Senia Maymin, Ph.D. – Brave Job Search
Senior Leaders: Get a new job *before* you get laid off
created as a super-category to the subcategory __(all posts)
Speaking of self-assurance in a musician…
One of my favorite musicians, the young and experienced way beyond his years Josh Ritter, is appearing on the Conan O’Brien show on Friday. This is Josh’s first national TV appearance. About 2.5 million people will see him. Here’s Josh’s bio. I highly recommend his CDs.
Time and Place: NBC. Just past midnight on Friday night, Aug 11 (as it becomes Saturday). 12:35am.
A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
~ Benjamin Franklin
Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.
~ Golda Meir
Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy…. Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture … Do not build obstacles in your imagination … Do not be awestruck by other people and try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as you can.
~ Norman Vincent Peale
Proverbs:
* Self-confidence is the memory of success.
* Self-assurance is two-thirds of success.
Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself.
~ Robert Collier
Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
~ Samuel Johnson
Self-trust is the first secret of success.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.
~ Arthur Ashe
I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards being a champion.
~ Billie Jean King
Self-assurance. Being aligned with yourself. Some people describe this as authenticity. You see this when you see a performer on stage who appears casual, who appears to have a very easy rapport with the audience – whether a pop performer or a folk musician or a comedian. It’s a lightness. And I so believe in life being light and being easy.
Two Ways
There are two ways to live life:
1) like a fast lottery ticket – by having one-time-payoff goals and going after them, and
2) like a squirrel gathering for the winter – by surely and consistently going after your plans.
Here are some arguments for the benefits of consistency. Sure, the lottery ticket is a draw – it is exciting, it is potential, and it can be huge! The squirrel, however, will always make her nest for the winter.
The Lottery Ticket. A friend of mine is a film reviewer. (I love dance movies: you name me a dance movie, and I’ve probably seen it!) My film-reviewer friend and I were talking about dance movies recently, and he said, “Senia, doesn’t it seem that most dance movies give the performer one chance or one performance or one try-out, and that that is the one that counts? And that things better be right for that one dance because it’s the one big chance?” And I thought about it, and he’s right – typically, dance movies are structured towards one dance or one night or one show or one try-out. It’s the lottery ticket – it’s the one chance to get things right. It’s what everything in your past training as a dancer has been moving you towards.
So you give it your all. And that’s the right thing to do. But it’s so hard to live life that way, anticipating one big hit every several years, and other than that, barely eeking by. It’s possible, but so hard. As Hugh MacLeod says (via Dave Seah’s post), “If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.” Living the lottery ticket is looking for big breaks all the time – looking for the job in which in a couple of years you can make enough money to retire, looking for the business contact that will bring in the company’s annual revenue for the entire year in January, looking for the book publisher who’ll love your idea for a novel and want to make it into a major motion picture.
The Squirrel. On the other hand, “slightly, lightly, and politely,” as I once heard a guy say at a dance club, the squirrel gets things done. She knows that she doesn’t have all summer to play, and so she builds and gathers for the winter. And the squirrel may be able to get even more things done while she rushes with the winter preparations. Yes, the lottery ticket is exciting. At the same time, a lottery ticket may not pay the bills. And if it does take 10 years to become successful at something, or if it takes 10,000 hours, then YES, start now, and consistently work at it. Just like after college, in your first job, some folks show you the benefits of investing early into a retirement account – that it is the amounts you put in earlier that reap the greatest gains later – just like that, the consistent attention to your chosen activity reaps the greatest gain from consistency. Just ask anyone who plays an instrument. Putting it down for a year definitely moves you back a bit.
