Cal Newport's Blog, page 44

The E-mail Productivity Curve

A Mixed Response

Late last year, Pew Research found that online workers identified e-mail as their most important tool, beating out both phones and the Internet by sizable margins. Almost half of the workers surveyed claimed that the technology made them “feel more productive.”

As Pew summarized: “[e-mail] continues to be the main digital artery that workers believe is important to their job.”

Around the same time this research was released, however, Sir Cary Cooper, a professor of organizational psychology, made waves at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference by identifying British workers’ “macho,” always-connected e-mail culture as a factor in the UK’s falling productivity (it now has the second-lowest productivity in the G7).

Cooper went so far as to advocate companies shutting down their e-mail servers after work hours and perhaps even banning all internal e-mail communication.

This bipolar reaction to e-mail — either it’s fundamental to success or terrible — extends beyond research circles and often characterizes popular conversations about the technology.

So what explains this oddly mixed reaction?

I propose that the productivity curve at the top of this post provides some answers…

The E-mail Productivity Curve

The above curve shows the rise and fall of productivity (y-axis) as e-mail use (x-axis) increases from a minimum of no e-mail to a theoretical maximum of non-stop e-mail use.

Notice, at the left most extreme (i.e., no e-mail use) productivity remains healthily above zero. This captures the obvious reality that even if e-mail (and similar digital communication tools) were banned, companies could still get stuff done, as they did in the many decades before such technologies were introduced.

As we begin to move to the right (increasing e-mail use) productivity increases. This point should also be obvious.  It’s hard to argue against the proposition that e-mail is an immensely useful technology: universal addressing, instant information transfer, asynchronous storage and retrieval — these are all hard communication problems that e-mail solves elegantly.

As we continue to move to the right, however,  things get interesting.

Eventually we will arrive at a theoretical maximum point on the x-axis where all workers ever do is check and send e-mails. At this point, no time is left for any actual work, so productivity would be zero.

If we step back, we see our three obvious observations from above tell us the following about any curve that describes a measure of productivity versus increasing e-mail use: the curve will start above zero; it will rise for a while; and it will eventually decrease all the way down to zero.

Any curve matching these criteria will, like the sample curve above, features two crucial points: one where the productivity produced by e-mail use hits a maximum point (marked by the first blue X above), and a break-even point after which  e-mail use makes users less productive than if they didn’t have e-mail at all (the second blue X).

I propose that the mixed reaction to e-mail summarized at the beginning of this post can be better understood with respect to the different regions of this curve.

In more detail…

Those who aggressively defend the e-mail (like the workers surveyed by Pew), are responding to the reality that much of this productivity curve is above the no e-mail level. That is, they’re reacting to the true observation that e-mail can make you more productive than no e-mail.

Those who decry e-mail (like Cary Cooper), are responding to the reality that an increasing number of organizations are to the right of the first blue X (and perhaps even to the right of the second X), and therefore their e-mail habits are making them less productive than they could be if they were more discerning about their use of this technology.

It’s possible, in other words, for your e-mail use to be both making you more productive (as compared to no e-mail) and less productive (as compared to its optimal use).

Holding both these thoughts in one’s head at the same time can be confusing — thus explaining, to some degree, the muddled polarization of e-mail rhetoric.

From Explanation to Opportunity

Once we understand this style of productivity curve, however, we can do more than simply demystify our confusion, we can also recognize a major management opportunity.

With few exceptions, e-mail use arose organically within organizations, with little thought applied to how digital communication might best serve the relevant objectives.

The result is that e-mail habits tend to fall somewhat haphazardly on the e-mail productivity curve, with a bias toward to the right-hand side (as increased connectivity tends to be more convenient for people in the moment, especially when unchecked by other metrics).

It’s important to note that there’s nothing fundamental about these current e-mail habits: an observation which leads to the conclusion that forward thinking organizations could consider exploring different regions of this curve in search of the optimal point.

By thinking in terms of a search for optimality, such organizations could escape the e-mail is either bad or good dichotomy that often cripples such initiatives before they get too far, and instead cast the efforts in terms of process optimization.

