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Video Description
A career can be both deeply satisfying and actually pay the bills — but three modern habits get in the way. This lecture from Academy of Ideas names them: no purpose, laziness wrapped in procrastination, and attention spans that dissolve at the first ping. Against each it prescribes a fix — choose a mission, show up daily in the physical space of your work, and train single-task focus in short, intense sessions. Drawing on Kotler, Pressfield, and Greene, it shows how one focused hour a day compounds into whole careers. You don’t need to quit everything first; start nights and weekends, and let the craft grow.
Full Video Transcript
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Consistently take part in challenging but intrinsically rewarding activities in this video
We are going to explore how we can achieve the uncommon success of getting it right in both these areas
We are going to examine in other words how we can cultivate an intrinsically rewarding and
financially lucrative career
What keeps this form of success?
Uncommon are three main factors or what can be called the defining weaknesses of our generation
The first of these weaknesses is a lack of purpose.
Most people drift through life and fail to harness the power of effective goal-setting.
The second weakness is a proclivity for laziness and an inability to overcome procrastination,
perfectionism, self-doubt, and complacency.
And the third weakness is our generation’s ever-shrinking attention spans
and the tendency to distraction.
If we counteract these weaknesses, we will be one of the few for whom
uncommon success is destiny. The first step toward uncommon success, therefore, is to counteract the
first generational weakness by setting some goals. For goals, by giving us something to aim at,
act as the lodestones on the path to uncommon success. Without some goal and some effort to
reach it, no man can live, said Fyodor Dostoevsky. In his book The Art of Impossible, A Peak
performance primer, Steven Kotler suggests that to achieve great things, we need three
types of goals. Firstly, we need an overarching purpose to our life. This is the goal of a
lifetime. But as we are striving for uncommon success, our purpose must meet two criteria.
Firstly, the activities that lead to its accomplishment must be intrinsically rewarding.
And secondly, it must offer the potential for financial rewards. If our choice does
not meet the first criteria, we will succumb to inertia at the first sign of difficulty,
and if it does not meet the second criteria, it can only ever remain a hobby. For some of us,
choosing a purpose is easy as we know exactly what our calling is, but for others, exploration
and experimentation in various fields is necessary to discover what we like and what we are good at.
After discovering a purpose, the next step is to break it down to the scale of what Kotler,
in The Art of Impossible calls high hard goals. High hard goals are the major accomplishments
required to move us in the direction of our purpose. If, for example, our purpose is to
become a successful musician, a high hard goal would be to produce an album. In setting these
goals, we want them to be big enough to be motivating, but not so big that we set ourselves
up for inevitable failure. For as Nietzsche warned, the talent of many a man appears less than it is
because he always sets himself two great tasks.
With a realistic but ambitious goal,
our next step is to break it down into the bite-sized pieces Kotler calls clear goals.
Clear goals give direction to our day-to-day life, and as Kotler explains,
clear goals are all the tiny, daily steps it takes to accomplish our mission.
They exist over much smaller timescales.
Becoming a great writer is a life’s purpose.
Writing a novel is the next level down.
A high, hard goal that could take years to complete.
Writing 500 words between 8am and 10am.
Now, that’s a clear goal.
With a set of clear goals, the next step is to put in the consistent day-to-day work that is needed to execute on these goals.
Towards this end, we must counteract the second of our generation’s great weaknesses.
Namely, the tendency to succumb to laziness and to be thwarted by what the author Stephen
Pressfield calls the force of resistance.
What is resistance?
Resistance, explains Pressfield, is our tendency to yield to procrastination, self-doubt, fear,
impatience, self-inflation, self-denigration, distraction, laziness, arrogance, complacency,
and perfectionism.
Defeat resistance, and our chance of uncommon success is high.
Allow resistance to defeat us, and we are destined to remain trapped in mediocrity.
So how is resistance defeated?
The title of Pressfield’s 2022 book states the solution clearly.
To defeat resistance, we should
Put our ass where our heart wants to be.
We should, in other words, locate ourselves, day in and day out,
in the physical location where our work gets done.
If a writer, this means every day we sit at our desk.
If a musician, at our instruments, or if a web entrepreneur, at our computer.
In addition to locating ourselves in the physical place of our work,
we also need to place our hands on our tools,
be it picking up our pencil or guitar, or placing our fingers on a keyboard.
