Build a Confident Practice
Sometimes I work hard, but nobody’s there to notice — or they don’t like what I’ve done. I’ve learned that a confident practice is the wisest way to handle things, whether or not anyone else notices.
A confident practice is the message I keep on repeat. Whenever I give people training advice, career advice, startup advice, or product launch advice (really any advice I give at all), it includes the phrase, “confident practice.” I thought for hours (probably hundreds) about what goes wrong with technical careers. I mentored dozens of people in their early software careers across two decades. I listened to podcasts and read articles and books. If you want to launch a successful career, Build a Confident Practice.
What I mean by that is it takes some time to learn how to play the whole game, to start to do the thing you’re interested in doing. Say you want to be a data scientist. Take some data, prepare it, explore it, model it, then learn from what you just did. Do that in under an hour, using a tutorial or video if you’re not sure what the steps are. This gives you an end-to-end experience, even if there are many more steps you’ll eventually learn how to do.
Hold on, you’re saying have confidence. Isn’t this obvious?
No, no it’s not. Go to Udemy. Go to Udacity. Go to Amazon. Go to YouTube. Go find just about anything in your field. What are they doing? How are they teaching you? They’re building a foundation of knowledge for you. Learning about things is not building a confident practice. It’s the opposite. It’s the thing we’re comfortable doing, because it’s the thing we’ve always done.
Don’t I need that foundation?
You get the foundation by doing the work, coming back and filling in the gaps. If you’re delivering things now, and coming back to learn how to do it better, that’s a better way to learn, a faster way to get all that knowledge. I can appreciate it when I can see how it improves something I do anyway.
We all have a spectacular failure in our own educations (well almost all of us): our math education. Think about it. You took math in school, yes? How did that go? How are your math skills today? Are you confident? Could you explain any of the techniques you picked up to a child? We learned about math instead of learned how to confidently do math. A Mathematician’s Lament (PDF) is a passionate and clear demonstration of this problem, and how to start to turn it around.
Alright, so play the whole game to build a confident practice? That’s your advice?
Almost. Here it is:
- Play the whole game.
- Learn from your own results.
- Gain confidence from your practice.
And, by doing this, you’re not getting ready to get ready. You’re not learning anything just in case. You’re not looking for the coward’s exit and just quietly studying without delivering anything. You’re not learning about things, you’re doing things.
Playing the whole game means I’m stepping out of my comfort zone. Often. I’m actually publishing articles. I’m delivering things. They might be wrong. They might lack sophistication. Others might be able to do a better job. That doesn’t matter.
This takes vulnerability, and there is power in vulnerability. Sure, I want to be expert in everything, but I’m not. Instead, I’m delivering something valuable to you. You don’t like it? You might move on before I’ve found my A game. That’s OK, I’m on the shortest path to learning my A game. Vulnerability is the power to develop confidence by taking committed action now and learning from the results.
You haven’t convinced me, you say. You want me to be weak to be strong?
I learn faster when I’m doing something. If I do it now, it’s better than later. That takes vulnerability. I’ll feel fear. Courage is feeling fear and going for it anyway. I may fail and feel regret. That’s OK, at least I know. There is power in knowing, and doing. There are things that I know because I did them that I couldn’t have read about or had explained to me.
What kind of things?
Well, I know that starting a bad first draft, I want to stop before I embarrass myself. I know that I have more started articles on Medium right now than published ones. I know that this article was almost abandoned because I didn’t want to make a fool of yourself.
So, you’re the shining example here?
Yes, I’m the fool that wanted to quit. But I didn’t, did I? This article may get zero claps, but I published it, didn’t I? When I had the idea to write about building a confident practice, I started thinking about it because I’d given the advice at least three dozen times in the last three weeks — that’s not an exaggeration. It still felt quaint. Then I thought about the dozens of people I’ve mentored. That’s some real experience. I’ve pushed myself any many other people out of our worst nightmares with this advice. This actually changes lives. Go early. Be first. Choose in.
And going early, being first, choosing in, taking these first vulnerable steps, they’ve paid off in confidence?
Eventually, yes. This confidence comes because I know what works. I know that pushing through an article produces the results I wanted. I know that with some tests, really bad code can become reliable. I know that a broken data model can be examined and fixed. I know that I can empower and inspire people — even dumb people in positions of authority — to come along and collaborate. By pushing through the most difficult parts of my practice, I know I can make things work.
But it doesn’t always work out, does it?
Absolutely not. Still, it’s a situation where good choices sometimes have poor results. I go in and build the best data models I can, say. If a football-captain-turned-executive cuts me off and marginalizes my work (because he too struggled in math), it was still a good model. It was still a good choice to put myself out there and do my best work.
The world is filled with under appreciated good work, but it’s still good work. I’ve got a story by Hemingway that I just can’t get into. Hemingway! The process of writing the story, of facing his demons one more day, meant he would go on to write many more stories. Hemingway is a great example of this, because he was very open about his battle with confidence, his battle with so many things. He talks about this a lot to other writers, which is collected in Ernest Hemingway on Writing. His advice to F. Scott Fitzgerald was:
You have to go on when it is worst and most helpless — there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.
This confidence, that I know what I know and practice what works, means I don’t need someone there to compliment me. It’s nice when people notice good work, but it’s rare to get it. When I’m doing something new, making a large effort, or pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, it would be especially nice to have someone there complimenting me. It doesn’t happen. I don’t count on it. Instead of compliments, I have confidence. I have confidence from doing things rather than dreaming about them or imagining what the end result might be like.
There’s no perfect day, we just have to start doing a thing, putting one foot in front of the other, and figure it out from there. We don’t start with confidence, we start with whatever’s going on, then we work through it enough times that we build the confidence.
Ah, so you’re not just giving vapid advice?
No, this is something to do today. Find something that scares you and do it today. Make it small enough that you finish it and put it out there. By doing that, you’re making confidence.
For every piece I write, every model I start, every project I commit to deliver, I have moments when I think I’m not going to be able to follow through. I get tired, frustrated, or distracted, and that’s no good. Also, I sometimes start comparing myself to other people. That never works either.
OK, I get it already.
Good. Go and do something. We’ve got this.
