A piano teacher my junior year of high school had me do exercises I didn't understand. A teacher in my college audition heard the result of those lessons and started me down another path of exercises. Essentially, the one teacher had communicated certain skills through me to the next teacher without my knowledge.
During one particular lesson my junior year of college, everything clicked and I began to play a melody with more control and direction. It was only at that moment that I could hear and feel the result of those exercises.
Furthermore, that teacher later speculated about the lessons my previous teacher had taught me. That speculation lined up pretty well with what I remembered of the exercises she gave me. And it was only then that I understood the efficacy of those lessons toward connecting a melodic line on the piano.
That's about 4 1/2 years and two mentors setting me toward developing a skill (in addition to others, granted), the process of which I didn't really understand for another half year after that.
And that's the best case of someone willing to do what seems like arbitrary work, and lacking the skills at the time to rationalize persuasive reasons to avoid doing that work. In my experience adult students are experts at talking themselves into the skills they think they already have, and talking themselves out of the will to learn new ones.
So without a decent mentor I'd speculate most people are hopelessly incompetent at assessing their circle of competence. Or at least they are if we widen the circle from "getting ahead in business" to "life."
There's a lot of this in mathematics education. Unfortunately, a lot of math teachers don't realize themselves the importance of the things that they're setting up in students' education. Having been through the educational process for getting a secondary math education certification, it felt like too much of this was left implicit. Worse still, there were cases like in abstract algebra where students would do exercises on the group a+b\sqrt(-2) without any indication of the significance that this would play later in the algebra course. Heck, high school algebra, I think students learning that being able to solve for x in ax+b=c equations turns into a goal or transforming more complex problems into that simpler problem.
I read a post recently talking about people learning to be artists. The point they were making was that the 'taste' to judge good from bad is inherent in a good artist, but the ability to produce good art develops over a long time.
That means that artists spend a lot of time producing work that their taste declares as below standard. It's not until you've been working for a while that your ability catches up with your judgement. This lag, causes a lot of people to give up concluding that they're not that good.
What's fascinating to me is the amount of knowledge and teaching experience that has to go into designing those exercises. How long and how many teachers and students did it take to come up with a good set of exercises to develop towards a certain skillset?
One might realize that you only need to grow your circle of competence so far before you're able to function reasonably well in the world, but you miss that in order to live meaningful life you have to live on the circle even as it grows.
I have to say I find the way of thinking presented in this article to be wrong in a fundamental way.
I realize that this is (more or less) how we're all brought up to think about our place in the world, but I have come to see it as a very destructive way of self-development.
> The idea behind this model is to focus on your strengths that you are either born with or something you have developed over the years instead of investing time and resources on trying to do anything and everything for the sake of it.
Why should my life be centered on the 'thing I'm good at'? What does that even mean? Is it the thing I like to do and that makes me happy, or the thing that can bring me money? Since the common understanding (I think) points more towards the latter interpretation, is this a desirable way to live your life, or to expect others to live their lives? Should we all be efficient production machines where our efficiency is dictated by whatever the economic needs of the moment are?
> Focussing [sic] on your strengths does not imply that you need to avoid exploring other areas, but it is rather about not letting those other areas take away too much time and resources that could be better utilised on your strengths.
How does such self-optimization relate to the aspiration of living a free life?
> Focussing [sic] will help you accumulate experience and knowledge in a particular domain giving you an almost unfair advantage over others who are much more scattered in their approach in the field.
Why should you aim to have an unfair advantage over anybody? More so, what happens if industry trends shift and it turns out you specialized on the 'wrong' thing (e.g. you're the best mainframe programmer, but the PC revolution has come)?
The article to me seems to be saying that if you pour your heart and soul into a skill, let's say playing guitar, and after several years despite your best efforts you are still not very good, you probably should not depend on it to support yourself financially. This doesn't preclude you doing it for fun on your own terms.
> Why should you aim to have an unfair advantage over anybody?
Cynical: This makes life easier. Exploiting an unfair advantage over others ensures you don't have to spend a large percentage of your life fighting for the basic elements of survival. It's selfish, but the number of people you are is 1 and not more or less, which also matches the number of people who truly care about your quality of life.
Your mainframe example is bad because those people are still making a lot of money maintaining legacy systems somewhere.
For me this is something that has more of an application in buisness than in life in general.
