Cal Newport's Blog, page 57

Following Passion is Different than Cultivating Passion

My article from CNN.com, featuring what is arguably the creepiest photo ever associated with a discussion of career advice.

Concerning Comments

Earlier today, CNN.com published an article I wrote. It summarizes the main idea from my new book: “follow your passion” is bad advice.

What interests me are the comments on the CNN website. Here’s a sample quote:

Following you passion should be a given. What’s the point of life if you’re a robot on a factory line…

As Study Hacks readers will notice, this commenter completely misunderstood my point. He thought I was arguing that you shouldn’t aim for a career that you feel passionate about. This couldn’t be more distant from the truth. I think passion is great. But it’s not something that you “follow” (which implies you can identify it in advance). It’s instead something you have to purposefully cultivate over time.

The key observation here is that the majority of the 60+ comments on the website made a similar mistake. I think this tells us something important about the American cultural conversation surrounding career satisfaction. The reason “follow your passion” has such a hold on our thinking is that many mistakenly equate this strategy with the generic and near-tautological statement that it’s good to love your job.

Of course it’s good to love your job. But “following” your passion suggests something more specific — a strategy that’s not supported by the evidence.

My challenge here is clear: To successfully spread this idea to a larger audience I need to be careful to separate the goal of developing passion from the flawed strategy of following it. (If you want to help me in this challenge, consider retweeting the CNN article with a more accurate description; e.g., “Don’t follow passion, cultivate it“).

You Probably (Really) Work Way Less Than You Assume

The 6-Hour Work Week

Last weekend, I decided it would be an interesting experiment to start tracking the hours I spent in a state of hard focus. I only counted hours where I was mastering new material (e.g., with the textbook method), engaging in a serious research discussion, or trying to formally write up new results.

I have done such tracking before, but not recently. I figured it would provide a helpful metric for my craftsman in the cubicle project. Here’s my tally for the four days I’ve tracked so far:

It’s depressing.

I have caveats — I was traveling through late Monday night and I was at a retreat most of the day yesterday — but still. I’m embarrassed by how few hours I managed to spend on work that really matters.

I have a general and a specific conclusion to make here…

The general conclusion: I think most knowledge workers probably way overestimate how much time they actually spend improving and applying the core skills that make them valuable. Keep a similar tally for a week, you’ll be surprised by what you find. This underscores the importance of the type of project I’m running here: if we don’t apply deliberate efforts in our quest to become craftsmen, our progress will be glacial. On the flip side, if we do apply these efforts, we have an opportunity to jump far ahead in our value.

The specific conclusion: As the summer gives way to the school year, I have my work cut out for me. I’m going to continue to track these hours for the near future, and let this tally drive me toward the hard decisions necessary to continue my quest to become “so good they can’t ignore you.”

#####

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:

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

Experiments with the Textbook Method

Tailoring the Textbook Method

I spent this past week experimenting with the textbook method. I began by creating a template — a blank LaTex document — for collecting research notes:

When compiled into a pdf, it looks like this:

My plan was to minimize friction when starting work on a new idea or project — all I have to do now is copy the blank document to a new directory, change the title, and start capturing notes.

With my system in place I could take it out for a spin.

I decided to apply the method to a big hairy graph theory problem that my collaborators and I have been battling for months. This big problem keeps branching off into many promising smaller problems, one of which I have been pursuing recently with my grad student. This sub-problem provided a perfect case for applying the method.

I started a new write-up to capture, in my own words, what we thought we knew so far:

This well-constructed plan worked well…for about twenty minutes.

As I was writing, this process of formalization led me to a new approach to the idea. I quickly generated a new blank document (easy to do now that I have a template) and spent the rest of the afternoon, textbook open in front of me, office whiteboard filling with diagrams, trying to work though the details:

At first, I felt somewhat uneasy about leaving that first document half-written. My task-oriented instinct is to finish each write-up, once started. Instead I had abandoned the document as soon as something more relevant popped onto my radar.

