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This article was initially posted on my WeChat public account: GeekArtT
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Basically, it’s an interesting book to explore one question in career path, is it correct to pursuit the passion of work? At this freedom oriented era, the proposition of this kind of question is very interesting.
From my viewpoint, the topics and opinions in this book are not something new, it even can be considered as old stuff. But what amazons me is how the author organize these things in some new ways. And it does give us deeper understanding about those materials.
The whole book is devoted to expand author’s argument by 4 rules. But in my opinion, I’d like to summarize them in 3 aspects:
1. You need to pursuit the work that makes impact on the world, and its value is accepted by people.
2. In order to take this kind of job, you need to use deliberate practice to achieve this goal.
3. In order to know if your work is what people are willing to buy, you need to use little bet to test and make experiments.
At first sight, these statements are harsh, especially the 1st item. Why should I have to pursuit the kind of work you said? Why can’t I just follow my heart and do what I want to do? For this part, I have the same doubts and arguments firstly. However, I’d persuade myself based on author’s interpretations. So, I’d like to talk about my own understanding.
For the slogan that do whatever you want, it’s attractive but easy to be misunderstood. It’s so simple that you may ignore lots of detailed issues in this slogan. It contains more information than your impression on it. The first thing I want to point out is, for this slogan, if you don’t have any further implied message, that’s okay and fine. In fact, this’s the definition of hobby:
the thing you just want to do whatever the opinions of the world are.
But mostly, we’re not. When we talk about do whatever you want, we’d include more hidden information in it. We’d like to automatically imply in whatever you want to do is:
- it can provide wealth, or at least I can live on that
- and it can bring the fame or respect from others.
But from here, once we consider these implied things seriously, the so-called whatever we want to do will be different. Because, the thing that matches above two properties is totally irrelevant to what you want. And why? Very simple: this world just does not care your opinion.
If we want the implied thing, we have to care: if the field has great impact to this world? Is it having market, i.e. is it compelling people to pay for what you do?
These things are so valuable that you need your career capital to exchange, which leads you to the concept of deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is not something. It gets its own popularity by Malcolm Gladwell’s book, which introduces the concept of 10,000 hours practice accumulation. But what’s deliberate practice? Its definition contains two aspects:
- You need to do the thing that beyond your comfortable zone, which means you need to devote only to your weak points instead of what you’ve mastered.
- You need to get feedback immediately.
These two items are seemed normal. But once we give more considerations on that, you’d find the horrible part of it, especially the item 1. If you do need to do deliberate practice, item 1 ensures that you should be staying outside the comfortable zone. The direct corollary is if you do feel happy and confident about your stage, you’re probably not on the deliberate practice way. Is it reasonable? Of course! The whole deliberate practice is pursuing the high efficiency of improvement, which means you need to keep correcting your weak points and hard shaped pattern. It requires your painful efforts. The more intense you’re focusing on those correction, the more you’d get. It’s reasonable. However, it also means, if this day, e.g. today, you’d be happy and hopeful about tomorrow, you’d probably not get enough improvements.
And, if you want to embrace the price of deliberate practice, you need to accompany with the frustrations. Because only when you feel frustration and desperation about your time, you’re knowing that you are definitely on the deliberate practice way. Most of people would upset to get frustration and they’d think they must do something wrong to take the price of frustration. But for deliberated guy, the frustration is what he want. Because this is the only evidence to show he is on the right way!
And for the concept of quick feedback? It’s connected with the 3rd main opinion of this book.
In order to make huge impact and get money, you need to know the feedback of market. Just as you need to know how good you performance is when you’re doing deliberate practice. The point here is, you need to know if you’re on the correct direction. But how? Can I predict the market? Or do I just need to be confident with myself that the efforts deserved the reward? No. Nobody can predict the future, and we all are the slavers of history. So, if we can’t predict, but how about know the history earlier? Yeah, that’s a good workaround, and it introduces the concept of doing tiny experiment. You need to keep doing tiny bets experiment to check if you’re on the right direction. And how? By building and implementing your product, by showing your work to your customer, by writing your opinions to your readers, wrap up by your down to earth practice! If you’re able to win the market, you can recognize it by some traits like: it should be so remarkable that people’re compelled to transmit your contributions and willing to pay for you.
Finally, the corresponding personal courses based on this book are:
- You need to be ready to jump into the pool of frustrations. If you do feel okay, it means you’re probably not on the correct way. You need to pick up your weak points to pursuit.
- Get feedback: first implement and execute you work, the precondition, and then publish it to see if it’s correct, and if it can trigger people’s interest and willing to pay.
- You need to get feedback as soon as possible, which is done by your implementation, replicate of your ideas.
- You need to check the market orientation, the willing people want to pay for you to test your ideas by little bets and execution of your projects.
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