CAL NEWPORT
Calvin C. Newport was born on, June 23, 1982. He is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. He previously earned his PhD from MIT and his bachelor’s from Dartmouth College. He runs the popular blog, Study Hacks, which decodes patterns of success for both students and graduates. He is the New York Times bestselling author of 7 books, including, ‘A World Without Email’, ‘Digital Minimalism’, and ‘Deep Work’, published in over 35 languages. He currently lives with his wife in Washington, D.C.
“The things that make great work great are rare and valuable. If you want them in your career, you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return.”
How to become rare and valuable?
Start volunteering for challenging projects at work, and start initiating challenging projects at home. Select your projects based on the skills they force you to develop.
When you’ve found a skill you want to develop, use the principles of deliberate practice to develop that skill. Push yourself to the edge of your ability, cycle between comfort and discomfort, and seek immediate feedback and mentorship. These rare and valuable skills are what Cal calls career capital.
Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said
In June 2005, Steve Jobs took the podium at Stanford Stadium to give the commencement speech to Stanford’s graduating class. About a third of the way into the address, Jobs offered the following advice: You’ve got to find what you love. If you haven’t seen it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. Soon after, an unofficial video of the address was posted on YouTube, where it went viral. The comments on these clips homed in on the importance of loving your work, with viewers summarizing their reactions in similar ways: “The most valuable lesson is to find your purpose, follow your passions”.
“Follow your passion” might just be terrible advice. This advice, though true, borders on the tautology.
Jobs’s story generates more questions than it answers. Perhaps the only thing it does make clear is that, at least for Jobs, “follow your passion” was not particularly useful advice.
If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers. But he didn’t follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break — a “small-time” scheme that unexpectedly took off.
The 10,000-Hour Rule
A rule, well-known to performance scientists, describes the amount of practice time required to master a skill. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the concept in his 2008 book ‘Outliers’.
“The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise is ten thousand hours.”
In Outliers, Gladwell pointed to this rule as evidence that great accomplishment is not about natural talent, but instead about being in the right place at the right time to accumulate such a massive amount of practice. The difference in their ability depends on how they used these hours.
In the serious study, Charness concluded, “materials can be deliberately chosen or adapted such that the problems to be solved are at a level that is appropriately challenging.”
Serious study focuses on strenuous activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.
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