But on reflection, I think what is happening — rapid idea abandonment and spawning –  is exactly what I want from the method. The write-ups, I must remind myself, are not a goal in themselves (most likely, no one will ever see them). They’re instead a tool to induce fast learning, and this fast learning, in turn, increases the rate at which I can explore a problem space — exactly what I need in my research.

To summarize: I’m testing this method in my applied mathematics research, but it’s becoming clear that it should work equally as effectively in most scenarios where you need to master complicated things fast — be it a new programming language or marketing strategy. We’ll see how it holds up as I apply it to multiple concurrent projects and more complicated topics.

#####

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


Work Less to Work Better: My Experiments with Shutdown Routines

#craftsmanincubicle

Hacking Education with Udemy

I few times a year, I offer to write an honest review about a relevant product if the company is willing to donate to a charity of my choice. Udemy, a web site that makes it easy to take and design courses online, recently took me up on my offer, donating money to Urban Teaching Center, a D.C.-area non-profit that sends highly-qualified teachers to the schools that need them most.

Hacking Education

Education is being disrupted. There’s near universal agreement on this point.

Experts can now reach students directly online. These students, in turn, can now hack their education experience — building valuable expertise in exactly the areas they need, all for a fraction of the cost of traditional schooling. (If you doubt the power of this disruption, check out Scott Young’s MIT Challenge.)

The question now is what will this new world look like?

Udemy, an online education platform, offers a glimpse of this future. I recently spent an entertaining morning exploring this site, and was impressed by the scope of their offerings: over 1000 courses in topics that range from geeky (I was drawn to Zed Shaw’s Learn Python the Hard Way) to artistic (Carol Robinson’s free Music Theory course has over 2700 students).

Turning toward the details, the underlying idea driving Udemy is simple: the site makes it easy to both take and offer courses (free and paid).

The most basic courses consist only of video lectures. The more advanced courses mix video lectures with workbooks, samples, and sometimes audio that can be downloaded to your iPod.

All the courses I sampled provide lifetime access (once you buy the course, the material is yours forever) and a 30-day guarantee (a sign of confidence given that 30 days is enough to watch all the material for most courses).

The platform is cleverly setup so that you can access your courses from any Internet-connected device, and the user interface is crisp and intuitive.

Summary: As the education model continues to be disrupted, there will be lots of sites trying to match students with teachers. Udemy’s advantage is that they’re taking the time to get the details right.

You Know What You Write: The Textbook Method for Ultra-Learning

Less Than Ultra Learning

The surprisingly useful Riemann Zeta function in action. (Image from MathWorld.)

As part of my craftsman in the cubicle project, I spent this past week monitoring how I learn new information.

I wasn’t impressed.

At one point, for example, I needed to dive into a topic I didn’t know much about: how information disseminates in random power law graphs. I went to Google Scholar and begin downloading papers with promising abstracts. I printed three and skimmed another half-dozen or so online. In retrospect, I think I was hoping to find a theorem somewhere that described exactly what I was looking for in notation I already understood.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t find this magic theorem. The two hours I spent felt wasted. (Well, not completely wasted, I did learn about the Riemann Zeta function, which turns up way more often than you might expect.)

This experience recommitted me to cracking the code of ultra-learning. Mastering hard knowledge fast, I now accept, requires more than blocking aside time on a schedule; it also demands technique.

The Chair

With this in mind, here was my first stab at cracking ultra-learning:

[image error]

I bought a traditional leather chair (a longtime dream of mine). My wife and I still need to add some bookcases, a rich rug, and an old brass lamp — but my general  theory here is that this library nook will be make it impossible to avoid mastering new bodies of knowledge, and perhaps also pipe smoking.

Under the assumption that I might need more than the power of The Chair to become an accomplished ultra-learner, I do have one more strategy to deploy — which is what I want to talk about in this post. It’s actually a strategy I’ve known for years (my PhD adviser taught me soon after my arrival at MIT), but have seemed to forgotten recently.

