Scott Adams describe two kinds of people -- those who get better by practice, and those who get better with experience.
Those in the former category must do a task repeatedly. Ideally this task would have some productive output (shoot a basketball for an NBA player, play the piano for a concert pianist, etc.). Not everyone is made for practice and view a repetitive task with no short-term gains as a form of torture. These people learn best from an ever-changing set of tasks.
I definitely fall into the experience-focused category. I force myself to practice the piano, but have never been stable. I even once fell asleep while practicing Fantasie Impromptu Opus 66. I don't have the attention span for repetitive tasks.
Okay, so I'm an experiential learner. Now what.
Scott Adams also said that as a soft rule to achieving success, every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. The idea is that you can raise your market value by being merely good--not extraordinary--at more than one skill.
"Doubling your odds" isn't an accurate way to think of skill building; rather, its more of a guideline that steers behavior in the right direction.
In Silicon Valley, everyone says to do one thing well. If you are pro at machine learning, you can go work on some algorithms at Google. If you build a product that does its task flawlessly, you might have a winning company. We are trained to think that following a path of doing one thing better than 99% of people is the winning path.
However, sometimes quantity beats quality. Most successful people aren't where they are because they excelled at one thing. They usually had a strength or two, and several okay skills. Maybe they were a great coder, but also an okay presenter to woo those early investors. Maybe they are a great salesman, but with an eye for product and can reimagine what solution might be better for a customer instead of pushing an existing item.
People offer me jobs all the time, and often ask me what are the skills I'm best at. I usually reply, to their disappointment, with "Nothing." I'm not great at anything. But I can design apps that don't suck. I can hack together pretty much anything without too many fatal bugs. I can pitch to investors without sounding like a complete idiot. I can run 5-6 miles, but I can't run a marathon. I can socialize with people well enough, but am definitely not the most interesting guy in the room. I can go door to door and sell an idea, but I may not give the best pitch in the world. I know a little about a lot of industries, but a lot about none. For an entrepreneurial career, I think I'm on the right track.
I'm not looking to make a resume that'd land me a textbook high-paying engineering job. I'm not looking for mastery. I want a little bit of everything.
Those in the former category must do a task repeatedly. Ideally this task would have some productive output (shoot a basketball for an NBA player, play the piano for a concert pianist, etc.). Not everyone is made for practice and view a repetitive task with no short-term gains as a form of torture. These people learn best from an ever-changing set of tasks.
I definitely fall into the experience-focused category. I force myself to practice the piano, but have never been stable. I even once fell asleep while practicing Fantasie Impromptu Opus 66. I don't have the attention span for repetitive tasks.
Okay, so I'm an experiential learner. Now what.
Scott Adams also said that as a soft rule to achieving success, every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. The idea is that you can raise your market value by being merely good--not extraordinary--at more than one skill.
"Doubling your odds" isn't an accurate way to think of skill building; rather, its more of a guideline that steers behavior in the right direction.
In Silicon Valley, everyone says to do one thing well. If you are pro at machine learning, you can go work on some algorithms at Google. If you build a product that does its task flawlessly, you might have a winning company. We are trained to think that following a path of doing one thing better than 99% of people is the winning path.
However, sometimes quantity beats quality. Most successful people aren't where they are because they excelled at one thing. They usually had a strength or two, and several okay skills. Maybe they were a great coder, but also an okay presenter to woo those early investors. Maybe they are a great salesman, but with an eye for product and can reimagine what solution might be better for a customer instead of pushing an existing item.
People offer me jobs all the time, and often ask me what are the skills I'm best at. I usually reply, to their disappointment, with "Nothing." I'm not great at anything. But I can design apps that don't suck. I can hack together pretty much anything without too many fatal bugs. I can pitch to investors without sounding like a complete idiot. I can run 5-6 miles, but I can't run a marathon. I can socialize with people well enough, but am definitely not the most interesting guy in the room. I can go door to door and sell an idea, but I may not give the best pitch in the world. I know a little about a lot of industries, but a lot about none. For an entrepreneurial career, I think I'm on the right track.
I'm not looking to make a resume that'd land me a textbook high-paying engineering job. I'm not looking for mastery. I want a little bit of everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment