, drive thousands of hopeful writers to Los Angeles each year, and motivate untold tens of thousands more to bookstores to seek instruction from a bewildering array of expert advice guides. These writer wannabes take this leap with full knowledge that screenwriting is one of the world’s most notoriously elite and inaccessible industries. The Writers Guild of America counts 12,000 professional screenwriters on its rolls — that is, writers good enough to have been paid for their work — and of these pros, it’s estimated that around half are out of work at any given time. To make matters worse for the amateur, a growing number of selective screenwriting M.F.A. programs ensures a constant flow of highly-trained newcomers to compete for the few open slots that remain. In 2009, the Nicholl Fellowship, the most prestigious amateur screenwriting award, received close to 7000 submissions.

If you want to make it in screenwriting you have to be exceptional, and this is what makes it a fascinating case study for our ongoing efforts to decode the secrets of becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

The Anonymous Screenwriter

In the winter of 2008, I pitched an article to Flak Magazine. Having recently spent time profiling a rap artist’s songwriting process, I thought it interesting to try something similar with a similarly fascinating field: screenwriting. I tracked down a successful television writer and convinced him to undergo several long interviews detailing his experience.

This writer, whom I’ll call Thomas, arrived in Hollywood with an Ivy League degree and a drive to avoid the professions one is supposed to pursue with such credentials. A half-decade later, he is the head writer on a television series that was recently picked up for its second season.

In other words, among the closed community of Hollywood screenwriters: Thomas has arrived.

What interests me about Thomas’ story is its deviation from standard advice. Consider, for example, this article from the popular Absolute Write web site, that asked readers share their wisdom for aspiring screenwriters. There were two type of responses.

The first type of response: Persevere.

• “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” says Bruce Andrews.
• “Be not afraid,” adds James Rae. “Send that screenplay all over the place…the more people that reader it, the better chance someone likes it.”

The second type of response: Use the right techniques.

• “Keep it short,” says Miriam Bradford.
• “The most important aspect of any screenplay is its structure,” quips  Sandy Payne.
• “Tell the story through pictures and action whenever possible,” notes Paul McLaughlin. 

In other words, succeeding in screenwriting requires that you learn some screenplay basics, and then work hard. Sounds good. The problem, however, is that thousands of hopefuls do exactly this every year — and consistently come up short.

Something more must be at play.

The Rise of Thomas

Thomas didn’t sit in isolation with a Syd Field book and a blank computer screen, refusing to give up until he penned the next Lethal Weapon. For lack of a better word, his path was much more ragged.

He got his foot in the door editing an online humor magazine while working on a quixotic pilot for a cable network toying with the idea of original programming. After a while he shifted to a job as an assistant to a development executive. This led to a job as a writers assistant on a television drama and then a stint as the right-hand man to a writer with a studio deal on the Fox lot. Somewhere in this mix, at the urging of a producer he met, he worked on an independent film screenplay based loosely on his childhood, and eventually landed a spot on the writing staff for the new drama helmed by the Fox-backed writer he had assisted. The show was promptly canceled.  Throughout all of this activity, he had a spec script, written for a popular television comedy, that he had been continuously polishing — integrating the lessons from his other experiences as he learned them.

It was this spec script that, two years ago, landed him an interview with an influential producer working on an interesting TV pilot.  Thomas was asked to pen the pilot episode, which was later picked up as a full-time series — making Thomas a head writer.  It pulled good enough ratings to recently earn a second season.

Whew.

The standard screenwriting advice, summarized earlier, is to learn the right techniques — perhaps by reading a book or attending a conference — then put your head down and keep writing until you hit upon that magic, Black-esque hook that lights up the industry.

Thomas’ life, by contrast, points to a much messier suggestion: immerse yourself in the world of screenwriting, getting as close as possible to scripts people like, and the people who like them. Furthermore, continually extract lessons from your exposure to apply to your own writing.

People don’t like this advice because it discounts their dream of writing the next Lethal Weapon during their lunch break. It requires, instead, a complete change of lifestyle and a risky dedication to mastering a tricky craft.

In short, screenwriting requires an apprenticeship, and this is why most working writers have stories that start, like Thomas, with an entry-level industry job — not the writing shelf at Barnes & Noble.

Beyond Screenwriting

I had lunch earlier today with some executives from Ford. (I’m penning these words from the Detroit airport, after giving a talk at Ford’s Center for Innovation and Research.) Listening to their insider take on the automotive industry, a curious fact caught my attention: It can take 15 years to master the skills necessary to work the equipment in the tool and die industry.

15 years.

I think this little piece of trivia provides an elegant way of thinking about becoming excellent in competitive industries, such as screenwriting: It’s not just hard work combined with some easily learned tips — “show, don’t tell!;” “use a three act structure!” — it’s a craft. And learning crafts takes not only time, but exposure to master craftsman.

The more I encounter examples of people building remarkable lives by becoming excellent, the more I discover that this model of craftsmanship is alive and well in our modern age. This offers interesting food for thought. When contemplating your own field, ask yourself: are you the wannabe screenwriter reading how-to guides on the subway, or are you, like Thomas, throwing yourself among the masters, and proclaiming: I know nothing, but you do, and I’m not going anywhere until I do too?

(Photo by BLundin)

The late summer of 2006 was a heady time for Terry Tao. First, in August of that year, he received the Fields Medal, an elite prize, given only once every four years, that honors the world’s top mathematicians. (One of Tao’s fellow prizewinners in 2006 was Grigori Perelman, the eccentric Russian who roared to international celebrity by solving the long-standing Poincaré conjecture.)

Next, less than a month after his return from the Fields ceremony, Tao learned that he won a $500,000 MacArthur “Genius Grant” — leading the LA Times to dub him a “Mozart of Math.”

Here’s what interests me about Tao: on his well-trafficked web site, he has a contact page that starts…

The best way to contact me is via e-mail.

It then goes on to list 22 different types of e-mails that he will not respond to — a list that includes invitations to “collaborate,” “contribute data to a project,” “give [a] talk,” or “attend seminars or conferences.” He also declines requests for “career advice” and “copies of his work.” On a separate page, he notes that he’s “not giving [media] interviews at this time,” and diverts all other queries to a representative of the UCLA office of media relations.

In other words, Terry Tao doesn’t want to hear from you.

And this is completely understandable.

The world’s top math mind is most valuable to society when it’s solving our knottiest combinatorial quandaries. Dedicating hours to interview requests and career advice seems somehow wasteful.

But this motivates an intriguing question: why have a public e-mail address at all? Certainly it would be simpler for him to omit any contact information from his web page.

I don’t know the specific reasons for Tao’s pseudo-accessibility, but his story emphasizes a general trend I first identified in my essay on quitting Facebook: our society has a warped relationship with communication technology. Instead of deploying tools like e-mail to maximize our effectiveness, we grant them default positions in our lives protected by an impossibly high threshold for disuse — a threshold usually articulated as: “If there is any possible negative consequence of abandoning full-throttled use of this technology, I won’t.”

The scenario that intrigues me is not to move to an opposite extreme and promote a world of techno-Luddism. I like to ponder what the middle ground might look like — a philosophy of work where communication technology is isolated and tuned to specific circumstances where it provides unambiguous benefit, and ruthlessly culled elsewhere.

I’m not sure what such a future would look like, but I can only hope that it doesn’t include contact policies so complex that only a mathematician can fully understand them.

