SKILLS YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN (BUT MAY NOT NEED)
This next step is easy. Start getting good at the things you want to get good at.
This is not so much a next step as it is a simultaneous step—there’s no reason to wait to develop your interests. The metaskills, while foundational, don’t have to come first. It’s better if they come sooner than later, but this is why we have a practice method and Short-Term Specialization and all that—so we can get better at many things instead of just one.
What are your interests? What do you want to get better at? There are no rules here, really. The only thing I would suggest is this: if you’re going to get good at something, make it something you want to get good at. That sounds like a truism. And that’s because it’s true. Remember when we talked about discipline and how the only way to develop discipline is by practicing discipline, and the only way to practice discipline without already having discipline is by doing something you like? Well, it’s time to find that something that you like.
When I was growing up, I went through a long stretch of being a seriously bad student. I’d skip class and refuse to do homework. Once, I got in-school suspension for showing my underpants to my German teacher. Some thought I was a degenerate. The truth is, I wasn’t so much a degenerate as I was disinterested in all the subjects I was supposed to learn in school. I didn’t really care about calculus. I didn’t really care about German, either. Looking back, I wish I had paid better attention to both, because now I see the value in these things—well, maybe not German, but French would be nice. Unfortunately, nobody ever taught me that math was a way of learning logic—instead, math was just a way of learning math, which I thought was a skill with limited value when it came to high-level branches such as calculus. I would have been interested in logic. Maybe. It’s easy to say that now. Mostly back then I was interested in music.
This is why, even as a terrible student, I’d spend hours practicing guitar. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any motivation; it was just that my motivation chased a separate set of interests than what was being taught at school. This is what I want for you. I want you to develop whatever makes you most excited. Yes, we need some “liberal arts”—and that’s why we have those foundational skills, and that’s why I took so much time explaining why I think they’re important. Maybe you’re interested in those, or maybe you’re not, but over time, I think you will be. Either way, let’s get started with the things you like.
What do you like? Woodworking? Painting? Gardening? Cooking? Training dogs? You can make a business out of just about anything you can be good at.
Well, let’s return to music. Let’s say you’re interested in drums—or you know what, scratch that—guitar. Drums are cool, but I know guitar, so let’s go with guitar. Say you want to make music and you want people to pay you to do it. And say you want to grow your hair out and get it highlighted. I think that would be just fine.
Let’s go back to a few of our principles. If you’re starting a new skill, the first thing to do is to short-term specialize in it. This goes for guitar and it goes for anything that isn’t guitar. I would say you should dedicate at least an hour of practice a day to anything you’re short-term specializing in. That’s a reasonable start. You could do more, depending on the skill, and in some cases, you could do less—there’s not an exact prescription for this. You need to use some judgment to decide how much practice is necessary and how much is too much or too little. When in doubt, ask someone who’s figured it out. Hire a coach, in other words.
Next let’s consider Integration > Isolation. What kind of guitar player do you want to be? Do you want to be a rock player, a jazz player, a country guitar player? Or maybe you want to be a generalist with your guitar playing? Certainly, I wouldn’t argue against that. Still, you’ll have to pick a place to start, so let’s say you want to learn to rock. Let’s say that whenever you hear Metallica, it sends a yellow streak up your spine, because if something can get you going like that, it’s a skill worth investing in; you probably think that it’s cool and resonate with it. Imagine all the things in your life that do that. Maybe it’s reading a piece of writing or watching a comedian or solving a math problem. I can’t tell you what you might be interested in. I can only tell you how to get better at that thing, once you determine what it is.
For me, there are now quite a number of things that fill me with giddy excitement. I’m not actually a huge sports fan, but I can see why people get into it. Debating I love—boy, do I get giddy when someone gives a great argument on stage, something I only started to appreciate after I joined the debate team in middle school. What else? I get giddy over yo-yo tricks sometimes, though I’m not sure I get quite giddy enough to want to dedicate my life to learning them. But still, it’s enough to cause me to learn at least a little bit. I get giddy over philosophy and science, and certainly I get giddy over growing businesses. Finally, I get giddy over God. Faith gets me triply giddy. These are my interests, most of them, anyway. Now it’s time to identify a few of your own.
