The Courage Fallacy

In 2005, Lisa Feuer quit her marketing job. She had held this same position throughout her 30s before deciding, at the age of 38, that it was time for something different.

As the New York Times reported in an article from last summer, she wanted the same independence and flexibility that her ex-husband, an entrepreneur, enjoyed. Bolstered by this new resolve, Lisa invested in a $4000 yoga instruction course and started Karma Kids Yoga — a yoga practice focused on young children and pregnant women.

Lisa’s story provides a pristine example of what I call the choice-centric approach to building an interesting life. This philosophy emphasizes the importance of choosing better work. Having the courage to leave your boring but dangerously comfortable job – to borrow a phrase from Tim Ferriss – and instead follow your “passion,” has become the treasure map guiding this philosophy’s adherents. 

But there’s a problem: the endings are not always so happy…

The Economics of Remarkable Lives

As the recession hit, Lisa’s business struggled. One of the gyms where she taught closed. Two classes offered at a local public high school were dropped due to under-enrollment. The demand for private lessons diminished.

In 2009, she’s on track to make on $15,000 — not nearly enough to cover her expenses.

This, of course, is the problem with the choice-centric approach to life: it assumes that a much better job is out there waiting for you. The reality, however, is often more Darwinian: much better jobs are out there, but they’re only available to people with much better skills than most of their peers.

As I’ve argued before, the traits that make a remarkable life remarkable — flexibility, engagement, recognition, and reward — are highly desirable. Therefore, to land a job (or start a business) that returns these rewards, you must have a skill to offer that’s both rare and valuable.

It’s simple economics.

Lisa didn’t have a skill that was rare or valuable. She did receive professional Yoga training, but the barrier to entry for this training was the ability to write a tuition check and take a few weeks worth of classes. This skill wasn’t rare or valuable enough to guarantee her the traits she admired in the lives of successful entrepreneurs, and as soon as the economy hiccuped she experienced this reality.

Her courage to follow her “passion” was not enough, in isolation, to improve her life.

The Value of Nerves

This brings me back to the (perhaps) controversial title of this post. If you’re in a job that’s boring but tolerable, and you feel nervous about quitting, you might consider trusting this instinct. Your mind might be honing in on the economic truth that you don’t have a skill rare and valuable enough to earn you a substantially better deal somewhere else. Because of this, your mind understandably reacts to your career day dreams with jitters.

On the other hand, those who have built up highly desirable skills rarely feel much nervousness about the prospect of switching jobs. They’ve probably had other job offers, or can name a half-a-dozen clients that would pay handsomely for their consulting services.

For example…

Tens of thousands of bored cubicle dwellers fantasize about building their own companies. (Writers have built lucrative careers around pitching this message.) Most of these workers, however, are nervous about this idea due to the very real possibility that their business ventures will fold, leaving them, like Lisa, broke, without health insurance, and worse off than before.

By contrast, earlier this year I received a call from a head hunter trying to recruit me to work at a Manhattan-based start-up incubator that would, in essence, pay me to think up and try out business ideas. (Jeff Bezos was in a similar position at D.E. Shaw when he came up with the idea for Amazon.com.)

My point is that if I wanted to start my own company (which I don’t), I wouldn’t feel nervous. The reason is clear: By earning a PhD in computer science at MIT I developed a skill that’s rare and valuable to this particular economic segment. The market has made this value clear to me; ergo, no nerves.

The Hard Focus-Centric Approach

Though I’m not nervous about the idea of starting my own company, I am, at this point in my career, nervous about the path that most interests me: becoming a professor at a quality research university.

Instead of paralyzing me, however, these nerves provide wonderful clarity. My goal during my postdoc years now centers on eliminating this nervousness. To do so, I need to make myself unambiguously one of the top candidates in the computer science academic job market. This, in turn, requires incredibly high-quality research that promises to push my research sub-fields forward. This specific goal has trickled down into concrete changes in my day to day work habits. Most notably, I’ve recently rebuilt my schedule around hard focus, and I spend much more time reading the research literature and thinking about the long-term direction of my short-term work.

In other words, nervousness can provide more than just sober-minded warning. It can also help guide you in your efforts to build a remarkable life. Instead of grappling with vague worry – ”Am I stupid for wanting to try this new career path?” — you can focus your energy toward a clear metric: building up a valuable skill until you’ve eliminated this nervousness.

Once your stomach stops churning about your occupational day dreams, the time is right to make them a reality. 

J.D. Roth of the popular Get Rich Slowly blog recalls a conversation he had with a friend who had just started his own web site. As J.D. recalls, after the friend posted an introductory article he asked: “Can you point people to the site?”

“Not yet,” J. D. replied. “You don’t have any content.”

Instead of writing, the friend tweaked the layout and introduced advertisements. Several weeks passed.