To reduce e-mail use, in other words, is not necessarily a repudiation of the technology, but can be instead an embrace of its full potential.

Pursue Metrics that Matter

Three Measures of Success

I’ve been thinking recently about the metrics we use to measure success when pursuing self-motivated ambitions. These metrics tend to fall into three major categories, which I’ll list from easiest to hardest to achieve:

Participation Metrics: The goal here is to simply invest regular time toward the ambition. For example, if you want to become a writer, this might involve creating a daily writing ritual.
Unconventional Custom Metrics: The goal here is now clarified to specify concrete outcomes, but these outcomes tend to be custom-built and not widely recognized as marks of success in the field. Returning to our writer example, a custom path to success might steer toward self-publishing, with much of your focus now directed on mastering the technical mechanics of Scribner, KDP, freelance cover designs, and well-paced e-mail marketing campaigns.
Conventional Competitive Metrics: The goal here is to achieve outcomes that are widely recognized as impressive. In our writer example, this might be a big book deal with a major publisher.

The Power of Competition

When it comes to the three categories from above, I think the first category is reasonable for dabbling with a topic, but it won’t take you much farther than that, so you shouldn’t be satisfied with this measure of success for too long.

The second category is more worrisome.

These unconventional metrics are insidious because they provide enough illusion of accomplishment to keep hijacking your limited energy, but ultimately they rarely provide much return.

The reason they deliver so little is that they’re usually designed to avoid competition checkpoints — steps in the process where many aspirants enter, but only a much smaller number win the ability to continue. This might sound nice, but such checkpoints are crucial for advancement in many ambitions. It’s these competitive clashes that force you to hear someone say, “this is not good,” and therefore find the motivation to return to the woodshed for more of the inevitable hard practice, driven to produce a different outcome.

This final point is why I like the third type of metric. Pursuing highly competitive and unambiguous definitions of success for a given ambition, if you persist, will force you to improve your skills at a rapid and sustained rate. This process can be ego-crushing at times (as I know from many personal experience in writing and academia), and in the moment it’s much less satisfying than implementing some hyper-specific life hacks, but it’s this scramble to win a limited resource that forges professional talent.

So this is my simple observation: When deciding to embrace a self-motivated ambition, choose a definition of success that your aunt in Peoria would understand and find impressive. This is not about succumbing to the status quo, but instead setting yourself up to receive the brutal but useful feedback needed to eventually start producing things too good to be ignored.

(Photo by shutterbugamar)

Deep Habits: Spend Six Months to Master Skills

Musical Wisdom

Not long ago, a reader pointed me to an article written by Josh Linkner, a jazz guitarist turned tech entrepreneur. In this article, Linkner recalls a piece of wisdom common among professional musicians: a new (musical) technique takes six months to master. As he expands:

I may have understood the scale, riff, or chord…but it took a good six months to internalize it and make it my own. If I wanted to perform something fresh, new, and bold, I needed to begin the learning process six months prior.

Linkner then makes the natural connection between the world of music and business. The same six month rule, he notes, applies to many skills that might give you a competitive edge in your professional life:

If you want to become reasonably knowledgeable in Asian currency fluctuations, salmon fisheries, or assembly line logistics, a solid six months of study will bring you to point where you can hold a thoughtful conversation.

I strongly agree.

I know I sometimes fetishize the long process of developing a craft through deep work, but it’s important to remember that this long process often partitions into many smaller, reasonably self-contained projects — each of which delivers its own benefit to your career.

Linkner, in other words, is identifying a pragmatic way to structure the task of building rare and valuable skills. Instead of asking what you should be doing for the next decade to become too good to be ignored, ask what you could do in the next six months to become demonstrably better at something that matters.

#####

On an unrelated note, I recently read an advance copy of Laura Vanderkam’s excellent new book, I Know How She Does It, which tackles the topic of how successful women manage the tension between professional and family life. Unlike many treatments of this topic, which rely on anecdotes and personal opinion, this book instead draws from an extensive data set of detailed time logs that Laura gathered from a large sample of successful women. The result is surprisingly optimistic and refreshingly unemotional. If this topic interests you: take a closer look.

