Turning Pro

Ryan wrote about this today:

Another way to get your narrative fix: Riding in the back of a cab or a towncar on the way into Manhattan. You come over the Williamsburg or the Brooklyn Bridge and you see the whole island laid on your right. If you lay back in the seat just perfect and stare out the window, the city, it seems, awaits your arrival.

A few hours earlier you were somewhere else – in another state, on a plane, over the middle of the ocean – but now you’re here and the timing, well, it couldn’t have been any better. You could broke or paid on business and the feeling is the same. That the epicenter of the world is open to you, that you matter there.

What’s important to remember is this sensation is meaningless. Or rather, it projects no new meaning onto you as a person. You should enjoy it. It is, no doubt, a rare and special feeling. Yet it is one of these agnostic narrative events into which you personally figure at such a minuscule percentage that is essentially exactly the same for everyone else.

So take it for what it is but don’t take it to heart.

Years ago, I used to get this exact feeling living in Chicago, driving into the city via Lake Shore Drive. You’d have the water on one side, the monolithic Hancock center towering over everything, and you’d get this feeling like it was all yours for the taking.

That feeling quickly evaporated upon reaching my cubicle, so take it for what it’s actually worth. These days, though the drive into downtown LA isn’t quite as scenic, the destination is infinitely more rewarding.

Picture the following commercial. Lauren is given $30,000 and a challenge: “If you can buy a car with this amount of money, you get to keep it.” Her first stop is an Audi dealership, because she’s always wanted one, and has heard nothing but great things about them. She leaves upset, “I could only afford the smallest one. I guess I’m not cool enough to drive an Audi.”

She finds her silver medal on the GM lot. Sure, it’s not as elegant and well-designed as the Audi, but it’s the right size and more importantly, in her price range. So if the message were “buy what you can afford” or “inferior products are cheaper than superior products” you might get up thinking the ad made sense. But in fact, the commercial reaches a very different conclusion:

“GM. Better than Audi.”

This would be about as convincing as Microsoft’s new commercial:

I like my ad better. Let’s see what was left on the editing room floor:

After she buys the car, she can’t drive it until she goes through a long and painful setup procedure. It’s stockpiled with third-party add-ons she never wanted and has to remove one by one. The vehicle is frequently recalled. Often these are in the form of an interruption while she’s at work: “YOUR VEHICLE REQUIRES AN URGENT SECURITY UPDATE.” Depression and anxiety mount. Her hands start shaking as she discovers the whiskey bottle her children had long since hidden from her, the shards of which surround her corpse when the body is found the next day. The police pry open her rigor-mortized hand to find a note. One line, written in blood:

I’m a PC.

Poor Lauren.

Anyway, I left this out because it would make my analogy too convoluted, but Microsoft DOESN’T EVEN BUILD THE FUCKING PC, SO THE COMMERCIAL IS TOTALLY INVALID UNLESS IT’S AN AD FOR HP. If Microsoft wants to get into a logically consistent price comparison with Apple, it should be on the grounds of its OS. But don’t worry, I’ve already done it for them:

vs.

Oops. Looks like I’d have to pay three times as much to buy the only version of Vista that managed to satisfy 12% of its users. Where do I sign up?

This isn’t an anomaly, just look at the other recent commercials:

• The I’m a PC ads. You remember, the ones that were made on a Mac.
• Then there’s the one where Microsoft has to trick people into using their product.
• And let’s not forget The Three Hundred Million Dollar Afterbirth.

It’s painful to watch a company with so much money and talent caricaturize themselves. Microsoft knows they need a revolution, but for some reason believe it’s going to come from their ad department. The money that was spent on Seinfeld cracking dumb jokes about shoes and cake should’ve been given to the nerds instead. They need only to look at their own history to see why.

I moved to downtown Los Angeles recently, and it’s been pretty exciting.

There’s plenty of noise, but of a different sort than the old Mexican neighborhood. The police helicopters, ice cream trucks, honking carts, car alarms, the mariachi band (really), the dogs, the cats, the birds, the catbirds, the mockingbirds that mocked the catbirds, and that guy who would constantly blast his horn at random, cacophonous intervals independent of the hour of day or night–these have all been replaced by the stops and starts of buses, live bands, and homeless people, who like to scream while they defecate.

There really are an astounding surplus of these (homeless people). I can’t imagine why they’d want to loiter downtown instead of the beach, but questions like those are only a few inches down the rabbit hole of perplexing homeless behavior. Living here has given me the opportunity to go a bit deeper, and I intend to make the most of it.

Here are a few of the characters I’ve come across so far. Having recently been told that the homeless are indeed people, I’m using out of courtesy what I’ve decided are their real names:

Black Mark Twain – I’m not even exaggerating, he looks Photoshopped. And though he lacked the author’s vocabulary, he made up for it with simplicity of language, limiting himself to just one word: “Vaginas.”