“Nobody’s coming to my site,” the friend complained. “Not a single person has clicked on an ad.”

“That’s because there’s nothing there…you need to focus on content,” J.D. replied.

The friend posted a new article, then let the site lay fallow for another month. Finally, he wrote J.D. again, this time pleading: “Can’t you please point people to my site?”

“Maybe in a couple months,” J.D. replied. “Maybe once you have some content.”

Empty Inspiration

Consider another example. I have a friend who is a successful entrepreneur in the movie industry. He’s a strong believer in the power of consistent action. When giving talks to student crowds he likes to sum up his entire approach to life as a two-step process: “(1) Get started; (2) Keep going.”

This friend told me that he’s often asked for help from both entrepreneur and movie producer wannabes. Not surprising, considering his views on the subject, his reaction is always the same: “Sure, go take two or three concrete steps toward your goal and then we’ll talk.”

Almost no one ever gets back to him…

The Schemers

The type of people described in the above stories are so common that I’ve given them a name: The Schemers.

The Schemers are young people who are talented and ambitious. They have some sense that they’re destined for something big and they often feel frustration that they haven’t yet earned much distinction.

What defines this group is a belief that the key to big achievement is finding the magic formula for breaking through. The blogger bothering J.D. thought the key was getting that one high-value link. The wannabes contacting my movie producer friend wanted a high-prestige job handed to them. Before I wrote a definitive article on the subject, I used to get a lot of e-mails and calls from young people who wanted to publish a book. I always told them to keep me posted. But I never heard back. I got the feeling that they didn’t like my advice: become a better writer and back-up your idea with widely recognized expertise. I think they were hoping instead for the name of the editor that would immediately buy their rough proposal.

They were all hoping for that magic formula that would make the big break happen all at once…

Beyond Schemes

The Schemers rarely earn lasting distinction. Real achievement, as it turns out, almost never comes from a big break that comes out of nowhere. There is almost always a long history of consistent action that builds, over time, to the state where they finally tip into real fame in their field. People who are constantly looking for an angle to induce a premature break — attempting to sidestep the years of consistent action — never find what they seek.

Here’s my advice: If you’re young, and talented, and ambitious, and have this feeling like you’re destined for something impressive, then take note of the lessons of J.D. and my producer friend. Once you’ve chosen the general direction you want to pursue — a choice that shouldn’t be taken lightly — just start doing things.

Start. Work. Finish. Start. Work. Finish…

It’s a simple rhythm. But it works. There is no magic formula; no one big idea or powerful contact that can grant you distinction. Compulsive networking and the sending of inspired e-mails will not get you to your ambitious goal. Real achievement is not the result of single well-chosen action, it is, instead, an epiphenomena of years of hard work.

Don’t be a schemer. Be a doer. Over time, action — not scheming — is what breeds achievement momentum.

(Photo by ishane)

An Interesting Question…

A student recently sent me an interesting question. It’s a topic I’ve thought a lot about, so I thought I would share my answer with you.

Here’s the original question:

To what extent does intelligence matter in college success? I have a group of friends that try very hard at school, yet fail to score the grades a select group of people I know are able to do. This question captures my concern about grad school admissions: no matter how hard I try, there will always be hundreds of other “geniuses” out there.

I responded: I don’t believe that intrinsic intelligence plays any significant role at the college level.

Let me explain why…

Doogie Howser Nation

Americans are obsessed with genius. We love the idea of Doogie Howser. We think there are math people and arts people, naturally gifted writers and those who were born to play golf.

In the classroom, however, this causes problems. When we see a student breeze through a class while we struggle, we label him “naturally good” at the subject and then write it off as something that we’re not meant to master. This holds back a lot of students from reaching their potential. It also causes a lot of unnecessary anxiety.

Here’s the thing: I don’t buy it. And neither do scientists. No matter how hard researcher look, they can’t find any trace that significant natural abilities actually exist.

How Does a Piano Virtuoso Become Good?

In the early 1980s, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist from the University of Chicago, launched a massive research effort to answer a simple question: how do extremely talented people become good?

His team identified 120 individuals who achieved international recognition. They were split evenly between the following fields: concert pianists, tennis players, swimmers, mathematicians, sculptors and research neurologists.

Over a period of five years, his team conducted extensive interviews with the individuals (and their families) to reconstruct their path to superstardom. The important result from this study was not what Bloom found, but what he failed to find: There was no trace of prodigies.

These stars got good only after many years of deliberate practice. Not only did it take a long time, but for many of these years there was no evidence that they would one day be great. After 6 years of serious training, the future concert pianists, for example, were still competing only at the local level. And they lost as much as they won The swimmers, on average, competed for 8 years at the national level before they started placing first, second, or third. Among the mathematicians and the neurologists, no one become renowned until their late 20s or early 30s.

