Cal Newport's Blog, page 56

Mastering Linear Algebra in 10 Days: Astounding Experiments in Ultra-Learning

The MIT Challenge

My friend Scott Young recently finished an astounding feat: he completed all 33 courses in MIT’s fabled computer science curriculum, from Linear Algebra to Theory of Computation, in less than one year. More importantly, he did it all on his own, watching the lectures online and evaluating himself using the actual exams. (See Scott’s FAQ page for the details of how he ran this challenge.)

That works out to around 1 course every 1.5 weeks.

As you know, I’m convinced that the ability to master complicated information quickly is crucial for building a remarkable career (see my new book as well as here and here). So, naturally, I had to ask Scott to share his secrets with us. Fortunately, he agreed.

Below is a detailed guest post, written by Scott, that drills down to the exact techniques he used (including specific examples) to pull off his MIT Challenge.

Take it away Scott…

 

How I Tamed MIT’s Computer Science Curriculum, By Scott Young

I’ve always been excited by the prospect of learning faster. Being good at things matters. Expertise and mastery give you the career capital to earn more money and enjoy lifestyle perks. If being good is the goal, learning is how you get there.

Despite the advantages of learning faster, most people seem reluctant to learn how to learn. Maybe it’s because we don’t believe it’s possible, that learning speed is solely the domain of good genes or talent.

While there will always be people with unfair advantages, the research shows the method you use to learn matters a lot. Deeper levels of processing and spaced repetition can, in some cases, double your efficiency. Indeed the research in deliberate practice shows us that without the right method, learning can plateau forever.

Today I want to share the strategy I used to compress the ideas from a 4-year MIT computer science curriculum down to 12 months. This strategy was honed over 33 classes, figuring out what worked and what didn’t in the method for learning faster.

Why Cramming Doesn’t Work

Many student might scoff at the idea of learning a 4-year program in a quarter of the time. After all, couldn’t you just cram for every exam and pass without understanding anything?

Unfortunately this strategy doesn’t work. First, MITs exams rely heavily on problem solving, often with unseen problem types. Second, MIT courses are highly cumulative, even if you could sneak by one exam through memorization, the seventh class in a series would be impossible to follow.

Instead of memorizing, I had to find a way to speed up the process of understanding itself.

Can You Speed Up Understanding?

We’ve all had those, “Aha!” moments when we finally get an idea. The problem is most of us don’t have a systematic way of finding them. The typical process a student goes through in learning is to follow a lectures, read a book and, failing that, grind out practice questions or reread notes.

Without a system, understanding faster seems impossible. After all, the mental mechanisms for generating insights are completely hidden.

Worse, understanding is hardly an on/off switch. It’s like layers of an onion, from very superficial insights to the deep understandings that underpin scientific revolutions. Peeling that onion is often a poorly understood process.

The first step is to demystify the process. Getting insights to deepen your understanding largely amounts to two things:

Making connections
Debugging errors

Connections are important because they provide an access point for understanding an idea. I struggled with the Fourier transform until I realized it was turning pressure to pitch or radiation to color. Insights like these are often making connections between something you do understand and the material you don’t.

Debugging errors is also important because often you make mistakes because you’re missing knowledge or have an incorrect picture. A poor understanding is like a buggy software program. If you can debug yourself in an efficient way, you can greatly accelerate the learning process.

Doing these two things, forming accurate connections and debugging errors, is most of creating a deep understanding. Mechanical skill and memorized facts also help, but generally only when they sit upon the foundation of a solid intuition about the subject.

The Drilldown Method: A Strategy for Learning Faster

During the yearlong pursuit, I perfected a method for peeling those layers of deep understanding faster. I’ve since used it on topics in math, biology, physics, economics and engineering. With just a few modifications, it also works well for practical skills such as programming, design or languages.

Here’s the basic structure of the method:

Coverage
Practice
Insight

I’ll explain each stage and how you can go through them as efficiently as possible, while giving detailed examples of how I used them in actual classes.