You might not even know your interests at first. Maybe you have a few fleeting areas you’re interested in, a few suspects in the lineup, so to speak. But maybe you’re not positive because you’ve never spent time practicing them. That’s the test, because to the extent you love something, you won’t mind practicing it, despite the endless frustrations that are absolutely destined to occur. I remember watching a clinic by one of my favorite guitarists back in high school, and at one point someone from the audience asked him how he found so much time to practice guitar. He said, seeming almost confused, “Because I want to play the guitar?” To him it wasn’t a valid question. Of course he found the time to practice the guitar. Because he wanted to play the guitar. How simple. I mean, of course!
If you want to do something, you’re going to find the time to do it. This isn’t a question about making time or scheduling or anything like that. This is a question about what moves you. This is a question about what matters most in your life. Now, hopefully, I’ve done a fair job explaining what should matter most in your life—in case it isn’t clear, I’m not exactly a moral relativist. Aristotle taught us that there is only one right way to live and that one right way is living well. A truism? Perhaps. But isn’t it still true?
Aristotle also taught us that living well means focusing ourselves around certain interests, developing virtue, and—most important—seeking the good. Aquinas, his successor in many ways, defined happiness even more specifically when he said it involves engaging in and enjoying genuinely good activities and doing so to the extent that both the effects and intentions are morally good, or, at the very least, neutral. So there are not too many restrictions here. If you follow these sages, you can align your interests to produce actual, real, authentic happiness. In other words, something isn’t good just because you desire it. Rather, there are things that are really good for you, so those are the things you should desire.
Aristotle said this:
He is happy who lives in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance periods but throughout a complete life.
And Aquinas wrote this:
It is impossible for any created good to constitute man’s happiness. For happiness is that perfect good which entirely satisfies one’s desire; otherwise it would not be the ultimate end, if something yet remained to be desire. Now the object of the will, i.e., of a man’s desire, is what is universally good; just as the object of the intellect is what is universally true. Hence it is evident that nothing can satisfy man’s will, except what is universally good. That is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone.
What does this mean? Actually, it’s simple. It means that while we’re alive, perfect happiness can’t be attained, but certainly a large degree of it can be, and that would be through the prudent accumulation of knowledge, virtue, wealth, and friendship. People hear that word wealth and they’re like, Ew, was Aristotle some sort of fat capitalist or something? I don’t think so. But he did recognize the importance of having your material needs met. Aristotle was basically saying that it’s hard to be happy when you’re starving to death. He even went so far as to distinctly declare that wealth should be possessed—as with most other material things—in moderation. It should be deliberately built, but not to excess. In other words, make a lot of money if you want, but don’t do it only for yourself. In fact, you should probably give most of it away if that’s the case.
That might sound unappealing to a lot of people, but think of the kind of character it builds if you profit for the sake of doing good rather than for the sake of stockpiling wealth. I guess you could see this as a metric of sorts, a way of measuring priority—the person who makes a lot of money but then gives most of it away is doing things for reasons other than making money, which is doing things for a better reason. We’ll get back to talking about practicing your interests in a second, but this is important.
I can tell you that Aristotle is absolutely right about this, because there was a time in my life when I had gotten pretty good at making money—and frankly, I still am. I had a goal upon leaving college of making a million dollars before I was twenty-seven, and I accomplished that goal. And I had the fast, yellow Porsche and ate at all the nice, fancy restaurants and vacationed at all the ritziest, goldenest places, and you know what? I’m not going to say I was miserable—that certainly was not the case. But I wasn’t particularly happy either. That is, I wasn’t particularly fulfilled. Rather, it was this constant game of cat and mouse, in which I’d chase a goal, an object, or something I wanted to do or buy, and then I’d reach that goal, get that object, or do or buy that something I wanted, and I’d enjoy it for a while, nibble on it, play with it, or take pictures of it, and then that feeling would fizzle out. It was very schizophrenic, now that I think about it. The problem was that I thought happiness was found in having accomplishments and a nice, big number in my bank account. It turns out I was mistaken. Happiness is not found that way. Happiness is found in exactly what Aristotle says—doing and knowing and making good things.
According to Aristotle, happiness is more of a cumulative quality, then, and something that can only be assessed at the end of one’s life. It’s not like the sort of happiness of having a “happy childhood” or being glad one moment and angry the next. It’s more “happy in the sense of flourishing and fulfillment” (eudaimonia is the word in Greek to describe this), and that can only happen over time. And then, Aquinas would say, to perfect our happiness, we need to come to know God. Maybe that means getting hit by a bus or something to figure that one out. Let’s not rush that part! In the meantime, we can simply pray.