(Photo by Christopher Albert)

Steve and David

Let’s try a simple experiment. Imagine that you’re an admissions officer at a competitive college, and you’re evaluating the following two applicants:

• David — He is captain of the track team and took Japanese calligraphy lessons throughout high school;  he wrote his application essay on the challenge of leading the track team to the division championship meet.
• Steve — He does marketing for a sustainability-focused NGO; he wrote his application essay about lobbying delegates at the UN climate change conference in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Who impresses you more? 

For most people, there’s little debate: Steve is the star.

But here’s the crucial follow-up question: Why is Steve more impressive than David?

The answer seems obvious, but as you’ll soon discover, the closer you look, the more hazy it becomes. To really understand Steve’s appeal, we will delve into the recesses of human psychology and discover a subtle but devastatingly power effect that will change your understanding of what it takes to stand out.

Steve’s Story

Steve is a real student, one of the many I profile in my new book on students who get into good colleges while still enjoying their high school lives.  He currently attends Columbia University, which he describes as: “a school I would have never gotten into without my UN work.”

Here’s how his story unfolded…

As a high school sophomore, Steve stumbled into an opportunity to attend a UN conference in New York City, near where he lived. A believer in underscheduling, he had been “e-mailing every non-profit under the soon, looking for an unpaid internship.” Most organizations ignored him. One wrote back, however, and said they didn’t have a job for Steve, but they did have a slot for a student to accompany their delegation to an upcoming UN conference on children’s rights.

Steve jumped at the opportunity. He met delegates and learned about related NGOs. He even spoke up in a sub-committee meeting. This led to an invitation to attend an upcoming conference. And then another. In a short span, Steve became a UN insider.

“I loved it,” he recalls.

It was with this experience under his belt that, one year leader, Steve found himself in a conversation with a college student at a model congress conference.

“What sorts of things are you working on?”, she asked.

Steve mentioned the UN.

“The UN?”, she replied, “I work with them.”

As they continued to talk, the young woman revealed that she was involved with a non-profit called SustainUS — a group dedicated to helping American youth advocate for climate issues. SustainUS, at the time, had little money and no office — the employees were volunteers who worked virtually, mainly from college dorm rooms, organizing with Yahoo Groups and free web-based conference calls.

Steve proposed that he help the non-profit gain press coverage for their activism. “I like speaking with people, and I like writing, so that was a natural thing for me to work on,” he recalls. The group agreed.

“At 16, I was younger than the other members,” Steve told me. “But technology masked that.”

Over the next year, Steve called and e-mailed reporters, eventually scoring a few big hits, including a mention in Time Magazine’s Green Issue and a write-up in the Associated Press. As a reward for these efforts, the organization told Steve he could join the team traveling to the UN climate conference in Johannesburg to present a petition signed by American youth.

This was the experience Steve emphasized in his head-turning application essay.

Decoding Steve’s Story

With these details established, let’s return to our motivating question: Why is Steve more impressive than David? The obvious answers now spawn troubling complications:

• Explanation: Steve worked hard.
  Issue: Being a varsity athlete requires many more hours of hard work than Steve’s efforts.
• Explanation: Steve revealed brilliance or natural talent.
  Issue: It’s hard to identify any specific brilliance or talent in Steve’s story. His path required him to attend conferences and send pitches to reporters. Being captain of a varsity sports team, by contrast, requires great natural ability — both in terms of athleticism and leadership.
• Explanation: Steve showed “passionate” commitment.
  Issue: So did David. He stuck with track through four grueling years and kept up his calligraphy throughout this same period.
• Explanation: Steve did something unusual, creative, and outside the structure of the school.
  Issue: Japanese calligraphy is also unusual, creative, and outside the structure of the school.

Steve’s impressiveness is intuitive and inescapable, but as the above exercise reveals, rationalizing this reaction proves tricky. To sidestep this obstacle, we must appeal to the curious psychology of social comparison.

Lassiter’s Insight

What happened inside your brain when you read the descriptions of David and Steve? According to a clever series of experiments conducted by G. Daniel Lassiter, a psychology professor at the University of Ohio, your first response was to look into the proverbial mirror. Or, as Lassiter describes it, somewhat more formally,  in his 2002 paper on the subject: we have a “pervasive tendency…to use the self as a standard of comparison in [our] dispassionate judgments of others.”

Put another way, to evaluate a person’s accomplishments, we imagine ourselves attempting the same feat, allowing your own capabilities to provide a convenient benchmark for assessing others’.

(In Lassiter’s experiments, students took tests made up of difficult mathematical puzzles. He showed that when a student was asked to rate the intelligence of another student, this judging student used a self-assessment of his own intelligence, combined with how well he did on the test, to construct the rating.)

Let’s walk through the logic here. When you first encountered David and Steve, your brain began to compare them to yourself. In essence, your brain asked: “Could I do that? And if so, what would it require?”

For David, this question was easy to answer. Assuming you had more or less the same athletic ability, you could imagine yourself becoming captain of the track team: show up on time to practice, work hard, respect the coaches, etc. The Japanese calligraphy is even easier to imagine yourself learning — it requires only that you sign up for lessons. You might conclude that David has more natural athletic ability and is a harder worker than yourself, but neither of these assessments leads you to think of him as a star.

(Admissions officers would agree. They’re not looking to build hardworking and diligent classes. Instead, they want to build classes that are interesting.)

Then there’s Steve. Your attempts to mentally simulate Steve’s path likely derailed. How the hell does a 16-year old end up lobbying delegates at an international UN conference? Your failed simulation then lead to a powerful conclusion: he must possess something special. This conclusion is soon followed by a feeling of profound impressiveness.

I call this outcome the failed simulation effect, which I formally define as follows:

The Failed Simulation Effect
Accomplishments that are hard to explain can be much more impressive than accomplishments that are simply hard to do.

This is the secret of Steve. He’s not brilliant. super passionate, or ultra-hard working — instead, he accomplished something that’s hard to explain. This is why he is more impressive than David, even though his high school career required less time devoted to extracurricular activities.

“Stanford Doesn’t Take Students with B’s!”

To help cement this concept, let’s consider the story that inspired the title of this post…

In the late spring of 2004, Kara, a junior at an elite Bay Area private high school, felt nervous as she arrived for a meeting with her college counselor.  Over the past three years, Kara had avoided the crush of competitive activities and AP courses that her peers suffered through to impress their reach schools. Even more galling to the hyper-competitive students at her school, she had even allowed the occasional B to creep onto her transcript.

(When her best friend tried to get Kara to drop a difficult linear algebra class, Kara, to her friend’s horror, simply shrugged and replied, “I like linear algebra.”)

“You’re on the cross country team, which is good,” the counselor began, when Kara sat down in her office. “But you’re not the president of any clubs, and with these grades, you’re just not going to get into your reach schools.”

Kara stammered a response, but was cut off: “Kara, Stanford doesn’t take students with B’s!”

This counselor, however, had not taken the failed simulation effect into account. It’s true that Kara had avoided an overloaded schedule, and in general enjoyed her high school experience. (“I was perceived as the relaxed kid at my high school,” Kara told me recently, grinning sheepishly as if admitting a crime. ) But her main activity, when described right, thwarts any attempt to be mentally simulated: she had developed a technology-based health curriculum that was adopted in ten states.

When you dig deeper, Kara’s path to this accomplishment was much like Steve’s — serendipitous occurrences developed, over time, into something inexplicable.  But these details are irrelevant, because before you can ponder the reality of the story, the failed simulation effect has taken hold.

Indeed, in defiance of her counselor’s protestations, Kara did get accepted to Stanford — not to mention Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and MIT, where she now attends.