The Textbook Method

This screenshot is from a web page I built as a grad student:

I needed to know about a certain family of combinatorial object sometimes called selectors. I actually needed to know quite a bit about these things because my collaborators and I wanted to prove the existence of a new one. My approach to this learning challenge was to build an annotated bibliography that listed every known result, with citations.

The web page took me a couple (hard) hours to make, which is roughly the same time I wasted this week “studying” power law graphs. I’ve probably used this knowledge on a dozen different occasions since, and I know at least two other scholars that have used it in their own research.

Here we have a nice comparison. In two cases I spent roughly the same amount of time trying to learn new knowledge. In one case, I efficiently mastered a new area, while in another, I ended up frustrated.

The comparison highlights the power of a simple act: describing and organizing information in your own words.

I call this the textbook method as you’re essentially writing your own textbook on a topic. One thing I like about it is that it works nicely with different levels of required detail. Whether you just need to organize what’s known about a subject, or build a deeper understanding of how results are derived, the textbook method seems to extract an optimum amount of learning out of the time spent.

It also leaves a written record that’s easy to reference later when you need to deploy the information.

Over the next week or two I’m going to take this method for a spin by applying it to some tough learning challenges in my queue. I’ll report back what I learn. I invite you to join me in this endeavor. Pick your own challenge, apply the textbook method, keep us updated in the comments below.

In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be in my chair.

#####

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:

Work Less to Work Better: My Experiments with Shutdown Routines

#craftsmanincubicle

 

The Recorded Life

A snapshot of the mind of Cal…

Personal Hacks

A reader recently noted the following:

It strikes me that you haven’t said much at all on your blog — or for that matter, in your books — about how one ‘succeeds’ at one’s personal life.

It’s true that I tend to keep things professional here at Study Hacks. But this doesn’t mean my personal life escapes similar scrutiny.

Exhibit A is the stack of moleskin notebooks shown at the top of this post.

They’re all full.

I keep one such notebook with me at all times for recording any “important thought” that I might want to revisit later during my monthly check-in. Some of the ideas, of course, relate to my work as a professor or a writer. The page below, for example, which is from September 2, 2010, shows the genesis of my Romantic Scholar series (though, at the time, I was calling it, ill-advisedly, the “aesthetics of student knowledge” series):

At least three-quarters of the notes, however, deal with living a better life outside of work. In other words, I put a lot of thought into hacking the personal — I just tend to be too private to share.

To understand my hesitance, I present Exhibit B:

This page, recorded on May 21, 2009, is one of several entries on the importance of the “500 push-ups project.” Something which I clearly deemed urgent.

Don’t ask…

Work Less to Work Better: My Experiments with Shutdown Routines

My dissertation. The pages shown here are from a proof that caused significant consternation.

A Novel Dissertation

I began working on my PhD thesis in the summer of 2008. I defended a year later, in early August, 2009.

There’s nothing unusual about this timing. What was unusual, however, was my approach.

By June 2008, I had a fair-sized collection of peer-reviewed publications. The standard practice in computer science would be for me to take the best of these results, combine them, fill in the missing details, add a thorough introduction, and then call the resulting mathematical chimera my dissertation.

To me, naive as I was, this sounded like a waste of a year. So I decided I would prove all new results.

This strategy worked fine for a while, keeping me engaged and happy, but then, in April, 2009, things took a turn toward the difficult. It was during this month that I accepted a postdoc position that would start in September.  This meant that I had to defend my thesis over the summer. Suddenly the allure of tackling all new results began to wane.

Here’s a scenario that became common:

I would be working during the day on an important proof.
At some point in the late afternoon I would find a flaw.
A helpful voice in my head would point out that my whole future depended on finding a fix — without a fix, it argued, the thesis would crumble, I would be kicked out of graduate school and end up homeless, likely dying in a soup kitchen knife fight.
After heading home, I would continue, obsessively, seeking a fix — ruining any chance at relaxation that night.

After two weeks of this exercise, I decided something needed to change.