Stage One: Coverage

You can’t plan an attack if you don’t have a map of the terrain. Therefore the first step in learning anything deeply, is to get a general sense of what you need to learn.

For a class, this means watching lectures or reading textbooks. For self-learning it might mean reading several books on the topic and doing research.

A mistake students often make is believing this stage is the most important. In many ways this is the least efficient stage because the amount you can learn per unit of time invested is much lower. I often found it useful to speed up this part so that I would have more time to spend on the latter two steps.

If you’re watching video lectures, a great way to do this is to watch them at 1.5x or 2x the speed. This can be done easily by downloading the video and then using the speed-up feature on a player like VLC. I’d watch semester-long courses in two days, via this method.

If you’re reading a book, I would recommend against highlighting. This is processes the information at a low level of depth and is inefficient in the long run. A better method would be to take sparse notes while reading, or do a one-paragraph summary after you read each major section.

Here’s an example of notes I took while doing readings for a class in machine vision.

Stage Two: Practice

Practice problems are huge for boosting your understanding, but there are two main efficiency traps you can get caught in if you’re not careful.

#1 – Not Getting Immediate Feedback

The research is clear: if you want to learn, you need immediate feedback. The best way to do this is to go question-by-question with the solution key in hand. Once you’ve finished a question, check yourself against the provided solutions. Practice without feedback, or with delayed feedback, drastically hinders effectiveness.

#2 – Grinding Problems

Like the students who fall into the trap of believing that most learning occurs in the classroom, some students believe understanding is generated mostly from practice questions. While you can eventually build an understanding simply by grinding through practice, it’s slow and inefficient.

Practice problems should be used to highlight areas you need to develop a better intuition for. Then techniques like the Feynman technique, which I’ll discuss, handle that process much more efficiently.

Non-technical subjects, ones where you mostly need to understand concepts, not solve problems, can often get away with minimal practice problem work. In these subjects, you’re better off spending more time on the third phase, developing insight.

Stage Three: Insight

The goal of coverage and practice questions is to get you to a point where you know what you don’t understand. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Often you can be mistaken into believing you understand something, but don’t, or you might not feel confident with a general subject, but not see specifically what is missing.

This next technique, which I call the Feynman technique is about narrowing down those gaps even further. Often when you can identify precisely what you don’t understand, that gives you the tools to fill the gap. It’s the large gaps in understanding which are hardest to fill.

The technique also has a dual purpose. Even when you do understand an idea, it provides you opportunities to create more connections, so you can drill down to a deeper understanding.

The Feynman Technique

I first got the idea from this method from the Nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman. In his autobiography, he describes himself struggling with a hard research paper. His solution was to go meticulously through the supporting material until he understood everything that was required to understand the hard idea.

This technique works similarly. By digesting the big hairy idea you don’t understand into small chunks, and learning those chunks, you can eventually fill every gap that would otherwise prevent you from learning it.

For a video tutorial of this technique, watch this short video.

The technique is simple:

Get a piece of paper
Write at the top the idea or process you want to understand
Explain the idea, as if you were teaching it to someone else

What’s crucial is that the third step will likely repeat some areas of the idea you already understand. However, eventually you’ll reach a stopping point where you can’t explain. That’s the precise gap in your understanding that you need to fill.

From that gap, you can research the answer from a textbook, teacher or online. Generally, once you’ve narrowly defined your misunderstanding it becomes much easier to find the precise answer.

I’ve used this technique hundreds of times, and I’ve found it can tackle a wide variety different learning situations. However, since each might be slightly different, it may seem hard to apply as a beginner, so I’ll try to walk through some different examples.

For Ideas You Don’t Get At All

The way I handle this is to go through the technique but have the textbook open to the chapter explaining that concept. Then I go through and meticulously copy both the author’s explanation, but also try to elaborate and clarify it for myself. This “guided” Feynman can be useful when trying to write anything on your own would be impossible.

