Opting out of healthcare (debate)

Ben Casnocha articulates something similar to what I've been feeling on the American healthcare debate:

I've decided I'm just going to read it about once it's resolved.

You can't keep up with everything. Rather than lightly follow along and skim articles and pretend to be informed, I'm consciously opting out. I rarely do this when it comes to current affairs -- I'm kind of a junkie -- but I must say, this time around, it feels liberating.

I've backslid a few times, but every time I get started it is a slippery slope - I truly don't know enough to debate, nor probably do the people I've argued with, and it just gets frustrating at some point. I think it would be great if everyone had healthcare, and I think it's important that the government be on sound fiscal footing. I will leave the debate of how to get there to smarter and/or braver souls than I.

Grit vs. grind in the professional world

I was pondering "Do Less. Do Better. Know Why." on my run this morning, and I kept coming back to another quote from Cal Newport's excellent post:

What separates the lauding of grit from the lauding of the grind lifestyle? This question is crucial to our mission here, as, of course, being happy and low-stressed is one of the key pillars of my philosophy.

After some thought, I arrived at an answer:

- The grind lifestyle involves filling most days with an unhealthily large amount of work. It treats the overwork itself as the goal, not its results. This chronic overwork, in turn, generates stress and deep procrastination.

- Grit, on the other hand, is about persistently accomplishing a reasonable amount of hard work. For example, consider my book writing. I spend 1 - 3 hours a day, most days, on this task. I’ve been doing this off and on for six years now. These are hard hours, requiring real hard focus. But they’re not many hours — so they’re not a source of overwork or stress in my life.

This makes a lot of sense, and it's easy to see how it applies to being a student, or personal hobbies at any stage of life. What I'm grappling with is how it can be applied to a more traditional professional career. Particularly as a manager, there are always fires to fight and lots of little things necessary to keeping the ship on course, and these are very difficult to keep "quarantined to a reasonable number of focused hours each day" (whether that's 1 hour, or 3, or 6, or 8, or...).

So, is there some way Cal's attractive philosophy can by applied to the task of leading a large team or organization? Or is this the part where someone says this advice is for students, and/or traditional careers are for suckers and this is why you should be a student/writer/public intellectual/serial entrepreneur?

Do Less. Do Better. Know Why.

Ben Casnocha is so money - his taste in career and life advice is well-nigh impeccable. Here he passes on a compelling paragraph from Cal Newport:

Maintain a small number of things that you return to, and do hard work on, again and again, over a long period of time. Choose things that actually interest you, but don’t obsesses over choosing the perfect things — as perfect goals, like perfect majors, probably don’t exist. Keep this hard work quarantined to a reasonable number of focused hours each day, and harness the rest of the time to recharge, relax, and, in general, enjoy life. Or, to put it in a more familiar wording: Do Less. Do Better. Know Why.

Running and reading are the keys to life

The consulting lifestyle often doesn't leave a lot of leisure time left over, particularly during the week, so how we use that precious time is often telling. Running and reading have historically been my personal activities of choice, so you can imagine I found it encouraging and gratifying to learn from Will Smith (via Ben Casnocha) that they are the keys to life.

I guess my new hobby of blogging didn't make the cut...

Career advice: Get good at an unusual combo of 2-3 things, rather than great at 1

Via Ben Casnocha, some compelling career advice from Dilbert's Scott Adams:

If you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.