It was then that I innovated my shutdown philosophy…

Schedule Shutdown Complete

In the spring of 2009, I adopted the following ritual to cope with thesis anxiety:

At the end of the work day, I would look over my calendar and tasks. I would then check in on where I stood on my major projects (which, at this point, meant my thesis). After taking in all this information, I would come up with a smart plan for the remainder of the week.

Once I was satisfied with my plan, I would say a quick mantra to officially shut down my scheduling for the day. For me, this was “schedule shut down complete,” which is a phrase with no particular meaning; it just happened to pop to mind the first time I tested the ritual.

The shutdown, however, was not enough by itself. The ruminating part of my mind would still fire up and propose worries about broken proofs and knife fights. This brings me to the second part of the ritual. Whenever I began ruminating on my work schedule after my shutdown, I wouldn’t engage the specifics of the rumination, but instead respond to myself with some variant of the following:

“I completed my schedule shutdown ritual today. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to complete the process if I didn’t trust that my plan makes sense. Therefore, I’m not worried.”

The key point here is that I didn’t try to ignore the urge to ruminate — which rarely works — but I also didn’t engage the specifics of the rumination — which tends to make things worse. My response was logical but also non-specific.

In less than month, the urge to ruminate on these issues had reduced to become essentially non-existent. So long as I did my shutdown each day, my mind had been trained to release work-related anxiety.

The Craftsman in the Cubicle Project

This story came to mind recently because I’m currently in another period of big changes: I’ve had a year now to get used to my new job as a professor, my wife and I bought our first house, and we’re expecting our first child.

The brand new Study Hacks HQ.

The time is right, I’ve decided, for a serious round of self-assessment and improvement.

One target of this scrutiny is my professional life. I write often about my career craftsman philosophy (and in fact even have a whole book coming out on the topic), which emphasizes treating your work as craft: focus intently on developing a small number of valuable skills, then leverage these valuable skills to push your career in a direction meaningful to you.

I want to see how far I can develop this idea in my own life.

Over the next month or two, I’m launching a series of experiments designed to re-focus my working life towards a satisfying, craftsman-like concentration on a small number of powerful skills, and away from open inboxes and continuous low-grade distraction.

I’m pretty good at this already. But I want to discover how much better I can become.

This mission will require logistical changes — e.g., how I structure my day or manage organizational obligations –  as well as skill changes — e.g., how I integrate deliberate practice into my work.

I call this the craftsman in the cubicle project because it aims to regain a spirit of craftsmanship in a knowledge work era defined by distraction.

Experiment #1: A Better Shutdown

This brings me back to shutdown routines.

As I move into a new phase of adulthood, a rock solid shutdown ritual is more important than ever before. If I can’t get away from work and recharge effectively with my family, then I won’t be able to consistently achieve the true hard focus needed for a craftsman-style working life. With this in mind, as my first experiment in this project, I’m revisiting my shutdown routine. I want to soup up the graduate student version of this ritual to one that can handle a life with many more serious obligations at work and home.

Here are three specific upgrades I’m trying:

Shifting to Paper

When I introduced this ritual, I would send my daily plan to myself as an e-mail. I knew that my inbox was the one place I would definitely check everyday, preventing my plan from being ignored.The downside of this strategy is that it forces me to check my e-mail in the morning. This often proves disastrous, as logging into Gmail has a way of context-shifting me away from craftsman-like focus, and toward aimless Internet tinkering. In other words, a ritual that was designed to support a craftsman lifestyle is simultaneously subverting this goal.

