1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer.
2. When you spend 20 years of your life doing that one thing, you'd better succeed because if not, it means you failed everything.
3. You need to define success. Being awesome at one thing is not for everyone. Steve Jobs' last words were about how giving everything to being the best at business stripped him from a good chunk of enjoyable things life has to offer.
4. Some people are excellent at a lot of stuff - Leonardo da Vinci is a good example.
5. Everyone should learn not to expect to become someone exceptional. You'll live happier if you accept the fact that you may never be in the top 0.1% of anything. As a consolation, you'll be like the remaining 99.9% of humanity.
I think a citation is required for point #3. As I understand it, Steve Jobs' last words were "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." The best-at-business quote is fake:
“I wanted my kids to know me,” Mr Isaacson recalled Mr Jobs saying, in a posthumous tribute the biographer wrote for Time magazine. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”
“He was very human. He was so much more of a real person than most people know. That’s what made him so great,” he added. “Steve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, ‘It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done’.”
Ah good to know thanks! I still stand by point 3 though. I'm sure one can find a good quote by someone who worked on one thing for too long and managed to do it, and then was unhappy because of the time lost.
Point 1 is most important. There is no guarantee for success. You may be doing everything "right" but if you are not at the right place at the right time meeting the right people you can still fail. A lot of life is luck and life is not fair.
Point 5 is also important. By definition we are all average. And things where you are maybe 0.1% may not be things that you have passion for.
Very common though. I am very passionate about sports but my natural ability is probably bottom 10%. That means I have spent a lot of time pursuing something where I would never be "successful"in the usual sense. I also have met a lot of people who had the ability but didn't really like it.
Sport has still benefited me a lot and was totally worth it to me but in terms of success it was a total waste of time.
> 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer.
That's a matter of ambition/risk. That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that. It's just that he many not be good enough to make a career of it. So yes he will look foolish but in the end, he will still be better than the rest.
If we scale back the risk levels, then this is probably true. For instance, focus on a particular field of software where there is a decent demand and you will very likely be able to live off of it.
Focus on being the founder of a successful company in a space that can only tolerate at most a handful of players (that's pretty much any business, once you properly define it) is a LOT harder and sheer willpower is not the only thing required to be successful.
> Focus on being the founder of a successful company in a space that can only tolerate at most a handful of players (that's pretty much any business, once you properly define it) is a LOT harder and sheer willpower is not the only thing required to be successful.
I agree with your whole post, but I urge caution at your parenthetical because it could easily play into the VC mentality of needing 9-10 figures to consider a company successful. Of course it's easy for them to take the risk with other people's money, but as a founder you need to ask yourself what your goal is.
It's dangerous for two reasons: first, you may build something amazing that would easily have been sustainable but fails because unchecked greed demands that it be the biggest even if that is not it's fundamental value (ie. see Twitter). The other is that billion dollar companies are not built by dreaming of the perfect vision, but rather smart execution leveraging available resources and opportunities—the vision sounds good in Wired article, but there are millions of dreamers with visions that never accomplished anything; you need execution and relentless learning, and that is very hard if you are not focused on where you are now and where you want to be in a few weeks or months.
I think the "risk" part of "ambition/risk" part of is what the OP was referring to, and I think not recognizing the relationship, in a kind of rampant survivorship bias, is a bit part of the problem with contemporary society.
I'm not really critiquing what you wrote, because I'm not sure how it applies to what I'm thinking, but to me it seems like there's a danger in assuming that degree of success in life or lack thereof arises from lack of ambition per se. I think as ambition increases, so does risk, in general, so lack of success could be due to lack of ambition, but many very ambitious people who just have been on the bad side of circumstances, in the wrong place or at the wrong time.
I worry a bit about an implicit assumption that we often make that someone could always have "tried harder," which seems to be the argument of the essay now that I think about it. If a failure situation arises, we tend to pick it apart and look for what the person did wrong, and then if we find anything, ascribe blame to the person. In some situations--maybe always, that sort of introspection is helpful, but often I worry it misses the broader picture, in terms of the value of what was given up, or why that person was put in the position to begin with. We also don't scrutinize success as often to look at stupid decisions that could have panned out very poorly, and blame the individual--often there's an implicit pass, like "oh this person is so lucky," as if that luck is an attribute of the person, and marvel at that luck instead as if it's something to reward.