A good example is I recently started doing Affiliate Marketing. Specifically I market webhosting products. I chose to do Affiliate Marketing and write about webhosting specifically because I already had a bunch of the core competencies.
The way I think about it, to start an Affiliate Marketing site (at this point I'm using it purely as an example), I have to have several competencies including:
- Knowledge of my Niche
- Web development skills
- Writing skills
- Marketing / SEO
While I am was not the best writer and knew little about SEO. I also knew I had a significant advantage over my competition because I already had a very good understanding of how to run a website and when learning SEO things came much easier because I could connect the technical dots that much faster.
I would characterize my decision to start this business is based largely in the fact that a good chunk of the skills required were already in my circle of competence. So I would never want to base my entire life on this theory, it works well when you are trying to work on something new and maximize your chance of success.
Yes, if you only focus on your one skill which you already have a high degree of competence in, you have a very low probablility to succeed; you would have to become the very top person in the world on that specific thing to actually succeed. Instead, you should probably try to combine your existing skill with other skills which complement the existing skill very well, as well as some other unusual but useful skills. That way, you have a large change of having a unique set of skills, which you can combine in ways which nobody else can do; this is highly probable to succeed, since you are then highly likely to be useful to many people.
This concept is usually called having a “Talent stack”; described, for instance, here:
You seem to be incorrectly applying this article as advice on self development and then making an argument against that.
The author isn't suggesting that this is the way to achieve true happiness. They are suggesting that this is a good strategy to become the best at something, regardless of why you want to be the best at it (financial benefit, personal fulfillment, etc.).
> More so, what happens if industry trends shift and it turns out you specialized on the 'wrong' thing
What's the alternative to this? Remain mediocre at a number of skills just in case one of them go out of style? If you want to be the best at something, specialize in that thing but keep a pulse on the direction the field is moving and adapt as needed. The world's best mainframe developer probably won't immediately be the world's best PC developer upon switching, but they will be far from starting from square one.
You need to eat. You want some other things in life that are not needs. You won't get good at something that makes you miserable while learning to do it (not to be confused with getting bored once you are good at it). Work really hard on whatever it is you do well because that leaves you with the money to do other things you enjoy that makes money.
The important part is to choose well. Magnus Carlson makes overa million dollars per year playing chess. I play chess, but it is highly unlikely I will ever make that much. Thus even though study could make me better, I don't study chess hard enough to become best in the world. I enjoy programming computers, and I get paid great for doing that. I could probably make more money than either of the previous if I was going for CEO, but I would hate the job so I let someone else do it (the competition is stiff too, but even if I never make CEO I'd be earning a lot more money in upper management)
The point is to choose what you become good at for money, and study as hard as needed, and then work as hard as needed to make the rest of your life work. In today's world you probably can't work less than 40 hours a week, so you need to choose that 40 hours well (note, chess world champion and CEO wannabes work more than 40 hours a week, one more reason to love it if you are doing it). You can choose to save and retire early if you want. Many people choose not to retire because they love their job, others retire early: both are valid life choices.
There is nothing wrong with switching courses. My dad switched from mainframes to PCs, and then back to mainframes. I know someone who quit programming to sell real estate. When to switch is a hard question because you have to accept that you are not the best for at least a while.
> Why should my life be centered on the 'thing I'm good at'?
I have a conspiracy theory: I wonder if this is the sort of thing the ultra wealthy want the rest of us to believe. That way we are more easily commodified as labor. We can be put into a spreadsheet or Big Data app to make the 99.9% of us more manageable. We are more manageable if we are more predictable.
It's the flip side to "you are not your job" from Fight Club which ultimately must have got it from the general idea of identification, in a spiritual sense.
> Why should my life be centered on the 'thing I'm good at'? What does that even mean? Is it the thing I like to do and that makes me happy, or the thing that can bring me money?
Those are supposed to be the same thing, insofar as enjoying something lowers the bar to practicing it, and practicing something is—regardless of "talent"—the way to become good-enough at that thing to make money.
How does a professional athlete, or musician, or artist, get their start? Certainly not by looking at the field and thinking "there's money in that!" Instead, they get their start by just being really, really into that thing as a hobby, usually from the time they're young. By the time they're an adult, they're better at it than the average professional in the field, regardless of whether they did sought out any "professional" training. Thus, they can very easily just decide to become a professional at that point. (Or not; nobody's forcing them to! But it's a way to keep doing what they love—so they usually do!)
