Because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are often the ones that do – Jack Kerouac.
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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle
What is excellence? How does one measure it? What does it take be excellent? Who are masters of excellence? These are questions that I spend a lot of time reading up on. A key part of being excellent is to be efficient in anything you do. The second most important part, and also the hardest, is to be a hard worker.
I used to play Quake 3 a game at the highest levels in India at one point of time and reflecting back , I see that the points mentioned in the article all fit into what I had done then. I wasn’t conscious and if I was I’d probably be better than what I was I guess.
1. Pursue what you love – This is often underrated. People in India do anything and mostly everything for money. It’s important to love or atleast like to a very large extent what you like. You’ll hit a dip almost ALWAYS in your path. Quake 3 for me largely was a smooth ride, but when I started it was so hard to get past a stage to evolve in the game. I kept at it. There’s a particular jump you make in a map that most of the professionals did. No one in India could make it. I spent 1 week and 4 hours a day just trying to make the jump. JUST doing that and nothing else. I ended up teaching it to everyone and being one of the first to achieve it. All because it was for the love. And hard work which is my second point.
2.a) Do the hardest work first – The easy comes easy. So you have to work on the hard part. Like that jump, the exam for you, the project at work, the meeting with the boss to lay out a roadmap or ask for a raise. Whatever it might be. That’s your first area of target. Brian Tracy calls it eating the frog first. The cake’s tastier but the frog needs to be eaten first.
2. b) Practice intensely - Nothing comes without practice. Nothing. And it’s very gruelling. My dad who was a state level tennis player told me that he had to do this thing called wall practice to steady his forehand and backhand rythms first thing in the morning. While everyone was watching videos, he was hitting against the wall for an hour. Little wonder that he always commanded where he wanted the ball to go against his peers who he ended up beating.
3. Seek expert feedback – This is probably the most important thing. No man is an island. You can’t do things on your own. At some point of time you’ll hit a ceiling, you’ll need to consult, observe, watch, talk to someone better than you. We Indians call it a Guru. That’s probably taking it a little too far but the idea is someone to critique you and teach you what you don’t know. Make sure he’s someone you trust and not someone you compete always against.
4. Keep a peer set that is involved in what you do. – If you are a guitarist and you are in a band of swimmers then you can’t find someone to relate your trials and tribulations to. It’s great if you have a fellow guitarist. It’s better if there’s a pianist because then you can discuss different ways of thinking. Napolean, it is said, had an uneducated man with a general in his army to seek 2 view points. Both men were intelligent with radically free different thinking. Alexander is said to have done something similar.
5. Keep a goal – How do you measure your progress? You keep a goal. That could be a song you want to sing in the tone, a lick on the guitar or a win/loss ratio in a game. If you want to play the guitar, I wouldn’t say you start with Eric Clapton. Unless you are strong willed that will almost always work in the adverse. Pick up someone on youtube like Marty who teaches and plays well. Learn to be him. When you are so involved, you’ll end up beating him.
6. Know that you’ll fail but then you’ll succeed - Everyone starts as a failure. We learn how to fall many many times before we start finding the balance. It’s often hard work but it’s important to have a plan. Think what you want to do. Then work on getting there but getting there smoothly. We can kick the ball in tennis to take it the other court. We can hit a smooth forehand, we can hit a slicer like Roger Federer. All achieve the same purpose but it’s the last of the three that gives you the highest satisfaction.
There is satisfaction in sophistication.
I suggest you read the article on HBR.org that talks about this and adds other points. I’d love to hear your own experience about this as well in the comments!
John Cleese might require an introduction if you have been a long reading member of this blog. He is a comedian and the main guy responsible for the brilliant Monty Python series. He started out as a scientist (in his mindset) and then turned to Creativity. In this great talk (a summary) he talks about his first step into creativity and how he flowered into it. The key is to have a division of time and space to yourself.
Division of space is to block out time of the day without interruptions. That means no twitter, no bullshit, just you. Division of time is saying when you’ll start and finish that space you have blocked out for yourself to get creative.
