Practice Makes Perfect

A year or so ago I was at a wedding, and a very successful doctor came up to me and started talking to me. I was very impressed with this doctor and had already learned about him through several people before our meeting.  He was involved in some fascinating and cutting-edge research that I found quite interesting.  I love meeting people who are passionate about their careers because they give off so much energy.  People who achieve amazing and significant success in any profession always have a lot of passion for what they do.  If you allow them to, these people will talk your head off about what they are doing.  They will show you their collection of books about the subject, debate various philosophies about what they are doing, and more.  People who commit to something are the most exciting people in the world.  I love finding people who are committed to something because, when I find them, they have the tendency to talk my head off. This provides me with an incredible education.  I wish everyone was committed to what they do.

In the process of speaking to this doctor, however, I realized that despite incredible knowledge about what he was doing, he was not satisfied.  “What I really want to do is start a business,” he told me.  “That is what being successful is to me.  I have a friend that is doing very well in the manufacturing industry now that steel prices are up.”

The manufacturing industry? Steel?  Why would someone spend years going to medical school and becoming a successful researcher only to go into steel manufacturing?  I am not saying that this is the wrong thing to do.  It is just that when you are an expert in something, it is not always in your best interest to switch jobs completely.

A lot of my career used to involve going around to various law firms and meeting with successful attorneys inside conference rooms.  I would say in at least 25% of these meetings, the attorneys I met did the same thing as this doctor–they started talking about how they wanted to pursue other careers in completely different professions.  One memorable meeting was with a famous attorney in Los Angeles who told me about opening a chain of ice cream parlors on the other side of the country only to see them fail miserably.  Of course they failed miserably!  The man running them is a famous attorney involved in all sorts of high profile cases.  How on earth could he be expected to also run a chain of ice cream parlors?

At this particular point in history, I know a ton of people who have lost all of their money and life savings by investing in real estate.  They bought homes in Arizona, condominiums in Florida, and other properties for little or no money down.  They jumped face first into the real estate game because they believed that they would get rich.  Most of these people taught high school, sold cars, or were accountants, for example.  Of course they lost money in real estate!  This was not their expertise and they knew nothing about it.  I saw the same thing back in 2000 with the Internet stock crash.  Back then, all sorts of people aggressively invested in these stocks and lost their shirts.  These people did things like sell insurance, own auto repair shops, and other similar things.  Of course they lost their shirts!  None of them had expertise in the stock market.

The point I am trying to make to you is that you can never be in two places at the same time.  You need to choose who you want to be and what you want to do.  You can never become an expert in multiple things.  You need to concentrate on doing one thing.

An excellent book I recently read is called “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell.  In this book, Gladwell examines the people who are able to achieve incredible and massive success in various callings.  He looks at people like Bill Gates, the best lawyers in the United States, chess grandmasters, Mozart, Steve Jobs, the Beatles, professional hockey players, and others.  Gladwell cites study after study that describe the fact that people do not get really good at anything, at a world class level, until they have been doing it at least 10,000 hours.  According to Gladwell:

The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a 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: ten thousand hours.

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert–in anything,” writes neurologist David Levitin.  “In study after study, of composers, of basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.  Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do.  But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time.  It seems it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

When I think about so many peoples’ careers and what they end up spending their time doing, I get very concerned when I think about people vacillating in and out of various skill paths.  Instead of choosing to do simply one thing, so many people spend their careers floating from job to job–each job different than the one before and requiring a completely different set of skills.  There is nothing wrong with changing careers, of course, but the most important think anyone can do is ensure they choose something and then focus on it completely.  If you continue to vacillate between what you want to do, then you will never develop true mastery.

One of the most amazing things I have seen in my life is people who become incredibly happy, successful, and rich by seeking out and doing simple jobs to which they have committed.  The universe rewards commitment.  Warren Buffet has become incredibly rich committing to one form of investing.  Some people make their fortunes doing simple things that you would not expect.  When I was an asphalt contractor, I knew a guy that had built a giant company putting hot tar in the cracks in roads all over Michigan.  I know of another guy who become massively wealthy building pallets for the automotive industry.  In college admissions, people with stand-out interests always do the best.  I remember a teacher of mine in high school who talked about the students of his who had gone to schools like Yale and Harvard, and how these students all had incredibly focused interests.  Some were interested in bug collecting, another liked translating Japanese poetry, etc.  The world awards people with specialized interests who nurture that interest and continue to get better and better at these interests year after year.

One of the most unusual things I have witnessed in my life is the fact that most people are flirting with life and their careers.  Instead of committing to a career and something, these people continue to dissipate their energies in many different directions.  As a consequence, they never achieve anything near what they are capable of achieving.  What are you capable of?  How much do you think you can achieve?  The sky is literally the limit if you focus and continue to get better and better at something.

Why do I call focus “a law of the universe”?  In the family unit, marriages, children and so forth typically only occur when two people decide to commit to one another and get married. People choose to focus on one another.  This is a rule in virtually every culture in the world.  It is almost as if the rule is saying that life cannot begin until two people choose to focus.  In your life, your career will never really begin until you choose to focus.

As a legal recruiter, I can get a sense very quickly after looking at an attorney’s resume of where they will be likely to get a job and, also, how long it is likely to take for the person to get a job.  Beyond anything–whether it is the person’s law school, their previous employer, or specialty–the most important determinant of an attorney’s future employability is how focused the person looks.  If the person has had several jobs in a short period of time, then employers will stay away (they know the person is unlikely to stay with them either and commit).  If the person has flirted around with other jobs in addition to practicing law, a smart employer will stay away.  Employers are looking for commitment, and they want to make sure that people who are accepting jobs with them are going to be committed to their company.  Employers want their employees to use their commitment to help the company grow.  The factors legal employers look for in terms of commitment are the same ones they look for in other professions as well.  People want to hire people who are likely to do a job long-term.

Your life and career will change when you learn to commit and do something over the long term.