Personally, I was an 11-year-old kid who really enjoyed learning programming concepts and playing around with compilers/interpreters/etc. Now, because I spent so much time indulging my passion, it's become my circle of competence. And so now it's how I make money.
> Should we all be efficient production machines where our efficiency is dictated by whatever the economic needs of the moment are?
I mean, comparative advantage. Assume for a moment that we're not in a post-work utopia, and some things need to get done by humans rather than robots, despite nobody wanting to do them. Who better to do those things, than the person who can do them "most" efficiently (probably because they practiced, probably because they liked it), and thus waste the fewest man-years of Global Aggregate Human Lifespan in solving that problem?
(Where by "most", I mean some optimum between "more-efficiently than that person can do any other thing they can do", and "more-efficiently than any other person can do that thing." There's a real formal definiton of comparative advantage but it's too finicky to lay out here.)
For your hobbies, do whatever you want. You're not optimizing your hobbies. But in terms of whether you e.g. spend five work hours (that you could have spent on work) doing your own books as a freelancer, vs. handing it those books to a professional accountant who finishes them in one hour, and who then charges you only the amount of money you make in one hour? I think the choice is pretty clear.
You will never be a better accountant than you are a [whatever], so you hire the accountant. If you want to be a better accountant than you are a [whatever]—then, upon achieving that goal, you'll be a person who is an accountant, and now someone who pays for [whatever] instead of paying for accounting!
I find that an interesting take-away from the article.
There are two underlying assumptions in the original author's piece; first that you find value in working and second that you need to work to support yourself. It also equates "less effort" with "easier to do" which implies more success at doing. But the questions posted are useful ones, to wit:
Why should my life be centered on the 'thing I'm good at'?
I'm going to stipulate here that most people split their life into three parts, the part where they work (someone else tells them what to do), the part where they sleep, and the part where they do what they want to do. And that the ratio of those three parts to one week can be called their "work life balance."
If you can agree to that stipulation, then I'm going to add the observation that the balance ratio is a significant, and perhaps dominant, contributor to a person's over all feeling of happiness, restfulness, and well being.
If you agree with that observation, then I'm going to add that the dominant force acting on the balance is the amount of wealth your work generates per unit time.
Basically, if you're paid more you can work fewer hours while still meeting all of your financial obligations. Further, you can reduce the portion of your life dedicated to work and distribute those hours over things you want to do or sleep. This allows you to adjust the life balance such that you can maximize your own feelings of happiness and well being.
The final piece is the assumption that "work" is a competitive marketplace. There are more people able to work than there are opportunities too work, so selection pressure will reduce wages on opportunities that anyone can do, and raise wages on opportunities that fewer people can do.
I believe this is the context in which the article is written.
If that is correct, then to "win" (defined by maximizing your happiness and well being for the longest possible time), one needs to find the opportunities that pay the highest wages per unit time and out compete other candidates for those opportunities.
So what I took away from the article is that if you start with the skillss that come easily to you, and focus on those, you can quickly become very competitive for opportunities requiring that skill. That will maximize the available wages to you at any given point of time.
Personally, I always suggest to people they continue to explore other skills. That way you can discover still more things that come easily to you and open up still more opportunities. More choices here are always preferable to fewer choices.
And to this last point, (e.g. you're the best mainframe programmer, but the PC revolution has come)? I believe the skill here is "programming", not the platform (PC or Mainframe). If programming comes easily to you then switching platforms will also be easy.
Contrast that with "struggling to learn programming" where once you have mastered exactly one system you don't have any idea how to generalize those skills to another system. This article suggests, and I concur, that you're time would be better off on finding a skill that comes easily rather than trying to develop one that doesn't.
One aspect is that being excellent at one thing is hard. Be really good at two things. And thats how you will stand out because it is the fusion of two skils that makes you unique.
And then there is a quote by Robert Anson Heinlein, if you want to take it to heart and live on other extreme. By no means it is a career advice but surely an interesting take.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
>"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
> One aspect is that being excellent at one thing is hard. Be really good at two things. And thats how you will stand out because it is the fusion of two skils that makes you unique.
This is a difference of semantics. "Do a thing you are especially good at" vs. "Do two things you're really good at ... to create a unique result" is another way of saying "find a thing you're uniquely good at."
The book didn't intend to be a book-length exposition. But the common insight that they found among good managers is that people come lop-sided. They have strengths and weaknesses that they aren't going to change. When you try to make people work on their weaknesses, you're virtually guaranteed to fail and make them miserable in the process. But instead figure out how to tailor their jobs to their talents and they will outperform. If you can pair up people with complementary talents, the combination will do much better than either person could on their own.