This essay kind of hit hard, because at middle age I've realized that the field / career area I'm in is in crisis, a sort of house of cards, and at some level driven by fundamentally unethical or unsound phenomena. My choice is basically to suck it up and just go along with it, or ditch the whole thing and start over as if I was in my 20s. If I ditch things, I feel like I'm by definition a failure by many, and ignoring this compounding benefits idea, but if I stay with it, I'm just supporting a system that I feel resentful about and that I think is going to fall apart eventually one way or another, even if some are inevitably going to be remaining at the top of that rubble pile.
I guess one way to think about it is this: in life, for most things, that compounding benefits curve is accompanied by a compounding costs curve, and sometimes the difference doesn't look compounding at all.
>> 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer.
> That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that.
From what I read somewhere, he retired from golf because of back injury. So if
my memory serves right, it renders your "[he] will still be a very good
golfer" ridiculous, because no, he will never be a golfer anymore.
>That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that.
Not true. Trust me. There is no guarantee. You've not met people who are singularly pursuing a goal, and it's clear they'll never improve past what they've already achieved (which can be no better than average)?
5.
You're probably best at some combination of skills. There are far more combinations of skills than there are people, and any one person can only master a small subset of all skills.
There seems to be an assumption here (which I've seen in many other places) that ordinary people are somehow missing this trick, are failing to grasp this. I think everybody knows this - more or less explicitly perhaps. The fact is we might talk about becoming rich, but most of us don't really want to - not in a real way. Not to become worth "millions" in our sixties like this guy's mentor.
People want to live rich, varied, exciting lives: Now. Sure, getting rich or being rich would help...but if it means living in a way that is controlled, patient and strategic for 30 years...well then no they don't really want that.
Not only that, but saying "rich" is usually shorthand for famous and/or having high social status. The money itself seems to me the least interesting aspect of "making it". Especially in the startup world, what most of us dream of (in my experience), is recognition from our peers, attention, etc, not zeros on a bank statement.
Agreed. I could easily live an extremely frugal life for the next 30 years to build riches, but then I would forgo 30 years of a life I want to live.
Not to mention I could die half way through those 30 years, and what would I have to show for it? a slightly larger savings account?
Live smart, but live life. Money is not the end goal for me and I honestly feel like people who make their life mission money driven are missing out a huge portion of what life offers.
> it’s much more effective to focus your effort on one thing.
This is the gist I got from this post, and while I agree with the statement I think it is too simplistic.
I am one of those persons that "have a long list of goals, desires, and wants for your life" as teased in the article. I think it's clear that focus helps to achieve an item on that list. It's the issue of deciding what to focus on, when multiple items are competing for the 24 hours we have per day. Most life-advice, as the article, starts off with stating the conflict and immediately jumps to the conclusion. The hard part is in the middle.
Personally, I came to the conclusion that everything I postpone to a later stage in life might just as well never materialise. If I can't live with that thought, then it has to be done concurrently.
That's probably different for short-term project that the article uses as examples, but these typically aren't the items I'm conflicted about.
> Personally, I came to the conclusion that everything I postpone to a later stage in life might just as well never materialise. If I can't live with that thought, then it has to be done concurrently.
Sheryl Sandberg recently gave a talk to Inc. where she used the term 'ruthless prioritisation' to describe her decision-making process. It basically comes down to finding the best thing you can do and making a lot of tough choices.
Now, she was discussing this concept from a business point of view, but speaking as someone who works from home, minds children, and runs a house, it also resonated with me. I have a long list of things to do on any given day, and only a certain number of hours in which to do them. Most days, I end up feeling guilty about not getting something done; it feels like I'm failing in one of my areas of responsibility. Or, worse, as you say, I try to get everything done concurrently and either fail or risk burnout.
The main thing that ruthless prioritisation does is give me the space to forgive myself for the things I couldn't do. I know that I calculated the best thing I could do on a given day and I worked on that. It makes postponing things a lot easier to handle.
Reminds me of John Doerr's advice on how to be successful: "Be ruthlessly intellectually honest about the biggest threat to your business and marshall all available resources to solve that." Rinse and repeat. The key is not just to do just one thing. You need focus and vision, then you'll get to your most successful as soon as possible.
That is the hard part I suppose. Figure out what matters to you, and prioritize accordingly.
As many books describe, you must figure out what story you want people to tell about you after you're dead. That is your ethos. Then you make a list of what you'd like to do, and then prioritize according to your ethos. Do you want to be a 2 digit millionaire, then you have to work towards that. Do you want to be a pillar for the community, then that guides you. Want to be a fantastic parent ect.
> If I can't live with that thought, then it has to be done concurrently.
What does it mean to say that you "can't live with" that thought? If in fact having that thought would cause your death, then I recommend avoiding death. However, if you are saying that figuratively, consider the possibility that you might be taking a less effective action simply due to your discomfort with the reality that we have limited time on this earth. Consider the possibility that you might be better off tolerating that discomfort and narrowing your focus to a few things rather than a dozen.