The Most Important Effect You’ve Never Heard Of

I devote an entire third of my new book to exploring the failed simulation effect. I also made it a cornerstone of Study Hack’s zen valedictorian philosophy. So it’s clear that I’m a huge believer in its power. This being said, it’s still fair to ask whether this neat abstract concept actually plays a role in real world admissions decisions.

To answer this question, I turned to Dr. Michele Hernandez.  Dr. Hernandez is a former assistant dean of admissions at Dartmouth College and the author of the bestselling book, A is for Admission. She currently runs an elite college counseling service, and offers a popular 4-day application boot camp.

In other words, when it comes to figuring out what works in college admissions, Dr. Hernandez is the person to ask.

“College admissions officers are only human,” she told me. “If they stop to say to themselves as they read a file, ‘wow, I wonder how Nancy managed to do this,’ that will be a huge plus.”

Though the specific name, failed simulation effect, is new to Dr. Hernandez, the general concept is not: “In my private practice, I always push students to try something like this that will make them stand out. My most successful students are those that take me up on my offer.”

Such students, however, are surprisingly rare, and this is due to a thorny reality: it can be incredibly difficult to put this effect into practice.

A Simulated Catch-22

Like many students, your instinct on first hearing about the failed simulation effect was probably to think to yourself: “What could I do, like Steve or Kara, that will generate this same reaction?”

Unfortunately, the chances are slim that you’ll come up with a good answer.

Here’s why: If you’re able to think up an activity that will generate this effect, then, by definition, you were able to simulate the steps required to complete the activity — otherwise, it wouldn’t have come up as a possibility. If you’re able to simulate these steps, then it’s likely that other people could simulate them as well. The result: the activity will not generate the effect.

It’s a catch-22: if you can think up the activity, it won’t have the traits you need.

Fortunately, Steve’s story highlights an escape from this paradox.

The Insider Advantage

Sophomore-year Steve could not have woken up one morning and thought: “I got it! I’ll find a youth-focused sustainability organization and volunteer to work on their media outreach so I can earn a trip to a UN conference!”

But for junior-year Steve, who had already done work with the UN, leading him to meet a representative of SustainUS, this failed simulation effect-generating idea was completely natural.

The difference is that junior-year Steve had become an insider. We can generalize this observation into an effective strategy for finding similar projects:

1. Choose a field.
   If you have a deep interest, this makes the choice obvious, but don’t over think this decision: you don’t need some mythical perfect match with some equally mythical innate talents or passions — your interest will grow with your involvement.
2. Get your foot in the door.
   Join a community; volunteer; attend a conference: whatever exposes you to the inside workings of the field
3. Pay your dues.
   The more you exceed expectations, the quicker you’ll rise to insider status.
4. Once you’re an insider — and not before –  seek projects with failed simulation effect potential.
   If you start this search before your an insider, you’ll end up with generic ideas that are easily simulatable.

In other words, devote your energies towards becoming an insider and head-turning project possibilities will eventually come along for free.

Putting the Pieces Together

As you age, the failed simulation effect becomes less relevant. At its core is the surprising juxtaposition of an impressive accomplishment and the young age of its progenitor. When you’re 25, by contrast, and trying to craft a remarkable life, the failed simulation effect won’t save you from actually becoming really good at something rare and valuable.

But for a high school student, this effect can provide a strong foundation for building an impressive college application without living an overloaded lifestyle.

As mentioned, I devote an entire third of my new book to detailed case studies and step-by-step instructions for how to realistically integrate this advice into your life. If you’re serious about this philosophy, you might consider pre-ordering a copy. In the meantime, however, the ideas laid out in this article should be more than enough to get you started: quit the key club; ditch the expensive mission trip; drop the 5th and 6th AP course from your schedule; and put your attention toward becoming an insider.

Then once you’re on the inside, let the failed simulation effect lead you to an uncluttered, meaningful, and happy high school life.

(Photo by Luke Redmond)

In 2008, when James McLurkin graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, he was unquestionably a star. Four years earlier, Time Magazine profiled James and his research on swarm robotics as part of their Innovators series. The next year, he was featured on an episode of Nova ScienceNOW. The producer of the show, WGBH in Boston, built an interactive web site dedicated to James, where, among other activities, you can watch a photo slide show of his life and find out what he carries in his backpack. Earlier this year, TheGrio, a popular African American-focused news portal, named James one of their 100 History Makers in the Making — a list that also includes Oprah Winfrey and Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker.

Perhaps most telling, even my brother, who finished his systems engineering degree in 2002, knew of James. “He’s the guy with the robots,” he recalled. “We watched a video of him in class.”

In other words, James is famous in his field. So it’s not surprising that in 2009 he landed a professorship at Rice University — one of the country’s top engineering schools — in one of the worst academic job market in decades.

With these accomplishments in mind, this post asks two simple questions: How did James become such a star? And what lessons can we apply to our own quest to become remarkable?

The answers, as  you’ll soon encounter, are not what you might first expect…

A Star is Born

The direct source of James’ stardom is obvious.  In 1994, as part of his senior thesis project at MIT, he designed a swarm of a dozen microrobots he called Ants. Inspired by the insect of the same name, the devices produced complex behavior — such as playing capture the flag — using only simple rules.

To call this swarm a breakthrough risks understatement. It wasn’t an advance, it was a leap. In the early 90′s, roboticists were just starting to discuss the potential of swarming groups of robots; no one was building fully functioning and autonomous swarms.

“Our group at MIT was way out in front,” James recalls. “Carnegie Mellon had some work moving in that direction, but that’s it; no one in Europe at the time, for example, was even thinking about it.”

When James published the paper documenting the project, it sparked a sensation that spread beyond the robotics community. James and his Ants were featured on Good Morning America. Magazines such as Discover, Omni, Popular Mechanics, and Business Week featured the project. The Pulitzer-prize winning humorist Dave Barry satirized the mini-robots in one of his widely-syndicated columns.

James became a star in the field.

After graduating from MIT, he stayed on for two years as researcher and lecturer — an honor considering his lack of any graduate degree at this point — before heading west to receive a masters from Berkeley.  He returned to Massachusetts in 1999, earning his PhD at MIT while working on the side with the Bedford-based iRobot Corporation.

With the support of iRobot, which was impressed with his work on the Ants, James upped the ante again, designing a swarm of over 100, tissue box-sized robots with many more capabilities than his Ants. These new robots could form structures, explore rooms, and even coordinate perform a beep-based orchestra. No other robotics researcher had a deployment that could rival the size or complexity of James’ new swarm.

Once again, the media turned their spotlight on young engineer: generating the stories highlighted in this post’s introduction. The impact of this work made James’ path to  professorship frictionless. Who wouldn’t want to hire one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known roboticists?

Decoding the McLurkin Factor

Steve Martin famously described the key to fame as: “be so good they can’t ignore you.” James confirms Martin’s axiom. By building two robot swarms that were an order of magnitude more complex than any that existed at the time or since, well-deserved stardom followed. But what lessons can we extract from his path to excellence?

A common reaction to James’ story is to emphasize the importance of thinking big. To borrow a phrase from Jim Collins, if you don’t have “Big Hairy Audacious Goals,” you can’t accomplish amazing things. According to this view, the core of the McLurkin Factor was his willingness, as an MIT senior, to think big — conceiving and executing the almost impossibly-ambitious Ants project.