This begs a natural follow-up question: if practice is key, why did these 120 individuals practice so hard while so many others give up? Fortunately, one of the researchers from Bloom’s team thought this question was worth exploring.

The Source of Persistence

In a 1997 study, Lauren Sosniak, a current Berkeley professor who was a member of Bloom’s original research team, dived back into the interview archives to figure out why the superstars persisted. She soon discovered that almost without exception they had all been exposed to their field, in a playful, unstructured, exploratory manner very early in life.

This random exposure built an interest which gave them just enough confidence to persist through the first stage of formal training. This extra persistence distinguished them enough to get re-discovered and advanced to more rigorous formal training. Their confidence grew. They were rediscovered and placed into ever more elite groups. Their confidence grew some more. And so on…

How a Math Person Becomes a Math Person

Sosniak gives the example of a future math star who recalled that when he was a kid, his dad would play a game where he would ask him what fraction of his omelet was left on the plate. He thought it was fun and soon learned his fractions.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, how this early exposure might have played out throughout the future mathematician’s education.

The omelet game might have generated slightly more confidence when the student was in his early elementary school math classes. His teachers, impressed that he seemed to know the fractions so well, probably would have then tracked him into the gifted and talented programs for math. At that young age, there isn’t much criteria to judge by, so seeming to be engaged in the math classroom is as good as any.

Once there, the student would get advanced training. More importantly, his confidence that he was good in math would increase. This would lead him to spend more time grappling with problems, which provides perfect deliberate practice (he’s stretching just beyond his ability) which in turn would make him even better. This gives him more confidence which leads to more deliberate practice and more ability, and the cycle continues.

By the time he arrives at college he’ll be considered a math whiz. By the time he’s 30, he’s a star in his field.

Why?

Because his dad liked to play with his food…

What You Can Do

You will encounter people at college who are much better than you at certain subjects. As we learned, this has nothing to do with a natural ability that you lack. They have simply done more deliberate practice of the relevant skills than you.

Here’s the good news: you can reduce this gap. Instead of despairing about your lack of ability to solve math problems or ace the LSAT, figure out your own plan of deliberate practice.

For example, you can experience huge jumps in math ability by tackling problem sets in a way that stretches your ability and adopting insight-driven review. Remember, this is how I went from a non-math person to a math whiz in one semester.

The same idea holds for other subjects. Early in my college career my papers were lacking. I came from a public high school. Many of my peers were from top private schools that had more demanding classes. These students simply wrote much better than me.

I didn’t, however, despair: “I just don’t have a gift for writing!” Instead, I practiced. I wrote for the newspaper. I wrote for magazines on campus. I obsessed over my papers, pushing myself to be better with each draft. By the time I reached my junior year I would regularly get notes that my papers were some of the best in the class.

I made myself into a “writing person.” Natural ability had nothing to do with it.

To answer the question that motivated this post: stop obsessing over intelligence. People are good at what they’ve practiced. Figure out what you want to be good at, then start making yourself better. You might not catch up to the rare student who has been building his ability over the past decade, but you can get good enough to score well.

Unless of course you’re Doogie. For him, everything just comes easy…

In response to my recent article on Misery Poker, a reader commented:

I wonder about the really exceptional people. Does Barack Obama “build a realistic schedule”? … maybe extraordinary stress IS required to accomplish extraordinary feats

Another reader added:

I think extraordinary sacrifices are required for great accomplishments.

This is a fascinating argument. Study Hacks, as you know, is driven by the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy, which claims that it’s possible to be both relaxed and impressive. But these commenters are pushing back on this world view. It’s one to thing, they note, to have a successful college career that is also relaxed, but is it possible to have an exceptional career without overwhelming amounts of work?

In this post I claim it is possible. And I’ll explain exactly how…

Barriers and Myths

Let’s start with the myth that drives most peoples’ thinking about what it takes to be exceptional:

The Exceptional Effort Myth: Exceptional results require exceptional amounts of effort.

The logic here is obvious. By definition, if something is exceptional it’s also rare. If it’s rare, there must some difficult barrier to achievement.

This we can agree on.

But what is this barrier? Most people default to the simplest explanation: the barrier that makes exceptional achievement rare is that it requires an exceptional amount of work. This gives us the myth highlighted above.

For some endeavors, of course, this myth matches reality. For example:

1. Running for president.
2. Aggressively growing a start-up business.
3. Becoming a standout junior associate at your law firm.

These exceptional achievements absolutely require lots and lots of work. Their criteria for success have amount of effort explicitly built in. A young lawyer, for example, is judged almost exclusively on the number of hours he bills.

