zoiaorg

by Roberto Zoia

focus

Neal Stephenson on Deep Work

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Neal Stephenson writes speculative fiction. In his books, he explores subjects such as mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science.

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

— Neal Stephenson, Why I am a bad correspondent

Did I do my best to…

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There is so much written about the importance of focus to achieve your goals, that it can be distracting.

It’s easy to deceive ourselves by thinking that working hard all day long means working in the right things. A simple tactic is to use some kind of metric to check, every day, if we are advancing towards our goal, spending our time and energy in the right things.

In his book Triggers. Creating Behavior That Lasts, world-class coach Marshall Goldsmith shares a straightforward technique he’s been using for years. He calls it the “daily questions”. Every day, at the end of the day, he asks himself a series of questions. This questions have been crafted to reflect his priorities, the change he wants to achieve.

The first versions of these daily questions asked directly if he had achieved a particular result or taken specific action. Later, with some experience and better understanding of human nature, he changed the formulation to ask if he had done his best possible effort towards that particular result or action. For example, Did I do my best to have a healthy diet? Goldsmith considers this simple mean so important, that he has a person hired to call him every day and ask him the daily questions.

It doesn’t have to be the daily questions, but focus goes in hand with some kind of review at the end of the day.

(Photo by Romain Vignes on Unsplash.)

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport

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Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, who specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms. According to Newport, the unprecedent growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our economy. Deep Work is a book about thriving in this new economy, where jobs that can be automated will be replaced by software or outsourced. “In this new economy three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.”

How does one join one of these groups? Leaving those with access to capital aside, Newport argues that there are two core abilities that are crucial for thriving in the New Economy: the ability to quickly master hard things; and, the ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. These two abilities, explains Newport, depend on your abillity to perform deep work. “If you haven’t mastered this foundational skill, you’ll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level.”

The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

Newport defines Deep Work as professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. In contrast, Shallow Work consists of noncognitevely demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

The book is divided in two parts. The first part explains what deep work is about, why it’s important, and how it will set people appart in the New Economy. The second part of the book contains several strategies for trainning your brain and transforming your working habits. The goal is “to place deep work at the core of your professional life.” The underlying strategies are valuable, but you’ll probably have to adapt the rules the author proposes to suit your needs.

The Traits of the Most Successful Founders according to YCombinator’s Jessica Livingston

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Sam Altman interviews Jessica Livingston, co-founder of YCombinator and author of Founder’s at Work. Stories of Startup’s early days.

The interview is great, and you should watch or read it in full if you are involved in startups, building your own product or service. Traits of the most successful founders are determination, understanding your users and building a product with a great user experience, being flexible minded, and being great leaders.

How about looking for these traits in your future hires?

Jessica: The most successful founders I have noticed are totally focused on two things, building their product and making something people want, which of course, is our motto, and talking to their users. And they do not let themselves get distracted by anything else. And that seems so obvious, but what’s not obvious is how easily distracted founders can be by lots of other things going on, and the most successful startups are like hyper-focused on their product.

(…)
Sam: Are there other traits in the founders that go on to really change the future, besides determination that separates the very best founders from the mediocre founders? Have you noticed any other traits that kind of founders should aspire to that really wanna have a big impact?

Jessica: Yes. If I had to say the most important traits of the most successful founders, I’ve already mentioned determination. That is by far the most important.

Sam: More than intelligence?

Jessica: More than intelligence, more than previous success, you know, in school. I mean, remember when we started Y Combinator, our hypothesis was, “We’ll just fund all the best hackers from MIT and Harvard, and they’ll turn out to be great sort of founders.” That is not true. That is absolutely not true. A lot of them are good. (…) Determination is the most important thing. Again, sort of understanding your users and building a product with a great user experience is second most important. Not being distracted, not getting lured down these paths that aren’t gonna be important for building your product. Being flexible minded I’ve always felt this very important, because you have this idea and you test it out, and it doesn’t always work the first time. And so you have to be able to say, “Okay, I thought I was gonna do this, but let’s try this. Even though I have like a lot of energy invested in this, let’s try this direction.” You really have to be open-minded. And then, ultimately, you have to be a good leader. You have to be convincing and a good leader because you are gonna be convincing employees to join you, you are gonna be convincing investors to invest in you. When you do get to the point where you are doing deals with bigger companies, you have to convince them. Like, your whole world is convincing people. And so you have to be able to communicate your idea and convince people why they should care about you more than any of the other hundreds of startups out there.

(emphasis is mine)

Watch the whole interview (also available on YouTube{: target=”blank”}) or read the transcript here.

80/20 Sales and Marketing, by Perry Marshall

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Perry Marshall’s book is all about Pareto’s Principle and Power Curves. Although the author tries to reason the logic under the principle, the value of this book is in the online marketing and sales tactics it offers.

The book covers topics like market discovery, getting traffic, conversion and selling. “To build a sales funnel, you begin with the end in mind.” Since selling starts with traffic, advanced marketers don’t begin with the invention (i.e., the final transaction). “They begin by asking: ‘what would these people want to buy?’ Then they create it or find it.”

Before trying to convince anybody of anything, however, you must disqualify people who don’t fit. Marshall explains what he calls the 5 Power Disqualifiers. They define who of the traffic you are going to buy:

Do they have money? (…) Do they have a bleeding neck? (A dire sense of urgency, an immediate problem that demands to be solved. Right. Now.) (…) Do they buy into you unique selling proposition? (…) Do they have the ability to say YES? (…) Does what you sell fit in with their overall plans?