This message resonates: it’s simple and it provides a satisfying little burst of enthusiasm. Not surprisingly, you encounter it often in the success literature. For example:

• In his history of modern American food culture, The United States of Arugula, David Kamp cites Emeril Lagasse reading The Magic of Thinking Big to spark the growth of his food empire.
• The final chapter of Jason Fried and David Hansson’s much hyped (but disappointingly generic) advice-guide, Rework, concludes: “If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You can’t just say you’ll do it later. Later you won’t be pumped up…”
• Steve Pavlina, another fan of audacious goals, notes: “most people underestimate what goals are truly ‘realistic’ for them,” preventing them from taking the “dice roll” needed to win big.

And so on.

But is this good advice for the aspiring grad student? James is skeptical…

Beyond Audacious Goals

“We never viewed the Ants project as a major jump,” James told me. “If anything, with this project, we were dialing back…our goal was to simplify greatly.”

To understand this modesty, you must understand Rod Brooks’ robotics laboratory at MIT. During the mid-90′s, the lab was leading a revolution in robotics — moving the focus away from hulking, C3PO-style androids, and towards smaller, replaceable, biologically-inspired devices.

Next door to James’ office in the lab was Maja Mataric, now the head of USC’s Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, who, during the 90′s, was a leading thinker on robotic swarms. (During this time, Mataric was writing papers with titles such as Coordination and Learning in Multi-Robot Systems.) James’ undergraduate supervisor was Anita Flynn, now the president of MicroPropolsion Inc., who, during the Ants-period, was shrinking the size of electronic motors — enabling the micro-robot revolution. (She’s well-known for building the world’s smallest robot, which at 10 mg is roughly the weight of a dozen grains of sand.)

James quickly integrated this knowledge into his repertoire of skills.

“I went to the lab as an undergrad to interview for a position,” he recalls. “Anita told me they’re not hiring. So I came back with some robots I had built, and some I was halfway through building, and she said, ‘okay, you can work in the lab, and use our parts, but we can’t pay you.’”

Once in the lab, James moved through project after project, under the careful supervision of Flynn, each expanding his abilities.

“I had friends call me in the lab, in the middle of the night, and say: ‘you have to go out and do something,’” James recalls. “To have an MIT student say you have no life, that’s a problem. But I was having so much fun.”

By the time he conceived of the Ants project for his thesis, James was an accomplished robot engineer with a number of successful projects under his belt. He also had a cutting-edge knowledge of microrobotics, and was “marinating” in a lab environment obsessed with biologically-inspired systems.

With this in mind, the idea of building a robot swarm that behaves like insects was not a big hairy audacious goal at MIT in the mid-90′s, it was water cooler conversation. And it made perfect sense that James — with his advanced robotics skills and enthusiasm to see projects to completion — took on the challenge.

The  Bleeding Edge

James’ story is not unique in the annals of science. As Robert Weisberg, a psychologist at Temple University, points out in his book Creativity, great scientific discoveries are rarely the result of “inspiration that blesses [only] geniuses.” They tend instead to be advances made by individuals at the bleeding-edge of knowledge and technique in their field. To the progenitors of breakthroughs, the ideas often seem obvious and incremental. To those without their level of expertise, however, they can seem miraculous.

In Weisberg’s retelling of the discovery of the DNA double-helix, for example, Watson and Crick didn’t win the race to decode DNA’s structure because they were brilliant. Instead, it was because they had mastered the brand new technique of x-ray crystallography (which is used to probe the structure of molecules) and had recent experience decoding the structure of a protein from a tobacco virus that had properties similar to DNA.

Like Watson and Crick, James’ bleeding edge knowledge made his big break seem obvious.

Let’s unwind the implications:

1. To become a star, in graduate school or elsewhere, you need to make an important advance in your field.
2. Important advances require bleeding-edge expertise. (Once this expertise is gained, however, the breakthrough itself will probably seem obvious.)
3. Therefore:  To become a star, you should focus on getting to the bleeding edge of your field as quickly as possible.

This last point is more difficult than it might seem. Many graduate students, for example, never arrive at the bleeding edge of their field. Instead, they reach a comfortable level of knowledge — enough to understand relevant research, and make their own acceptably-complex contributions, but not enough to make bold advances.

Put another way: Thousands of chemists could understand Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper on the double helix, but only a handful had the knowledge needed to have discovered it for themselves.

(Note: The idea of a comfortable level of knowledge is similar to Anders Ericsson’s notion of an “acceptable plateau” of ability where most people stall if they don’t deliberately push their skills forward.)

This motivates an obvious question: How do you get to the bleeding edge?

Returning to James’ story, we find a compelling answer…

The Power of Stretch Churn

“Every semester, my supervisor, Anita [Flynn], had me write out goals,” James told me. “We would go back at the end of the semester and look at what I did and didn’t do. She would tell me, ‘it’s fine that you didn’t get this all done, but what’s not fine is your inability to estimate how long something will take.’”

James describes this lesson as perhaps the most valuable he learned as an undergrad at MIT. Under the tutelage of his supervisor, he honed his ability to choose projects that were hard enough to stretch his ability, but still reasonable enough that he could complete them. She wanted him to be ambitious and set big goals, but she had no tolerance for goals so big that they were beyond his ability to finish in a reasonable time frame.

This should sound familiar. The type of stretch project James describes provide a perfect match with the theory of deliberate practice.

In a 2003 study of deliberate practice and sports stars, for example, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley noted that elite figure skaters spent most of their practice time on jumps — one of the most difficult elements of their routines — while “second tier” skaters spent more time on the easier, more familiar elements of their routines.

James’ stretch projects are like figure skating jumps: they’re hard and uncomfortable, but completing them is the key to getting better.

With this in mind, I argue that the secret to James McLurkin’s success is his ability to choose the right projects. By resisting work that reinforced what he’s comfortable with, yet also sidestepping overly-ambitious projects, he consistently advanced his skill until he arrived at the bleeding edge of research robotics.  Once there, the “breakthrough” projects that cemented his reputation became obvious next steps.

Put another way: stretch projects are an effective way to integrate deliberate practice into fields without clear competitive structures and coaching. If you’re a figure skater, a top coach can walk you through the hard jumps you need to get better. If you’re a grad student (or entrepreneur, writer, or knowledge worker), however, there are no such coaches to guide you through this process.

Stretch projects can fill this role.

To make this more concrete, let me give you a couple definitions:

• Stretch Project: A project that requires a skill you don’t have at the outset.
• Stretch Churn: The number of stretch projects you complete per unit of time.

If you’re interested in building a rare and valuable skill in your field, ask yourself a simple question: What’s my stretch churn?

James’ value was off the charts.

To give you another example, in my own recent efforts to push out onto the bleeding edge of systems research on wireless networking (a shift from my grad student work on the theory side), I’ve fostered an obsession with my stretch churn. It’s tempting to fall back on the skills I’m comfortable with (i.e., “I’ll handle the theory, you guys figure out if it works”), and it’s equally tempting to try to  change the field in one quixotic swoop (i.e., “Let’s revolutionize wireless broadcast!”), but neither would advance my knowledge, and I desperately want to get to the bleeding edge where the real advances are made.

With this in mind, I’ve spent the past few months in a constant state of discomfort — obsessing over channel coherence times and hacking complex wireless network simulators, among other decidedly non-theoretical diversions — and have been loving it: with each stretch project complete, I feel myself growing more knowledgeable.

(In a recent bid to accelerate this effort, I’ve begun reading through this year’s proceedings of the top three wireless conferences. My mantra: Expertise is destiny.)

Conclusion

In the quest for big accomplishment, there’s no escaping the discomfort of deliberate practice. As James’ story emphasizes: for many fields, grad students included, a metric such as stretch churn can be an easy way to integrate this hard work into your life.

Big goals are overrated. As is hard work for the sake of hard work. Master your field and the breakthroughs will slide into focus.