Fortunately, I’ve been practicing this habit long enough that I’m no longer worried about ignoring my plan. To avoid the distraction of my inbox, therefore, I can confidently shift my daily rundown from an e-mail and into an old-fashioned notebook. Chris Guillebeau recently gave me a nice set of moleskin-style ledgers, one for each month of the year. These should serve perfectly for my purpose (and, as a bonus, after a year, I can easily go back and review my planning process).
Disconnecting my iPod

I don’t have a smartphone, because I like being bored when I’m away from my house (building comfort with boredom, in my weird mathematician world, equates to building one’s ability to focus). I do, however, have an iPod Touch, because I like to download podcasts without having to go through my computer. Some time back, my wife configured my iPod so that I could check my e-mail easily when I’m at home and connected to our network. I hate this temptation because it often wins — ruining my shutdown. Earlier today, as part of my efforts to upgrade my shutdown routine, I deleted my e-mail accounts from the iPod. Checking-in online now requires me to plug in and boot up a computer — something that’s just difficult enough to easily resist.
Committing to a DMZ

In my experience, a shutdown is most successful when you can downshift your mind from the high-energy, tackle all problems state it occupies during the workday, to a more relaxed, present state that works best when at home. This transition can be hard. One method I’ve been toying with is a dedicated meditation zone (DMZ) — which I define as an extended period (at least 20 minutes) of focusing on either a single, non-work related thought, or giving your full attention to a podcast or audio book. The focus on a single thing helps the other parts of your brain shutdown and cool off. As part of my ritual upgrade, I’m committing to a DMZ everyday, immediately following my shutdown. During a normal workday, I’ll use my commute. On a day when I work at home, I’ll use my daily dog walk and exercise. The key will be consistency.

By explicitly eliminating my shutdown ritual’s ability to cause distraction during the workday, and then striving to maintain its integrity after work is done, I’m hoping that it will remain muscular enough to handle this new phase of my life.

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, onward to more experiments…

Perfectionism is a Loser’s Strategy

Ocean-Front Writing

Yesterday, I submitted an important grant proposal. In a perhaps overzealous interpretation of my adventure studying philosophy, I wrote the bulk of the content on the island of Madeira, in a hotel room overlooking the Atlantic, which turned out to be wonderfully monastic and productive.

The process was hard. I probably spent around 100 hours total; some energized, but most mired in the dreary hinterland of editing. In standard Study Hacks fashion, however, I was organized, and able to spread the work out.

I bring this up because throughout the process I found myself wrestling with insecurity. Every evening, when I was done with my careful plan for the day, the voice of doubt arrived trying to convince me to spend a few more hours editing or to bother a few more people to take a look at my draft. Did I really want a little bit of laziness to be the reason I lost this award?, it would ask.

I was experiencing the classic battle between perfectionism and lifestyle design. This battle is familiar to those who embrace my career craftsman philosophy, because this philosophy requires a balance between becoming “so good they can’t ignore you” and then leveraging this value to build a life you love.

The former goal attracts perfectionism while the latter can’t work if it’s around.

I’m writing this post to share with you the thought process that helps me navigate this mental minefield…

The Source of Value 

Whether you’re a professor, writer, student, or entrepreneur, your job is to produce products that are valuable to your audience. The more valuable your product, the more reward you receive.

If my grant “product” is valuable, I get the grant. If a writer’s blog “product” is valuable, she gets an audience. And so on.

At the top of this post, I put a plot that displays my intuitive understanding of product value. Consider, in particular, the column on the left side of the plot, which breaks down the contribution of three different factors as follows:

The vast majority of your product’s value comes from your underlying ability .
The next biggest contributor is providing reasonable packaging for your product. For most audiences, there’s a quality threshold you must cross to be taken seriously. You gain non-trivial value for crossing this threshold. It’s not as important as ability, but it’s important enough that you shouldn’t ignore it.
The final contributor is the time you spend obsessively polishing and worrying and tweaking after you passed the threshold required by your audience. This perfectionism-driven work is by far the least important to the overall value of your product.

View from balcony where I wrote much of my proposal.

For example, for my grant proposal, the most important predictor of my success is my underlying ability as a researcher.

Presenting this vision in reasonable packaging — e.g., a clear, thoughtful proposal — though perhaps less important than the proposed research, is still important enough for me to spend 100 carefully-planned hours working on it.

To continue to obsessively polish after that point, however, would offer diminishing returns at best. Once the reviewers understand my vision and see that I’m serious, it’s the quality of the vision that will dominate the process moving forward.