The three steps to selling anything, according to Marshall, is what he calls the Power Triangle:

  • Get Traffic. Who would buy this?
  • Conversion. What can we say to persuade them to buy?
  • Economics. Can you reach them affordably? Can they give you money?

The Power Triangle can be applied to each corner of the Power Triangle itself, again and again. For example, to get traffic, you should think about traffic in terms of traffic, conversion, and economics. “There is a Power Triangle inside each element of the Triangle.”1

Marshall’s approach finding customer needs and effective marketing actions is to test, test, and test. Test fast. Fail fast. Move on.

“You send a calculated signal that most ignore, but a few respond to. (…) Before you bet your precious time or money on any sales or business project, you need to rack the shotgun.”

The best place to start testing, Marshall argues, is Google Adwords. Test ads. Test landing pages. Test sign-up pages. Test everything. Then, scale up.

Marshall offers some insights about the Bull’s-Eye Social Media Technique, a method developed by Glenn Livingston to narrow your field of competitors and focus on the exact “corner of the internet”.

Finally, Pareto’s principle should be applied to analyzing your client portfolio. Which 20 percent of your clients make the 80 percent of your sales. Marshall goes deeper and proposes three variables that must be considered in the analysis in addition to gross sales: Recency (when was the last time this customer bought something), Frequency (how often does the customer buys from us), and Money (how much does he buy). He then uses this additional variables to build a scoring system and applies Pareto’s Principle to the results.

Although I didn’t like Marshall’s writing style and I found the hype around the 80/20 Principle somewhat excessive, this is a useful book. It will get you up to speed on modern marketing techniques, specially regarding to online sales and advertising.

Find 80/20 Sales and Marketing in Amazon.

  1. What Marshall calls Power Triangle is a Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal with the overall shape of an equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles. ↩

The One Thing: The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results, by Gary Keller

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Gary Keller proposes a framework for achieving extraordinary results in work and in life in general. The author’s premise is that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus, or more precisely, by focusing on the One Thing.

[Achievers] have an eye for the essential. They pause just long enough to decide what matters and then allow what matters to drive their day. Achievers do sooner what others plan to do later and defer, perhaps indefinitely, what others do sooner. The difference isn’t in intent, but in right of way. Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority.

The author explains how getting things done is not a matter of discipline but of developing habits that will help you focus on the task at hand. Discipline is needed to acquire the habit, but we cannot run on discipline in the long term.

Achieving extraordinary results requires making extraordinary efforts. In that sense, Keller does not believe in a balanced life as a goal to be achieved or a state of balance, but in counterbalancing your life as an every day reality, an act of balancing.

If you think of balance as the middle, then out of balance is when you’re away from it. Get too far away from the middle and you’re living at the extremes. The problem with living in the middle is that it prevents you from making extraordinary time commitments to anything. In your effort to attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets its due. Sometimes this can be okay and sometimes not. Knowing when to pursue the middle and when to pursue the extremes is in essence the true beginning of wisdom. Extraordinary results are achieved by this negotiation with your time.

One day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls—family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.

The book mentions the now-more-known Stanford Marshmallow Experiment by Walter Mischel, which relates the effect of delayed gratification and developing grit with outcome and success in different areas in life.

Keller also cites Carol Dweck‘s research on growth-mindsets vs fixed mindsets as an example of how your perception of things strongly affect what you can achieve:

Dweck’s work with children revealed two mindsets in action—a “growth” mindset that generally thinks big and seeks growth and a “fixed” mindset that places artificial limits and avoids failure. Growth-minded students, as she calls them, employ better learning strategies, experience less helplessness, exhibit more positive effort, and achieve more in the classroom than their fixed-minded peers. They are less likely to place limits on their lives and more likely to reach for their potential

Keller’s framework is constructed on applying what he calls the Focusing Question to the different areas of your life: What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Productivity isn’t about being a workhorse, keeping busy or burning the midnight oil…. It’s more about priorities, planning, and fiercely protecting your time.

To stay on track for the best possible day, month, year, or career, you must keep asking the Focusing Question. Ask it again and again, and it forces you to line up tasks in their levered order of importance. (…) you can drive yourself nuts analyzing every little aspect of everything you might do. I don’t do that, and you shouldn’t either. Start with the big stuff and see where it takes you. Over time, you’ll develop your own sense of when to use the big-picture question and when to use the small-focus question.

Answers to the Focusing Question come in three categories: doable (something that is already within your reach), stretch (at the farthest end of your range), and possibility (an answer that exists beyond what is already known and being done). “Highly successful people”, explains Keller, “choose to live at the outer limits of achievement. They not only dream of but deeply crave what is beyond their natural grasp.”

The Focusing Question, however, is not enough. Adopting the mindset of someone seeking mastery is needed (the commitment to becoming your best, and embrace the effort it represents).

More than anything else, expertise tracks with hours invested. Michelangelo once said, “If the people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all.”

You will also need to deal with the natural ceiling of achievement with a purposeful mindset (not accepting the limitations of our natural approach as the last word), and learn to be accountable for the outcome of your lives (in contrast with being a victim of the situation). This is essential –according to Keller– to achieve extraordinary results.

If you have to beg, then beg. If you have to barter, then barter. If you have to be creative, then be creative. Just don’t be a victim of your circumstances.

Almost finishing the book, Keller warns the reader against the four thieves that can stand in our way to extraordinary results. The inhability to say “No” , the fear of chaos –“pursuing your One Thing moves other things to the back burner (…) chaos is unavoidable. Make peace with it. Learn to deal with it”– , poor health habits, and an environment that doesn’t support your goals.

I enjoyed reading the book and strongly agree with most of what the author proposes. You can use the framework “as-is” or adapt it to suit your needs.

Find The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results in Amazon.