(Or maybe you're just designing a well-balanced week that is made up of tango lessons, a side-project, and your job. I dunno. You're an autonomous agent.)
In open source, I take the opposite approach. I tend to take on large, difficult projects and get burned out working on them for too long. Combine this with wanting to get a lot of cool projects done, and my approach is to have lots of things in progress and switch between projects often. When I start to get tired or bored of a particular project, I switch gears so I can continue working at my usual pace without getting burned out.
I feel satisfied with the success of this approach so far. Among my large (with a scope of, say, 1000+ commits and/or 10000+ LoC), 2 are mature, 2 are WIP but suitable for practical use, and 2 are in their early stages. Among medium projects, maybe about 3 are mature and 5-10 are WIP. Dozens of smaller projects and experiments exist in various stages of completion as well.
I haven't finished everything yet, but I have got a lot done and I'm happy with the results. Getting over the initial hump is also a great way of getting others interested in contributing to open source projects, which expands thoroughput significantly. My advice is not to be scared of taking on lots of projects :)
David Allen, has said this in his TEDx talk. In moments of crisis and duress, its very easy for the brain to reserve all its cycles to the one task at hand.
However once that moment slips, your mind begins to wander. So a degree of constancy of purpose is needed. And you need a kind of GTD system to prioritize and eliminate what is unnecessary.
Surely. I also believe we need some training. If you give up at the first mental shortcoming you will take a lot of time. Making a habit of having thinking runs of 30min or a long enough period.
Also, I believe there's another factor at play in crisis, you don't hesitate. Any option will do as long as it's not too absurd. Your brain is full on, but your mind is also more open.
this is classic survivorship bias. in order to reach incredibly high levels of success, of course you have to dedicate all of your energy to it.
Of course, this ignores all the people who dropped everything to pursue something and failed, catastrophically too, because they let everything else suffer in pursuit of this objective.
It's like singling out big slot machine winners and saying, "look! the common thread among all these people who won it huge is that they spent thousands of dollars, all day, every day, playing the slots, and eventually they made it. So if you want to make money playing slots, you have to just keep at it!"
It's fun to touch at every thing especially in a start up. This summer I was on the phone, at the clients office, documenting everything with a videographer, mentoring the interns, making youtube videos, building the website, building the app, meeting with investors...
Mid August came and I looked back, everything was only partially done. Not only I was exhausted of everything, I wasn't having fun anymore.
I have decided to put everything aside and focus on the one thing i know how to do well. I am only programming, and in two weeks i have done more then I did all summer long.
I didn't put much toughs about it regarding life goals and aspirations, but regarding little creative projects, I've found that it's really hard to focus just on one thing because passion for the project progressively drops while ideas for new projects flourish.
I've tried sticking to doing one and only one project, but all what happened is that my passion dropped to the point of zero productivity and I was doing nothing. Can't start a new project because this one isn't finished. Can't finish this project because new ones are more interesting.
I imagine that it's about the same for life, and that the solution is so much more complex.
I appreciate the post, and it would do good for most of us to understand how compounding works in so many things in our lives, also in relationships etc. But it isn't one thing vs. everything, there is also a balanced middle ground. A generalist might be interested in several things, and not care if as a specialist she could be "more successful", usually measured by an oversimplified metric, e.g. number of dollars or books sold. But this is a very good topic.
One thing at the time is never really just one thing in real life, specially if you have a family. But lets say a few important things, and doing it for a limited period of time (weeks, months, a few years), then I can accept this as a solid advice. Otherwise, IMHO life is just to damn short to waste it all on a single goal, even if you make it in the end. As they say traveling is not about destination, but what you choose to do along the way...
I agree that it is a good mindset.
But i think the advice to spend a little time each day on something consistently is more important. That allows you to improve several things concurrently.
Buffett would agree with everything written here, including not trying to get rich by actively investing in the stock market. He recommends index funds.
1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer.
2. When you spend 20 years of your life doing that one thing, you'd better succeed because if not, it means you failed everything.
3. You need to define success. Being awesome at one thing is not for everyone. Steve Jobs' last words were about how giving everything to being the best at business stripped him from a good chunk of enjoyable things life has to offer.
4. Some people are excellent at a lot of stuff - Leonardo da Vinci is a good example.
5. Everyone should learn not to expect to become someone exceptional. You'll live happier if you accept the fact that you may never be in the top 0.1% of anything. As a consolation, you'll be like the remaining 99.9% of humanity.