A Loser’s Strategy

At this point, you might still counter that even if perfectionism adds only a little value, it’s still worth it, as every bit helps in a competitive world.

This inane observation brings me to the right column in the plot at the top of this post. This column reflects my understanding of where stress comes from when creating a product. In particular:

Building your ability is not particularly stressful. It’s something you work on day after day, month after month. It adds up to lots of culumlative deliberate practice, but no particular day is all that bad.
Constructing reasonable packaging can be slightly more stressful as it often requires a lot of work in a relatively short period. But, if you’re a Study Hacks reader, you can tame this process with smart schedules — leaving you enough free time to end your day with a bottle of Coral, watching the sun set over the Atlantic.
Perfectionism, by contrast, can be incredibly stressful. It puts you in a state of constant worry that you’re on the brink of failure. It also tends to push you past your energy reserves and into exhaustion.

This is why I call perfectionism a loser’s strategy: you’re generating a disproportionate amount of stress for a small amount of value. The only reason this strategy makes sense is if you’re convinced that you’re never going to get any better at what you do, leaving this minor polishing at the margins all that’s left in your control.

This is a sad view of life.

Here’s the alternative: focus on getting better. The benefits of improving your underlying skills will dwarf the benefits of perfectionism. If you fall just short of some recognition this year then the next year it will be an easy win and the year after that it will seem trivial. In the long run, in other words, this is the approach that allows exceptional achievement to flourish in a life you love to live — an approach, I can attest from recent experience, that lets you shut down the computer and take a dive into the ocean.

On Dominating the World

A Perhaps Ill-Advised Talk

I recently returned from Portland, Oregon, where I was a speaker at Chris Guillebeau’s World Domination Summit. I stood in front of a crowd of 1000 energized, non-comforming, optimistic folks and told them: “follow your passion” is terrible advice.

And I somehow escaped injury.

Actually, the most common response I received: “I completely agree, but other people are going to find your message radical.” After enough people told me they agreed, I concluded something I’ve suspected for a while now: this idea is less radical than we assume.

Perhaps our generation is tired of the passion hypothesis, but just hasn’t gotten used to saying it out loud yet.

All told, I met many interesting people and was exposed to many interesting thoughts. This was not a Study Hacks crowd, but it was a crowd I was honored to join.

If You’re New Here

If you’re a WDS person visiting to find out more about passion and its discontents, I want to point you to my upcoming book, SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU (pub date: September 18), which lays out my detailed case why “follow your passion” is bad advice, and what you should do instead.

Here’s my tentative call to action (I’m such a bad marketer that Chris Brogan, within an hour of meeting me, literally gave me an empty business card holder):

If you love this idea:  the single most useful thing you could do for the cause is to pre-order the book (this forces booksellers to take notice).
If you’re on the fence, but want to keep the conversation going: consider clicking that Facebook thumbs-up, likey button on the Amazon page.
If you want to learn more:  search my blog for the term “passion” (click here).

Will Return Soon

Anyway, I’m off to Funchal, Madeira tomorrow for a conference of an entirely different tenor (less inspirational speeches, more powerpoint slides full of equations), but I have a series of interesting posts backed up, waiting for my return.

Stay tuned…

(Photo by Chris Guillebeau)

 

On the Remarkably Long Road to the Remarkable

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

Here’s John McPhee reflecting on his path to The New Yorker: ”I had been continually rejected…until I was in my thirties.”

He’s not alone in fostering patience for this particular goal.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell notes that it took him ten years of training at The Washington Post before he made it to the The New Yorker. Jonah Lehrer had seven years of dues paying between his first book deal, inked as he left his Rhodes Scholarship, and earning his own staff spot.

I like these examples because they remind of a simple truth: remarkable careers take a remarkably large amount of training. If I’m not relentless in my focus, they tell me, I should not count on a life as interesting, autonomous, and respected as that enjoyed by Mr. McPhee.

It’s just enough of a push to turn me away from my latest schemes, and get me back to putting pen on paper and chalk on chalkboard.