Here’s an example I used for trying to understand photogrammetry.

For Procedures

You can also use the method to fully understand a process you need to use. Go through all the steps and explain not only what they do, but how they execute it. I would often go through proof techniques by carefully explaining all the steps. I also used it in understanding chemical equations or in organizing the stages of glycolysis in biology.

You can see this example I used when trying to figure out how to implement grid acceleration.

For Formulas

Formulas should be understood, not just memorized. So when you see a formula, but can’t understand how it works, try walking through each part with a Feynman.

Here’s an example I used for the Fourier analysis equation.

For Checking Your Memory

Feynmans also offer a way to self-test your knowledge of the big ideas for non-technical subjects. Being able to finish a Feynman on a topic without referencing the source material means you understand and can remember it.

Here’s one I did for an economics class, recalling the concept of predatory pricing.

Developing a Deeper Intuition

Combined with practice questions, the Feynman technique can peel those first few layers of understanding. But it can also drill deeper if you want to go from not just having an understanding, but to having a deep intuition.

Understanding an idea intuitively isn’t easy. Once again, getting to this point is often seen as a quasi-mystical process. But it doesn’t have to be. Most intuitions about an idea break down into one of the following types:

Analogies – You understand an idea by correctly recognizing an important similarity between it and an easier-to-understand idea.
Visualizations – Abstract ideas often become useful intuitions when we can form a mental picture of them. Even if the picture is just an incomplete representation of a larger, and more varied, idea.
Simplifications – A famous scientist once said that if you couldn’t explain something to your grandmother, you don’t fully understand it. Simplification is the art of strengthening those connections between basic components and complex ideas.

You can use the Feynman technique as a way of encouraging these types of insights. Once you’ve gotten past a basic understanding of the idea, the next step is to go further and see if you can explain it using some combination of the three methods above.

The truth is plagiarism is okay too, and not every insight needs to be unique. Understanding complex numbers as being two dimensional is hardly original, but it allows a useful visualization. DNA replication working like a one-way zipper is not a perfect analogy, but so long as you understand where it overlaps, it becomes a useful one.

The Strategy to Learn Faster

Learning faster doesn’t need to be a trick to work well. It simply means recognizing what is actually going on when we reach a new level of insight and finding tools to help us reach those stages consistently.

In this article I described learning as being three stages: coverage, practice and insight. This gives the false impression that these three occur always in distinct phases and never overlap or repeat.

In truth you may find yourself going between them in a loop as you successfully peel down to deeper layers of understanding. The first time you read a chapter you may get only superficial insights, but after doing practice questions and building intuitions, you may go back and read for deeper understandings.

Applying the Drilldown Method for Non-Students

This process isn’t one you need to be a student to apply. It also works for learning complex skills or building expertise on a topic.

For skills like programming or design, most people follow the first two stages. They read a book teaching them the basics, then they practice with a project. You can extend that process however, and use the Feynman technique to better lock in and articulate the insights you create.

For expertise on a topic, the only difference is that, prior to doing coverage, you need to find a set of material to learn from. That could be research articles or several books on the topic. In either case, once you’ve defined the chunk of knowledge you want to master, you can drill down and learn it deeply.

To find out more about this, join Scott’s newsletter and you’ll get a free copy of his rapid learning ebook (and a set of detailed case studies of how other learners have used these techniques).

(Image by afagen.)

The Joys and Sorrows of Deep Work

An Autumn Adventure

To help increase the attention I dedicate to literature-driven research projects, I’ve spent the last couple weeks immersing myself in a new area of my field. Today, for example, I thought the warm weather called for some adventure work. As shown above, I took some papers, a notebook, and my dog into the woods to grapple with some of these new ideas.

Here’s the thing: this type of immersion can be frustrating.