Then just play.
To know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at those things. Which means if you’re absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly the skills to know that you’re absolutely hopeless at it. This is a profound discovery. that most people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing, have absolutely no idea that they have no idea of what they’re doing. It explains a great deal of life.
Watch the quick summarised talk on Youtube here.
If you are going to try. Go all the way. Otherwise don’t even start.
This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench, it could mean jail, it could mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation.
Isolation is the gift. All the rest are tests of endurance of how much you really want to do it. And you’ll do it. Despite rejection and the worst odds and it will be better than anything else you could have ever imagined. If you are going to try, go all the way. There is no feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods. And the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is..
do it, do it, do it. do it. all the way, all the way.
- From Charles Bukowski‘s roll the dice poem.
I’m going to talk about a powerful idea I learned from a colleague. The Ideasliver. You take one slice of the pie we call the world. Cut one sliver but cut it very very deep. Take it out and own the sliver. Own the idea. This now becomes your breath and your obsession. You know it’s an obsession only when you indulge yourself in it completely. This means you do away with sleeping, walking, gaming, sex, eating and never feel wanting when you are with this ideasliver of yours.
About 1.5 years back the itch to find my ideasliver started. It has been a long time and I sought desperately to seek counsel to define it. But there was one very important, albeit extremely annoying, piece of advice that I constantly received.
Only you can decide what you want to do with your life. No one can tell you how you want to define yourself. They can acknowledge it or judge it, but can’t decide it for you. You choose. And choose wisely.
Enjoy the journey.
Most people say Life’s in the journey. We shouldn’t worry about the destination. I take the example of a ship. All of us are ships on the sea. If you don’t choose a country to land in you’ll drift in the sea. If we left our journey to the universe and it’s winds, we won’t get anywhere. Winds blow in opposite directions over different points of time. A lot of ships get wrecked. A lot of them drift mindlessly. A lot of them are forced to land. The best journeys are those that you decide the country you want to land in (country = industry, expertise). This will take you to one port (part of a country). You might not like this port or even stay there long enough BUT you must decide the country you wish to sail to. Especially like me, if you are nearing 30, which I consider two fifths of your life. Or your sailing in the ocean if you will.
Jack of all trades, master of some.
But what if like me, you have many interests? Where do you get your ideasliver from? I’ll present to you an idea I had and one that I plan to test for the next 3 months. I believe to gain reasonable expertise in anything you should spend all of your waking/free time for atleast 3 months at tasks to know if you can stick on to it. I decided to split up my interests and skillsets into 2 buckets.
The first bucket I’ll call Personal. In this bucket you put in all your interests and passions. These are things you’ll do if never paid, if only for curiosity.
The second bucket is called Professional. Depending on your age, you have gained some skillsets but you wish to pick up some more that has a market value. This means you cannot be a nudist unless there was a market for it. There is, by the way, a market for almost every thing.
For the next 3 months, I plan to work solely on 2 professional and 2 personal interests and form my ideaslivers around them. I know at some point i’ll want to quit and I’ll note which activity makes me do that. But not without trying. Then I’ll keep what I have lasted with at the end of the three month period and see if I can grow that even more or squash that and pick up 2 more interests. At this rate, I can potentially learn 8 new skillsets over a period of a year. Or spend 3 months finding my ideasliver.
True happiness lies in finding the sweet spot between both of them. Steve jobs has found it, Picasso found it and so did Jimi Hendrix. It’s our turn now.
What are your personal and professional slivers?
Everyone’s interested in money. No one denies it’s importance. But how many really understand it’s significance and replaceability? Or it’s origin?
Paul Graham, in his fantastic set of essays, talks about Creation of Wealth and not money. In it is a short history course on the significance that I’m highlighting here today.
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The definition of Wealth
The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage– just a shorthand– for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.
From Barter to two trade exchange
Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can’t make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.
How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can’t get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?
The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff– the medium of exchange– can be anything that’s rare and portable.