The book then includes example after example from industry after industry. For everything from housekeeping in a hotel to being a bartender to data entry. For each of these jobs, there are people whose talents will make them ridiculously better at it.
(Side note. That is the only management book that I recommend to non-managers.)
When I first started running outdoors for exercise, I couldn't run a mile. I was in really poor physical condition. 5 days a week, I'd go outside and do whatever I could, stopping as my heart rate demanded. I was really bad at running. My form was poor. I was overweight. Yet, I persisted. I learned how to celebrate small victories. Successes slowly compounded. I persevered. I kept training and improving. A few years passed and I successfully finished my first marathon. I was slow as molasses and stopped a lot after mile 20. I was one of the heavier finishers that day, too. I also raised 3 grand for the Leukemia Lymphoma Society in the process (Team in Training). My colleagues were shocked to find out what I did, and it inspired at least one to sign up and give it a try. What I learned about myself from running is that I had the capacity to go far beyond limits that my mind sets for me. The more familiar I became with physical and mental pain, the more I learned how to manage the urge to quit -- stopping before injury most of the time. I've experienced this process of development in other aspects of my life and career. It never feels easier to do something that I'm not good at, but I know how to deal with a strong urge to quit and do something else.
For a long while, I haven't improved as a runner, running only 3-4 miles a session. Instead, I keep my perseverance reserve for my work, where I've spent years doing work that has been very outside of my comfort zone, compounding one small success at a time. I have been far from the best at what I've done, but boy do I have a long line of accomplishments that I am proud of.
If you want to grow as a person, try moving outside of your circle of competence and grow the circle. It's not about achieving more than everyone else. It's about doing what your former self wouldn't. Do it enough times and you may one day find that moving beyond your comfort zone is a strength.
I'm not seeing his this relates to ambiguity traps. What is the trap?
In general, I think doubling down in success makes sense versus starting over. Even if it is small success. But, most people making drastic changes probably aren't doing so by choice alone. Are they?
It all depends on what you want out of life. If you want to stay in one area and go as far as possible, yes I would follow this advice. You'll probably be more "successful" overall. But I was never that type of person; I've always been pulled in several directions. So I've sequentially focused on each of those, and made shorter careers out of each. Of course I haven't gotten as far in each, because there just isn't time. And I've struggled harder, stepping into new areas and being a beginner over and over. But it can't help but make you stronger and more of a person overall, or at least I like to tell myself that. Every minute Willard sits in that room he gets weaker, while every minute Charlie squats in the bush he gets stronger! And there still end up being weird little synergies sometimes, where something unrelated nonetheless applies in an unexpected way, usually on more of a metaphorical or symbolic level, that gives some insight.
I should say I've basically still been honoring my 3 or 4 main circles, plural, of competency, i.e. I still pursued things for which I had aptitude and interest, and not totally random ones!
I believe this way of thinking is an (ocidental?) cultural bias
- "god gave you talent", "you're the chosen one", "your fate is sealed".
In other cultures (Korea/Japan, at least?) it seems it's more common to attribute success to hard work and mentoring and less on innate abilities. You can't walk into a dojo and just tell the sensei "Mom said I'm very talented - please give me a black belt", you have to put in the work like everybody else.
I wonder how much that shapes people's perception of what they can do, motivation, etc.
Is it me, or is this a rather depressing way to view oneself?
> Focussing on your strengths does not imply that you need to avoid exploring other areas, but it is rather about not letting those other areas take away too much time and resources that could be better utilised on your strengths.
I think that there is something especially rewarding in pursuing an activity at which you lack natural talent. It teaches very important lessons about hard work, makes you question yourself, and can help you be less arrogant. I think sometimes, it can actually be far less of a waste of time than pouring more hours into something you already very well.
The best thing I ever did was take classes outside of CS in college - I quickly realized I could not skate by in linguistics or writing classes. My proudest academic achievement is probably a B- in a grad linguistics class I took.
Book - Range by David Epstein - covers this topic really well. The book shows how expanding into neighboring areas increases your performance in your chosen field itself.
That aside I find this more useful when it comes to organizations where momentum is pretty hard to change. I can't tell you how many initiatives I've seen with "We're going to do this now!" and really that group doesn't do that well, is busy not doing that, and just as an organization isn't built to do ... the new thing. The result is inevitable.
