More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
But if you push when you’re able and you do the hard work of carving out 20% time, you’re often in rare company—and your experience has the potential to be transformative.
The truth is, it’s challenging to carve out 20% time—even if you work at the company that popularized the concept. You have to make the extra effort, fight against other pressures on your schedule, and create your own openings.
Sometimes, though, the best reason to pursue 20% time is simply because you want to fulfill a dream.
It’s always easy to put something off until tomorrow. There’ll be plenty of time in the future, when you’re less busy. But you’re never less busy.
You have to put structures in place to solidify your learning and keep growing.
Here’s the ultimate way to de-risk your 20% time: make sure that even if you lose, you still win.
The gift of 20% time, especially when we think in decades, is that even if we ultimately change plans or decide on a different course, the small steps we take now compound over time, and give us more options in the future.
But sometimes, if the opportunity in front of you lines up perfectly with your goals, you might want to strategically overinvest.
Jared told me there’s no shame in trying other things, “but only if you’re in a heads-up mode. If you’re in a heads-down mode, and you’ve identified what’s working, then stick to it.”
Confusing the two—constantly scouting for something better when you should be doubling down on what’s working, or doubling down on something when you haven’t sufficiently vetted the possibilities—only leads to heartache.
There are four key Career Waves in becoming a recognized expert in your field: Learning, Creating, Connecting, and Reaping.
Part of playing the long game is understanding that you can’t always immediately jump into the ring.
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the basic frameworks and ideas in your field, and have begun formulating your own perspective, it’s time to create and share your ideas.
Learning your craft is an essential first step, but if you want people to recognize you and the unique contribution you can make, at a certain point, you have to begin the second wave: Creating.
Writing is one method for sharing your ideas, but it’s not the only one; you can give speeches, or conduct webinars, or host a podcast, or create online video tutorials. The key is to make yourself “findable” by the people you’d most like to do business with.
Taking the time to connect with others and immerse yourself in new communities, as Al’s example shows, can be a powerful way to set yourself up for success.
Thinking in waves means you can’t focus exclusively on the parts of the process you enjoy. You have to keep moving and growing.
It’s crucial to realize: Reaping isn’t a final destination. And by the time he’d reached his late sixties, Marshall felt it viscerally. “You can’t ever be happy in life with a thing that used to be,” he says. “[People will say] ‘I used to be the CEO, I used to be the football star.’ And what happens is, when the profession disappears, our identity disappears. We have no identity.” Reaping has an expiration date: you have to create something new and start again.
As the Bible (and Bob Dylan) famously said, there is a time to reap. But it doesn’t go on forever. The most successful people enjoy their success, then recognize: it’s time to move on and learn something new.
No matter how good you are, you can’t win any game by doing the same thing all the time.
Playing the long game means understanding where you are in the game and what skill is necessary to deploy at what point. When you learn to think in waves, you’ll choose your tool to suit the moment, and ensure that you don’t stop and don’t stagnate. That’s how you win.
To get more done, alternate between heads-up and heads-down modes. During the former, you’re actively seeking connections and exploring new possibilities. During the latter, it’s time to focus and execute.
You can’t do it all—at least, not all at once. Instead, follow the Career Waves, in which you sequence between: – Learning. Study your field so you become knowledgeable. – Creating. Now that you have experience, give back by creating and sharing what you’ve learned. – Connecting. Begin leveling up your connections with others in your field, so you can learn from them and contribute as part of the community. – Reaping. You’re at the top of your field, and it’s time to enjoy the benefits of your hard work.
“Bad” multitasking happens when we’re trying to perform two incompatible tasks at once, like writing an email and participating in a conference call.
But the multitasking I had intuitively adopted—what I’ll dare to call “good” multitasking—enabled me to perform two complementary tasks at the same time, like exercising at the gym and listening to an audiobook, or calling my mother while preparing dinner, or taking in a theater performance with a business client.
What should I spend my time doing? What are the 20% of my activities that will yield 80% of the results? What can I stop doing? How can I use constraints to my advantage? What are my hypotheses about the future—and how do they inform my actions today?
As the Dutch researcher Ap Dijksterhuis has discovered, unconscious thought while we’re distracted by other things can lead to better results than consciously weighing pros and cons—as happened during my St. Petersburg walkabout.
You can’t become known for your ideas if other people don’t know what they are. Thus, you need to find a way to create content, whether that’s through writing articles, giving speeches, starting a podcast, making videos, holding lunch-and-learns, or whatever channel you prefer.
Social proof—your demonstrated credibility—is a quick way to do that.
Instead, the right move is to take the area where you’re strong—the currency you have—and strategically leverage it to gain the currency you lack.
True networking
Too many professionals take an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to their networks. But playing the long game means staying focused on, and connected to, the great people you meet along the way.
Long-term networking isn’t about getting a job next week or next year. Instead, it’s about cultivating connections with people you admire and want to spend more time with. We don’t know precisely what form it will take. But when you’re in the right rooms with the right people, it creates the conditions for opportunity.
When you connect to others with an infinite horizon—no agenda whatsoever other than being helpful and deepening your relationships with interesting people—that’s how opportunity happens.
Another way to offer value is to help others make connections that will be interesting and valuable for them.
Networking done right isn’t about what it can get you today or tomorrow. It’s about what kind of life you want to live and surrounding yourself with the kind of people you want coming along on that journey.
If you can practice the art of strategic patience—not blindly waiting for good things to magically happen, but understanding the work that needs to be done and making it happen—you’re far better off than almost anyone else in your realm.
As Aikido master George Leonard notes, “In the land of the quick fix it may seem radical, but to learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau, to keep practicing even when it seems you are getting nowhere.”6
When you focus on how you’re helping others with your ideas, and who you want to be in the world, you’re far better able to keep things in perspective.
Do you actually know what it takes to succeed?
The first is to identify role models who have accomplished all or part of what you’d like to. The goal is not just to gawk or admire, but also to study their path deeply so you can understand exactly what they did on their way to success and interrogate whether the same moves are right for you. The second is to get a clear understanding of their timeline so you’ll know how long, realistically, it should take for you to show results.
Seeing what others have done can be a way of inspiring ourselves or sparking new ideas. But our comparisons have to be realistic.
What we need is the ability to pivot and reinvent ourselves when necessary. But changing course means thinking hard about what, exactly, it means to fail.
But in the midst of failure, and setbacks, and the sinking feeling that it may never work out, how do you keep pushing through?
The lesson we can learn from Silicon Valley and the lean startup methodology is that we should, in the early days, treat everything as an experiment.
As I learned, you always have to ask: Might there be an alternative way I can still use this?
One precommitment strategy is naming a date. Another, it turns out, is involving other people.
Every successful professional who wants to chart a new course or aim for a big opportunity will, sometimes, hit a wall. And in moments of irrational emotion, like the kind of self-doubt brought on by failure, we simply can’t trust ourselves.
Most goals, if they’re big enough, probably will fail. If you reach every single goal you set, you’re probably aiming too low.
Obstacles are inevitable. In order to succeed, you have to learn how to climb above them, dig beneath them, smash them to pieces, or simply go around: your choice.