But here’s the thing (and this is the important part): I claim that for most exceptional endeavors, an exceptional amount of work is not required. In other words, the barrier to exceptional achievement is not the volume of effort, but something else entirely…

The Magic of Deliberative Practice

Last year, Geoff Colvin, a senior editor at Fortune Magazine, wrote an article titled: Why Talent is Overrated. It was a sensation. He received so many letters that he soon expanded the ideas into a full length book of the same name, which was released last month.

At the core of the article was a simple proposition: the real path to great performance is not built on natural talent or volume of hard work. As Colvin describes, recent research has increasingly highlighted, instead, the importance of a very specific type of work called deliberative practice.

Researchers claim that it’s this type of practice — not natural talent, and not raw hours spent working — that makes the bulk of the difference between exceptional people and the rest.

Colvin provides five traits that define deliberative practice:

1. It is designed specifically 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. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us are just doing what we’ve done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.”
2. It can be repeated a lot.
   “Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent.”
3. Feedback on results is continuously available.
   “[Y]ou may believe you played that bar of the Brahms violin concerto perfectly, but can you really trust your own judgment? In many important situations, a teacher, coach, or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback.”
4. It is highly demanding mentally.
   “Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one’s hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone’s mental abilities…no one can sustain it for very long.”
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.”

I want to draw your attention to point (4). In further explaining this property, Colvin tells a story:

Nathan Milstein, one of the 20th century’s greatest violinists, was a student of the famous teacher Leopold Auer. As the story goes, Milstein asked Auer if he was practicing enough. Auer responded, “Practice with your fingers, and you need all day. Practice with your mind, and you will do as much in 1-1/2 hours.” What Auer didn’t add is that it’s a good thing 1-1/2 hours are enough, because if you’re truly practicing with your mind, you couldn’t possibly keep it up all day.

In other words, deliberative practice is hard. It demands we leave our comfort zone. We need expert feedback. We have to return again and again to the same trouble areas to get better. But the one thing it’s not is exceptionally time consuming. It can’t be. You simply can’t keep it up for 12 hours a day.

Pulling It All Together

I’m fascinated by deliberative practice because it provides a missing piece to our ongoing conversation about becoming a standout.

Recall, for example, our discussion of Steve Martin. His path to becoming famous was defined by deliberative practice: every night, he would return to a comedy club and try to push his comedy a little bit further into new territory. This was hard. But instead of defaulting to easy laughs he relentless drove his routine forward.

We see similar patterns with our student case studies:

While Toph was working in Australia, he kept taking on projects that stretched him beyond his current ability within the marketing field. The result was a rapid rise. When he left, the company begged him to stay.

Scott had a similar experience pushing himself to become an Eastern Europe expert once he arrived at Law School. He’s now on his way to a Fullbright Scholarship.

Here’s my conclusion. For most endeavors, the path to becoming exceptional requires that:

1. You focus on one thing and commit to it over a long period of time.
2. During this period, you consistently engage in deliberative practice, again and again, to cause a rapid rise in your ability.

This approach is consistent with the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy. The practice is hard but short. If you’re properly focused and can put in an hour or two of deliberative work on most days, you can become exceptional. Doing more work isn’t going to help. Neither will tacking on dozens of other activities or commitments.

So if your goal is to become a true star, take a careful look at how you spend your time. Beneath all of your activities and faux-busyness, what really matters is the time spent buckling down and putting in the right type of effort to get better at what’s most important to you. Everything else is just for show.

(Photo by Thirty30; modified by author)

In a recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, professor Rachel Toor asks:

Who feels at home in a place like Yale, where your roommate has already published a novel and the person down the hall performed on Broadway?

This question captures a familar trope: top schools contain a small number of exceptional genius students with whom the rest of us mortals must compete. This idea strikes fear into heart of those approach the college admissions process and sows insecurity for those already on campus.

But is it based in reality? Are there really geniuses — teenagers publishing books and performing on Broadway — who have innate skills that blow away their peer’s ability? And if it’s not true, what danger do we face in keeping this myth alive? This essay tackles these questions.

The Tale of Two Superstars

To aid our discussion, let’s introduce two students that seem to support the genius myth.

The first is a Stanford undergrad who we can call Mike. As Mike recently explained to me in an e-mail exchange, by the time he arrived on campus he had published four books, two of which were bestsellers.

The other student is author Christopher Paolini, who, at the age of 15 began writing the book Eragon which was eventually bought by Alfred Knopf for $250,000 and became both a New York Times bestseller and a big budget movie.

We can agree that Mike and Christopher are exactly the type of young superstars we have in mind when we think about the young genius myth. Four books by the age of 18? Writing a bestselling novel at 15? What else other than rare exceptional ability could explain such feats?

