Day 6: Focus on levelling up your skills!
We spent a big part of today with a couple of friends who all knew each other. At some point past the usual warm up talk, we got to the meaningful topic of skills. Us mostly being fresh graduates, it felt natural to dive into a discussion about how skills fit into our fledging work lives.
Cal Newport published a book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You in 2012 that had a lot to contribute to this conversation (despite its gimmicky title). He is a fervent proponent for finding your passion through good work, not doing good work once you find your passion.
One of his best arguments in the book in my opinion, which I told my friends today, is that you should focus on getting good at a skill because that’s the best way to establish a strong and meaningful career. He named his book after a quote by Steve Martin, which I think is quite apt in describing the way we — young fresh graduates — should approach the start of our careers:
“If somebody’s thinking, ‘How can I be really good?’ people are going to come to you.” — Steve Martin
That makes sense to me. But it’s also one of the hardest things to make yourself do as a fresh graduate, having just emerged from the extremely long system of education (from age 6 to 24!). Just out of school with our first breath of working-world air, it’s difficult to justify going back to ‘school mode’. But unless you’ve gotten quite good at something during school, like writing VR software or baking delicious cakes that look like art, keeping the apprentice’s hat on is exactly what we have to do to instead of demanding for a remote working arrangement from your boss just because you are a university graduate who topped your cohort, or something similarly outrageous.
Those good things, I believe as Cal Newport suggests, will come when people see that you’re good at what you do and need you to stay. And when you’re finally at that position, which shouldn’t take as long as most of us imagine, you will feel good about yourself (ie. feel useful and have significance) while having an enviable work arrangement.
There are of course prerequisites to the skills that can produce such admirable results:
- The skill must align with a demand in the market that people are willing to pay for. In other words, it must be a sellable skill.
- It’s not a commonly possessed skill. The only exception is if you’re exceptionally good, like top five percent of your industry good.
As we divulged more of our fears over wine, I realised that it’s quite commonplace for people at our stage in life to be overwhelmed, even paralysed, by the innumerable possibilities that lay before us. My friend lamented how she thinks she might be good at occupational therapy, or maybe being a barista. Or this… and that… and maybe that other thing…
At that point, I slipped in a question that I hoped would frame the rest of our conversation: “How would you ever know whether you’re good at any of those?” She took a while to think about that one.
The truth is, and I think she knew this, you will never know unless you try.
In this sense every potential job that we think of but never try is like a box with a lock — you’ll never know what’s inside it until you pry it open. But the difficult truth is that for most of us, we have the keys in our pockets. We just have to open it.
I don’t think we’re afraid that what’s inside the box might hurt us. Rather, I think we’re just scared off by the prospect of being completely wrong of what’s inside, and never put the key into the hole in the first place. So the strategy we default to is to go ‘with the flow’, to take up a job as soon as possible even if it’s a job that we have little interest in getting good at in the first place.
I thought out loud and suggested that perhaps what we ought to do is to begin by naming a few jobs that we think we are interested in or might potentially be able to excel at. From that list, we can strike out those that don’t pay well enough (this is of course very subjective), like being a painter or professional gamer. (The reality remains that some jobs aren’t plugged into the global economy, and can’t pay well.) The last step is the simplest but somehow also the toughest: opening each box one at a time to see what’s really inside, starting from the one we feel most strongly towards.
Bias towards action
Having had two glasses of wine then, I was eager for a conclusion and came up with one:
The best thing any person who just (finally) graduated can do is to learn to have a bias towards action.
So for us to go down a path that brings us meaning and moments of transcendent joy, we have to start doing things. Do as many things as possible, and for only as long as is needed to get a good sense of how every aspect related to it feels. If you don’t hate it, that itself would already constitute a good start. And if it fulfils the two prerequisites of “a skill that pays” and “not so common”, there’s a good chance that you’ve stumbled on your future passion and you should therefore stick to it for a while.
Just when I finished talking, I suddenly remembered two things that Cal Newport said about the process of becoming successful and happy at work: ‘deliberate practice’ and the ‘adjacent possible’.
Deliberate practice is the act of forcing yourself into executing an aspect of the skill that remains challenging to you. For a motorcycle racer that might be bending into a deep left bank instead of the right which might feel more natural. For a web developer it might be learning how to use JavaScript ‘promises’ instead of multiple nested callbacks. The point is that the more often you engage in deliberate practice, the quicker you will build up your repository of rare and valuable (sub)skills.
The ‘adjacent possible’ is a term used to refer to the imaginative space just beyond the cutting edge of any industry. It’s the unexplored territories that is the exclusive playground of those who have worked their way to the edges. Here, Cal reckons that you’ll have a good chance of finding a big mission to dedicate your life’s work to. But to get there you first need to be great at something, and have enough noticeable work to show for.
Perhaps the best thing we can do now is to get a job that requires a particular skill that sounds interesting, and focus on getting better at that skill each day through deliberate practice. Leave the job only when it doesn’t have room for you to do good work that hones your skills anymore, and find another. I imagine that if anyone has the fortitude to do this for 2–3 years, that person will get close to, if not be at the cutting edge of her chosen industry.
There, they just can’t ignore you anymore.
This post is part of my 30-day commitment to write daily about my journey learning something technical everyday. You can see my other posts at Getting Technical.