There are two brief stories that illustrate the squirrel’s deliberate life of consistency:
The Fisherman
The story goes that a business school student was on his spring break in a small fishing village, and saw one fisherman who seemed to be more efficient than all the other fishermen. He watched him day after day, and just before returning to school, he approached the fisherman and said, “I’ve been watching you, and your catch is larger than all the other fishermen. I think if I help you out, we could get a few more boats out here, and you could train me and my friends, and we could make a lot of money very fast, and then, just think, you could retire very soon.” The fisherman just looked at him. And the business school student continued, “Just think, if you could retire, what would you do?” And the fisherman replied, “I would fish.”
“Sew a Little at Night”
There was a man who was the main tailor to the king, but one day a genie came to him and told the man that he would now be rich beyond all his beliefs, and the king would let him go as his servant because the king would have a tailor who could do things magically for the king, and that the man was free to go and enjoy his life. The man thought that was fine. Then the genie asked him, “What will you do all the day long now that you don’t have any cares and now that you have all the money that you want?” The man answered that he would live a relaxed life during the day, including walking, reading, eating, and then, he added, “I would sew a little at night.”
It’s what he does well – he would “sew a little.” Plus, even at that point, a little more money wouldn’t hurt. Of course, both these tales are exaggerated tales that show two things: the benefit of doing what you like to do and the benefit of consistency. I bet you would argue with me, “Well, Senia, why wouldn’t I want to do both? Shoot for the lottery and keep consistently improving at what I’m doing?” Actually, YOU WOULD! That would be the ideal!
DO BOTH – Shoot for the Moon and Keep the Day Job
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One of my heroes in this sense is Dana Gioia (pronounced “JOY-a”). Dana Gioia has a Stanford MBA and worked for General Foods for 15 years, becoming a Vice President. Currently, he heads the National Endowment for the Arts, and here is his bio on the NEA site.
For years, Dana Gioia did both – published poetry books and worked a corporate job. I find that wonderful and incredible and inspiring. That’s the whole point. That’s what Hugh MacLeod means by “Keep your day job” and “Put the hours in.” |
Dana Gioia has been masterful on two levels – at work with a corporate managerial role and in his spare time with poetry. That’s incredible! That’s like a story I heard from my friend that you are what you do in your spare time. If you consistently work at a hobby (or work more at your job like most entrepreneurs) in your spare time, you will be good at it. You will be good – whether it’s guitar-playing or rock-climbing or golf or running or writing. Whatever you consistently do, you will be good at. There are other ways to push yourself to improve at your chosen activity (through incremental challenges, asking raw questions, etc.), but you are already good at it if you do it consistently.
I heard once that John Grisham wrote his first few legal thrillers by getting to his law firm at 5am and writing from 5 to 8am. That is consistency. That is perseverance.
“Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.”
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
You are sure to wake up somebody. Like the little squirrel who finishes all her preparations for the winter, and then goes to the store to buy a lottery ticket … just in case. Although her affairs are in order, she thinks, “Why not?”
“Mommy, are elephants like dinosaurs?†asked the little boy.
“Well…what do you mean?†questioned his Mommy.
“If the dinosaurs went extinct, then aren’t there some animals that came from what the dinosaurs used to be like?â€
“You mean, ‘Are there some animals that are descended from dinosaurs?’ â€
“Yes, I think. What does “descended†mean?â€
“It means animals that were born from animals that were born from animals that were originally dinosaurs.â€
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“Yes, are elephants descended from dinosaurs, Mommy?â€
“Well, people don’t say that elephants are descended from dinosaurs, but there are creatures that you know that people say are descended from dinosaurs. Want a clue?†asked his Mommy. “Yes, tell me.†“Well, this is an animal that you might think is fast and can sometimes look like a small dinosaur or like a small dragon. Usually this animal has an interesting skin. The skin could be a puffy material or even more rarely scaly like an alligator. And the animal walks on short legs. This animal also comes in many, many colors.†|
He thought for a moment, and said, “Alligators?†Then immediately, “Lizards?!”
“Well, people say that lizards and dinosaurs were not related even though they looked very similar to each other,†said his Mommy.