The reason I bring all this up? Again, I just want you to have the right orientation when deciding on the things you want to get better at; I want you to engage in them and enjoy them because they are good things to enjoy, and just about anything can be a good thing to enjoy when done for the benefit of others and for the right reasons. I think we could even make a case for cage fighting. But certainly music and writing and mathematics and biology and really, honestly, just about anything. It’s so important—so very, very important—to keep the overall goal in mind. We’re moving toward happiness. We stack skills to not only create advantages but find fulfilment. OK, end of sermon. Let’s move on.
So, Integration > Isolation. Say you chose guitar and want to learn rock. Well, then start with a song. Either get someone to teach it to you or pull up an instructional video on the interweb and take it bit by bit. Right away, you’ll run into something you can’t do. That something may be learning to hold the pick the correct way. So you isolate that technique until you get it right, but don’t rush. Skills take time to set in, and it’s worth spending extra time on the basics. Your brain works very much like a Crock-Pot, in this way. You plop in all these ingredients by practicing them, and then at some point you just need to set it and forget it. Come back the next day and everything will have hopefully blended. As you get better, you sometimes need a longer cooking time. Initial skills are sort of like cooking lettuce. You don’t need all that much time to take in all the beginner stuff and ready it for use in a much larger recipe. Later, you’ll get onto roasting chuck, the higher-level skills that take a lot more time to soften and set in. Whether that’s sweep picking or doing a freestanding handstand, your patience will need to increase as your practice time remains steadfast and dedicated.
Remember, you’re always working toward some specific goal even as you are practicing techniques in isolation. Maybe that goal is to perform “Smoke on the Water” in your living room in front of your grandparents or to do your first set of five pull-ups—but whatever the goal is, be sure you have one, and be sure you’re working toward that goal in some capacity at all times. Don’t just practice techniques to practice techniques. Integration > Isolation. Practice the techniques you need to learn in order to do the things you want to do, and practice them in a context that is as close as possible to the context in which they’ll be performed.
Let’s take the example of another skill at this point: writing.
Say you want to be a humor writer and you want to write jokes, whether you want to do stand-up, write stories and columns, or perhaps be a staff writer for a comedy show. I think that’s great. Part of your practice then, will be reading and listening to all the funniest people you can find. Just like part of the practice for any musician would be listening to the musicians and instrumentalists they want to be like. After this, you’ll actually need to sit down and write. Obviously, if you want to be a humor writer, you’ll need to practice writing thoughts that make people laugh. Grammar and syntax may need to be isolated, but this should again be done in the direction of the goal. I think what you’ll find with humor writing is that sometimes you’ll want to intelligently break the rules of grammar and syntax to achieve a certain effect, like writer Ring Lardner was so exceptional at—for example, in his book The Young Immigrunts:
Are you lost daddy I asked tenderly.
Shut up he explained.
You might analyze that snippet to try to examine what makes it funny. Part of it, certainly, would be the element of surprise. Nobody really explains “shutting up” to someone, do they? (As if this needs to be explained—and such is the problem with attempting to dissect humor; it dies in the process.) But when coming from the perspective of a kid, it kind of makes sense. It gave you an idea, though: maybe you want to try to write a short story from the perspective of your childhood, and maybe you want to bring out the absurdities of family road trips. Great. I think that’s a surefire way to get a laugh out of almost anybody. Who doesn’t have material they can use from family road trips gone awry? If you want, you could borrow some of mine. I’ve got quite a surplus.
This is Integration > Isolation. You’re practicing writing, but you’re practicing specifically in the context you want to get better at. Now, if I were doing this, I’d want to highlight something about how my mom would fall asleep in the passenger seat while driving out east, and how half the time she’d still have a cigarette in her mouth. What would happen next is that the cigarette would drop onto her lap and my dad would scream, “Goddamnit, Judy!” and we’d all become hysterical and the whole van would start to rock and swerve. My mom would awake with a start and search frantically for the lit cigarette and attempt to flick it out the window. The only problem was that half the time the window wasn’t open, so it would typically bounce and burn itself out on one of the armrests. This isn’t much of a story in this format, but that’s OK. The first operation of any writing project is to just get something down. You can shape it into something more exciting later. Start with a very rough first draft.