(Top photo by cctvprojdoc)

The Admissions Outliers

Olivia shouldn’t have been accepted to the University of Virginia. At least, not according to the conventional wisdom on college admissions.

Olivia attended a small private school near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She had good grades and test scores, but nothing phenomenal. More striking, she maintained a minimal extracurricular schedule. During the school year, she was a member of the dance team, which satisfied her school’s athletic requirement. She also joined the tech crew for the school musical and was the co-chair of her senior class’s community service organization.

Combined, her school year activities required only seven to eight hours of effort per week.

During the summer, she worked in a marine zoology laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, studying lobsters and horseshoe crabs with a research group run by her neighbor, a professor at the university. She started as a part-time, unpaid volunteer, but the position  morphed into a full time summer job when the professor discovered extra money in his grant.

“It was not a big commitment at all,” Olivia told me, reflecting on her high school obligations.

Students familiar with competitive college admissions tend to have the same reaction to Olivia: she’s a solid applicant, but certainly not good enough to earn a spot at a top-twenty school like UVA. Research involvement has become a standard item on modern applications — the 21st century equivalent of becoming student council president –  and her school-year activities are nearly non-existent by the standards of most competitive applications.

Olivia, however, defied this reaction.  Not only was she accepted at UVA, she also won the hyper-competitive Jefferson Scholarship – a merit-based award, given out by UVA alumni, that covers the full cost of attending the school.

Most high school senior classes have a student like Olivia – someone who defies our understanding of who should get accepted to competitive colleges. We tend to attribute these outliers to the “randomness” of the admissions process. Indeed, even Olivia was surprised by her own success: “I wasn’t stressed like the other students at my school, because I wasn’t interested in trying to impress colleges,” she told me. “I still don’t understand how I got into UVA.”

In this article, by contrast, I argue that the success of students like Olivia is not the result of randomness. It instead points to a surprising possibility: perhaps our understanding of extracurricular activities and their role in the college process is all wrong.

Beyond the List Quality Hypothesis

We’re surprised by admissions outliers like Olivia because their accomplishments fall short of the quality we expect from top applicants. This surprise, of course, requires the belief that the role of extracurricular activities is to signal important qualities about the applicant. It’s common, for example, to hear students talk about an activity demonstrating their “leadership potential” or “passionate commitment.”

I call this understanding the list quality hypothesis, and if you subscribe to this belief, Olivia remains a mystery; her activities don’t signal enough outstanding things to make her competitive at a top school.

Having spent the last three years researching outliers, like Olivia, for my new book, I’ve noticed a surprising trend: the greatest asset of these relaxed superstars is not the quality of their activities, but the fact that they’re genuinely interesting people. This trait, which I call interestingness, permeates their application – from their essay to recommendations – and has a profoundly positive impact on their admissions chances.

For these students, extracurricular activities play a different role than for their peers.  They don’t use activities to signal their qualities, they use them instead to transform themselves into more interesting people. In other words, what’s important about an activity is not its impressiveness, but its impact on your personality.

I call this idea the interestingness hypothesis, and it upends conventional wisdom on how to get accepted at a competitive college.

How Olivia Got Into UVA

In March 2008, when Olivia sat down for her final interview with the Jefferson Scholarship Committee, she was plagued by nerves.

“At the time, I felt really insecure,” she recalls. “Maybe I should have played varsity soccer and lacrosse, and you know, become student council president.”

Then one of the committee members turned to her. “So, tell me about these horseshoe crabs,” he asked.

Olivia began to talk about her research from the past summer, where she helped the graduate students in her lab try to match the movement of horseshoe crabs in New Hampshire’s Great Bay to the movement of the tides. They were pursuing the hypothesis that crabs use the tides to coordinate their migrations.

It soon became clear that over the past three years, Olivia had developed a deep interest in this work. It had started, perhaps, during the  daily commute to campus, which she made with her neighbor – the professor who ran the research lab. His enthusiasm for marine zoology infused their conversations.

“One morning — to give you an example — the professor began going on about a paper on some neurotransmitter in the brain of lobsters,” Olivia told me. “It wasn’t his area of research, but he was fascinated anyway.”

This enthusiasm, evidently, proved contagious, as Olivia began to pursue the subject on her own time.

The conversation with the scholarship committee shifted. Olivia began talking about the book Emergence, by Steven Johnson, which describes how simple small-scale decisions can aggregate into complex large-scale behavior (for example, dumb ants creating smart colonies).

Olivia had read the book for fun, and started riffing with the committee about how Johnson’s ideas might apply to marine zoology. “Was it possible,” she wondered out loud, “that the complex migrations of horseshoe crabs might also be an emergent trait?”

Most students, when faced with a similar interview situation, fall back on emphasizing their activities and the traits they signal. “Running my church youth group,” they might say, “is another example of my leadership ability.”

Olivia followed a different path. She didn’t emphasize her activities (which, in isolation, weren’t all that impressive) or the qualities they supposedly signaled, instead she let her natural interestingness come through – and her interviewers were entranced.

Put another way: she rejected the list quality hypothesis, embraced the interestingness hypothesis, and won a full-ride scholarship for her efforts.

Students Aren’t Born Interesting, They Earn It

The interestingness hypothesis is appealing — using a small number of activities to transform yourself into an interesting person is much less demanding than trying to build a long list of time-consuming commitments. But when I tell the story of relaxed superstars like Olivia, most high schools students balk.

“That’s great for her,” they say. “But there’s nothing in my life that I’m that interested about!”

They then go join the Key Club.

This reaction is based on the common belief that only a few lucky students are born naturally interesting, while everyone else has to prove their worth the hard way – one demanding extracurricular commitment at a time.

But is this true?

In 2001, a research team led by Professor Linda Caldwell of Penn State University, conducted an experiment that effectively put the idea of the naturally interesting student to the test.  They gathered a group of middle school students from four rural Pennsylvania school districts. A subset of these students were randomly selected to receive a six-week training course called TimeWise. The goal of the course was to teach the students to make better use of their free time (their theory was that less bored students are less likely to fall into dangerous behaviors, such as drug use).

One of the lessons, for example, taught students how to balance what they “have to do” with what they “want to do,” while another provided strategies for following up on an idea that seemed interesting.

After the course finished, all of the students were subjected to a battery of tests to assess their interestingness. As Caldwell described the results in a 2004 paper, the group that received the training showed “higher levels of interest (and thus lower levels of boredom) than the [control] group,” they also “scored higher…on initiative…the ability to restructure boring situations…and the ability to plan and make decisions [about their] free time.” They participated in more new and interesting activities than the students in the control group and were overall more happy.

This is an astonishing result.

We tend to think about interestingness as an innate trait possessed by a lucky few, but Caldwell and her team revealed that a half-dozen common-sense lessons were enough to make a significant difference in the measured interestingness of randomly-selected middle school students.

If these basic lessons had such an impact on bored middle schoolers, imagine the change possible for someone committed to the goal of becoming more interesting.

How to Become Interesting

Intrigued by Caldwell’s results, I called her to ask if she could distill some lessons from her research. I wanted her advice for a student hoping to become more interesting.

“You need to be exposed to many things – you should expose yourself even though you might not know if you’ll be interested,” she told me.

“You need some time when you turn off the phone and the instant messenger and take a walk to appreciate the world without something in your ear.”

(This should sound familiar to fans of Ben Casnocha, one of the most interesting people I know.)

In other words, to become more interesting…

1. Do fewer structured activities.
2. Spend more time exploring, thinking, and exposing yourself to potentially interesting things.
3. If something catches your attention, use the abundant free time generated by rule 1 to quickly follow up.

Olivia’s story follows this structure. As a sophomore, she was a believer in rules 1 and 2; she kept her obligations light and maintained an addiction to interesting things. After getting a good grade on a chemistry project on nitrogen in marine habitats, she e-mailed her neighbor on a whim (demonstrating rule 3 in action). “I knew he did something with lobsters,” she recalls, “and thought ‘maybe he would want an unpaid volunteer over the summer.’”

He did. And two years later she won the Jefferson Scholarship.

Pulling The Pieces Together

My argument is simple:

• High school students place too much emphasis on the qualities demonstrated by their activities. In a quest to demonstrate as many good qualities as possible, they end up stressing themselves with unwieldy lists of time-consuming commitments.
• Students like Olivia highlight a different approach. They show that that being interesting can go farther than being widely accomplished. With this in mind, they use activities to build their interestingness – not their credentials – and therefore enjoy happier lives.
• The research of Linda Caldwell supports a powerful corollary: any student can become more interesting – it’s not an innate trait possessed only by a lucky few. The key, roughly speaking, is to allow yourself more time to stare at the clouds, and then be prepared to follow-up when you spot something cool.

These ideas are so important that I dedicate the first half of my new book arguing their validity. I’ll also be returning to this territory over the next few months, as I continue this series on what really makes impressive students impressive. In the meantime, however, you can ease your mind into this counterintuitive conversation with a simple thought: Just because most students follow the same stressful strategy for becoming a standout, doesn’t mean that it’s the only strategy for reaching this goal.

Just ask Olivia, who quipped, when reflecting on her path into UVA: “I feel like I’m the luckiest person in the world.”

(Photo by Greenmonster.)

Predicting Greatness

The impact of teachers is profound. If you rank the world’s countries by their students’ academic performance, the US is somewhere in the middle. In a 2009 New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell notes that replacing “the bottom six percent to ten percent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality” could be enough to close the gap between our current position and the top ranked countries.

“[Y]our child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher,” Gladwell concludes.

But there’s a problem: “No one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.”

Or at least, according to Gladwell.

Teach for America, a non-profit that recruits outstanding college graduates to teach in low-income school districts, disagrees. This organization is fanatical about data.  For the past 20 years, they’ve gathered massive amounts of statistics on their teachers in an attempt to figure out why some succeed in the classroom and some fail. They then work backwards from these results to identify what traits best predict a potential recruit’s success.

As Amanda Ripley reports in a comprehensive look inside the Teach For America process, published in the Atlantic Monthly, the results of this outcome-based approach to hiring are “humbling.”

“I came into this with a bunch of theories,” the former head of admissions at Teach for America told Ripley. “I was proven wrong at least as many times as I was validated.”

When Teach for America first started 20 years ago, applicants were subjectively scored by interviewers on 12 general traits, like “communication” ability. (A sample interview question: “What is wind?”)  By contrast, if you were one of the 35,000 students who applied in 2009 (a pool that included 11% of Ivy League seniors), 30 data points, gathered from a combination of questionnaires, demonstrations, and interviews were fed into a detailed quantitative model that returned a hiring recommendation.

This data-driven approach seems to work.  As Ripley reports, in 2007, 24% of Teach for America teachers advanced their students at least one and a half grade levels or more. Two years later, as the organization’s models continued to evolve, this number has almost doubled to 44%.

I’m fascinated by Teach For America for a simple reason: the traits they discovered at the core of great teaching are unmistakably a variant of deliberate practice — not the pure, coach-driven practice of professional athletes and chess grandmasters, but a hearty, adaptable strain that’s applicable to almost any field.

Put another way, these outstanding teachers may have unwittingly cracked the code for generating a remarkable life…

Inside the Classroom of an Outstanding Teacher

In her Atlantic piece, Ripley recounts an afternoon spent in the math classroom of William Taylor, a teacher in southeast Washington D.C. who ranks in the top 5% of all math teachers in the district.

When Taylor enters the classroom his students fall into a strictly-choreographed interaction.

“Good morning,” he calls. “Good morning!” the students answer.

The period begins with Mental Math. Taylor calls out problems which the students answer in their heads. They then write their solutions on orange index cards which they all hold up at the same time.

“If some kids get it wrong, they have not embarrassed themselves,” Ripley notes. But Taylor now knows who needs more attention.

After Mental Math, Taylor teaches the class a new method for long division. The students try the strategy in groups of four, each led by a “team leader” that rotates on a regular basis. (Taylor found that students were more receptive to help from their fellow students.) After having the students try the method on their own, Taylor begins calling them up to the board, selecting names at random to ensure no one is overlooked.

“I try, but I can’t find a child who isn’t talking about math,” Ripley recalls about her afternoon in the classroom,

The class continues with a spirited game of Multiplication Bingo. Before the students leave, they have to answer a final problem on a slip of paper that they hand to Taylor at the door — another method for him to assess who is still struggling with the day’s material.

What Makes Great Teachers Great?

“Strong teachers insist that effective teaching is neither mysterious nor magical,” says Ripley. “It is neither a function of dynamic personality nor dramatic performance.”

Instead, Teach for America has identified the following traits as the most important for high-performing teachers such as Taylor:

1. They set big goals for their students and are perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness.
   (In the Atlantic article, Teach for America‘s in-house professor, Steve Farr, noted that when he sets up visits with superstar teachers they often say something like: “You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you — I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure…because I think it’s not working as well as it could.” )
2. They’re obsessed about focusing every minute of classroom time toward student learning.
3. They plan exhaustively and purposefully, “working backward from the desired outcome.”
4. They work “relentlessly”…”refusing to surrender.”
5. They keep students and their families involved in the process.

An expert quoted in the article summarized the findings: “At the end of the day…it’s the mind-set that teachers need — a kind of relentless approach to the problem.”

The first four traits above should sound familiar. Setting big goals, working backwards from results to process, perpetually trying to improve, relentless focus — these sound a lot like the traits of deliberate practice.

Indeed, when selecting teachers for their program, Teach for America’s complex recruiting model identifies graduates who show evidence of having mastered this skill. Two effective predictors of a recruit’s classroom success, for example, are improving a GPA from low to high and demonstrating meaningful “leadership achievement.” That is, improving a 2.0 to a 4.0 is more important then maintaining a 4.0, and doubling a club’s membership is more important than simply being elected president. Teach for America wants signs that you can take a difficult goal and then find a way to make it happen.

A Different Kind of Deliberate Practice

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal estimated that it takes around 500,000 hours of deliberate practice for an NFL team to make it through a season. To put that in perspective, that’s about 32 hours of hard work for each foot the ball moves down the field. This effort, of course, is carefully controlled and coached — for example, the article quotes the Colt’s defensive end, Keyunta Dawson, talking about the intense training needed to make split second decisions based on subtle positioning of the head or foot of the opposing lineman.

“I thought college was a grind,”  said Dawson. “But this is a job.”

When we think about deliberate practice, we tend to think about examples like Dawson, or chess grandmasters, or piano virtuosos being painstakingly coached through a difficult, but well-established, path to mastery.

The examples of this process playing out in classrooms, however, have a different feel. William Taylor doesn’t have a coach or decades of well-established training methodology to draw on.

His approach is more free-form. He started with a clear goal — when he presented a concept, he wanted every student to understand it — and then became obsessed with its achievement. His Mental Math exercise, his random selection of students to do problems at the board, the “exit slips” he collected at the end of the period — these activities evolved from a drive to constantly assess his classes’ comprehension.