For as the cognitive scientist and author Guy Claxton explains in his book Intelligence in the Flesh,
We have this inbuilt tendency to lock our attention on to objects that are in or near our hands and
It is hard for us to shift our attention away from such objects to something else
Occupying the space where our work gets done and gripping our tools
Only requires moving our muscles and so can be accomplished by all but the laziest among us
But when we place ourselves in this physical location with tool in hand
We greatly increase the chance that we will do some work and so defeat resistance
When I sit down to write in the morning, writes Pressfield
I literally have no expectations for myself or for the day’s work
My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys
I don’t judge myself on quality
I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity
The only questions I ask are
Did I show up?
Did I try my best?
If I’ve done that
then I’ve put my butt where my heart wants to be. I can’t ask anything of myself more than that.
Defeating resistance is furthered by committing to our purpose mentally and emotionally. This means
to think of ourselves as the artist, writer, entrepreneur, or athlete we wish to become.
For as the poet William Blake wrote, as a man is, so he sees. Integrating our life’s purpose into
our self-concept will lead to a new way of attending to the world. We will notice inspirations
and ideas for our work that otherwise would have escaped our attention. And these inspirations can
be a motivating force to help keep us consistent in our efforts. Attention changes the world,
writes Ian McGilchrist. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find
then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future.
One form of attending to the world that is essential for uncommon success is distraction-free concentration.
And this leads us to the third weakness we must counteract, namely, a short attention span.
We need to learn how to fully engage in our work by focusing on single tasks for extended periods of time.
Those who cultivate this skill produce a greater quality and quantity of output.
Or as the author Robert Greene writes in his book Mastery,
It is better to dedicate two or three hours of intense focus to a skill
than to spend eight hours of diffused concentration on it.
You want to be as immediately present to what you are doing as possible.
One way to improve our ability to focus is to dramatically decrease the use of smartphones and social media.
It is well established that these technologies are addictive,
a prime source of distraction and that extended use of them significantly diminishes our ability to concentrate.
And as Oliver Berkman explains in 4,000 Weeks,
notifications and the addictive pull of endless feeds of video, pictures and text.
It is much easier to remain in a state of distraction-free concentration while doing our work.
If we find our attention span is short, we can exercise this mental muscle by devoting 15 to 20 minutes sessions
focused on a single task and then gradually increase the length of these sessions.
Performance psychologists, writes Cal Newport, have extensively studied how long distraction-free focus can be sustained by an individual in a given day.
In their seminal paper on deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson and his collaborators survey these studies.
They note that for someone new to such practice, an hour a day is a reasonable limit.
For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.
If we reach these upper limits of distraction-free focus, we will possess a rare and valuable skill.
If we put this skill to work in executing on our goals, uncommon success will be within our grasp.
But an important question remains. Should we quit our day job and fully devote ourselves
to the pursuit of uncommon success? Or should we adopt what is called the hobbyist approach,
and initially pursue our calling in our spare time, and wait until the financial success
becomes more certain to quit our job.
While there are costs and benefits to both approaches, the hobbyist approach may be more
realistic.
For if we quit our job immediately, unless we have deep pockets, we place a deadline
on our ability to pursue a calling.
Once we run out of money, our energy will have to shift to finding a new job, and this
may lead us to cut corners and make poor choices in the need to attain quick financial rewards.
For this reason, many who have attained uncommon success recommend the hobbyist approach.
Or as Kotler writes,
I was a bartender for the first decade of my writing career, which allowed me the time
to develop my craft without the terror of having to pay my bills off the results.
This was critical to my success.
This is also why Tim Ferriss tells entrepreneurs to start out with a hobbyist approach to their
first start-up, nights and weekends, curiosity into passion, passion into purpose, and purpose
into patient profit, that’s the safest way to play this game.
The cumulative effects of pursuing a purpose in this hobby-like manner can be immense,
for as Pressfield writes,
1 hour a day is 7 hours a week, 30 hours a month, 365 hours a year, 360 hours is 9 40
weeks. 9 40-hour weeks is a novel. It’s two screenplays, maybe three. In 10 years, that’s
10 novels or 20 movie scripts. You can be a full-time writer one hour a day. So, should we
make the effort of finding a purpose, setting goals that move us in its direction, fighting
resistance and cultivating the focus that leads to uncommon success? Or should we just remain on
the safe and easy path of a mediocre and boring 9-to-5 job. In answering this question, we should
recognize that for some people, this is not merely a question of an easy life versus one of risk and
hard work. For some, this is a question of sickness versus health, or even life versus death. For as
Pressfield writes, how many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumors and
neuroses, succumb to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive cell phone use, simply because
we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to.
Source: Academy of Ideas