Mike’s “Genius”

As it turns out, Mike would be embarrassed to be labeled a genius. In out brief conversation, he went out of his way to emphasize that what he had accomplished, in true Zen Valedictorian fashion, was actually easier than the brutal workloads of his high school classmates. The full story on Mike’s books — the story you’d never get in the college press release — is that the books are computer manuals in a series written for and by teenagers. The “bestseller” status refers to a good day in the Amazon rankings.

What Mike should get credit for is boldness and discipline. As a 15-year-old attending a tech conference with his family, he fearlessly pitched the teen tech series to a group of publishing executives. When they turned him down he went ahead and wrote up sample chapters and sent them along. When they saw that this 15-year-old could write, they green lit the plan. Once the first book was complete, Mike stayed focus, pitching and writing three additional manuals.

Mike impresses the hell out of me because he not only has interesting ideas but he also acts on them; a rare combination for someone his age. He’s a perfect example of the Steve Martin Method. But as he would readily admit, he possess no special genius ability that surpasses those of his classmates.

Christopher’s “Genius”

But what about Christopher Paolini? His book was a mega bestseller and it was also a novel. He has to have a genius ability.

Let’s dive deeper…

When you read through enough interviews with the young author, a consistent view emerges: he was trained, from a young age, like a Chinese Olympian, to become a young novelist. He was home schooled by his writer parents who ran their own publishing house. As Christopher recalls, his mother, a former Montessori teacher, supplemented standard textbook lessons with creativity-boosting exercises and a large amount of writing. After receiving at the age of 15 — through correspondence courses — the equivalent of a high school degree, Christopher, with the blessing and support of his parents, turned his full-time attention to writing his first novel. No college. No job. Just writing. The young man who grew up being groomed to become an author spent the next three years working on nothing else but realizing this dream.

Once he finished, his parents published the book through their own publishing house and Christopher hit the road; doing over 145 appearances — in full medieval regalia — to help promote the book and spread the word. It eventually came to the attention of Carl Hiaasen, who passed it along to his publisher, which, in turn, liked the book, saw the fan base Christopher had built, and, more importantly, saw how much money they were making with Harry Potter, and then bought the rights.

The resulting book isn’t a great work of literature. In its review, The New York Times notes:

Paolini does not yet have the [strengths of classic fantasy authors]…He often slips into clichéd descriptions…and B-movie dialogue…The plot stumbles and jerks along, with gaps in logic and characters dropped, then suddenly remembered, or new ones invented at the last minute.

That being said, the story is gripping and authentic and caught the attention of the public at just the right moment when children fantasy was the rage — leading to a deserved bestseller status.

Once again, however, we don’t find a natural, untouchable genius ability. Instead, we find a young man, groomed from a young age to write this book, who followed through on this plan over three hard years, and ended up, with a lot of luck and even more elbow grease producing a break out.

No magic ability lurks here.

The Young Genius Myth Debunked

My experience working with the country’s most exceptional students has taught me that the genius myth is rarely justified. When you encounter a student who, when casually described, hits you as brilliant and beyond comparison with your own abilities, often, as with Mike and Chris, the following factors are in play:

1. The “genius” accomplishments, when investigated closely, are less exceptional than they were at first described.
2. The “genius” had been working toward his accomplishment for years, probably in an environment that afforded him insider connections and a detailed understanding of what exactly is necessary to make progress.

The Danger of the Genius Myth

The danger of the genius myth is that it unnecessarily muddles our discussions of student stress. When considering college admissions, for example, it helps no one to casually reference the “published authors” that you have to compete with. This deference to genius is a way to justify unhealthy behaviors — “I’m in 25 clubs because I have to keep with geniuses like Mike!” It also generates unnecessary insecurity, making you feel like your college acceptance was a mistake and that the work load is probably beyond your natural abilities. Finally, it helps foster the idea that intelligence and ability are “innate” traits. As Carol Dweck has shown again and again, adopting this mindset leads to much poorer academic performance and worse mental health.

Beyond Geniuses

Here’s the reality: there are few — if any — geniuses in this world. When you hear about a student who blows your mind, assume you’re not getting the full story. The key, as always, to standing out is to: keep a manageable workload, innovate, master a few things instead of juggling many, and use smart, efficient work habits. Don’t stress over your lack of a magic ability because, as much as this might pain Eragon fans to hear, there is no magic: Just hard work, focus, a dash of innovation and a healthy dose of luck.

(Photo by midiman)

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)

The phenomenal success of Tim Ferriss’s recent book, The Four-Hour Work Week, brought to prominence a distressing trend that has been recently plaguing the self-help community: citing rough summaries of scientific principles as evidence for unrelated how-to advice.

The principle, in particular, that I’m interested in here is Parkinson’s Law. Informally, the law states:

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

This was the opening sentence of the humorous essay Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson published in The Economist in 1955. The essay went on to explain the results of a study of the British Civil Service. (Click here for an expanded version of the essay published in Parkinson’s eponymous book on the subject).