Over time, the extraneous was excised from his classroom schedule (he developed hand signals for the students to use to indicate a need for the bathroom — a way to eliminate the wasted time and distraction of calling on them). He exhaustively plans his lessons, and then ruthlessly culls or modifies any piece that isn’t effective.

“I found that the kids were not hard…[i]t was explaining the information to them that was hard,” Taylor recalls about his first year. He kept working until he cracked that hard puzzle.

Freestyle Deliberate Practice

Here are the main components of Taylor’s approach to deliberate practice:

1. Build an obsession with a clear goal.
2. Work backwards from the goal to plan your attack.
3. Expend hard focus toward this goal every day.
4. Ruthlessly evaluate and modify your approach to remove what doesn’t work and improve what does.

Let’s call this approach freestyle deliberate practice to differentiate it from the more structured strain written about in the research literature. Here’s my argument: for most fields, freestyle deliberate practice is the key to building a rare and valuable skill. 

Most people fall short of this standard — even those who are highly-motivated to get better. From my experience, two obstacles trap people at an “acceptable plateau” of performance. First, we’re uncomfortable blowing up our assumptions and ruthlessly evaluating our approach. It’s much easier to choose a plan that feels right, and then follow it blindly. Second, exhaustive focus, on a daily basis, is hard. It’s not necessarily hard to do — we’re only talking a couple hours out of the day — but in an age of constant electronic distraction, many have lost their ability for hard focus.

Freestyle deliberate practice is not a clearly-structured system that you can plug into your schedule and follow mechanically toward results. It’s demanding and personal — touching upon the deepest levels of your character. It requires you to get down in the sweaty trenches of effort and attack short-term projects with an almost animalistic passion.

“Damnit,” you’ll cry, “good is not good enough…if I can’t make this so excellent you’ll weep, than it’s not worth even trying.”

Fortunately, this process also feels great. Not the weak, squirt of dopamine from an interesting Twitter exchange, type of pleasure, but the deep down in your bones, captial-Q, Pirsig-esque appreciation of Quality experienced by master craftsmen throughout history.

I’ll end with a simple question: If you’re interested in building a remarkable life — be it as a student or industry veteran — what would it mean to integrate freestyle deliberate practice into your life? This is a question I’ll certainly be thinking (and writing) about in the weeks to follow.

(Photo by Daniel Greene)

The Great Career

Laura loves what she does. To many people, myself included (I’ve known her for the past five years), she represents the Platonic ideal of  a great career.

Laura  is a database whiz. Companies hire her to wrangle their most gnarly data into streamlined structures. If you’re lucky enough to engage Laura, she’ll assemble a handpicked team of programmers and descend on your office for up to six months. She’ll then take your generous check back to her charming Jamaica Plain bungalow and set about finding novel ways to spend it.

She allows months to pass between projects — the paydays being ample enough to buy her as much downtime as she wants. She has used this time, among other pursuits, to earn a pilots license, learn to scuba dive, and travel through Asia.

In several earlier posts, I argued that mastering a rare and valuable skill is the key to generating a remarkable life — much more important than following your “passions” or matching your career (or academic major) to your personality.  It occurred to me, however, that to continue this discussion, we need to better understand our goal; that is, we need to figure out what exactly makes a remarkable life remarkable.

In this post, I’m going to tackle this question, using Laura as our running example of someone who has achieved the end result we have in mind…

The Introspection Principle

If you want to quickly assess how Americans think about the search for the “right” job, spend a few minutes browsing the career guide bestseller list at Amazon.com. For example, when I last checked…

• The number two bestselling guide was a book titled Career Fitness Program. The first step of its three step program was a “personal assessment.”
• The number three bestselling guide was Nicholas Lore’s Pathfinder, which “leads readers though the process of deciding exactly what they want to do for a living and finding a way to make it happen.”
• The book in the number five slot, Career Match, notes in its description that those “whose careers fit their passions and personalities” find them to be a “source of great satisfaction and success.”

Sense a pattern?

These bestsellers are founded on the belief that matching your work to personality traits and interests is the key to finding a job you love. I call this the introspection principle because it elevates the act of self-reflection to be the important for making big life decisions.

This principle extends beyond career issues. It’s also at the core of popular advice for new college students. For example:

• The description for Patrick Combs’ ubiquitous Major in Success (he’s sold over 120,000 copies) emphasizes that students should choose a major that “suits their interests.”
• The cover of Lind Andrew’s canonical How to Choose a College Major instructs students to “use your own interests and talents to find the perfect major.”

The introspection principle is so ingrained that we forget to think of it as a hypothesis that needs to be tested. If you’ll indulge my heretical-side, however, I think it’s worth taking this idea out for a spin.

My question is simple: when we study people like Laura who love what they do, is an introspection-driven match between their work and their personality the explanation for their happiness? And if it’s not, what is?

To answer this question, we can turn to 30 years of cutting-edge scientific research…

The Surprising Science of Human Motivation

As Dan Pink recounts in the introduction to Drive, his new book about workplace motivation, our understanding of what compels people to action was upended in the late 1940s. Before this point, conventional wisdom said that we’re motivated by rewards (think B.F. Skinner and his rats). The more we are rewarded, the more fired up we get about our work.

Then Harry Harlow, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, began giving puzzles to the rhesus monkeys in his primate laboratory.  He noticed a curious effect: when he rewarded the monkeys for solving the puzzle, they became slower at the task.

Twenty years later, Edward Deci, then a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, tested this effect in humans, and found a similar result: the presence of cash made them worse at solving creative puzzles.

This kicked off three decades of intense research into the sources of human motivation.

Eventually, Deci, working with his longtime collaborator Richard Ryan, corralled the diversity of (sometimes contradictory) research on the topic into a single, over-arching model called Self-Determination Theory (SDT). This model has been extensively validated and summarizes, to the best of our current understanding, what can make someone love what they do. (See this 2000 paper by Ryan and Deci, from the journal Psychological Inquiry, for a good overview).

At a high level, SDT makes a simple claim:

To be happy, your work must fulfill three universal psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

In more detail…

• Autonomy refers to control over how you fill your time. As Deci puts it, if you have a high degree of autonomy, then “you endorse [your] actions at the highest level of reflection.”
• Competence refers to mastering unambiguously useful things. As the psychologist Robert White opines, in the wonderfully formal speak of the 1950s academic, humans have a “propensity to have an effect on the environment as well as to attain valued outcomes within it.”
• Relatedness refers to a feeling of connection to others. As Deci pithily summarizes: “to love and care, and to be loved and cared for.”

SDT explains why Laura’s career resonates with us. She clearly has autonomy (she handpicks projects and runs them on her own schedule) and competence (she’s highly regarded and compensated for her expert ability). She also has relatedness, both from her close-knit teams and her ability to build a schedule that dedicates extended amounts of time to friends and family.

Falsifying the Introspection Principle

SDT answers our original question: Is the introspection principle correct? They key feature of the three SDT need are their universality — they span both differing career fields and cultures. Put another way: three decades of research has shown that the traits that make us happy with our work have little to do with our personality or so-called “passions.”

Similar conclusions apply to related decisions, such as choosing your college major. Forget trying to divine some perfect match, and instead choose a major for your own reasons — not pressure from your parents or a misguided view on what’s “practical” — and then strive to become excellent at it. As I argued before, your love of the subject will grow with your sense of autonomy and competence.

For those who sweat this style of decision, this research should provide relief. There’s no reason to lose sleep over whether you’re “passionate” about your major, or if your job is what you really want to be doing with your life. Working right trumps finding the right work.