(Photo from joshlinkner.com)

Don’t Trust Anyone Under 500: Dale Davidson’s Unconventional Advice for Graduates

My friend Dale Davidson runs the excellent Ancient Wisdom Project blog, where he chronicles his experience with 30-day experiments, each dedicated toward living a practice from an ancient religion or philosophy, pursued in the service of deep personal growth. I’m always impressed by Dale’s thinking, so I asked if he would provide me something provocative to post for graduation season.

Fortunately for us, he obliged. Below is an open letter Dale wrote to the graduating class of 2015.

Don’t Trust Anyone Under 500

By Dale Davidson

 

To the class of 2015,

With graduation season upon us, you have likely been hearing a lot of advice about how to live your life. Regardless of what anyone tells you, I ask that you do one thing: consider how old it is.

***

I graduated college in 2009 fully intending to become a Navy SEAL. I was accepted into SEAL training, and several months later, for reasons I’m still not sure about, I quit.

I was thrust back into “civilian life” and felt aimless. What should I do now? I first turned to the Internet in search of wisdom (always a risky endeavor). I read The Four Hour Work Week, a book by lifestyle designer Tim Ferriss who advocates becoming incredibly productive and minimizing doing work you dislike and spending most of your time doing only things you enjoy. I followed travel bloggers who quit their jobs to spend a year traveling around the world and fantasized about doing the same. I discovered the pop psychology advice genre that turns psychological research into advice on becoming happy.

This advice didn’t work. I ended up more confused and lost about what I should be doing with my life.

So last year I decided to try something different. I decided to look to ancient sources of wisdom for advice on how to live a good and meaningful life and created what I call The Ancient Wisdom Project.

The rules of the project are simple:

Choose one ancient religion or philosophy that is 500 years old and that stills exist in some form today
Select one practice from the religion or philosophy that would help cultivate a desirable virtue (compassion, humility, etc.)
Perform the practice for thirty days and write about it

The results of these experiments were powerful, certainly far more powerful than anything I found in modern self-help literature. Here are just a few of the lessons I learned that I hope will encourage you to take a similar approach to evaluating the advice you receive in the coming months.

Pursue virtue, not success

The core belief in our meritocratic culture is that you can achieve great success if you work hard enough. The risk of this thinking is we become too attached to our desire for success, rather than the cultivation of a coherent and virtuous moral character.

Stoicism, an ancient Greek philosophy, is premised on the idea that there are certain things within your control, and far more things that are not.

My practice and study of Stoicism, which included daily ice baths and negative visualization exercises, confirmed that this ancient insight is still relevant to our modern lives.

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

– Epictetus

You can control how hard you work and how virtuously you behave; you cannot control how fast you receive promotions. You can control how you treat others; you can’t control how well others treat you. They knew the rewards for cultivating strength in heart and mind are far greater than the rewards of pursuing worldly success, which will always remain just outside of your control.

Modern advice tells us to pursue accomplishments.

Ancient wisdom tells us to live virtuously.

Forget yourself

Last year, I wanted to quit my job. It wasn’t that it was particularly hard, rather, it was incredibly boring and seemingly meaningless. Though it was tempting to follow modern career advice and quit to do something more interesting, I resisted, and dived into my Catholic month.

My experiment with Catholicism, which included Jesuit spiritual exercises and daily attendance at Mass, taught me that giving oneself to the service of others is far more gratifying than pursuing self-interest. I came away acknowledging how much energy I was spending on obsessing on my own desires for the perfect job, energy that could be better spent, perhaps, thinking of ways to serve others.

A few weeks later I started volunteering at Miriam’s Kitchen. A few hours per month serving breakfast to the homeless, while certainly a small contribution, has made me feel like at least some of my work is doing some good in the world. More importantly, doing something for others lets your forget your own desires, which is a relief! Thinking about what you want all the time is exhausting.

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.