Unfortunately, as we’ll see, in modern usage the study itself has been discarded in favor of this one sentence opening — a tendency that obscures its true meaning.

The Misuse of Parkinson

Parkinson’s Law is widely cited in Ferriss’s book and in countless blog articles as evidence that when given a task, a human will fill whatever time was alloted for its completion. The conclusion: a feeling of busyness shouldn’t prevent us from reducing the time we set aside for work. In other words, they take the opening sentence from Parkinson’s essay and then interpret it literally.

The reality, however, is more complicated…

Inside the Civil Service

If you read deeper into Parkinson’s work, you soon discover that he is not making a general claim on how humans procrastinate. He is, instead, summarizing a rather rigorous statistical proof he devised to explain observations of a very specific context: the British Civil Service. Parkinson, it turns out, was intrigued by the following paradox: the number of people employed in the British Colonial Office bureaucracy increased even as the British Empire imploded — an event that decreased the amount of work available.

Parkinson’s Law is not a catch phrase, but instead a statistical model devised by Professor Parkinson to describe the factors that control the growth of bureaucracy. It’s central conclusion: growth is independent of the amount of work to be done.

Among the non-work related growth factors he identified were:

1. The tendency of slightly overworked officials to hire pairs of subordinates to relieve the strain — the pair being necessary to prevent any one from usurping the original official’s functionality. The added work capacity here far outstrips the demand.
2. The well-known ability of officials to create work for those below them.

Parkinson Doesn’t Care About Your To-Do List

In light of Parkinson’s full findings, the adage that “work expands to fill available time” takes on a new meaning. To Ferriss, and other how-to writers, it’s interpreted, as mentioned, to mean that individuals will procrastinate and drag out tasks to fill an arbitrary work day. To Parkinson, however, the adage was meant to highlight a truth about large bureaucratic organizations: growth can be unrelated to work.

Parkinson would be amused at best, and confused at worst, to see his conclusion applied to self-employed, blog-reading, high-tech entrepreneurial types struggling to maintain a work-life balance. It’s a worthy cause. But certainly not one that concerned the good Professor.

Finding New Relevance for Parkinson

At the risk of suffering the same sin I just urged you to avoid, I suggest, tentatively, that there is still some modern value to be mined from Parkinson’s work. When you forget the famous one sentence summary, and dive, instead, into the guts of his study, the following more profound conclusion shakes loose:

Well-established work cultures can harbor irrational behavior. Beware!

In the civil service, this meant employee growth can occur even as work demands decrease. For a college student, on the other hand, this could refer to the irrational belief that physical suffering — in the form of all-nighters and long study marathons — is the key metric for proper test preparation and paper writing.

This isn’t logical. As Study Hacks readers know, a little pre-planning and some efficient review techniques can eliminate the need for such suffering all together. But a strong work culture — as Parkinson observed — can exert surprising strength on your behavior.

Conclusion

To conclude, be wary of any writer, myself included, who uses a brief high-level summary of some scientific principle as justification for any manner of unrelated ideas. What lurks beneath the fortune-cookie headline invariably provides richer insight.

A few weeks back, Brian Clark, of Copyblogger fame, posted an intriguing article on Zen Habits. It was titled: Punk Rock Your Life: The Simple Six Letter Word That Determines Success.

The essay got some attention; eventually earning 1090 digs and 92 comments. I can see why. Like any timeless advice fable, it presents a simple message built around a compelling, illustrative story. Clark describes a Sex Pistols concert held in 1976 in Manchester, England. In attendance at this concert where a surprisingly large number of then unknown musicians who, inspired by the innovation on display, went on to become famous. Clark draws a clear conclusion:

So, what’s the six-letter word that determines success in life? Action.

Is that correct? The answer, I believe, is more complicated…

Beyond Action

Ask yourself the following: Do you anyone who tried to become a professional musician? Most people do. Did they succeed? Most such aspirants do not. (It’s a brutal business.)

Now ask yourself this: Did they work hard? Most likely, you answered “yes.” So why did the failed musicians you know not succeed when the inspired Sex Pistols fans did? There are several possible answers. Luck could play a role. Also talent. Maybe different levels of hard work. But none of these factors, alone, seems to provide the full story. On a closer examination of the hundreds of success stories I’ve witnessed or told, I’m starting to arrive at a new truth: Action cannot generate success unless it’s focused on an incredibly productive path.

Let me explain…

Punk, Not America Idol

Allow me a modest proposal. The reason those Sex Pistol fans became successful punk musicians is because they discovered a productive path on which to apply action. Here was a new type of music with the potential of making a big splash in that social context. By virtue of their age, where they lived, their political views, and their social circles, these musicians were uniquely qualified to be an early promoter of this genre that had explosive potential. All that was missing was taking the action to get there. Those that did made it big.