I spent hours today doing intellectual battle with a set of formalisms that still largely confuse me. In the long run, I know this type of battle is crucial (past experience has shown that even just a few dozen hours of such grappling can lay the foundation for multiple publications). But in the short run, it leaves me feeling like I accomplished nothing concrete with my day. (An unfortunate corollary of intellectual immersion is that it doesn’t work if you take time off to answer e-mails or do laundry — ensuring your to-do list remains untouched.)

So here we face a paradox. The very type of deep work that provides the nutriment for remarkable results also defies all our instincts for how a productive day should feel. I don’t have a specific set of strategies to suggest here. Instead, I just want to point out that when it comes to our understanding of how to build towards something important in our working life, there is a lot that our current conversation about work — which focuses on themes like courage, passion and productivity — seems to be missing.

The Importance of Auditing Your Work Habits

An Autumn Audit

I had to travel unexpectedly last weekend, so I missed my normal household chores. This morning, I woke up to the lawn picture above. Because I don’t have class or meetings scheduled today (a miracle!), I decided to take an hour or so to clean things up.

I never mind working outside, as it has the nice effect of moving my thoughts beyond the immediate future, and allowing me to perform a bigger picture audit of where things stand in my life. Today, I was thinking a lot about my work habits.

By the time I had the lawn looking like this…

…I had wrapped up some nice epiphanies.

Standing on Shoulders in Search of Important Problems

As I worked, my mind wandered to earlier this week, when I hosted a visiting scholar at Georgetown. He had recently published a nice result.

Some quick background: there is a network-related algorithm problem — how quickly can you schedule a connected structure in a wireless network with additive interference — that was introduced in 2006, and has received steady attention since. The first known solution required time relative to the logarithm of the network size raised to the fourth power, but this was quickly knocked down to cubic and then quadratic, where it has stalled since 2007. That is, until earlier this year, when my visitor, working with his collaborator, dropped the result down to the straight logarithm, which is almost certainly the best you can do.

This is an example of what I call an important result, because there’s a community of researchers who immediately recognized its value (in this case, because it improved a bound that lots of people had been trying, and failing, to improve). For an applied mathematician, important results are the bread and butter of a successful academic career.

Naturally, I asked the visitor about how he came to his big finding.

The short answer was reading. He had been trying to understand another important result in his field, which had been published the year before, and in doing so stumbled onto a technique that allowed his breakthrough.

This knowledge-driven approach to breakthroughs should sound familiar, as it turned up again and again in my previous study of the impact instinct. I also detail the phenomenon in Rule 4 of SO GOOD. To summarize: new important results almost always require expert-level knowledge of existing important results.

The implication is that, as an academic, I should be spending a significant portion of my time reading and trying to understand the best work in my field. As I raked and mowed this morning, I performed an internal audit, and came to the conclusion that although I do this,  I’m not doing it nearly enough if I want to make a big splash.

My Skewed Project Ratio

Here’s the problem that’s keeping me from more time diving into the existing literature in search of important problems…

I currently have 10 projects that I consider active (i.e., they receive regular attention). Only 2 of these projects are aimed at improving results that are well-known in the existing literature. The other 8 are speculative, by which I mean my collaborators and I essentially invented them.

To be clear, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with speculative projects, especially when you’re combining disciplines (which almost always requires new problems to be identified). But they take time to maintain, are prone to fizzling (when you invent a problem there’s always a good chance that it will end up either trivial or impossible), and because they’re new, you tend to get less recognition for them once published. Eight such projects is too many.

A better mix for me would be 2 – 3 literature-driven projects and perhaps no more than 2 speculative projects at a time. The reduced load would allow me to advance results faster, so I wouldn’t expect my overall rate of publishing to reduce. But it would also skew my output so that at least half of my papers are geared toward potential important results. This is a much better ratio for a pre-tenure theoretician.

There’s no mystery as to how I fell into my current unequal balance: speculative projects are easy to start, while literature-driven projects can be difficult to find and always require lots of struggling with hard papers .

Which is why I’m glad I performed an audit this morning: If I had relied on the behaviors that were appealing in the short term, I would have continued to sell short my long term success.