– Galatians 5:13

It’s also important to not think too highly of yourself. During my Islam month, I practiced Salat, or prayer, five times per day with the goal of cultivating humility. These prayers, inconvenient by design, acted as a sort of check against my arrogant tendencies. I became aware of how much I resented my co-workers as idiots or sheep. Though I can’t say that those feelings are gone, I find that simply acknowledging them allows me to be more open and less frustrated with others.

Bring anger and pride under your feet, turn them into a ladder and climb higher…

Don’t become its victim you need humility to climb to freedom.

– Rumi

A commitment to humility and service requires a systematic emptying of the self, a practice in which ancient religions excel.

Modern advice tells us to enlarge the self.

Ancient wisdom tells us diminish the self for others.

Get a real life

As new graduates, you will have to work hard as you start your careers. But at some point you will realize that work can’t fulfill all your needs. You might think you need more “work-life balance,” but simply reducing the amount of time you spend at work is not sufficient for creating a life.

During my Judaism month, I attended daily Minyan services (a type of prayer service) at a local synagogue. The Minyan was mostly filled with retired people (it was a 7:30 AM service, after all), and it mostly consisted of regulars.

While they all began attending for different reasons, they all found that actively setting aside time each week to communally study and pray added a layer of depth to their lives that is increasingly rare in a rushed society that promotes passive rest rather than spiritual recovery.

These voluntary obligations outside of work are necessary and difficult. I attempted to observe Shabbat (the Sabbath), which begins at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday. Shabbat advocates a powerful combination of removing the profane distractions of everyday life and adding active participation in sacred rituals that allow us to connect more deeply with our humanity.

Ban yourself from using your laptop or phone during Shabbat and you will find time to read, take long walks, and contemplate. If you make the necessary preparations to host a Shabbat dinner, you will renew your relationships with your friends and family over food and wine without the distractions of a noisy bar.

The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. ‘Last in creation, first in intention,’ the Sabbath is ‘the end of the creation of heaven and earth

— Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

While not as easy as ordering a pizza and turning on Netflix on a Friday night, committing to this ancient system of sacred rest and spiritual renewal is far more rewarding.

Modern advice encourages us to achieve work-life balance.

Ancient wisdom tells us to work hard at building a life.

***

I chose the 500 years criterion somewhat arbitrarily. I figured if a particular philosophy or religion has survived at least five centuries there must be some value to it. It’s not perfect, but after a year of experimenting with this heuristic I find it works remarkably well for evaluating the advice I receive.

So the next time you are looking for advice on the way forward, you might turn to a theologian, prophet, philosopher, or saint before any modern-day blogger (except for me, of course).

Don’t trust anyone under 500.

(Photo by Hartwig HKD)

The Eureka Myth: Why Darwin (not Draper) is the Right Model for Creative Thinking

 

The Inspiring Story: A Brilliant Mind “Thinks Different”

In a pivotal scene in the Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything, the physicist is staring into the embers of a dying fire when he has an epiphany: black holes emit heat!

The next scene shows Hawking triumphantly announcing his result to a stunned audience — and just like that, his insight vaults him into the ranks of scientific stardom.

This story is inspirational. But as the physicist Leonard Mlodinow points out in a recent New York Times op-ed, it’s not at all how Hawking’s breakthrough actually happened…

The Stubborn Reality: A Highly-Trained Mathematician Works Hard

In reality, Hawking had encountered a theory by two Russian physicists that argued rotating black holes should emit energy until they slowed to a stationary configuration.

Hawking, who at the time was a promising young scientist who had not yet made his mark, was intrigued, but also skeptical.

So he decided to look deeper .

In the (many) months that followed, Hawking trained his preternatural analytical skill to investigate the validity of the Russians’ claims. This task required any number of minor breakthroughs, all orbiting the need to somehow reconcile (in a targeted way) both quantum theory and relativity.

This was really hard work.

The number of physicists at the time with enough specialized training and grit to follow through this investigation probably wouldn’t have filled a moderate size classroom.

But Hawking persisted.

And to his eventual “surprise and annoyance,” his mathematics confirmed an even more shocking conclusion: even stationary black holes can emit heat.

There was no fireside eureka moment, but instead a growing awareness that gained traction as the mathematics were refined and checked again and again.