“Well, but how about an elephant? Elephants are big, they walk with very loud footsteps, and they have that interesting skin you talk about, right? Are elephants like dinosaurs?†he asked again.
“‘They’re not exactly like dinosaurs. How about something smaller?” asked his Mommy.
“But how could something smaller be descendable from dinosaurs?”
“Descended from dinosaurs,” said his Mommy.
“Descended from dinosaurs,” he repeated.
“Well, what dinosaurs do you know?”
“I know the bronotsaurus who is huge and eats only plants, and I know the TRex, who eats animals.”
| “What about those theropods that look like the TRex?” asked his Mommy. “The ones that are big and eat animals?” asked the boy. “Yes.” “Ok,” said the boy. “Imagine those smaller,” said his Mommy. “Ok,” said the boy. |
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“What do they look like?” asked his Mommy.
“Like small dinosaurs,” said the boy.
“And how would they have moved?”
“Fast, like they didn’t like running, but still like they could run,” said the boy.
“Ok, what else moves fast on the ground?”
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“Well, that’s funny! Dogs can move fast, and birds that aren’t flying can move fast.” “Ok, so let’s think about birds,” said his Mommy. “Ok.” “They’re fast?” “Yes.” “They are shaped like small dinosaurs when they stand on the ground?” asked his Mommy. “Yes.” “Could birds be descended from dinosaurs?” |
“Maybe…” the boy thought for a moment, “but that’s weird.”
“Ok, it’s weird, but could it have happened?” asked his Mommy.
“Yes… a bird is a small dinosaur?”
“I’m not sure that it’s actually a small dinosaur, but it may be descended from a dinosaur!”
“So not elephants… but yes birds?… That’s good: when I see a bird, I can think of a dinosaur,” decided the boy happily.
Because I recently wrote about expertise being trainable with a major component of the article I referenced being about chess, I want to show you this: David Cowan writes a hilarious post about playing chess online and the im-bots that attempt to simulate a teenage girl on the online chess site. Here’s a segment from his blog:
Unlike other AI engines, the Yahoo! bots do not even incorporate the human being’s questions into their responses. Rather, they exploit the disjointed nature and shallow personae of adolescent chat to spoof a teenage girl, as demonstrated by these pearls of wisdom recently quoted–typos and all–from A_busty_babe_cc_32 (interjected with comments from armandolinares001, a naive suitor):
can any guys beat me?
you play good
19/f bored with pics in profile
can i see?
Hi… 19/f :-) Pics in my profile
do you have a profile?
oOOooOooo
yeah, in my profile
ohh
armandolinares001: hi
tee hee
armandolinares001: wat?
are you married?
armandolinares001: no u?
I love cheesy poofs
you play good
19?F/Cali web cam and pics in my profile!
I’m feelin gfrisky
lolol
thats hot
See David’s full post here.
What makes me feel most alive?
On My Own:
* Lounging. When time stands still. When you’re lazily doing nothing and enjoying yourself immensely – usually after work or on a weekend. Just lying on your back on a picnic table in the local park, looking up at the moving clouds. Just being outside in nature without even necessarily moving, lounging as time goes by.
* Pushing myself in sports. Running. Swimming. To total exertion – talk about “alive!”
* Getting past a challenge. Daring myself and then doing it. (Like the ideas in The Game of Work – just setting new metrics to get better at. Or doing something risky – like making an announcement in a crowded train.)
With People:
* Debating and Story-telling. My really good friend says that the two times time when people are most alive are when they are debating something with each other (because then their brains have to be active, have to be engaged in the back-and-forth), and when they’re telling stories (because then their brains are actively reliving those stories).
* SPORTS! Rock climbing. Hoops. Volleyball. Hiking. Rollerblading.
* Outdoorness. Even separately from sports, being outside – hiking, rock climbing, running into the cold east-coast ocean on July 4.
* Finishing a project. For work or with classmates. This is such a good feeling.
