The Plan for Action #5: Become excellent in only a few things
There is an oft-quoted story about Warren Buffet coaching his pilot on setting goals, and for this step in the Plan for Action, I would like to share the story as it illustrates what action is going to look like:
Warren Buffett asked his long time private pilot why he was still working for him. “The fact that you’re still working for me, tells me I’m not doing my job. You should be out going after more of your goals and dreams,” said Buffett. He then told his employee to write down a list of 25 goals he hoped to achieve in the coming years.
Once the pilot had completed his list, Buffett told him to circle the 5 that were the most important to him. After some deliberation, the pilot finally had narrowed down the 5 goals that were of highest priority.
“Now that you have your top 5 goals identified, how do you propose setting out to accomplish them?” asked Buffett. His pilot’s response was hesitant at first, but he eventually mustered up enough ideas to satisfy his boss. Finally Buffett asked about the other 20 goals on his list. What would be the pilot’s approach to accomplishing those?
“The top 5 are my primary focus but the other 20 come in at a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit as I’m getting through my top 5. They are not as urgent but I still plan to give them dedicated effort,” replied the pilot.
To the pilot’s surprise, Warren responded sternly,
““No. You’ve got it all wrong. Everything you didn’t circle just became your ‘avoid at all cost list’. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”
When everything's a priority, nothing's a priority
One phrase you hear occasionally in the project management world is "if everything's a priority, nothing is a priority." Priority means that everything else must be ignored, even if it means suffering some kind of loss. However, the thing you prioritize, will be accomplished. From the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership there is the "Law of the Big Mo," or the Law of Momentum, which states that one effective achievement will fuel the next one. Further, in the same book, we learn from the "Law of Priorities" that activity does not equal achievement.
This is why the "elite" keep winning and "the little man" doesn't - you end up trying to take on too many things at once, and none of them are effective. You are working like crazy, but the work isn't producing anything. Further, because nothing is produced, you aren't gaining the influence needed to really make change happen.
Exponential excellence
From the book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell documents what he calls the 10,000 hour rule. The idea is, true legends in a field, the "outliers" in the data, spent 10,000 hours or more of their time in the field early in their career, doing little else. For perspective, that means 40 hours a week for 5 years. Being a PhD, in academia I've seen a similar saying that "a PhD is a 10,000 hour project," and if you look at papers published, a very typical track is 0 publications the first 2-3 years, then 1 publication, then a few publications, and then graduation.
What's happening is "exponential excellence," and I will illustrate it in my coding career:
When I switched from my old field to programming I literally knew nothing about the field, outside of hobby experience. For the first year, still in grad school, I earned virtually nothing from it (a few odd jobs totaling less than $5,000), and even basic websites were a struggle. I seriously wanted to give up. It was a true experience of overcoming atrophy.
But after all of that unproductive struggle the first year, I had learned enough basics from free courses and practice to land a job, and be able to speak intelligently to a mentor. He gave me some of the industry-standard open source tools, like Git, and all of my projects improved accordingly. Also, as I continued deciphering Stack Exchange answers and raw code from big projects, I kept solving incrementally more difficult problems, and began to build a "code library" of sorts that I could refer back to, thus making each project faster than before. And with basics solved, I could move on to more ambitious projects, which meant an even bigger code library, and so on. This puts me at 3 years in.
Now that I am at about 5 years in, the various old projects have given me both enough momentum and enough reputation that people are now coming to me to learn. On the business side, this means income, and the ability to start training a team of people so it is no longer just me, which means even more explosive growth. But since we're looking to change the world, my discussions about open source have gone from simply arguing on social media, to "here is how I made it happen for this organization." And with each successful project, the selling point for the open source movement becomes that much stronger. Indeed, industry wide there are so many people succeeding with open source that some of the tech giants are starting to abandon proprietary projects, and are instead investing in the open source movement as a sort of inevitable future.
What do you hope to achieve?
With this question of priorities in mind, what is one specific way in which you truly want to change the world? There are so many problems to solve, and so many things we all could do, but what is that one thing that makes you say "If I could just accomplish this, my life was worth it?" I believe God has put enough of a variety of people on the world that, if we all thought this way, and we all achieved our "one thing," then we would all together change the entire world in just one lifetime.
I look forward to talking about it with you!