The Eureka Myth

Mlodinow tells this story as one of many examples of scientific discoveries incorrectly portrayed as the result of sudden insight. (He also places Darwin’s finches and Newton’s apple in this category.)

There are many lessons that can be drawn from Mlodinow’s article, but there’s one in particular I want to highlight here: we need to rethink creativity.

This idea came to me soon after I read Mlodinow’s op-ed. Later that morning I was at Barnes & Noble, still thinking about his points, when I saw the table display pictured above.

The two books placed right next to each other on the display, I realized, capture a fundamental rift in our culture’s thinking on creativity.

The bottom book, titled The Eureka Factor, explains, among other things, how to setup your environment to be more “conducive” to generating “creative insights” of the type portrayed in The Theory of Everything.

The top book, titled Birth of a Theorem (which I bought and read this weekend), is written by the french mathematician Cedric Villani. It tells the tale (without undue exposition or elision) of how he came to solve the theorem that won him the 2010 Fields Medal.

The former promotes a Don Draper style story that we like to hear: if you’re willing to open yourself to your own genius, you’ll have eureka moments that change your life.

The latter paints the Stephan Hawking style reality of what produces real creativity: hard won skills are put to work in a painstaking, obsessive way to uncover, one cognitive brush stroke at a time, something fundamentally new.

In an economy where creativity is becoming both more important and complicated,  I suspect we need to abandon the old ways of thinking about this type of thinking, with its conference room brainstorming sessions and markers on butcher paper, and instead discover what scientists knew along: creativity is hard, highly skilled work that is often quite unromantic in its execution, but is ultimately a source of deeper satisfaction than any short-lived eureka moment could ever deliver.

Shipping Trumps Serendipity

The Annoyed Rhodes Scholar

To research my first book, I interviewed several Rhodes Scholars. During this process, I noticed they tended to be touchy about their press coverage.

When you win a Rhodes, not surprisingly, reporters will seek you out and write articles about you. Most of these articles follow the same shock and awe template of listing the student’s accomplishments, one after another, in an attempt to overwhelm the reader.

It was this article format that annoyed winners.

To understand why, you must first understand that most Rhodes Scholars follow a similar path: they invest a large amount of energy in doing a small number of things (usually two) extremely well (for someone their age).

Over time, as they get better and better at their core points of focus, related opportunities and accomplishments start to come along for free (see my third book for more on this phenomenon, sometimes called The Matthew Effect). It’s these freebies that ultimately extend their CV’s to a head-spinning length.

Consider, for example, the following lines from a profile of 2015 Rhodes Scholar Noam Angrist:

While at M.I.T., he did economic research for the World Bank, The White House, and on the Affordable Care Act…As a Fulbright Scholar in Botswana, Noam founded an NGO for HIV education designed to discourage intergenerational sex (“sugar daddy awareness”). Its success led him to raise the money to extend the program to 340 schools, and he now plans to launch it in four other southern African countries.

This list can appear inexplicable at first read, but a closer examination makes it clear that all of these accomplishments flow from a single deep focus: mastering the intersection between economics and program evaluation (a field being innovated at MIT, where Noam is a student).

The internships at the World Bank and White House, as well as the Fulbright Scholarship (which led to the HIV prevention program) are all side effects of Noam proving unambiguously that he was really good at this one type of academic research.

The reason Rhode Scholars get upset by volume-centric, over-hyped, shock and awe press coverage is that it obscures what they’re really proud about: doing professional quality work in a field that they respect and want respect from.

The Serendipity Hype

This experience with Rhodes Scholars came to mind recently as I pondered an idea that has become increasingly popular in the Age of Social Media: exposing yourself to many different people and opportunities is the key to serendipitously stumbling into professional breakthroughs.

I’ve long been fascinated with this concept, but the more time I spend around people actually doing things of consequence, the more I recognize its hollowness.

Here’s the reality for almost every professional pursuit: shipping things that are unambiguously valuable generates significantly more interesting and high-return opportunities than exposing yourself to lots of different people and ideas.