For me, I've always worked the hardest on the things I've failed the hardest at. Failing motivates me to try more - even if I only achieve supbar results after not failing.
In my later years, I've become better at being selective about these things. I try not to spend too much resources on things I know will not mater, or bring me any more happiness.
I also read yesterday's post from the same author, but neither article is really a mental model (despite that being the subject of the entire blog), and they aren't particularly informative enough to be on the frontpage for the blog's first two posts?
If you upvoted this one, what am I missing that you liked about it?
> Another example could be switching to a career at 30 years old when you do not have the required social skills. You are better off focussing your efforts on a career that you will thrive in as an introvert while at the same time giving some room to improve on your social skills without making it your focus. Trying to put all your chips on a career based on a skill that you have not mastered or you struggle with is not the smartest bet to make.
This could have been written about me. I'm a software engineer who switched careers (from filmmaking) at 30. One of the best decisions I ever made. I love my job. I'm good at it. I have more (hard-earned) people skills than your average developer, but I'm fundamentally an introvert, and love my distraction-free IC time.
One interesting about being in the technology field, is that it can make you better in any sphere, as you can pick up the software quicker or write code to make things better, or simply can technically analyze things as a strength. Also, project planning and dealing with abstract ideas.
Tech is crazy in that it enhances you in a lot of areas that apply in numerous ways in the modern world.
Some skills are facilitating skills, and they come back to bite you if you don't sufficiently master them. For me, writing was always massive source of frustration. Not knowing how to write persuasively has limited me in my career. I've hired a writing tutor, which I hope helps me.
This way of thinking presupposes that not being (highly) competent at whatever it is you're doing is losing (or will lead to losing) in some form. Maybe this is true in some environments, but I don't think it's generally true, or particularly valuable life advice.
[+] [-] jancsika|5 years ago|reply
During one particular lesson my junior year of college, everything clicked and I began to play a melody with more control and direction. It was only at that moment that I could hear and feel the result of those exercises.
Furthermore, that teacher later speculated about the lessons my previous teacher had taught me. That speculation lined up pretty well with what I remembered of the exercises she gave me. And it was only then that I understood the efficacy of those lessons toward connecting a melodic line on the piano.
That's about 4 1/2 years and two mentors setting me toward developing a skill (in addition to others, granted), the process of which I didn't really understand for another half year after that.
And that's the best case of someone willing to do what seems like arbitrary work, and lacking the skills at the time to rationalize persuasive reasons to avoid doing that work. In my experience adult students are experts at talking themselves into the skills they think they already have, and talking themselves out of the will to learn new ones.
So without a decent mentor I'd speculate most people are hopelessly incompetent at assessing their circle of competence. Or at least they are if we widen the circle from "getting ahead in business" to "life."
[+] [-] dhosek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terretta|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkangel|5 years ago|reply
That means that artists spend a lot of time producing work that their taste declares as below standard. It's not until you've been working for a while that your ability catches up with your judgement. This lag, causes a lot of people to give up concluding that they're not that good.
[+] [-] zszugyi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infogulch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhapsodic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leto_ii|5 years ago|reply
I realize that this is (more or less) how we're all brought up to think about our place in the world, but I have come to see it as a very destructive way of self-development.
> The idea behind this model is to focus on your strengths that you are either born with or something you have developed over the years instead of investing time and resources on trying to do anything and everything for the sake of it.
Why should my life be centered on the 'thing I'm good at'? What does that even mean? Is it the thing I like to do and that makes me happy, or the thing that can bring me money? Since the common understanding (I think) points more towards the latter interpretation, is this a desirable way to live your life, or to expect others to live their lives? Should we all be efficient production machines where our efficiency is dictated by whatever the economic needs of the moment are?
> Focussing [sic] on your strengths does not imply that you need to avoid exploring other areas, but it is rather about not letting those other areas take away too much time and resources that could be better utilised on your strengths.
How does such self-optimization relate to the aspiration of living a free life?
> Focussing [sic] will help you accumulate experience and knowledge in a particular domain giving you an almost unfair advantage over others who are much more scattered in their approach in the field.
Why should you aim to have an unfair advantage over anybody? More so, what happens if industry trends shift and it turns out you specialized on the 'wrong' thing (e.g. you're the best mainframe programmer, but the PC revolution has come)?
