Practice Makes Perfect
February 12, 2010
A year or so ago I was at a wedding, and a very successful doctor started talking to me. I was very impressed with this doctor and already knew of him through several people before our meeting. He was involved in some fascinating and cutting-edge research 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. They provide me with an incredible education. I wish everyone was committed to what they do.
In speaking to this doctor, however, I realized despite his incredible knowledge of 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 who 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 this is the wrong thing to do. But when you are an expert in something, it is not always in your best interest to switch jobs completely.
I spent many hours of my career going to various law firms and meeting with successful attorneys. 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 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 was 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 many people who’ve lost all 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 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, or own auto repair shops. Of course they lost their shirts! None of them had expertise in the stock market.
The point I am trying to make is 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. 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 describing 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.”
I get very concerned when I think about people vacillating back and forth between various skill paths. Instead of choosing to do one thing, so many people spend their careers floating from job to job – each one 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 thing anyone can do is ensure they choose something and then focus on it completely. If you continue to change your mind, 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 you would not expect.
When I was an asphalt contractor, I knew a man who’d built a giant company putting hot tar in the cracks in roads all over Michigan. I know of another man who became very wealthy building pallets for the automotive industry. In college admissions, people with stand-out interests always do the best. I remember a high school teacher who talked about his students who’d gone to schools like Yale and Harvard, and how those students all had incredibly focused interests. Some were interested in bug collecting, another liked translating Japanese poetry, etc. The world rewards people with specialized interests who nurture that interest and continue to get better at those interests year after year.
One of the most unusual things I’ve witnessed is 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 your capabilities? How much do you think you can achieve? The sky is the limit if you focus and continue to improve 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 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 very quickly get a sense after looking at an attorney’s resume of how long it is likely to take for the person to get a job, and where. The most important factor determining an attorney’s future employability is his or her focus, beyond where they went to law school, their previous employer, or specialty. 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 commit). If the person has flirted 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 people 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 level of commitment legal employers look for is the same as in other professions. 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 to something over the long term.
You Are Never Too Good to Stop Learning
April 19, 2009
I once read an article inWired magazine about a guy who had developed an airplane with foldable wings that you can tow behind a car. It was a long article, and I was very interested in this airplane because at one point in my life I was studying to be a pilot. As I read the article I realized that this particular guy was having a ton of fun. He was trying to develop something that would revolutionize aviation and was really trying to change the world with his airplane. It was an exciting article, and I had read previous articles about this guy and his airplane at least one or two times before in other magazines. Apparently the airplane, called “The Icon,” would be going into production very shortly and selling for $139,000. This new airplane was predicted to change aviation for private pilots and make the skies accessible to the world.
When I read this particular article, however, something completely amazing happened. I realized that I knew the guy. In fact, I had spent a couple of days with him only three or four years previously when I had decided to pursue a master’s degree at Stanford Business School. I had gone up and enrolled in Stanford Business School and met him during a weekend orientation for new students. We had actually become friends and spent a couple of days together. At the time he was older than me, around 38, and I was in my mid-30s. Incredibly, in the few months I had been reading about this airplane and this guy, I had not realized it was him.
What You Will Learn
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After picking out a dorm room, getting various textbooks from the school, and putting down a deposit on my tuition, I decided that I was no longer interested in going to business school. I thought that there was nothing the school could teach me that I did not already know about business, and that the businesses I was running would suffer too much if I went away to school.
How arrogant that was of me at the time.
Imagine believing that you are too old and know too much. Imagine how limiting this can be. You need to be constantly learning and stretching yourself. In addition, you need to take advantage of every opportunity to learn that ever presents itself to you. Had I gone to Stanford Business School, I realized I might be doing something with the guy I met up there. Who knows what could have happened?
Every time I look up in the sky and see an airplane flying by, I will remember the value of education and the things you can do with it. You can develop airplanes or do tons of other things that will literally change your life when you pursue education with vigor. Education is about the most important thing you can do with your time. Another thing about education is that it does not matter how old you are. You can get an education at any time. Regardless of your age, if you keep learning it is going to change you. There is simply nothing more important than education. The guy who developed the airplane and was now marketing it was 38 at the time he enrolled in business school. It is never too late to pursue your dreams.
Most people, at some point in their lives, decide that they have learned enough. This is a huge mistake. There is so much power in knowledge. Knowledge can empower you to become better, faster, and stronger in everything you do. It is astonishing to me that so many people go through their lives making the same mistakes over and over and over again. Many of these mistakes they could simply fix if they took the time to get some education and learn more about themselves. So many people fail to reach their full potential because they do not allow themselves to get the education they should.
There is more to education than just going to school, however. Education is also about making sure that you are continually learning and never stop learning. There are tons of books out there that you can read about your profession and what you do specifically that will allow you to get better and better at everything you are doing. You should be working in a job that you are continually interested in learning more about. The more you learn about your job and how to get better at it, the better you will do in your career. Regardless of whether you are in sales, management, or the law, the more you know about your profession, the better you are going to do.
One of my favorite copywriters in the world is a guy named Joe Sugarman. I really like Joe Sugarman because he is so exceptionally gifted at copywriting. His copywriting is all based on educating consumers about why they should buy a given product that he sells.
Sugarman is most famous for selling items such as BluBlocker sunglasses. Sugarman also owns a good portion of the islands of Maui and Kauai and the newspaper in Maui. Sugarman has written several books which include step-by-step instructions to teach people exactly what they need to do in order to write like him. The books are exceptional, and people who follow the advice in the books can do very well if they are also copywriters.