Consider, on the other hand, if I was to watch an episode of American Idol and get inspired and proclaim: “This is great! I want to do this!” Who cares. No amount of action is going to make me into a pop music star. Ditto if I wanted to become a great cage fighter or literary novelist. These paths would not be productive for my particular situtation.

Steve Martin Knew It

On reflection, this approach of identifying a productive direction for your action is embedded in our recent discussion of the Steve Martin Method. When he says “be so good they can’t ignore you,” you could substitute “relevant,” “new,” “necessary,” or “original” for “good.” Indeed, this is exactly what Martin did. He didn’t become good at the style of comedy currently in vogue. Instead, he invented a new style so compelling that it could not be ignored. Because he was a young, smart, well-educated comedy writer during a time of great social change, he was in a prefect situation to make this happen.

Applying to Your Life

I’m still working out some of these ideas, and can’t, at this point, distill this brainstorm into concrete advice, or even provide strong definitions of key concepts like “productive path.” I do think, however, that something important is brewing here. I will be revisiting the concept soon.

In the mean time, let me know what you think. How does this match or clash with your own experience? How does one best take advantage of this reality of big achievement? I’m interested to dive deeper.

I just observed something distressing about my behavior. The absolute most simple component to my productivity repertoire is to keep a notebook and a pen within reach at all times. In the standard GTD canon, this allows me to immediately capture any tasks or ideas that pop to mind.

In theory, this basic behavior — taking a notebook out of my backpack when I sit down — should present no difficulty. What task could be more simple? All I have to do is move my arm, literally, just a few feet, from my bag to my desk. No thinking is required. No more than 3 – 5 seconds transpire. No sweat.

Many times, however, I can’t stand the thought of it.

In fact, as I write this, such an occasion just occurred. I returned to my office after lunch, sat down, and found that every ounce of my being was resisting this trivial act. I had to fight to rally the energy to get out that notebook. And this is I fight I often lose.

The Problem with the Hardness Assumption

This observation contradicts a lot of what we assume about productivity. We like to imagine that the difficulty of starting something is in linear proportion to the difficulty of a task. When we see “write term paper” on a to-do list, we know we have our work cut out for us to overcome the urge to procrastinate. Something simple, on the other hand, like “take a notebook out of your backpack,” should be a breeze.

But it’s not.

To my continual consternation, the simple and hard, at times, can be equally difficult to get started. And this causes trouble. The core of most modern work flow management systems depend on the use of “easy” habits to support and simplify the “hard.” If these gradated designations fail, so does, perhaps, many of the claimed benefits of these systems.

Toward a More Realistic Theory of Motivation

The obvious question remains: What does explain our varying motivation levels? I don’t really know. But it’s likely quite complicated.

One thing I have noticed, however, is that I tend to move between grooves and slumps. When I’m in a groove on a certain type of work, it’s relatively painless to switch between tasks within this same type. For example, if I’m in a blog groove, it’s easy to knock off tasks related to the blog. This is similar to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow state, but not quite the same. In a groove you are able to move between many different tasks within a broad type, whereas Flow typically refers to your concentration during a specific activity.

The slump is the evil twin to the groove. It describes a general period of low energy where anything beyond desultory e-mail checking seems impossibly distant.

What’s key is that in both situations the “hardness” of the task at hand plays a minimal role in determining my motivation to tackle it. The key is not only that I’m not in a slump but also that I’m in the right groove for the type of work I face.

The Important Questions

If this general model holds universally, it begs some interesting questions. For example:

1. How do you avoid slumps?
2. How do you jump from a slump to a groove?
3. How do you know what groove you are in?
4. Is it possible to jump from one groove to another?
5. Do we have any control over what grooves we land in? And, if not, does it hold that the optimal work flow is one in which you learn to identify and then extract the maximum amount of work out of whatever groove you happen to be in?

From Control to Accommodation

I’m fascinated by these questions. But I have no real answers. It seems that the general paradigm shift at play here is one away from rigid control over your entire work day and toward one where you acknowledge a big part of your motivation is out of your control, and the best you can do is be aware and leverage what you face each day.

For future reading, there are, no doubt, relevant lessons in Csikszentmihaly. There is probably also a lot to be learned from Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s work on energy management.

I leave a more rigorous examination of these issues as future work. For now, however, as I sit and ponder the notebook that sits beside me, and the herculean struggle that preceded it’s arrival in this position, I can’t help but a feel a slight shiver of discomfort — maybe the whole productivity game is much more elusive and much more non-deterministic than we would like to believe.

The author opens with the story of his time in his high school drama club. For three years he paid his dues — practicing his singing, showing up at every meeting, taking on tedious parts — so that, as a senior, he could reap his triumphant reward in the form of a leading role in the yearly drama production.