All creative efforts are done in segments. You write songs by coming up with simple melodies and stories by devising simple themes. The details, the nuances, the tone, the decoration of language—all that can be added in layers. The key for any skill, whether you’re practicing technique or actively creating, is to get started and work toward the goal in mind.
Obviously, Repetition and Resistance are also tucked into this. You can’t integrate or isolate if you’re not practicing a skill and increasing the demands as you go. Perhaps you move from learning to hold a pick to strumming a chord, or from writing three hundred words to writing five hundred to a thousand. Just be sure that however you’re increasing resistance, it remains in line with the goal. Don’t make things harder without making them relevant, in other words. I used to do this with guitar a lot: I’d learn a number of high-level techniques that took immense amounts of time to master (like sweep picking), but they just weren’t all that useful for the kinds of music I wanted to play, especially for the kinds of music people want to listen to. I was falling into the snare of specialization, of wanting to be better just to be better rather than wanting to be better in order to be good.
Let’s look at martial arts now. Anybody here have an interest in fighting? Great. Because maybe you had a rough childhood or maybe you’ve got a lot of pent-up frustration. I’m not saying martial arts is going to cure that, but I can say it helped me find a productive, physical outlet. But what would the principles of generalism look like when applied to this? Well, pretty much the same. You start with the end in mind. Is your goal to compete, or do you want to be more of a showman? When I first started tae kwon do, I wanted to compete. That meant I spent most of my time practicing the strikes that were most useful as part of the sport, particularly roundhouse kicks. But eventually I got deeper into the aesthetic side of the martial art, which meant I could then spend more time on some of the high-flying acrobatics and techniques—moves that aren’t especially useful when fighting people but certainly look cool.
I remember my coach would have me drill kicks for thousands of reps and sometimes we’d have to break the kicks down into steps. That was isolation, but it was all toward integration, as well. We never practiced a kick I wasn’t going to use soon. The same with punches and forms and self-defense. A lot of times we had to break things down on a granular level. I think this is something you have to do with pretty much any skill, but you should always know why you’re doing it. The reason for such slow, technique isolation is that the goal is eventual, seamless integration. Sometimes (often, actually) you need to pull things out of context to get them to work while in context. So you repeat and repeat (repetition), and you get closer and closer (resistance) to bringing that technique into its final form, whether that’s a competition, performance, or act of creation. It doesn’t matter what the goal is. The process is ultimately the same.
What about something that isn’t particularly artsy or fantastic? I know I’ve talked a lot about activities that I’m personally interested in, but there are also a lot of things that I don’t get particularly excited about, but maybe you do. For example, forensic analysis. Anybody here want to become a forensic analyst? No? OK, yup. That’s about what I would expect. What about marine biology, then? Anybody got a thing for whales or tiger sharks? Sea stars, maybe? Let’s say that you do. Because this is something I have no interest or ability in, but I assure you the principles of generalism still apply. Take the skill of dissection, for example. I don’t particularly know how relevant this is to marine biology, but I’m guessing marine biologists dissect things, and certainly dissection is a skill. I know because in second grade I had to cut open an octopus. Frankly, it was disgusting. But I remember we started with just a small procedure for practice and then moved on to the final operation. We were isolating so we could integrate. I forget now what we were even trying to discover, but I remember distinctly that there was progression to it. There was a goal. And that goal was broken down into small, little bits for us to practice. Obviously, none of us conducted a clean operation. (One kid just put the octopus on his head and pretended it was sucking his brains out. This boy quickly became a classroom hero.) It would be insulting to any great dissector to insinuate that a second grader could master the skill in just one lesson. I don’t know enough about dissection to say how long this skill takes to develop, but I know enough about skills in general to say that it can’t be acquired overnight.
The point is this: it doesn’t matter what you’re interested in. The only thing that matters is that you figure out how to apply the principles of generalism so you practice it in the most efficient way, toward the outcome you want. And you do so while keeping the bigger picture in mind: in some capacity, you remain oriented toward happiness and flourishing and helping others.
Finally, as you build your interests on top of the foundational skills we covered earlier, you’ll develop a strong and sturdy base from which to launch a career or a business. There is one last, remaining element, however. Even if you build those foundational metaskills to prepare and direct yourself, and even if you get really, really good at the things that interest you on top of that, there often remains a chasm. That chasm is the gap between taking your good-to-great ability and combining it with all the other skills you have, and then bringing it forward into the world and, preferably, getting paid to do so.
And it is to that particular topic that we turn now.