I find it incredible that someone can make literally hundreds of millions of dollars by writing very good ads like Sugarman. Sugarman does not even work all that hard. He finds a product he likes and thinks about the product in an unconventional way that educates the consumer by creating an analogy to something more significant than the product. Then, he writes an advertisement in a few hours and makes sure that he has a number set up for ordering and someplace that will ship the product to people. It is a bit more complex that that; however, this is the gist of it.
I have met Sugarman on several occasions, and he is relaxed and incredibly eager to teach people about what he does. This guy probably makes more money than the presidents of General Motors, IBM, and Boeing combined. While the main goal of no life should be purely financial (the goal of Sugarman’s life is not financial), the point is that there are rules that people can learn and easily follow that can drastically change and improve their careers.
Throughout the years I have employed probably at least 100 writers in our offices in Los Angeles. I am in the career business and not the writing business; however, I have always admired Sugarman. Whenever I have encountered a writer in our company who has promise, I have gone out and purchased for them all of the books by Sugarman I can find. I have spent $200+ doing this for some of my favorite writers. I tell the writers, “You are so lucky to have this talent. Read these books and study them. Let me tell you about what this guy, Joe Sugarman, has been able to do with the same ability. If you get really good at this, you can have the same sort of career he has had. In the interim, you can make a hell of a lot of money here if you learn all about this stuff.”
A lot of the people I have given these books to have been maybe in their early 50s. Others have been in their mid-20s, having just completed degrees at schools like Harvard. Others have been people who have come to our company from successful careers in other sorts of companies, like working in copywriting for major department store chains writing weekly newspaper ads.
The most depressing thing has happened with the education I have handed to these people. Almost all of the people I have given these books to have never opened them a crack. They do not read these books. I know this because I have seen the books on their desks month after month pristine and unopened. To me, this is amazing. If I were a writer, I would want to do everything possible within my power to dramatically increase my income and make sure that I was the best I could be (if I could own half the islands of Hawaii as well, that would not be so bad).
There are people out there who have whatever job you are doing figured out. All you need to do is find their book or learn about whatever they are doing. Once you know what they are doing, you can step up and learn from them as well. It is that easy to get good at something. There is not a lot you need to do to get better and better at your job.
There is another thing that is really important to understand about seeking out knowledge: the more you have, the more people will seek you out. People want to hire and do business with people who are knowledgeable about what they are doing and are continuously studying it. That is why people hire you and do not do the work themselves. That is why I hired copywriters and did not do the work myself. People are comforted by people who have taken the time to understand what they are doing and are constantly learning.
Think about how you would react in the following situations if you were the boss:
In the first situation, you interview someone for a job in your company and the person comes in and tells you they are very good at what they do. They do not provide you any reasons for you to really believe them, but they are pretty adamant about being really good at this type of work.
The second situation involves a person who comes in and, in addition to telling you they are really good at what they do, starts discussing all sorts of books they have recently put together about their profession and new developments in their profession. They tell you about seminars they have attended and developments in your field.
I would always hire the second person, and I think you would as well. We are comforted knowing that a person cares about what they are doing and has educated themselves about it. The more we believe someone knows, and the more seriously we believe they take their job, the more we will want to work with them. This is just human nature.
It should be this way with you, too. Education is not just a matter of going to school and being done with it. Education needs to be a process of continually educating yourself, continually growing, and continually improving. The more you are constantly pushing yourself, the more you will grow.
In some respects I feel that many workplaces are sort of like zombie movies. People report to work each day, leave at the end of the day, and never seek to improve themselves. You need to constantly and consistently continue educating yourself about what you do. Never stop educating yourself. The more you learn, the more profound your ultimate experience will be and the greater the career and life you experience will be.
One of the best examples of the power of education is the career of Claude Hopkins, one of the greatest marketing strategists of all time. In 1919, Schlitz Beer of Milwaukee had mediocre sales compared to other nationally-marketed beers. Claude Hopkins was hired and brought in from New York to try to improve Schlitz’s sales. The first thing Hopkins did was try to learn everything he could about beer. He took a class to understand how beer was made, and he toured the facilities and learned everything he could.
One of the first things that Hopkins discovered was that even though Schlitz was right on a Great Lake, they had dug a 4,000-foot deep well because they wanted the purest water possible. In addition, they showed Hopkins a mother yeast cell that they had made that was the product of 2,000+ experiments they had done because they wanted to ensure the beer had a certain taste. Then they showed him how the beer bottles were cleaned at least 10 times for purity before the beer was bottled. They also showed him several rooms with three-foot thick glass where the beer was condensed and re-condensed to ensure it was as pure as possible.
When Hopkins studied all of this, he said, “My God, you should be telling everyone everything you do in order to make your beer so pure.”
“Well, every beer does this. It’s not just our beer, but every beer,” the Schlitz people told Hopkins.
“Yes, but the first brewer who tells the public about this will have a huge advantage,” Hopkins said. Within six months of promoting this aspect of how they made beer, Schlitz went to number one in terms of its sales.
Hopkins understood the value of education and also the value of educating the public. You, too, need to really understand the value of education and what it can mean in your life. You need to ensure that you are constantly educating yourself so you can improve. The worst thing you can do with your career and your life is stop learning. Get books, tapes, and whatever else you can and apply these to your work. This one piece of advice could literally change your career and life forever.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.