But things didn’t go as planned. A new choral director was hired and gave all the choice parts to the younger students he already knew. In short, the author got screwed.

His lesson:

It did teach me one thing that I haven’t forgotten — to be extremely skeptical of people who tell you to pay your dues. You can do everything right, and still get passed by.

The author then extends this logic to the workplace. In his calculus, older employees grumble about us hotshot Gen-Y’ers not wanting to “pay our dues,” while we feel justified in our hot-shotedness because we’ve seen our parent’s generation be rewarded for years of service with a pink slip.

This is a confusing stalemate. On the one hand, young people are not content to put in time for the sake of putting in time — just because that’s the payment owed some antiquated seniority system. On the other hand, the older folks aren’t far off the mark by retorting that it’s hubristic to expect benefits immediately.

So what’s a modern workforce to do? The author’s conclusion:

I’m not advocating that Gen-Y employees should all be given high-level jobs, months of vacation time and great salaries the moment they set foot in the door. Experience matters…But I think we do need to feel like we’re in an environment where we can learn, achieve our goals and be happy.

I’m not quite sure what this means (it smacks of business-speak to me). But I suspect that me and this author are actually working from the same page here. Despite the provocative statements made earlier in his post, I think we both see some value in the “paying dues” concept — value, that is, if you are willing to rething your definition of “dues.”

Redefining Dues

A careful analysis of the dues argument reveals two separate components. One is the inadequacy of seniority (as oppose to skill-based) benefit ladders. The other is the indulgent lunacy in coddling young hires in whatever benefits or opportunities satisfies their ego-bolstering whims. We can solve both (says Cal, with completely unjustified confidence). Here’s how:

1. Maintain the core concept that in order to obtain a certain benefit (be it more responsibility, more pay, or increased schedule flexibility) an employee most “pay his dues” in a well-defined manner.
2. Redefine what it means to “pay dues” to a system that is completely independent of seniority. Instead, make it based on the achievement of specific performance benchmarks.

If you’re twenty-two, and you want to be given your own project team to manage, fine. Just show us three previous projects in which your manager allowed you to run the main technical meetings and your fellow team-members gave you a rating of “excellent” or above on their post-project evaluations.

You want flexible work hours? Great. Take on a stretch project the company has been meaning to get done. If over the period of a month your managers report no problems in your normal workload and you get the stretch project done, then we deem you productive enough to handle more flexibility.

Barriers are fine so long as the path to circumvention is well-known and well-justified.

The Power of the Dues Paying Mindset

This whole discussion leads to a larger point that holds, perhaps, more salience to my non-working student audience. A willingness—perhaps even eagerness—to “pay your dues” in the non-seniority, performance-driven manner described above, is a crucial trait to aid the accomplishment of big things.

Almost anything that is worth doing is worth doing because its considered impressive or valuable. It’s likely considered impressive or valuable because not many people do it. Not many people do it because it’s hard.

If you want to accomplish the types of things that impress people, then you must get used to aggressively putting in the prerequisite work to get to the ability level you need to be at. This holds if you’re a new hire in the workplace or a student involved in an undergraduate research program. It’s equally relevant to a wannabe entrepreneur as it is to a fledgling author.

See the World in Terms of Dues

Dues paying is where you differentiate yourself from the masses. Regardless of the pursuit, first ask yourself: “What specific thing could I achieve that would prove me capable/deserving of making progress in this pursuit.” Then set about to find the most efficient possible path to this achieving this specific thing. Don’t worry about the ultimate goal. Just worry about the next set of dues you need to conquer en route to completion.

When you enter the workforce for the first time, your first thought should not be to complain about how your bosses are under-appreciating you. Instead, identify what specific thing you could accomplish that would indisputably qualify you as worthy of increased appreciation.

Let’s take a more collegiate example. You join a campus magazine and are frustrated that the editors won’t give you more important positions or let you tackle the bigger features. Don’t complain that you can write just as well as they can. Instead, resolve to turn in a steady stream of articles, over the next few semesters, that will unequivocally establish you as a top writer worthy of the extra responsibility.

What happens if you fail? What if your business project flounders? Or, your magazine articles fall flat? In this case, you’re not yet deserving of the benefit. That’s what makes the “dues paying” mindset so effective — it injects meritocracy back into the process.

In Conclusion

In the final accounting, I, like many young people, bristle when I hear old commentators describe our generation as spoiled and wanting everything without doing any work. On the other hand, I also bristle when I hear young commentators drivel on about the kid gloves with which Gen-Y’ers in the workplace should be handled.

My final solution: Ignore this jabber. All of it. See the world in terms of your own system of dues and start paying as soon as possible. The benefits will come.