You probably don’t, in other words, need to invest dozens of hour a week into cultivating your social media community, or thousands of dollars a year attending feel good conferences, to stumble into the Next Big Thing in your career.

A significantly more effective path is to instead ship things that catch peoples’ attention.

Our Rhodes Scholar example from above didn’t start by trawling for interesting intern opportunities, he instead became a star economics student at MIT, and then let interesting opportunities subsequently fall into his lap.

The same pattern holds for many different fields: value attracts value.

People don’t always like hearing this advice because seeking serendipity is satisfyingly contrarian (most people don’t do it, so you can feel special if you do), while at the same time saving you from the difficulty of having to compete (and fail) in clearly defined arenas.

But a decade spent researching and writing about elite accomplishment (while attempting to pursue it myself in my academic career) has taught me that: (1) there aren’t any hacks that will save you from the necessity of stepping into a ring and winning over other people who desperately want to do the same; and (2) this first step is really, really hard.

This isn’t a lesson that I perfectly embody, but is instead one that I have to keep reminding myself to pursue. If you want a breakthrough, forget serendipity and focusing on shipping.

The Original Four Hour Workweek

The Four Hour Consensus

In 2007, Tim Ferriss published a hit book that suggested “work,” in the traditional money-making sense of the term, could and should be reduced to as little as four hours per week — freeing time for more fulfilling pursuits.

Seventy-five years earlier, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, in an essay titled In Praise of Idleness, suggested this same number of working hours as a worthy goal, explaining…

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving…Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers…Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas…

Russell and Ferriss propose wildly different paths to this goal: while the former believed a radically reduced workweek requires socialism to realize, Ferriss argues that the productivity tools of the Internet Age suffice.

But both writers hit on a deeper idea that has remained as intriguing today as in the 1930s: the notion that industry (what we might now call “busyness”) is intrinsically virtuous is suspect. It’s worth instead working backwards from a more general confrontation with the question of what matters and deciding how best to act on the answers.

I don’t have a specific point of view here (I know Russell mainly from his work on mathematical philosophy), I just thought the coincidence was cool, and the ideas interesting…

######

On an unrelated note, my friends over at the exceptional 80,000 Hours organization have recently released a (free) career guide that is among one of the most thoughtful and grounded I’ve seen. If you read SO GOOD, you’ll probably appreciate their technical take on cultivating (not finding) passion.

It’s Not Your Job to Figure Out Why an Apple Watch Might Be Useful

The Watch to Watch

A couple weeks ago, the New York Times reviewed the Apple Watch. A paragraph early in the article caught my attention:

First there was a day to learn the device’s initially complex user interface. Then another to determine how it could best fit it into my life. And still one more to figure out exactly what Apple’s first major new product in five years is trying to do — and, crucially, what it isn’t.

It’s worth taking a moment to recognize what’s strange here. If it takes three days to figure out why something might be useful to you, then you probably don’t need it!

In any other market, a product without a clear use case would be impossible to sell. But in the cultural distortion field of Silicon Valley, this is the new normal. They provide the hot new thing, and it’s up to you to figure out why you need it.

Start With Why, Not What

The reason this state of affairs worries me is because once you start letting other people tell you how to invest your limited time and attention, you’re almost certainly going to stray from the things you find most important.

Here, for example, is the reporter from the above article explaining his experience with the Apple Watch (once, that is, he figured out how to work it): “[it] became something like a natural extension of my body, a direct link, in a way that I’ve never felt before, from the digital world to my brain.”

For anyone trying to build (or write, or code, or paint, or plan) something of consequence, this is, to steal a line from George Packer, a truly frightening vision of the future!

But when you work backwards from what’s hot, instead of what you need, this is the type of behavior you stumble into.

The alternative here is simple: Decide what matters to you; seek out the tools that most directly and obviously help you accomplish these things; then get down to work.

Life’s too short to waste three days trying to figure out whether some shiny new gizmo might be useful.

Deep Habits: Listen to Baseball on the Radio

Distracted in the Dugout

Last week, the Washington Post featured a front page story about the declining number of kids who play organized baseball. There are various reasons for this decline, but the story emphasized the sport’s lack of action.