[+] [-] tenebrisalietum|5 years ago|reply
> Why should you aim to have an unfair advantage over anybody?
Cynical: This makes life easier. Exploiting an unfair advantage over others ensures you don't have to spend a large percentage of your life fighting for the basic elements of survival. It's selfish, but the number of people you are is 1 and not more or less, which also matches the number of people who truly care about your quality of life.
Your mainframe example is bad because those people are still making a lot of money maintaining legacy systems somewhere.
[+] [-] _fat_santa|5 years ago|reply
A good example is I recently started doing Affiliate Marketing. Specifically I market webhosting products. I chose to do Affiliate Marketing and write about webhosting specifically because I already had a bunch of the core competencies.
The way I think about it, to start an Affiliate Marketing site (at this point I'm using it purely as an example), I have to have several competencies including:
- Knowledge of my Niche - Web development skills - Writing skills - Marketing / SEO
While I am was not the best writer and knew little about SEO. I also knew I had a significant advantage over my competition because I already had a very good understanding of how to run a website and when learning SEO things came much easier because I could connect the technical dots that much faster.
I would characterize my decision to start this business is based largely in the fact that a good chunk of the skills required were already in my circle of competence. So I would never want to base my entire life on this theory, it works well when you are trying to work on something new and maximize your chance of success.
[+] [-] teddyh|5 years ago|reply
This concept is usually called having a “Talent stack”; described, for instance, here:
https://www.stedavies.com/talent-stack/
[+] [-] jakemal|5 years ago|reply
The author isn't suggesting that this is the way to achieve true happiness. They are suggesting that this is a good strategy to become the best at something, regardless of why you want to be the best at it (financial benefit, personal fulfillment, etc.).
> More so, what happens if industry trends shift and it turns out you specialized on the 'wrong' thing
What's the alternative to this? Remain mediocre at a number of skills just in case one of them go out of style? If you want to be the best at something, specialize in that thing but keep a pulse on the direction the field is moving and adapt as needed. The world's best mainframe developer probably won't immediately be the world's best PC developer upon switching, but they will be far from starting from square one.
[+] [-] bluGill|5 years ago|reply
The important part is to choose well. Magnus Carlson makes overa million dollars per year playing chess. I play chess, but it is highly unlikely I will ever make that much. Thus even though study could make me better, I don't study chess hard enough to become best in the world. I enjoy programming computers, and I get paid great for doing that. I could probably make more money than either of the previous if I was going for CEO, but I would hate the job so I let someone else do it (the competition is stiff too, but even if I never make CEO I'd be earning a lot more money in upper management)
The point is to choose what you become good at for money, and study as hard as needed, and then work as hard as needed to make the rest of your life work. In today's world you probably can't work less than 40 hours a week, so you need to choose that 40 hours well (note, chess world champion and CEO wannabes work more than 40 hours a week, one more reason to love it if you are doing it). You can choose to save and retire early if you want. Many people choose not to retire because they love their job, others retire early: both are valid life choices.
There is nothing wrong with switching courses. My dad switched from mainframes to PCs, and then back to mainframes. I know someone who quit programming to sell real estate. When to switch is a hard question because you have to accept that you are not the best for at least a while.
[+] [-] volume|5 years ago|reply
I have a conspiracy theory: I wonder if this is the sort of thing the ultra wealthy want the rest of us to believe. That way we are more easily commodified as labor. We can be put into a spreadsheet or Big Data app to make the 99.9% of us more manageable. We are more manageable if we are more predictable.
It's the flip side to "you are not your job" from Fight Club which ultimately must have got it from the general idea of identification, in a spiritual sense.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] deltron3030|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|5 years ago|reply
Those are supposed to be the same thing, insofar as enjoying something lowers the bar to practicing it, and practicing something is—regardless of "talent"—the way to become good-enough at that thing to make money.
How does a professional athlete, or musician, or artist, get their start? Certainly not by looking at the field and thinking "there's money in that!" Instead, they get their start by just being really, really into that thing as a hobby, usually from the time they're young. By the time they're an adult, they're better at it than the average professional in the field, regardless of whether they did sought out any "professional" training. Thus, they can very easily just decide to become a professional at that point. (Or not; nobody's forcing them to! But it's a way to keep doing what they love—so they usually do!)
Personally, I was an 11-year-old kid who really enjoyed learning programming concepts and playing around with compilers/interpreters/etc. Now, because I spent so much time indulging my passion, it's become my circle of competence. And so now it's how I make money.
