Pick Your Arrows

Adam Short
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

“There are only two things you need to do in your career: work hard at what your given, and pick your arrows. Don’t throw darts and expect them to stick.”


After finishing my parent teacher interviews, he pulled me aside to a line of chairs and told me to sit down with me for a moment. These interviews happened once a year and every time it was the same story. A one-hour loop of “Adam’s got the brains, but when something doesn’t interest him, he won’t do anything. He can’t keep breezing through his courses like this.”

My parents had been more or less expecting this as had I. What I hadn’t been expecting was for my father to give me some of the most impacting career advice I’d come across. Of course, when he gave me his two minute speech the focus had been on my education. However, the meaning of his words extended so much further then just the classroom. They were two principles that seem logically obvious yet seem to escape the majority of people.

Principle #1: Choose your arrow heads.

When approaching goal setting and then executing on those goals, the typical approach is ‘dart throwing’ as my father put it. The logic in this systems goes that if you throw a hundred darts at a hundred different shaped targets, one of them will be lucky enough to stick out of luck.

In practise, this means something like; “Try a little bit at everything and eventually you’ll find something that resonates.” This is fundamentally flawed advice and yet it is often the most naturally gifted individuals that succumb to this school of thought. When you have a number of passions you wish to pursue, it can be difficult to hone in on just a handful. This is compounded further when you exhibit a natural ability with all of them.

But dart throwing doesn’t make you successful. It makes you mediocre.

My father is an extremely successful businessman especially given his origins and lack of higher education. A big contribution to his success has been his laser focused on his ‘arrow heads’; he makes a point to hone in on his strengths and use those as his means to succeed. In every job he’s had, he’s used those same arrow heads to be successful.

Don’t throw darts. Pick your best arrow heads, and stick to them in everything.

Principle #2: Put your everything behind them.

“The only way I ever succeeded and got to where I am was kicking the absolute shit out of every task I was given. It’s the only way you can succeed. Once, you have your arrow heads, you have to put the wood behind them. You have to find your targets, aim, and fire with everything you’ve got.

You see, it’s not enough to just ‘know’ your strengths and passions. You have to actively work and build upon them. If the arrow head is the skill — say, developing — the wood behind it is your knowledge, experience and developed talent. And the force with which you fire them is your execution.

If you want to be a writer, you better get fucking good at writing.
If you want to be a salesmen, you better get fucking good at the pitch.
If you want to be a developer, you better get fucking good at programming.

See a trend?

It’s not enough to just focus on a few things with regular intensity. If you want real success, you have to put your everything into it. Forty-five hours a week isn’t enough.


I will leave you with a quick summary of perhaps the most important metaphor for your career.

  • Pick your arrow heads. These are the specific skills you have natural fluency in and love.
  • Put your best wood behind them. That’s your accumulated knowledge, experience and developed talent.
  • Find a target. Whether that’s a job, a business, a client or just a single project.
  • Fire with everything you have. Work three times harder then the next person, and you’ll produce three times the results.

Adam Short

Written by

full stack engineer 🐺 18. works @ Stella AI

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