Putting Passion First
One of my favourite things to read in the HBR is the column “The Best Advice I ever Got.” This month particularly resonated with me as it ties in with Marc Jacobs musings that I briefly mentioned a few days ago. This month featured Linda Mason, Chariman and Founder of Bright Horizons Family Solutions. The idea is to put your passions first and make them central to your life. Mason recalls a conversation with her mentor, James Rose, who said to her,
“Linda, your passions don’t have to be extracurricular. They can be central to your life. Unleash them, and you’ll help other people unleash theirs.”
This to me is another way of stressing the importance of being relentlessly authentic, of putting what you care about first and making it a central theme in your life and not an after work/weekend thing. When what gives you a sense of purpose is aligned with what your life mainly consists of, its limitless where you can go.
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Being shameless
March Jacobs in a recent New Yorker article: “That’s what I think everyone should aspire to in life - being shameless.” He explains further, “I shouldn’t do anything, or shouldn’t feel anything. I either do feel or I don’t feel. I’m not going to should feel.” The articles writer, Ariel Levy, goes on to elaborate:
When Jacobs says that people should be shameless, he is talking about something more than exhibitionism. He seeks a kind of relentless authenticity.
Going to sit on this one for a while.
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The third and final characteristic I’m going to mention from the article The Making of an Expert, is the essential need to find the right coaches and mentors to guide you in your pursuit to expert status. Having a mentor and coach to guide you is absolutely essential. Borrowing a quote from the article from Ivan Galamain, one of the most famous violin teachers of all time, said
“if we analyze the development of the well-known artists, we see that in almost every case the success of the their entire career was dependant on the quality of their practicing. In practically every case, the practicing was constantly supervised either by the teacher or an assistant to the teacher.”
The most obvious reason is that teachers accelerate the learning process, as they give constructive and painful feedback, and elite performers know when a coaches feedback and advice is or isn’t working.
One of the most famous teacher/student combinations in history is that of Warren Buffet and Ben Graham. Graham is the author of the most influential finance book in history, Security Analysis, which demonstrated that a stock had an intrinsic worth independent of the market price. Graham was Buffet’s finance professor at Columbia and the only student to every get an A+ in his class. Initially Buffet was crushed when his mentor refused to let him work at his firm on Wall Street, but eventually gave in and he headed to New York. Although their investment philosophies differed, and Buffet eventually moved back to Omaha, he would credit Graham as being his reason for entering into the business.
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Well, so much for this taking a week, but I’m back after a much needed vacation. Anyways, the second principle of attaining excellence is that (surprise!) it takes time - almost 10 years of intense practice to reach expertise and compete on an international level, based on Ericsson et al’s research. The article goes on to explain that due to new techniques and refinement in training methods, it is almost impossible to beat this rule in areas such as sport and classical music. Being crowned king on some creative stages can generally take less time, however, the notion that people are born a “natural” should be laid to rest now. Sticking with the Kayne West story, earlier this year he was crowned by MTV as the “Hottest MC in the game.” However, Kayne West struggled for years get a record deal, since he was seen by his contemporaries, most notably Jay-Z, as a producer first and MC second. Anyone comparing his first album in 2004 to his third album entitled “Graduation” in 2007 should notice significant growth.
The point is, don’t expect anything to happen for you overnight. The idea that people are born talented is a deeply ingrained notion in our culture. I also find in my conversations with people about the topic is that this fallacy also serves as a convenient scapegoat; that someone is good at something simply because they were born that way. Don’t fall into this stereotype. If you want something, put the time in. If you have any interesting stories about people related to this, please leave a comment or email me.
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Ryan Hall and 4:05
Before I get to part two (and three) of the previous post, I came across an interesting article in the most recent copy of The New Yorker worth noting. This was an article entitled “Running to Beijing,” a story profiling US Olympic marathon runner Ryan Hall. The part that of the article that stuck out the most for me was his obsession over meeting the time of 4:05 to run a mile. Below:
“Hall ran the sixteen hundred metres (a distance close to a mile) in four minutes and twenty-two seconds. Hall had a natural stride, and he also had the obsession that characterizes top runners. He posted photographs of world-class milers in his bedroom, and he listened to the Olympic anthem repeatedly. On Halloween, when he was fifteen years old, he carved out a jack-o’-lantern with the five rings and “2008,” because that was the year he planned to run in the Games. Before eleventh grade he got a notion about the numbers 4:05. He inscribed “4:05” into wet cement outside the house, and he wrote “4:05” all over his school note-books. When it snowed, he scratched “4:05” onto the window of the family car. The following spring, in 2000, he ran the sixteen hundred metres in exactly four minutes and five seconds.”
I’m going to tag this characteristic “eye on the prize.” If anyone has any interesting stories, I would love to hear them.
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Good news. Extensive research has disproven the notion that you need a high IQ to achieve expert performance. In fact, there is absolutely no correlation between intelligence and success in a particular field (of course, it can’t hurt). Last year, in a great article from the 2007 summer edition of the Harvard Business Review entitled The Making of an Expert, K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely laid out three principles of outstanding performance. I’ll talk about these three things over the next week, any try to find some good examples of them in use.
Part One - Practice can make perfect, if you know what you’re doing…
The notion that “practice makes perfect” has been beaten into our heads since kindergarten, however evidence points out there aren’t many of us who are practicing properly. When most people practice, they focus on things they already know. This doesn’t actually make you better at anything new; it simply reinforces something you can already do. In addition to the practice required to maintain a current skill set, practicing must be deliberate; with a focus on things you can’t do well, or can’t do at all. A striking transgression of this principle from my own life immediately comes to mind.
When I was younger I used to play the guitar a lot, having weekly lessons with a teacher. Between classes I would have a certain number of pages and exercises out of a book that I needed to cover. During this time there was a lot of growth in my development as a guitarist. However in grade eight, an accident left my hand in a cast for a few months, and when I got better I didn’t resume the classes. It was around that time that my growth stagnated. From then on, whenever I picked up the guitar, I would work my way through a repertoire of the six or seven popular songs I could play well (I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve played Led Zeppelin’s Over the Hills and Far Away). After about 20 minutes I would put the guitar down, only to repeat the same process a few weeks later. I would never bother to learn a new song, resulting in a waning interest and ultimate retirement of the hobby.
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Last December I found myself in the Cancun International Airport with three hours to kill, so I bought a GQ Magazine with Kayne West on the cover and sat on the grass, flipping to the cover story. Although the people that influence me the most are typically found in Philosophy (Soren Kierkegaard, Alan Watts) and Finance (Warren Buffett, John Mack), I’m interested in Kayne West for a number of reasons. First, he has an uncanny ability to pick up on a musical trend, popularize and dominate it (think RZA’s sped up soul samples of the late 90’s or the current electro fever). Second, how he often comes across as arrogant and narcissistic, yet likeable. There was a quote from this interview with GQ that stuck with me:
“…I just listen to other types of music to get influences. I just don’t listen to rap. I don’t need to. I do it too good. Why not study shit you don’t do good?”
How often do we cook the same three or four dishes we know well instead of branching out into new culinary territory? Or run to the same spot on the paint to take that same 10 foot jumper? Or in the office, going through some inefficient process in Microsoft Excel, not taking the 10 minutes to learn how to write a macro or learn some shortcuts? Taking the time to push yourself to practice and study things you can’t do will go a long way.
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