OnTheSpiral

Diligence Versus the World

I’m reintroducing this idea of diligence because I keep encountering it in the stories of people with remarkable lives and yet almost never see it mentioned in the online community where Study Hacks lives.

And this is a problem.

We’ve created this fantasy world where everyone is just 30 days of courage boosting exercises and life hacks away from living an amazing life.

But when you study people like Martin, who really do live remarkable lives, you almost always encounter stretches of years and years dedicated to honing craft.

Part of the resistance to diligence comes from the following two common complaints:

1. I don’t love any one thing enough to pursue it with such dedication.
2. I like to keep my options open.

These complaints, it’s important to realize, are built on shaky ground.

To counter the first worry, recall that the idea of pre-existing passion, as I’ve argued many times, has almost no scientific backing. Martin, for example, with his commitment to diligence, could have created a remarkable life based on any number of different pursuits.

He ended up playing banjo because Pete Seeger was big at the time, and ended up in comedy because, when he was young, his parents moved to a town next to Disneyland, where Martin landed a job that surrounded him by professional performers.

If his parents had instead moved to Cape Canaveral, Martin may have become an important rocket scientist.

If they had moved to the Lower East Side, we’d probably know Martin today primarily as a novelist.

When it comes to passion, the what is often much less important than the how.

The worry about keeping options open is even more groundless. I have a new book coming out in September (its title, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, also comes from  Martin). I’ll talk more about this project later, but one of the things I discuss in the book is that when you study the evidence, it’s clear that you’re not likely to encounter real interesting opportunities in your life until after you’re really good at something.

Cal Newport is one of my evil twins.  I have a lot of respect for his work but I almost always feel like he frames his arguments in entirely in the wrong way.  The post quoted above is a case in point.  Cal has argued relentlessly for the importance diligent relative to innate passion.  In this post Cal recounts the career arc of comedian Steve Martin and points out how Martin's success derived predominantly from his ability to focus diligently.  

Unfortunately, Cal neglects to mention numerous aspects of this narrative that are inconvenient to his argument.  If diligent focus breeds passion after a certain level of competence is achieved, then why do so many people end up experiencing mid-life crises?  How is it that so many people spend years focusing on honing their expertise only to find themselves trapped in careers they hate?

Clearly diligent practice alone is not enough to establish passionate careers.  Too often Cal's advice reduces to: "just pick something and commit to it".  He suggests that Steve Martin, in a different environment, might have been just as successful as a rocket scientist.  

Really?  

There is nothing that meaningfully distinguishes comedian/actor/musician from rocket scientist?  

Cal unnecessarily weakens his argument by overextending it.  Moreover, he ignores a subtle but critically important distinction when he unequivocally dismisses the desire to keep options open.  He conflates 'diligent focus on developing capabilities' with 'diligent focus on achieving specific career goals'.  

There is a huge difference between focusing on developing comedic capabilities and focusing on being a stand-up comedian.  Both involve deliberate practice.  Only the latter prematurely reduces options.  The specificity of focus involved in focusing exclusively on a precise role (stand-up comedian) is neither necessary nor reasonable until you have achieved some first hand familiarity with a particular market.

...

In summary, all strict dichotomies are false.  Surely the ability to engage in deliberate practice is a critical factor in career success, but so is a certain degree of compatibility with your chosen pursuit.  This might not be obvious if you restrict your case studies to individuals whose careers followed a straight line from novice to initial success.  

However, numerous others have achieved success only later in life after bouncing around from one dead end to another.  It would be foolish to assume that these people achieved success because they suddenly learned how to focus diligently.  It would be just as reasonable to argue that such people finally learned how to focus because they discovered something worth focusing on.

In reality both arguments have merit...but sadly, false dialectics are better for attracting pageviews.

The appeal of Instagram is, for lack of a better word, simple; the world is moving too damn fast and we don’t want the cognitive load of figuring out what we’re looking at — we just want to see simple pretty things. This simplicity is what makes services like Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest a joy versus other entertainment offerings.

The truth is that on any given day, I’d rather check in on Instagram then watch a movie. Today — from afar — I watched my friends visit Germany, take in the 49r’s vs. Giants game, traverse the Sundance festival and eat at a restaurant on my block. I probably opened the app between 10-15 times. And I watched absolutely no TV today.

Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch offers us the curiously conflicted reasoning quoted above. Apparently the world is moving too fast so we are drawn to "simple pretty things". However, "the simple pretty things" she is referring to are instagram photos, a service she apparently checks 10-15 times a day.

In other words, because life is becoming more hectic she soothes herself by filling every momentary break in her day with micro-consumption of simple calming images. Rather than resisting the increasing chaos in her schedule, she fills disjointed experiences with simulacrum of calming experiences.

I don't mean to criticize. This is a temptation I succumb to myself. With the potential for positive media consumption constantly available I find myself attempting to fill every vacant moment with some form of passive consumption. If I am cooking I might as well put a podcast on the background. If I'm cleaning my apartment why not watch a TED talk? When I'm eating I can pull up a show on hulu.

These modes of consumption are tempting because in each individual instance they do produce an unequivocal gain. Empty headed cleaning becomes more enjoyable and more productive when you are learning something at the same time. Yet, in aggregate the story shifts subtly.

Small tasks tend to proliferate endlessly and eventually crowd out higher value pursuits requiring larger blocks of time. The cognitive impact also mutates as you approach 100% attention utilization. When our brains are constantly receiving sensory input we unwittingly decrease our capacity to process any of that input. We can't interpret, integrate and generate new insights from the content previously consumed while simultaneously focusing on current perception.

The more closely we approach maximum attention capacity the more we begin to resemble the shallow behavioralist input/output machines described by Nick Carr. We come to resemble lab rats impulsively pressing levers, desperately searching for our next hit of sugar water. The culprit isn't, as Carr asserts, the small chunks of content that the internet offers up (at least not directly). Rather, the culprit is the lack of quiet time we allow ourselves, within which to (re)evaluate the benefits and costs of rapidly habitualized behaviors.

Micro-tasks can be sustainably productive...so long as they don't crowd out the cognitive capacities we use to determine whether, in fact, they are productive.

At about the 3 minute mark in the video above Shea Hembrey discusses the criteria he uses to judge quality art. The first of his criteria is particularly relevant to me, given what I try to accomplish in my writing:

So amongst all the criteria I have, there's two main things. One of them, I call my Mimaw's Test. And what that is I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric and it hasn't been refined enough yet. It needs to worked on until it can speak fluently.

Refining an idea until it can "speak fluently" is a struggle for big-picture thinkers. In my experience it is definitely the most difficult part of the writing process. I can ramble on endlessly about the ideas I find interesting and all the associations those ideas bring to mind...but those associations, in their unrefined form, rarely produce resonance for anyone but myself. Moreover, few readers will have the patience to wade through my rambling stream of consciousness in order to extract the few needles in the haystack.

The process of refinement is, in its essence, the process of generating an appropriate compression algorithm. It is a process of testing various phrasings, metaphors, and perceptual analogies to discover those that most effectively compress sprawling meaning into a compact package. The best compression schemes contain so much depth that almost anyone can understand them at whatever depth of meaning they choose.

The best example that immediately comes to mind is Einstein's insight:

Space and Time are curved gravity.

That is an idea that can be explained to child:

A planet's orbit is like the inertia of a marble carrying it along a circular path around the edge of a fruit bowl.

Yet, relativity is an idea with so much depth that it can also occupy the career of a Ph.D. theoretical physicist.

Theories exhibiting such elegance are never produced in a single flash of insight, but instead require a consistent effort...continually compressing bigger and bigger ideas into smaller and smaller packages.

But the notion of loose coupling doesn’t stop there.  It also begins to reshape organizational design and behavior. Think about the organizational equivalent of component-based software or modular product design.  Rather than traditional hierarchies driven by command and control management styles, we are likely to see relatively independent organizational modules brought together to perform one set of processes and then different arrangements of modules to perform other processes.  Some of these modules will belong to the same enterprise, but modules from other enterprises may be brought in to perform specific tasks on an as needed basis. Richard Veryard in The Component-Based Business: Plug and Play offers an intriguing early exploration of some of these organizational design opportunities and issues.

Even business strategy will become more loosely coupled.  Conventional business strategy approaches emphasize the need to develop a detailed strategic blueprint and then tightly couple operational initiatives to execute the blueprint. As uncertainty grows in business environments, these hard-wired approaches to business strategies are becoming less and less viable. In their place, companies are developing much more loosely coupled and layered business strategies.

The quote above by John Hagel is from 2002, though we are still just scratching the surface when it comes to adopting this notion.

The social web is clearly reaching its "Now what?" moment. Early adopters who were once overflowing with enthusiasm are more frequently expressing feelings of disenchantment. Millions of people are now able to connect with each other like never before...but to what end? People who want to see themselves as change agents are finding themselves talking more and more, yet doing less and less.

One of the challenges in this newly fluid social environment is that we tend to gravitate towards people similar to ourselves. Many pundits have maligned our tendency to form echo chambers, seeking out people with opinions and values similar to our own. Less commonly recognized is the tendency to engage with people who fill functional roles similar to our own. Echo chambers tend towards all talk and little action because they fail to attract people with complimentary skill sets.

Loose coupling will be critical to any self-organizing group that intends to move beyond talk and to initiate action. In practice, individuals in collaborative environments will need to develop a keener understanding of the particular strengths they bring to the table. The better able individuals are to express their own unique strengths, the more they will engender opportunities for others to pull them towards mutually beneficial roles.

Peter Thiel is a grump, but a special kind of grump. He is a dystopian utopian (if such a person can exist). The investor who wrote the first check for Facebook both believes in the power of technology to transform our lives, and is perennially disappointed by it.

A lengthy profile in the November 28, 2011 edition of the New Yorker (summary here) states: “his main lament is that America—the country that invented the modern assembly line, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the personal computer—has lost its belief in the future.”

Peter Thiel loves telling us how disappointed he is...how we are wasting too many resources on stupid shit rather than focusing on opportunities for meaningful progress.

Clay Shirky takes the contrarian point of view, noting that even lolcats are a sign of progress. The technology that allows us to engage in puerile activities like lolcat-ing, is the same technology that empowers deeply creative acts. If you condemn the former you risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

This is a debate that has already been thoroughly hashed out in the context of biological evolution:

(Stephen) Gould favored the argument that evolution has no inherent drive towards long-term progress. Uncritical commentaries often portray evolution as a ladder of progress, leading towards bigger, faster, and smarter organisms, the assumption being that evolution is somehow driving organisms to get more complex and ultimately more like humankind. Gould argued that evolution's drive was not towards complexity, but towards diversification. Because life is constrained to begin with a simple starting point, any diversity resulting from this left wall will be perceived to move in the direction of higher complexity. But life, Gould argued, can easily adapt towards simplification, as is often the case with parasites.

In the context of technological progress, this argument suggests that the type of progress that Thiel desires necessarily comes about through diversification. The process of evolutionary diversification that brings impactful change, carries with it a perpetually expanding ecosystem of increasingly cynical "waste". The same processes that created human intelligence also created viruses and dung beetles.

If Thiel's prodding leads to the invention of miraculous new technologies, say for example free energy...he will have done a great service to humanity. He will also have created a wellspring of new abundance that many people will learn to squander in shockingly asinine ways.  Two sides of the same coin...

The question this should raise: how do a very, very small group of neo-feudal plutocrats control a global population (of economic losers) in the modern context?  

Right now?  Lawfare and the bureaucracy of the nation-state.  As things continue to degrade, that veneer of legality and constraint will fade and become less effective.  

Long term?  Bots.  Software bots.  Drones. My good friend Daniel Suarez did a great job of demonstrating how this works in his books Daemon and Freedom.   

In short, bots will increasingly allow a VERY small group of people (in our case, a small group of plutocrats that act as the world's economic central planners) to amplify their power/dominance in a the physical world to a degree never seen before.

I like a lot of John Robb's stuff but some of it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. A small group of plutocrats is going to control everyone and everything with bots? Really?

When did plutocrats become tech geniuses? I won't deny that such technology exists. I do challenge the assertion that this is a potential competitive advantage for the bureaucratic class. Such technology would be far more hackable than are corporeal police officers. Moving the conflict between protesters and law enforcement into digital space would do far more to empower the distributed masses than it would the centralized bureaucracy.