Maybe 8/10 times, if you interview
someone who really loves what they're doing, they probably started without a clear cut vision
that “this is what I'm meant to do,” but what they did commit to was getting very good.
Getting very good at skills. Becoming very impactful. Building mastery.
And that for these 8/10 cases, the passion follows the mastery.
So, we have decades of research on what leads people to actually feel
sort of motivation towards their job, what leads them to be satisfied.
And it turns out that the traits have very little to do with this intrinsic match,
it has more to do with things like impact, mastery, connection with people,
doing something worthwhile, getting better at a skill that's valued.
If you get these generic traits, you tend to enjoy your job more and more.
In fact, research shows that if you can take a group of people who all had the same job
and they interviewed them to try to understand how they felt about it,
the main differentiating factor on what separated someone from feeling like the
job was a calling versus just a job was how long they'd been doing it.
Cause the longer they'd been doing it, the better they got at it,
the bigger sense of impact they had, the more connection they had to people.
And so, in my book, I basically flip the script and said
what I'm actually observing out there is that maybe 8/10 times,
if you interview someone who really loves what they're doing,
they probably started without a clear cut vision that “this is what I'm meant to do,” but what
they did commit to was getting very good. Getting very good at skills. Becoming very
impactful. Building mastery. And that for these 8/10 cases,
the passion follows the mastery. Well, I say you should
look to professional musicians, professional athletes, professional chess players,
people who have to get good in a world that has a well-defined competency hierarchy.
Where you have a chess ranking and you can't run away from it.
You have a batting average. You can't get away from it.
Watch how they train. Because in their world,
there's a lot of effort that has gone into how do you systematically improve.
And what you see is that they deliberately practice.
And there's really no shortcut to deliberate practice to gaining mastery in almost any field.
But in knowledge work in particular, so in this sort of whole array of sort of various creative
and other types of professions, we don't think that way
and people don't actually do a lot of the sort of systematic practice
and so that's why in “So Good They Can't Ignore You,”
I go and I hang out with a professional guitar player.
And I say, “okay, I wanna watch you practice.” And in this case, there is actually
a good reason to do so, because this is someone who
started playing guitar at the same time that I started playing guitar.
And at the age where like I was
not that great, I played in a rock band, we were like ok,
he was being, had a record deal, was being heralded as like this
talent in new acoustic guitar playing. So I said great, I want to understand why did
he become really, really good and I didn't. Watching him practice,
in this sort of musician's frat house he lived in at Boston with all these other musicians,
answered the question 100%. He was so intense,
when he was practising the guitar, that he would forget to breathe.
So he'd be doing this, he was trying to get a lick faster,
so the way he got the lick faster is, “let me play it at about 10% faster
than I can comfortably play it.” And he was so concentrated that
he would forget to breathe, so he would do these ragged
gasps every once in a while when his body would force him to take in air.
That's the whole difference. I never did that. That's stretching, you're like,
“what I need to do is be better at this lick. And so, I'm gonna push myself
beyond where I'm comfortable.” So, deep work, which is just my term for
concentrating very intensely. You give something intense focus
without distraction, so you don't glance at things.
No phone, no browser tabs, you're just focused in.
This skill is essentially the answer to the question
that my readers had about “So Good They Can't Ignore You,”
which was, “okay, how do I become so good I can't be ignored?”
And in a lot of fields, this ability to concentrate very intensely,
first of all, that's necessary for deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice requires you to be in a state of deep work.
And deep work is also what allows you to produce very effectively.
If you wanna use your skills to produce high-quality work,
you wanna produce it at high quantity per time spent,
very concentrated effort is what's important. But what I discovered working on that is that
it's a skill that has to be trained. So it's a little bit circular.
If you're good at deep work, you can pick up skills quickly,
but deep work itself is a skill
that has to be trained. All you have to do is, on a regular basis,
do something without your phone. You basically go back to about 10 years ago.
Not all the time, but just occasionally. Maybe, one, when you walked the dog at some point,
like, “I'm not gonna bring my phone,” you're going to the drugstore,
“not gonna bring my phone,” like just have some activity you
do most days without your phone. Even if it's 20 minutes.
There you're already getting little doses of solitude,
you're breaking the complete solitude deprivation syndrome.