Conclusion

The above details on how one produces important applied mathematics results are unlikely to be relevant to your career. But the bigger picture conclusion here is relevant: we should all regularly perform audits where we ask ourselves how we are currently spending our work time and how we should be spending this time. This sounds like a basic idea, but few of us actually do it. The lesson I’ve learned is that the best practices for a specific job are not always obvious without reflection. Furthermore, you can’t trust your instincts to lead your day-to-day decisions toward the best outcomes. Craftsmanship, in other words, requires guidance.

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This post is part of my Craftsman in the Cubicle series which explores strategies for building a remarkable working life by mastering a small number of rare and valuable skills. Previous posts include:

Solutions Beyond the Screen: The Adventure Work Method for Producing Creative Insights


Henri Poincare’s Four-Hour Work Day
You Probably (Really) Work Way Less Than You Think


Experiments with the Textbook Method
You Are What You Write: The Textbook Method for Ultra-Learning


Work Less to Work Better: My Experiments with Shutdown Routines

#craftsmanincubicle

My Article in the New York Times and Other Miscellanea

I wanted to share a few notes about the SO GOOD launch and some related material that caught my attention recently…

Here’s an article I wrote on passion for this Sunday’s New York Times. If you’re looking for a concise description of the thesis of  SO GOOD — perhaps to share with a passion-obsessed friend or relative — this article is a great way to do it. (As shown on the right, the article moved onto the list of the top 10 most e-mailed articles on the Times this morning, so hopefully the idea is spreading!)

If you’re still looking for more about the book, check out the article I wrote for the Harvard Business Review Blog (still one of their most read articles of the past month), or the excerpt that ran at FastCompany.com.

In the meantime, on an unrelated note, my friends, The Minimalists, just published a new book: $5 Simplicity. If you’re interested in living a simpler and more meaningful life, few commentators are more thoughtful than Ryan and Josh — definitely check it out. (Also check out their blog; they’re about to move into a Walden-style cabin in Montana…should make for interesting reading.)

Also unrelated to the book, Daphne Gray-Grant has recently launched a series chronicling her experiments in applying the principles of deliberate practice to writing. Thought some of you might enjoy hearing about her adventures in career craftsmanship.

As the busyness generated by my book launch begins to fade, I’m excited to return soon to my normal style of posts. I have a lot to share about my most recent attempts and thoughts regarding the quest for a remarkable career…

Zipcar CEO’s Dangerous Advice on Passion

Problematic Passion

The Wall Street Journal’s At Work blog recently featured an interview with Zipcar CEO, Scott Griffith. The title worried me: Zipcar CEO: “If You Don’t Have Passion for Your Job, Quit.”

Sure enough, in the interview, Griffith recalls that he had an interest in technology and transportation as early as junior high school. He then generalizes widely:

[W]e all kind of know what our passions are pretty early in life, and if you can figure out a way to align your avocation with your vocation, the sky’s the limit for your career and your happiness.

This, of course, is the standard thinking on career satisfaction. As readers of my new book know, it’s also dangerous advice. To reiterate: most young people do not have a clear passion. In fact, it’s unclear what “passion” really means at this stage. Is it a hobby? An obsession? A vague interest?

Griffith is well-intentioned. And to be fair, he also precedes the above with the caveat, “it may not be that clear to everybody.” But ultimately he’s still reinforcing a dangerous trope: that we’re all hard-wired for a specific profession.

As I’ve argued, this belief leads young people to anxiety and disillusionment when the reality of work doesn’t match their dream job ideal. For most, passion must be cultivated over time, as part of a more general process of building skills and then leveraging these skills to control our career.

Put another way: passion is a great goal, but unless you’re exceptionally lucky, it requires more than just a little day dreaming in the back of a junior high classroom.

#####

At around 6:00 pm this evening, I drew the winners for my one-on-one conversation contest. They have been notified by e-mail. Thank you everyone who entered. I wish I could speak to each of you individually, but with well over 150 book purchases submitted, I would have been glued to the phone for the foreseeable future!