Here’s an articulate 15-year old, as quoted in the article, explaining his reasons for quitting baseball:

Baseball is a bunch of thinking, and I live a different lifestyle than baseball. In basketball and football, you live in the moment. You got to be quick. Everything I do, I do with urgency.

This teenager is right. Baseball, undoubtedly, is a slow sport: even more so for spectators than the players.

But while this might be bad news for those hoping to attract the allegiance of the iPhone generation, I’ve found it to be quite useful in my own quest to sharpen my deep work skills.

Deep Relaxation

In particular, I try to listen to at least one baseball game per week on the radio (we don’t have cable, and I can’t stream local coverage, so there’s no other way for me to legally catch the games).

When listening, I maintain a strict “no technology” rule — no phones, no iPads, no other source of electronic distraction (I do allow myself to read during commercial breaks).

My experience is that the slowness of the games, combined with the lack of visual stimuli, can be, at first, excruciating.

If I stick with it, however, my mind eventually downshifts — quieting the noisy neuronal clamoring for easy entertainment, and leaving instead an unencumbered attention of a type that I often seek in my work.

Listening to a ballgame, in other words, becomes excellent training for reaching and maintaining the deep mental states that produces things that matter.

I’m not suggesting that everyone become baseball fans. I am suggesting, however, that if you take deep work seriously, it’s worth having some rituals outside your professional life that help you practice the states of mind it requires.

(Photo by Garry Wilmore)

What Steve Jobs Meant When He Said “Follow Your Heart”

What Steve Said

I opened my last book with Steve Jobs’s 2005 commencement address at Standford University. Toward the end of the speech, I noted, Jobs said:

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Many people interpreted this suggestion simplistically, assuming that Jobs was telling them to follow their passion and everything would work out.

I argued in my book that this interpretation conflicted with Jobs’s own story. During the period leading up to Apple’s founding, there was no indication that Jobs felt any particular passion for technology entrepreneurship.

His company was, in many ways, a happy accident that evolved into a calling.

What, then, explains the mismatch between what Steve Jobs did and what Steve Jobs said?

Fortunately, we gain new insight into this question from Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s excellent new biography, Becoming Steve Jobs. In this book, the authors (one of whom had a long term personal relationship with Jobs) devote a full chapter to dissecting the Stanford address, taking specific aim at his “follow your heart” line.

Not only do Schlender and Tetzeli provide needed nuance to Jobs’s advice, but they also end up providing one of the more sophisticated and useful interpretations of professional passion that I’ve heard…

Beyond “Shuttered Confidence”

The authors begin by acknowledging Jobs’s word choice skirts the border of cheesy:

Without the proof of Apple’s success, these words from the speech’s final chapter could be misread as the kind of shallow cheer-leading intoned by high school valedictorians.

But they then note that Jobs’s success buys him the benefit of the doubt:

…but what gives [the words] strength and power is that they come from someone who has proved their value in a corporate setting.

So what did Jobs’s mean? In a nice turn of phrase, the authors note that Jobs learned how to “modulate the potential solipsism of ‘follow your heart’“, elaborating:

Early in [Jobs’s] career, intuition had meant a shuttered confidence in the inventions of his own brain. There was a stubborn refusal to consider the thoughts of others. By 2005 intuition had come to mean a sense of what to do that grew out of entertaining a world possibilities. He was confident enough now to listen to his team as well as his own thoughts and to acknowledge the nature of the world around him.

In other words, Jobs was not suggesting that we all have a true calling that must be unearthed before you can begin your career.

He was instead arguing that as your professional expertise and power grow, you must resist the urge to be washed along in the flow of convention. It’s then that it becomes important  to integrate your maturing intuition — in full cooperation with your expert knowledge of your field and the realities of the world around you — to steer toward something that might leave a dent in the universe.

This is likely why, in another part of the speech, Jobs describes meaningful work by noting: “like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”

#####

The book quotes come around the 32 minute mark in Chapter 14 of the Audible.com audio version. All emphases are my own.