> Should we all be efficient production machines where our efficiency is dictated by whatever the economic needs of the moment are?
I mean, comparative advantage. Assume for a moment that we're not in a post-work utopia, and some things need to get done by humans rather than robots, despite nobody wanting to do them. Who better to do those things, than the person who can do them "most" efficiently (probably because they practiced, probably because they liked it), and thus waste the fewest man-years of Global Aggregate Human Lifespan in solving that problem?
(Where by "most", I mean some optimum between "more-efficiently than that person can do any other thing they can do", and "more-efficiently than any other person can do that thing." There's a real formal definiton of comparative advantage but it's too finicky to lay out here.)
For your hobbies, do whatever you want. You're not optimizing your hobbies. But in terms of whether you e.g. spend five work hours (that you could have spent on work) doing your own books as a freelancer, vs. handing it those books to a professional accountant who finishes them in one hour, and who then charges you only the amount of money you make in one hour? I think the choice is pretty clear.
You will never be a better accountant than you are a [whatever], so you hire the accountant. If you want to be a better accountant than you are a [whatever]—then, upon achieving that goal, you'll be a person who is an accountant, and now someone who pays for [whatever] instead of paying for accounting!
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|5 years ago|reply
There are two underlying assumptions in the original author's piece; first that you find value in working and second that you need to work to support yourself. It also equates "less effort" with "easier to do" which implies more success at doing. But the questions posted are useful ones, to wit:
Why should my life be centered on the 'thing I'm good at'?
I'm going to stipulate here that most people split their life into three parts, the part where they work (someone else tells them what to do), the part where they sleep, and the part where they do what they want to do. And that the ratio of those three parts to one week can be called their "work life balance."
If you can agree to that stipulation, then I'm going to add the observation that the balance ratio is a significant, and perhaps dominant, contributor to a person's over all feeling of happiness, restfulness, and well being.
If you agree with that observation, then I'm going to add that the dominant force acting on the balance is the amount of wealth your work generates per unit time.
Basically, if you're paid more you can work fewer hours while still meeting all of your financial obligations. Further, you can reduce the portion of your life dedicated to work and distribute those hours over things you want to do or sleep. This allows you to adjust the life balance such that you can maximize your own feelings of happiness and well being.
The final piece is the assumption that "work" is a competitive marketplace. There are more people able to work than there are opportunities too work, so selection pressure will reduce wages on opportunities that anyone can do, and raise wages on opportunities that fewer people can do.
I believe this is the context in which the article is written.
If that is correct, then to "win" (defined by maximizing your happiness and well being for the longest possible time), one needs to find the opportunities that pay the highest wages per unit time and out compete other candidates for those opportunities.
So what I took away from the article is that if you start with the skillss that come easily to you, and focus on those, you can quickly become very competitive for opportunities requiring that skill. That will maximize the available wages to you at any given point of time.
Personally, I always suggest to people they continue to explore other skills. That way you can discover still more things that come easily to you and open up still more opportunities. More choices here are always preferable to fewer choices.
And to this last point, (e.g. you're the best mainframe programmer, but the PC revolution has come)? I believe the skill here is "programming", not the platform (PC or Mainframe). If programming comes easily to you then switching platforms will also be easy.
Contrast that with "struggling to learn programming" where once you have mastered exactly one system you don't have any idea how to generalize those skills to another system. This article suggests, and I concur, that you're time would be better off on finding a skill that comes easily rather than trying to develop one that doesn't.
[+] [-] priyaaank|5 years ago|reply
One aspect is that being excellent at one thing is hard. Be really good at two things. And thats how you will stand out because it is the fusion of two skils that makes you unique.
First: Some advice on this by Scott Adams. https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car... I love this one.
Also a book that pretty much centers around the same point. I think the book itself is a great read. And I recommend it. https://www.amazon.com/Medici-Effect-Elephants-Epidemics-Inn...
And then there is a quote by Robert Anson Heinlein, if you want to take it to heart and live on other extreme. By no means it is a career advice but surely an interesting take.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
[+] [-] chosenbreed37|5 years ago|reply
That's a brilliant quote
[+] [-] arkades|5 years ago|reply
This is a difference of semantics. "Do a thing you are especially good at" vs. "Do two things you're really good at ... to create a unique result" is another way of saying "find a thing you're uniquely good at."
[+] [-] copperx|5 years ago|reply
Why would you follow advice from a certified nutcase?