* Just lounging with people you really like. Nothing is sometimes a very, very good activity.
I feel like I am a delineating the different activities even a little too much. All I really mean to say is that activities that push me make me feel the most alive! (Many would call that flow.) And activities that quiet me also make me feel most alive. Push me and quiet me. :)
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What makes you feel most alive?
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On Fridays, I post questions because I love questions. I would love it if you feel like answering the questions! Thanks. (I’m a big fan of privacy also, so if you don’t want to put your name in, just use an initial or just fill in the letter “A†and we’ll know it’s anonymous, and if you don’t want to put your email address for privacy reasons, just put mine – it’s at the link ‘email me’ above.)
“Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of day saying “I will try again tomorrow.” ”
~ Mary Anne Radmacher
What did Willa Cather do when she wanted to become a great writer? She took Henry James’ books and she copied entire sections, entire sentences from them. She felt the music of each sentence, and its richness, and the fall of the words. Then, Willa Cather wrote many stories in Henry James’ literary style. And then she wrote her own stories and novels.
First, you copy.
Alex Ross describes Mozart’s early work in music in this issue of the New Yorker in an article called “The Storm of Style.” Between the ages of eight and ten, Ross writes, “Young Mozart shows an uncanny ability to mimic the styles and forms of the day: Baroque sacred music, opera buffa, and opera seria, Gluckian reform opera, Haydn’s classicism, the Mannhein symphonic school, Strum und Drang agitation, and so on.”
This is the 10,000 hours of practice, practice, practice (some of which is copy, copy, copy) that I mentioned here.
Ross continues, “Hearing so many premonitions of future masterpieces, I got the feeling that Mozart’s brain contained an array of musical archetypes that were connected to particular dramatic situations or emotional states—figures connoting vengeance, reconciliation, longing, and so on. One example appears in “La Finta Semplice,†the merry little opera buffa that Mozart wrote when he was twelve. In the finale, when all misunderstandings are resolved, there is a passage marked “un poco Adagio,†in which Giacinta and her maid Ninetta ask forgiveness for an elaborate ruse that they have pulled on Giacinta’s brothers. “Perdono,†they sing—“Forgive.†Not just the words but the music prefigures the tremendous final scene of “The Marriage of Figaro,†in which the wayward Count asks the Countess’s forgiveness—“Contessa, perdono!â€â€”and she grants it, in a half-hopeful, half-heartbroken phrase. I looked at the New Mozart Edition scores side by side, and noticed that the two passages not only waver between the same happy-sad chords (G major and E minor) but pivot on the same rising bass line (B-C-D-E). It is unlikely that Mozart thought back to “La Finta Semplice†when he composed “Figaro,†but the idea of forgiveness apparently triggered certain sounds in his mind.”
Programmer and writer Paul Graham says, don’t copy things mindlessly: copy what you like. He points out that it’s very important to copy those things that you like and not those in fashion to copy or those that it may be useful or good for you to copy. Plus, he says, when you copy, copy the good things about the item, not the bad things (such as when artists used to draw with a brownish haze to copy Rembrant’s colorings that just made paintings look a little muddier).
Two friends of mine both just pointed me to one of the best articles that I’ve read in a long time. It’s called The Expert Mind by Philip Ross in the Aug 06 issue of Scientific American.
The main points are:
* Expertise is Trainable (in the argument of nature vs. nurture, nurture appears to often win in developing experts)
* Expertise is Developed through Practice
* The Practice That Has the Best Results is Repetition with Increased Difficulty (This article emphasizes Anders Ericsson‘s words of “continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence.”)
Expertise is Trainable (Nurture Wins!)
In the argument of nature vs. nurture, it seems that each side is always looking for evidence to support it. In this article, the author Ross several times repeats that nurture wins. He bases most of the article on the work of Herbert Simon and on the work of Anders Ericsson, and uses chess throughout as the study case.