“Vaginas. Vaginas vaginas, vaginas vaginas vaginas. Vaginas.”

Our proximity on the bus made me a little uncomfortable, but probably not as much so as the young woman he was talking to.

C. - This guy approached me just as I was exiting the local Rite Aid, enjoying my scoop of Thrifty brand Mint Chip for Poor People ice cream. He looked at me sideways and growled, “Just how many of you are there?”

Do you think he was talking about:

A. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?

B. The duality of man?

C. I’m a crazy homeless person who should be ignored, but you’re going to be thinking about our interaction for weeks, thereby making you sorry you ever made eye contact with me in the first place?

The Woman Who Is Probably Watching Me Right Now – I was dozing off on the Metro Rail, jolted out of my sleep by these strange gospel jingles. Short and saccharine little rhymes you might learn in Sunday School. When I heard the weird guttural intonations, I realized they were not coming from a child of God, but rather a woman of Satan. She had a shaved head and black eyes and sang the way Billie Holiday would if she had psychologically regressed into a child. With AIDS. She was a real-life horror movie, the most disturbing thing I had ever seen, and I felt that if displeased she could dissolve me from the inside out somehow.

The Ten-dollars-and-fifty-cents-on-sale-at-Wal-Mart Man – To be fair, I don’t know if he’s homeless. But he’s definitely legless. His torso is capped watertight by a silver tarpaulin and he roams the streets using two wooden handles to propel himself forward. The world is his pommelhorse.

And no, I don’t know how he goes to the bathroom either, but I imagine he just shits the tarp and then donates it as shelter to the Santa Monica homeless, which explains why they smell worse.

If you are an expert, then you have practiced at least 10,000 hours.

You’ve practiced at least 10,000 hours.

Therefore, you’re an expert.

Sound fishy? I hope so; it’s a basic fallacy. So it’s a fascinating thing when people read Outliers and conclude that success is a mere 10,000 automatous hours away. As Ryan said, it’s a sticky number. I got carried away enough to host a challenge based on the premise–actually that was the original intent of this post. Really, here it is:

The Challenge: Commit 10,000 hours to something you want to excel at, and track your progress. You can log the hours at the end of each post, scribble hash marks in a notebook, whatever. Share your progress with everybody, and invite them to do the same. Or keep it to yourself if you want, then casually inform your friends that you’re a chess grandmaster or world-class kickboxer. If you’ve already made serious headway, start wherever you honestly feel is appropriate. There’s no background check, your involvement is your business. But if you’re going to participate, leave me a comment and tell me about it. Or blog about it. (And if you still don’t have a blog, I would spend the first thousandth of my time setting one up.)

As daunting as that figure might be, it’s just as reassuring in its meritocracy. The research shows that talent can be supplanted by hard work. The biggest opportunity of my life came when I tested those boundaries just a little. But something happened afterward. I let them rebound back. I started waiting for things to happen again, to be perpetually assigned. How about you? And are you even close to that number, in anything? I’m not. That’s why I’m issuing, and taking part in, this challenge.

Then I realized that’s just another easy way out, veiled in hard. Umair said that communities need love, not math, and I think the same holds true for success. While there is a lot to be gained from trying to deconstruct successful behavior, there will always be variables difficult to quantify. Like practice, which Gladwell kind of glosses over in the book, but is critical when qualifying the research.

This notion of deliberate practice is to me far more substantive and less arbitrary than the 10,000-hour rule. I mean, if you just accumulate hours, you’ll eventually hit the target–assuming you don’t get bored and give up. But if you want that number to actually quantify your effort, to be more than some worthless binary, that’s up to you. Deliberate practice, perfect practice–call it whatever you want, but I’d spend the first of those hours understanding the distinction.

People have also used the book to affirm their belief that success is a matter of luck and circumstance. Obviously it plays a role; I mean, here you are, alive. Relatively healthy and hopefully free. You’re reading this, so you have access to the internet. But anyone who would argue that success today requires more than that is, on a historical scale, preposterously selfish. I didn’t really think that view would be seriously held, but in a discussion we had recently, about a guy who uncovered AP23 “for fun,” people were still pulling the luck card.

You just can’t say that anymore. You can learn anything you want for free. Become a post-graduate level expert in the field of your choice. You can produce almost anything for nearly nothing, and get funding for the exceptions.

Hell, even looking at the examples in the book: Bill Gates may have had the opportunity to program more often than many of his peers at the time. Remember though, that University of Washington mainframe was free at night–Gates was just the one who snuck out of his house to use it. That’s what it means to have success ensue.

So, I’ve revised the challenge, and while it might not be as sticky and formulaic, I think it’ll help you, and me, a lot more:

Find something you like doing so much that you won’t even realize 10,000 hours have gone by.

I admit I’ve fallen behind in my writing, and there are plenty of reasons, just none of them good. Let’s just say I’m starting to learn how important time management really is. I’ve got a lot of new stuff coming soon though, I promise.

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