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.