The ultimate calibration we make is the attention we pay to our craft versus our interests. Our craft is what solidifies our place in the world and drives much of our contribution to it. Our interests add to our worldliness, general happiness and as I will soon articulate, feed success in our craft. The question I struggle with is, how can I pursue knowledge/interests that are seemingly external to my craft, while becoming the best I can at what I am tasked with doing each day.
First, we must define our craft. This isn’t easy as often we live or aspire to live multi-faceted lives. We might be a marketer, a manager, and an endurance runner. We might spend 100% of our day coding, while aspiring to also write a book. To define our craft, we must think deeply about what we enjoy and which of our actions contribute to the majority of our output.
With this in mind, two models of success are presented to us. One is of the person who is an absolute machine at a single skill – images of superstars like Tiger Woods or Kobe Bryant should come to mind. These people spend all waking hours improving their ability in a single area. The other is of the person who is in the top 25% of a few things but wouldn’t win a gold medal in any one of them. According to people like Marc Andressen, Scott Adams and and Tim Ferriss, being very good (but not the absolute best) in multiple areas makes you rare. It allows you to achieve things that those with a single competency could never fathom. An artist who can’t communicate won’t watch the world be touched by their art. A software developer who doesn’t know how to manage people is preventing new ideas from being added to their product. A writer who only knows how to write won’t have anything to write about.
Of course, this is a generalization. There’s no universal law stating that you can only be 100% at one thing. Kobe Bryant seems to have an artistic and entrepreneurial flare, in addition to his basketball dominance. Nonetheless, given that superstardom in a single area is partly based on genetic ability/luck and that an unbalanced life can be a miserable life, the remainder of this blog post will focus on the person opting to be in the top 25% of approximately three domains.
This broadens the definition of our craft. It also makes our interests more productive; your interest in politics may be the driving force behind your aspiration to run for office. Knowing that we have multiple crafts, we may spend our days bouncing between many interests, while rationalizing to ourselves that each is contributing to a craft.
However, at different points in our life, each of the three things we decide to be in the top 25% in may play an oversized or undersized role in our success. For instance, over my career, I would like to be in the top 25% of software engineers, communicators, and managers/business thinkers. But, over the next month, I will be writing exams for computer science classes and starting a new job as a software engineering intern. Given current demands, I have dedicated nearly all of my focus to increasing my proficiency as a programmer. Maybe in 5 years I will decide to start a company, which will propel me to learn more about management. But, if I don’t focus on becoming a better software engineer right now, starting a company may not be an option in 5 years.
Therefore, the way in which we advance through our careers matters. It will dictate how we should allocate our energy to developing each craft at a given period in time; we should unevenly allocate our energy. This will require stints of total focus on a certain area. As an analogy, a race car driver may drive at an average speed of 150 km/h with a standard deviation of 60 km/h to account for turns and straightaways. We must hone our crafts in response to our environment’s demands in order to advance to the next level.
Back to the question of how to calibrate our time between our crafts versus our interests. The crucial insight given above is not just that we’ll have many crafts but that we’ll dedicate ourselves to these crafts at varying frequencies over our career. Therefore, crafts that aren’t driving much of our current advancement must take a backseat to those that are. This does not mean that pursuing interests related to future crafts should be avoided – pursuing breadth of knowledge is fun and it’s hard to resist an area you hope to one day be accomplished in. But, time spent pursuing these interests should be labelled for what they are, interests. If you must dedicate 10 hours/day to reading and writing news articles to support your current role as a journalist, don’t delude yourself into believing that your recent hour-long Google search on preparing lentil curry was work since you aspire to be in the top 25% of cooks.
Interests must be pursued but they aren’t work. Advance to the next level through your work. Prepare for the next level through your interests.