In other book news, you might enjoy this excerpt from SO GOOD which ruffled some feathers over at Fast Company. Turns out people really like Steve Jobs. Who knew?

(Photo by crschmidt)

My New Book and a Chance to Speak with Me One-On-One

The cake my wife surprised me with to celebrate the release of my new book.

 The Education of a Writer

I wrote my first book when I was 21. At the time, I thought it would be an interesting, one-time challenge. But it didn’t take long before a more ambitious goal emerged. I decided that I wanted to one day write a  big deal hardcover idea book, in the style of the non-fiction authors I admired, such as Steven Johnson and Bill McKibben.

It took me two more books, a stellar agent, and a decade of training, but today I finally fulfilled that goal. My first hardcover idea book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, is now available. It will be on the New Arrival table at Barnes & Noble stores across the country and available in all relevant online stores and digital formats.

This is an exciting day for me and one that never would have happened without you, my readers here at Study Hacks, who have helped me hone my arguments and my craft. So I humbly thank you.

(And if you’re looking for a way to show your appreciation for Study Hacks, buying a copy of this book is a great way to demonstrate your support!)

This brings me to today’s post. I have two goals in the sections below: (1) to tell you a little bit more about the book; and (2) to tell you how you can win a chance to speak with me one-on-one about any topic of your choosing.

Onwards to the details…

“Follow Your Passion” is Bad Advice. Here’s What Works Instead…

In the fall of 2010, I set out to answer a simple question: “Why do some people love what they do, while so many others do not?”

This quest took me across the country. I met with organic farmers, venture capitalists, computer programers, college professors, med school residents, and globe-trotting tech entrepreneurs, among many others, all in an effort to understand how people cultivate compelling careers.

My new book chronicles this quest and what I discovered.

In more detail, the book is divided into the following four “rules,” each cataloging a different discovery:

Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion. Here I make my argument that “follow your passion” is bad advice. You’ve heard me talk about this on Study Hacks, but in this chapter, I lay out my full-throated, comprehensive, detailed argument against this common advice.
Rule #2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Here I detail the philosophy that works better than following your passion. This philosophy, which I call career capital theory, says that you first build up rare and valuable skills and then use these skills as leverage to shape you career into something you love. During this chapter I spend time with a professional guitar player, television writer, and venture capitalist, among others, in my quest to understand how people get really good at what they do. You’ll also encounter a detailed discussion of deliberate practice and how to apply it in your working life.
Rule #3: Turn Down a Promotion. Here I argue that control is one of the most important things you can bargain for with your rare and valuable skills. I discuss the difficulties people face in trying to move toward more autonomy in their working lives and describe strategies that can help you sidestep these pitfalls. During this chapter, I spend time with a hotshot database developer, an entrepreneurial medical resident, an Ivy League-trained organic farmer, and Derek Sivers, among others, in my attempts to decode control.
Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big. In this final rule, I explore how people end up with career-defining missions — often a source of great passion. I argue that you need rare and valuable skills before you can identify a powerful mission. I then spend time with a star Harvard professor, a television host, and a Ruby on Rails guru, all in an effort to identify best practices for cultivating this trait.

I conclude the book by talking about how I apply these ideas in my own career. You’ll hear about my academic job search process and the types of systems I have in place to help push me toward more and more passion in my work.

If you’re serious about loving what you for a living, and are tired of people reducing this complex goal to a simple slogan (“do what you love! the money will follow”), then this book is perfect for you. (If you’re on the fence, check out the endorsements from folks like Seth Godin, Reid Hoffman, Dan Pink, Kevin Kelly, and Derek Sivers, or the growing number of unsolicited 5-star reviews).

Purchase details: You can buy the hardcover at most book stores and online at Amazon, B&N.com, 800-CEO-READ, and IndieBound. The book is also available in Kindle , Nook, and audio formats.

Talk One-On-One With Me

To help motivate you to buy the book during this crucial first week I’m offer a promotion in which I’m giving away 30 minute, one-on-one phone calls with myself, to talk about any topic of your choosing.

Here are the details…

I am holding three separate random drawings: one for people who preordered the book; one for people who buy the book this week; and one for people who buy five or more copies of the book. (Not very many people buy in bulk, so if you do, you’ll probably have a good chance of being drawn).

To apply, simply forward your receipt to interesting@calnewport.com with the subject line [contest: preorder], [contest: 1 copy], or [contest: 5 copies], depending on which contest you’re entering. (It’s important that you use this exact wording and capitalization or your entry might be missed by my filters.)

I will use random.org to draw winners from each category next Monday. The number of winners I draw will depend on how many entries I receive.

If you win, I’ll notify you by e-mail, and we’ll set up a time to chat on the phone.

Steve Jobs’s Complicated Views on Passion

Jobs Parses Passion

At a recent media panel, Walter Isaacson remembered the following conversation with the late Steve Jobs:

I remember talking exactly a year ago right now to Steve Jobs, who was very ill…He said, “Yeah, we’re always talking about following your passion. But we’re all part of the flow of history… you’ve got to put something back into the flow of history that’s going to help your community…[so] people will say, this person didn’t just have a passion, he cared about making something that other people could benefit from.”

Isaacson also shared his own views on the passion hypothesis:

Every baby boom generation person who has to give a college commencement talk uses the phrase “follow your passion.” But that’s why no one has written a book calling us the greatest generation. The important point is to not just follow your passion but something larger than yourself. It ain’t just about you and your damn passion.

The specific advice given above is interesting. But to me, what’s even more interesting is the general point that building a meaningful working life is damn complicated. “Follow your passion” is a nice slogan, but as Jobs and Isaacson emphasize, there’s a lot more involved in building a career you’re proud of.

Put another way, “follow your passion” is like the kiddie’s pool of life advice. It’s time to take off the floaties and dive into the deep end.

If only there was a book about how to do this…

I Want to Give You a Free Copy of My New Book

My new book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, will be published in eight days! If you haven’t already pre-ordered the book, sit tight: next week I’ll do the official announcement, which will include some exciting giveaways for people who buy a copy then.

In the meantime, two pieces of pre-pub business…

If You Pre-Ordered the Book, Please Consider Leaving an Amazon Review

This is me in favor asking mode: If you pre-ordered the book from Amazon, and received your copy early, please consider leaving an honest review. I want the people who consider the book during the publication week to encounter some social proof that I’m not a crank.

If you do leave a review, please e-mail me at interesting [at] calnewpot.com with the subject line “[Review]” so that I can thank you personally. Feel free to include in your e-mail any questions or comments you had about the book.

I look forward to hearing from you!

If You Have a Platform, I Have a Free Book for You

My publisher has given me a limited number of electronic copies of the book to give away. If you have an online platform (e.g., a blog, a big twitter following) that you think might be interested in my ideas, I want to give you one of these free copies. In exchange, I will ask that you share your honest thoughts about the book with your audience on (or near) the 9/18 publication date.

If you’re interested send me an e-mail at interesting [at] calnewport.com with the subject line “[Platform].” Please include a link to your platform and audience size, just in case I end up with more requests than books!

Solutions Beyond the Screen: The Adventure Work Method for Producing Creative Insights

Fog marching down the Berkeley hills (photo by Ianan).

Battling the Beast

A couple weeks ago, I made a brief visit to Berkeley, California, for a wedding. My wife, Julie, had to take a conference call the first morning after we arrived, so I decided to get some work done myself. I didn’t bring a computer, so “work” couldn’t mean e-mail replying (the standard instinct in this situation).

Instead, I decided to log some hard focus hours on what I like to call The Beast: a particularly vexing theory problem that my collaborators and I have been battling for many months.

I got some coffee and headed toward the Berkeley campus on foot. It was early, and the fog was just starting its march down the Berkeley hills (as shown above).