Here are some examples of practice proving to lead to expertise (the first two are from a 2001 Economist article):
1) A 26-year-old man could in a few seconds find the fifth root of a ten-digit numeral or could raise a two-digit number to its ninth power. The most interesting part is that he had taught himself how to do such calculation-intensive math by studying math-specific memorization for four hours a day – but having started this only at age 20!
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2) Ericsson trained volunteers to increase the size of their memory significantly. Regular people can remember up to about seven digits easily. Ericsson trained volunteers in increasing their memory, and after one year of practice, two of the volunteers could remember up to 80 and 100 digits at a time. 3) A third example in both the Economist and the Scientific American article is of Laszlo Polgar, who trained his three daughters to become one masters and two grandmaster at chess. Interestingly, Polgar wrote a book called “Bring Up Genius!” before he had children. Then he followed his own techniques, including giving his daughters six hours of chess exercises per day. The youngest is now the 14th best chess player in the world. |
Expertise Through Practice. (Not All Practice is the Same.)
Increasing “Chunking”. Increasing the Quality of Connections.
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Now the article gets a little more involved, but I’ll give you just the summary here. How are experts able to remember and recall so much more information, and with such detail and complexity? There’s the Herbert Simon concept of chunking: this means, for example, grouping several different chess game openings into one. Or if you’re a chef, grouping several different ways that you might serve tomatoes into a list of the five best ways. |
Using chunking, you are creating a memory “well-organized system of connections,” describes Philip Ross. And the brain remembers best in maps.
Using those well-organized connections, expert chess players are able to look quickly at a chess board that’s had a game in process and even if you were to overturn the pieces, the experts would be able to quickly reconstruct where the pieces had been. But…! (and here’s an example from the article) if you “asked players of various strengths to reconstruct chess positions that had been artificially devised–that is, with the pieces placed randomly on the board–rather than reached as the result of master play,” the opposite would happen! When it came to randomly arranged pieces, the chess experts did not recall the placement of the pieces any better than the amateurs, and in fact, they recalled the placement worse than the amateurs! Because the chess experts were used to recalling piece placements in chunks.
(Here I’m not summarizing, but this is my favorite example from the entire article!)
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“Take the sentence “Mary had a little lamb.” The number of information chunks in this sentence depends on one’s knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most native speakers of English, the sentence is part of a much larger chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk. For someone who has memorized the words but not their meaning, the sentence is five chunks, and it is 18 chunks for someone who knows the letters but not the words.” |
10,000 Hours and 10 Years
In this 1994 NYTimes article on Peak Performance, author Daniel Goleman describes Herbert Simon’s and Anders Ericsson’s research on expertise. Goleman writes, “The old joke — How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice — is getting a scientific spin.” Ericsson’s research led him to conclude that virtuoso violin performers often have 10,000 hours of practice by the time they are in their early 20’s. Ross in the SA article writes, “Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. ”
10,000 hours or 10 years. This has come to be a calling card for expert knowledge: the 10/10,000 rule.
Dave Seah breaks down the 10,000 hours into more manageable groupings, and he has fun ideas on how to use those hours towards becoming your own “niche” of expert. Alvin describes the trainable structure of expertise and discusses how to increase the impact of your training through – suprisingly and very interestingly to me – your five senses.
Best Practice: Repetition with Increased Difficulty
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One of my friends who pointed out this article to me said, “it’s not about hitting a golf ball 100 times, it’s about hitting each time at the edge of your abilities.” At that edge, at the brink of challenge, that’s where you can grow. So the best thing you can do to improve within a field is to have an incredible coach, who can lead you along your brink of challenge – or to keep yourself on a very increasingly difficult carefully-paced training system.
Ericsson says that what matters is not experience but “effortful study” and specifically “continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence.” |
So, in summary,
expertise is trainable at any age,
practice, practice, practice,
and increase the difficulty continuously!
