I feel like I’m a decent athlete, but my tape study and my meticulous attention to detail are what make me a good ball player. -Richard Sherman
This video feature on Sherman is worth watching, even if you don’t have any interest in football. Sherman acknowledges he’s not the most athletically gifted at his position, but he’s considered maybe the best cornerback in the NFL. And it’s all because of how he prepares. He pursues his work with an obsessive attention to detail. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but thoughtful, strategic, relentless preparation can set you apart because so few, even the most gifted, pursue excellence with such focus.
I’ve written before about my appreciation of John Mayer’s artistry as a musician. I just saw this new documentary, Someday I’ll Fly, about his career and came away impressed. It’s a thorough review of how he got to mastery. Mayer narrates and offers several gems of insight throughout:
“I used to be at home in my bedroom and pretend that I was on stage, and now I’m on stage and I pretend that I’m home in my bedroom.”
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“I want to bring my playing all the way up to the the top of ability…there are some nights my playing goes over my ability. I kind of hit that place where I’m unsure. But then I always find that I get a little further into the craft by doing that.”
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“That craft responds to truth, and you’ve got to stay truthful. No matter how many records you’ve sold or performances you’ve played, you come home, the whirlwind stops and you go back to the craft.”
When he was a teenager Mayer was so obsessed with getting good at playing guitar that his mom had to give him a “guitar curfew”, a time he had to stop playing every night. John Mayer wasn’t born with a gift for guitar. He worked hard to become great.
It’s both comforting and convicting to know that our own levels of mastery are completely up to us. If we want to get really good at something, we only need to be willing to obsess enough to consistently devote quality time and smart effort.
What would your advice be to the 20-year-old version of you, who’s just starting their career?
I wish I had Everything Is A Remix when I was younger. I wish I knew that you can just start copying other people’s stuff and fiddling with it, and putting stuff into it, and just sort of build from there. It’s okay to be primitive. That’s a perfectly fine way to start making things.
I wish the earlier me understood work and practice more. Just the repeated concerted effort to get better at things. I wish I didn’t have the notions of talent and genius I had back then. I thought, “Oh, these other people, they just have something that I don’t have.” When really, they are just people who work more.
I wish I understood work. Work is the key to anything you want to do. If you want to play the guitar—anybody can learn to play the fucking guitar—you can be good at it. Maybe you won’t get to be a genius but you could be good.
You can be good enough to write good songs or make a good film or whatever. There’s no such thing as not having enough talent to get to that level. I mean, persistence is talent, really. Just sticking with it. Talent is not stopping.
I keep coming across this simultaneously reassuring and frightening notion that genuine talent is not based on innate ability. We’ve got no excuse for not being great. It’s all about effort and persistence and thoughtful, incremental improvement. Sure, some people have genetic advantages, but the hard work and clear focus of someone of average ability can overtake the half-hearted efforts of a genius slacker.
“If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.
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[O]ne should have a system instead of a goal. The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavours. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.
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Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction …”
This is great insight. Instead of aiming for some goal out there, arbitrary as most goals are, aim instead to be the kind of person and do the kinds of things that someone who achieves those goals would be and do. And then don’t obsess on the goals. Just do the work and live the life. Act as if you are who you want to be.
A daily or weekly routine, a consistent application of even small habits, will transform our lives more effectively than striving for some overwhelmingly large goal.
“If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. … If you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can’t help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile every day for doing so. And you’ll be working at it almost to the exclusion of personal hygiene, and your friends are knocking on your door, saying, ‘Don’t you need a vacation?!,’ and you don’t even know what the word ‘vacation’ means because what you’re doing is what you want to do and a vacation from that is anything but a vacation — that’s the state of mind of somebody who’s doing what others might call visionary and brilliant.” -Neil DeGrasse Tyson
“Not enough love.” That was the response from Frank Chimero’s design professor after looking through some of his work.
“My work was flat, because it was missing the spark that comes from creating something you believe in for someone you care about. This is the source of the highest craft, because an affection for the audience produces the care necessary to make the work well.”
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“The work has enough love when enthusiasm transfers from the maker to the audience and bonds them.”
This is from Chimero’s excellent book, The Shape of Design. The passage above reminds me of Tolstoy’s claim that “Art is infection.” An artist, a teacher, a maker of any sort, has an idea or feeling and wants to share it. It’s effective, it’s art, when the audience gets that very same feeling or sees that idea just as the maker did.
You’ve got to care enough about your work and those you serve – an audience, a customer, a student – that you fill your work with all the love you can, with care and attention to detail and enthusiasm.
When I write, I often imagine my audience to be my young daughters reading this many years from now, maybe even after I’m gone. Don’t you know that informs my efforts. When I lose sight of my ultimate audience, it’s easy to lapse into just going through the motions. Then flatness abounds.
What if we examined all our work in this light? What gift can we offer to our audiences? Our colleagues or customers? Our families? Are we putting enough love into our labors?
Here’s your reminder as you prepare to begin another week. Go, be awesome.
I’ve posted previously about the Cal Newport book whose title was inspired by this Steve Martin quote. And you really ought to do yourself a favor and listen to Martin’s great audiobook, which I’ve raved about before.
I would rather receive or send an email about a task than receive or make a phone call or go to a meeting about a task. Email allows you to respond in your own time. A phone call does not. Email allows a person to assess and look into something, to build a potentially thoughtful, worthwhile gap between the stimulus and the response. Problems certainly arise when people don’t utilize that gap and instead respond thoughtlessly or too hastily. But email respects the time and attention of others better than conventional communication methods.
Most people need a couple of hours of uninterrupted time to get into a flow of productive work. Phone calls, especially, but meetings, too, have a skewed sense of urgency that does not respect the time and need for the deep focus of others. Certainly, some things have to be talked out or are best handled in person. But I appreciate someone who emails asking me to suggest a day and time when a call or face-to-face would be convenient. I have even set my phone’s voicemail message to encourage the caller to send an email instead of leaving a voicemail if possible.
Yes, email can be overwhelming if your email inbox is your de facto task list, especially if you don’t tend to your inbox consistently. But I’m an inbox zero guy. I process through my inbox every day and empty it almost every time I open my email app.
That doesn’t mean I respond to every email, and it doesn’t mean I respond quickly to every message. I just do triage. I decide which emails need a response from me and which can be deleted or archived. If an email needs a response, I do it right away if it will take less than a couple of minutes. If it will require more thought and take longer than two minutes, I file it in an “Action” folder in my Mail app for review at another time. Also, I only open my email app two or three times each day, ideally.
A good email should have a clear subject line, nothing cryptic, and the body of the email should be as short as possible. You’re more likely to get effective responses if you keep your emails clear, direct, and simple. Don’t cc unnecessarily, and there are very few cases where you need to bcc.
Tone is always important. Some people allow the impersonal nature of email or social media to enable bad manners. Be impeccable with your words, always. Read over everything you send or publish to check for errors, of course, but also to check your tone. Imagine anything you send being published for all to see. Don’t email anything you would regret becoming public.
Email is just a tool, but used effectively it can help you work smarter and better.
My email inbox just minutes before this post was published
Excellent Journey 