It’s to this new goal, “working right,” that we turn our attention next…

Working Right

Research reveals that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the key to loving what you do. So how do you get them? There are different answers to this question, but the strategy that I keep emphasizing on Study Hacks has two clear steps:

1. Master a skill that is rare and valuable.
2. Cash in the career capital this generates for the right rewards. 

The world doesn’t owe you happiness. Your boss has no reason to let you choose your own projects, or spend one week out of every four writing a novel at your beach house. These rewards are valuable. To earn them, you must accumulate your own career capital by mastering a skill that’s equally rare and valuable.

It’s important, however, that you cash in this capital, once accumulated, for the right rewards. The word “right,” in this context, is defined by the traits of SDT. In other words, once you have something valuable to offer, use it to gain as much autonomy, competence, and relatedness as you can possibly cram into your life.

This explains, for example, why there are so many CEOs in the world who are excellent at what they do, but also stressed, anxious, and unhappy. They generated career capital by becoming excellent at management, but instead of cashing it in to satisfy the needs that we know would make them happy, they instead bartered for increased prestige and income. The strict demands of the job sap their felling of autonomy, while their sense of relatedness dissipates with the late night work binges.

When we return to Laura, we see that she’s a perfect example of the Study Hacks system in action. In the 1990s, she started working for a major technology company. She noticed that the giant databases at the core of the company’s business were increasingly crucial to its success. She focused on mastering these systems. As the technology boom continued, her skill became increasingly rare and valuable. Instead of cashing in the capital this generated to become an overworked VP, she instead exchanged it for her freelance venture — an approach designed to maximize the autonomy, competence, and relatedness in her life.

Back to the Grandmasters

Now that we’ve established how a rare and valuable skill can be used to generate a remarkable life, we can return, in the next articles in this series, to the topic promised at the end of my recent post on deliberate practice: the details of building this mastery.

Stay tuned…

(Photo by dio5)

Becoming a Grandmaster

How do great chess players become great? If you read Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, you probably have an answer: the 10,000 hour rule. This concept, which was first introduced in academic circles in the early 1970s, was popularized by Gladwell in his 2008 book.

Here’s how he summarized it in a recent interview:

When we look at any kind of cognitively complex field — for example, playing chess, writing fiction or being a neurosurgeon — we find that you are unlikely to master it unless you have practiced for 10,000 hours. That’s 20 hours a week for 10 years.

There seems to be no escape from this work. As Flordia State University Psychology Professor Anders Ericsson reminds us: “even the chess prodigy Bobby Fisher needed a preparation period of nine years.”

The full story, however, is more complex.  Gladwell is right when he notes that the 10,000 hour rule keeps appearing as a necessary condition for exceptional performance in many fields. But it’s not sufficient. As Ericsson, along with his colleague Andreas Lehmann, noted in an exceptional overview of this topic,   “the mere number of years of experience with relevant activities in a domain is typically only weakly related to performance.”

Put another way, you need to put in a lot of hours to become exceptional, but raw hours alone doesn’t cut it. 

To understand what else is necessary, I’ll turn your attention to a fascinating 2005 study on chess players, published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology. After interviewing two large samples of chess players of varied skill, the paper’s authors found that “serious study“  — the arduous task of reviewing past games of better players, trying to predict each move in advance — was the strongest predictor of chess skill.

In more detail:

…chess players at the highest skill level (i.e. grandmasters) expended about 5000 hours on serious study alone during their first decade of serious chess play – nearly five times the average amount reported by intermediate-level players.

Similar findings have been replicated in a variety of fields. To become exceptional you have to put in a lot of hours, but of equal importance, these hours have to be dedicated to the right type of work. A decade of serious chess playing will earn you an intermediate tournament ranking. But a decade of serious study of chess games can make you a grandmaster.

I’m summarizing this research here because I want to make a provocative claim: understanding this “right type of work” is perhaps the most important (and most under-appreciated) step toward building a remarkable life…

Deliberate Practice

Anders Ericsson, the psychology professor quoted above, coined the term deliberate practice (DP) to describe this special type of work. In a nice overview he posted on his web site, he summarizes DP as:

[A]ctivities designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.

Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune Magazine who wrote an entire book about this idea, surveyed the research literature, and expanded the DP definition to include the following six traits (which I’ve condensed slightly from his original eight):

1. It’s designed to improve performance. “The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice.”
2. It’s repeated a lot. “High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.”
3. Feedback on results is continuously available. “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.”
4. It’s highly demanding mentally. “Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it ‘deliberate,’ as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.”
5. It’s hard. “Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.”
6. It requires (good) goals. “The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome.”

If you’re in a field that has clear rules and objective measures of success — like playing chess, golf, or the violin — you can’t escape thousands of hours of DP if you want to be a star. But what if you’re in a field without these clear structures, such as knowledge work, writing, or growing a student club?

It’s here that things start to get interesting…

Deliberate Practice for the Rest of Us

Colvin, being a business reporter, points out that this sophisticated understanding of performance is lacking in the workplace.

“At most companies,” he argues, “the fundamentals of fostering great performance are mainly unrecognized or ignored.”

He then adds the obvious corollary: “Of course that means the opportunities for achieving advantage by adopting the principles of great performance are huge.”

It’s this advantage that intrigues me.  To become a grandmaster requires 5000 hours of DP. But to become a highly sought-after CRM database whiz, or to run a money-making blog, or to grow a campus organization into national recognition, would probably require much, much less.

Why? Because when it comes to DP in these latter field, your competition is sorely lacking.

Unless you’re a professional athlete or musician, your peers are likely spending zero hours on DP. Instead, they’re putting in their time, trying to accomplish the tasks handed to them in a competent and efficient fashion. Perhaps if they’re ambitious, they’ll try to come in earlier and leave later in a bid to outwork their peers.

But as with the intermediate-level chess players, this elbow-grease method can only get you so far.

As Ericsson describes it, most active professionals will get better with experience until they reach an “acceptable level,” but beyond this point continued “experience in [their field] is a poor predictor of attained performance.”

It seems, then, that if you integrate any amount of DP into your regular schedule, you’ll be able to punch through the acceptable-level plateau holding back your peers. And breaking through this plateau is exactly what is required to train an ability that’s both rare and valuable (which, as I’ve argued, is the key to building a remarkable life).

This motivates a crucial question: What does DP look like for fields that don’t have a tradition of performance-optimization, such as knowledge work, freelance writing, entrepreneurship, or, of course, college?

Let me use myself, in my role as a theoretical computer scientist, as an example.  There are certain mathematical techniques that are increasingly seen as useful for the types of proofs I typically work on. What if I put aside one hour a day to systematically stretch my ability with these techniques? Taking a page out of the chess world, I might identify a series of relevant papers of increasing complexity, and try to replicate the steps of their key theorem proofs without reading them in advance. When stuck, I might peek ahead for just enough hints to keep making progress (e.g., reading an induction hypothesis, but not the details of their inductive step).

The DP research tells me that this approach would likely generate large gains in my expertise. After a year of such deliberate study, I might even evolve into one of the experts on the topic in my community — a position that could yield tremendous benefits.

Why am I not doing this?

What would such strategies look like in other aspects of my life, like non-fiction writing or blogging?

What about for other similar fields?

These are the type of questions I want to explore this winter here on Study Hacks.

The answers aren’t obvious. But that’s what makes this endeavor exciting. By piecing together a systematic approach to building a DP strategy for unconventional fields, I hope to identify an efficient path to the type of excellence that can be cashed in for remarkable rewards. Or, perhaps I’ll discover that such a quest is quixotic.

Either way, it should be fun…

(Photo by World Economic Forum)