I eventually wandered into a eucalyptus grove:

(Photo by letjoysize)

Once there, I sipped my coffee and thought.

Our existing strategy for The Beast included a complicated algorithm which none of us looked forward to analyzing. Deploying a trick I learned while a grad student, I avoided needing to understand why the complicated algorithm worked by instead turning my attention to understanding why simpler strategies failed (I’m surprised by how often the study of things that break lead to simple things that don’t).

After only an hour, which included a strategic fill-up at the Free Speech Cafe, I had an idea for a more concise (and easier to analyze) algorithm that seemed to work.

I realized, however, that there’s a limit to the depth you can reach when keeping an idea only in your mind. Looking to get the most out of my new insights, and inspired by my recent commitment to the textbook method,  I trekked over to a nearby CVS and bought a 6 x 9 stenographer’s notebook.

(I discovered this notebook style when writing HIGHSCHOOL SUPERSTAR, much of which I outlined while walking by the Charles River — they’re sturdy and easy to use when not at a desk).

I then forced myself to write out my thoughts more formally:

This combination of pen and paper notes with the exotic context in which I was working ushered in new layers of understanding. Our battle with The Beast continues, but in the latest draft of our solution in progress, these Berkeley simplifications play a useful role.

Adventure Work

I’m telling this story because it sparked a realization. Back in my student advice days, I was a promoter of adventure studying — a tactic where you tackle schoolwork in exotic locations, such as here…

…where one of my readers prepared for an important Chinese exam (which he aced), or here…

…which is a view from the rooftop of a campus building where another of my readers would sneak out to crack tricky problem sets.

The motivation for adventure studying was two-fold:

Changing your context makes the work seem fresh and allows you to tackle it with new creativity and energy.
Going somewhere exotic separates you from common distraction urges.

My experience in Berkeley helped me realize that this same adventure tactic should work for non-student work as well. When faced with a core responsibility — something that draws on and develops the ability that makes you rare and valuable — the same two motivations listed above apply to adventure work just as much as adventure studying.

This explains why a couple hours outside in the eerily unchanging northern California weather could produce more insight than days of work back at my office.

Do you adventure work? If so, share your story and a photo…

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This post is part of my Craftsman in the Cubicle series which explores strategies for building a remarkable working life by mastering a small number of rare and valuable skills. Previous posts include:

Henri Poincare’s Four-Hour Work Day
You Probably (Really) Work Way Less Than You Think


Experiments with the Textbook Method
You Are What You Write: The Textbook Method for Ultra-Learning


Work Less to Work Better: My Experiments with Shutdown Routines

#craftsmanincubicle

Henri Poincaré’s Four-Hour Work Day

John Cook, an applied mathematician and blogger, recently highlighted the following quote from a new biography of Henri Poincaré:

Poincaré … worked regularly from 10 to 12 in the morning and from 5 till 7 in the late afternoon. He found that working longer seldom achieved anything …

At first, we might marvel at how little time Poincaré spent working. But then we realize that “work” in this context probably means super-intense, hard-focused, uber-concentration; the type of “work” that required him to ponder things like a triangulated homology 3-sphere (pictured to the right).

Still, it doesn’t seem that hard to get 4 hours of hard focus out of an 8 – 10 hour work day. Most probably assume that they hit this mark easily. But then we measure this assumption and get a cold dose of reality.

At which point, we stop marveling at Poincaré’s supposed laziness, shut down our e-mail, and turn back to the metaphorical (or, in my case, literal) chalkboard.

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This post is part of my Craftsman in the Cubicle series which explores strategies for building a remarkable working life by mastering a small number of rare and valuable skills. Previous posts include:

You Probably (Really) Work Way Less Than You Think


Experiments with the Textbook Method
You Are What You Write: The Textbook Method for Ultra-Learning


Work Less to Work Better: My Experiments with Shutdown Routines

#craftsmanincubicle