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Metals are considered both rare and portable. Hence they became the medium of exchange. We have dollars now as the medium but it’s not a “physical” thing. It’s just another medium. Concentrate on the commodity not on the medium.
For Bill Robertie, his success has a simple explanation: “I know how to practice. I know how to make myself better.”
Robertie bought a book on backgammon strategy, memorized a few opening moves, and then started to play. And play. And play. “You’ve got to get obsessed. You’ve got to reach the point where you’re having dreams about the game. I could just glance at a board and know what I should do. The game started to become very much a matter of aesthetics. My decisions increasingly depended on the look of things, so that I could contemplate a move and then see right away if it made my position look better or worse.”
It’s not the quantity of practice, it’s the quality. The most effective way to get better is to focus on your mistakes. In other words, you need to consciously consider the errors being internalized. Searching for his errors, dissecting those decisions that could have been a little bit better. He knows that self-criticism is the secret to self-improvement; negative feedback is the best kind. An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
- From Derek Sivers notes on the book How We Decide.
I always thought taking notes were important. I’m a overdrive note taker. I believe it reinforces your thought and drills down the basics when you read it. It also helps that you can often reflect back on the single most important point. Over the years I have gotten better at taking notes and I’m currently compiling a post to give you my best practices. Here Caterina Fake, the co founder of Flickr, gives some wisdom into her productivity and thinking.
On the importance of notes.
I think it’s a sickness in business to always try to do more things in less time. I try to spend more time. People read all this information and think they’ve accomplished something, but what have they really taken in? What can you take in that’s important in 140 characters? I read books and articles, and I take a lot of notes. I put stickies in passages I find interesting, and later I write them into my notes, because that reinforces them in my memory. And I’ll make a point of going back and rereading them. Otherwise it’s like cramming for a test in high school where you don’t retain any of the material.
On prioritizing tasks
I have a to-do list so I don’t forget things. But I don’t prioritize tasks. I just know what needs to be done, and I check tasks off in the order I do them. Sometimes I feel like checking off all the little things. Mail this letter. Respond to this e-mail. Sometimes I want to figure out the entire strategy for 2010. As long as everything gets done, it doesn’t matter in what order.
On innovative meetings.
Interaction should be constant, not crammed into meetings once a week. You just turn around in your chair and bounce an idea off one of the other 10 people in your office. Keep the floor plan open so people can talk to each other. As the company gets bigger, keep dividing it into smaller and smaller groups. Follow Jeff Bezos’ two-pizza rule: Project teams should be small enough to feed with two pizzas. At Hunch, we don’t have meetings unless absolutely necessary. When I used to have meetings, though, this is how I would do it: There would be an agenda distributed before the meeting. Everybody would stand. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone would drink 16 ounces of water. We would discuss everything on the agenda, make all the decisions that needed to be made, and the meeting would be over when the first person had to go to the bathroom.
In a commencement address to the students of Princeton, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, had some very interesting things to say. I have written about him before here, but I urge you to read the full transcript. Here are my takeaways.
1. What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
2. I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that
3. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice. Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.
4. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
This is a lesson from one of the greatest martial artists and thinkers of our generation. Bruce Lee. In an episode narrated by a friend of his.
Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run three miles under twenty one minutes or twenty two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: When running on his own in 1968, Bruce Lee would get his time to six and a half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me, “We are going [to run] five”. I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m hellava lot older than you are and I can’t do five”. He said, “When we get to three we shift gears and then it’s just two more and you’ll do it”. I said, “Ok Hell I’ll go for it”.
So we get to three and we start the fourth mile. I’m okay for three or four minutes then my legs start to give out and I say to him – “Bruce if I’m going to run any more, I’ll have a heart attack and die”. He said, “Then Die”.
It made me so mad that I went the five miles. After we had done and were in the shower and I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, “You know why did you say that?”. He said, “You might as well be dead. Seriously you know, if you put limits on what you can do, physical or otherwise, then it’s going to spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, your morality, your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level”.
There are no limits.
(hat tip : dubey)