[+] [-] btilly|5 years ago|reply
The book didn't intend to be a book-length exposition. But the common insight that they found among good managers is that people come lop-sided. They have strengths and weaknesses that they aren't going to change. When you try to make people work on their weaknesses, you're virtually guaranteed to fail and make them miserable in the process. But instead figure out how to tailor their jobs to their talents and they will outperform. If you can pair up people with complementary talents, the combination will do much better than either person could on their own.
The book then includes example after example from industry after industry. For everything from housekeeping in a hotel to being a bartender to data entry. For each of these jobs, there are people whose talents will make them ridiculously better at it.
(Side note. That is the only management book that I recommend to non-managers.)
[+] [-] Dowwie|5 years ago|reply
For a long while, I haven't improved as a runner, running only 3-4 miles a session. Instead, I keep my perseverance reserve for my work, where I've spent years doing work that has been very outside of my comfort zone, compounding one small success at a time. I have been far from the best at what I've done, but boy do I have a long line of accomplishments that I am proud of.
If you want to grow as a person, try moving outside of your circle of competence and grow the circle. It's not about achieving more than everyone else. It's about doing what your former self wouldn't. Do it enough times and you may one day find that moving beyond your comfort zone is a strength.
[+] [-] taeric|5 years ago|reply
In general, I think doubling down in success makes sense versus starting over. Even if it is small success. But, most people making drastic changes probably aren't doing so by choice alone. Are they?
[+] [-] rdiddly|5 years ago|reply
I should say I've basically still been honoring my 3 or 4 main circles, plural, of competency, i.e. I still pursued things for which I had aptitude and interest, and not totally random ones!
[+] [-] chadlavi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _jal|5 years ago|reply
Both of those tell you more about the author than provide any objective advice.
[+] [-] hcarvalhoalves|5 years ago|reply
In other cultures (Korea/Japan, at least?) it seems it's more common to attribute success to hard work and mentoring and less on innate abilities. You can't walk into a dojo and just tell the sensei "Mom said I'm very talented - please give me a black belt", you have to put in the work like everybody else.
I wonder how much that shapes people's perception of what they can do, motivation, etc.
[+] [-] culopatin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blintz|5 years ago|reply
> Focussing on your strengths does not imply that you need to avoid exploring other areas, but it is rather about not letting those other areas take away too much time and resources that could be better utilised on your strengths.
I think that there is something especially rewarding in pursuing an activity at which you lack natural talent. It teaches very important lessons about hard work, makes you question yourself, and can help you be less arrogant. I think sometimes, it can actually be far less of a waste of time than pouring more hours into something you already very well.
The best thing I ever did was take classes outside of CS in college - I quickly realized I could not skate by in linguistics or writing classes. My proudest academic achievement is probably a B- in a grad linguistics class I took.
A nice article that explains this better than I can: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/smarter-living/the-case-f...
Of course, these feelings could just be a rationalization for a 'dabbler' complex, it's hard to tell.
[+] [-] padiyar83|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PHLNR28/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
That aside I find this more useful when it comes to organizations where momentum is pretty hard to change. I can't tell you how many initiatives I've seen with "We're going to do this now!" and really that group doesn't do that well, is busy not doing that, and just as an organization isn't built to do ... the new thing. The result is inevitable.
[+] [-] TrackerFF|5 years ago|reply
For me, I've always worked the hardest on the things I've failed the hardest at. Failing motivates me to try more - even if I only achieve supbar results after not failing.
In my later years, I've become better at being selective about these things. I try not to spend too much resources on things I know will not mater, or bring me any more happiness.
[+] [-] lowmemcpu|5 years ago|reply
If you upvoted this one, what am I missing that you liked about it?
[+] [-] dqpb|5 years ago|reply
But, I find the exploration vs exploitation mental model useful. There is theory behind it (which is used in reinforcement learning):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
[+] [-] droctothorpe|5 years ago|reply
This could have been written about me. I'm a software engineer who switched careers (from filmmaking) at 30. One of the best decisions I ever made. I love my job. I'm good at it. I have more (hard-earned) people skills than your average developer, but I'm fundamentally an introvert, and love my distraction-free IC time.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nickthemagicman|5 years ago|reply
Tech is crazy in that it enhances you in a lot of areas that apply in numerous ways in the modern world.
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asciimo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mips_avatar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillDaSilva|5 years ago|reply