CARDINAL Tema 2: Ventaja competitiva

Ben Campbell, en la escena inicial de 21 Blackjack, afronta la entrevista para una prestigiosa beca de Harvard. Recibe la siguiente pregunta: «¿Qué le hace diferente? ¡Impresióneme!» Ben despliega méritos académicos pero no construye una historia memorable… y no consigue sobresalir entre los otros 76 candidatos.

En este segundo módulo de Cardinal: trabajaremos fortalezas y minimizaremos debilidades, discutiremos entornos laborales en los que crecer profesionalmente e identificaremos una diferenciación, para luego monetizarla en un mercado.

David contra Goliat

Malcolm Gladwell es periodista del New Yorker y escritor mediático. Muchos le acusan (¿quizá por envidia?) de falta de rigor, de cherry picking, significa, de publicar los datos que encajan con su teoría. No sigue métodos precisamente científicos para validar las hipótesis pero siempre encuentra buenas historias y plantea debates interesantes. En su nuevo libro, David y Goliat, expone el caso de un equipo infantil de baloncesto que perdía todo lo que jugaba. Las niñas no conseguían defender a unas rivales más altas. ¿Qué hicieron? Cambiar las reglas. En lugar de defender en zona, la opción clásica, decidieron hacerlo con una presión individual a toda pista, táctica mucho más arriesgada. Eran pequeñas, un handicap en baloncesto tradicional, pero también rápidas, una fortaleza si jugaban de forma agresiva. Titular clickbait… no te vas a crees lo que ocurrió después… sí, empezaron a ganar partidos. Gladwell conecta este relato con la ofensiva militar de Lawrence de Arabia durante la Primera Guerra Mundial y cierra el libro con una moraleja ad hoc: cuando eres el underdog (¡nos encanta esa palabra!) nunca compitas según las reglas del grande. Estarás así dándote una opción de éxito. Accede al artículo original. El relato bíblico de David contra Goliat esconde otra lección de carrera: cuando eres joven, y dispones de cierto margen de error, busca oportunidades en lugares extraños. Arriésgate, realiza tu apuesta rara. Allí encontrarás la diferenciación.

En este módulo hablaremos de crecimiento personal. Quién mejor que Toni Nadal, el tío de Rafa, para abrir la discusión. Un fragmento de Todo se puede entrenar:

Talento es la capacidad para desarrollar un aprendizaje. Cuanta más capacidad tiene uno para desarrollar una disciplina, más talento tiene. El que tiene talento encuentra el camino que le conduce a sus objetivos. El que tiene talento es el que se da más oportunidades. El que tiene talento es, sobre todo y lo repito, el que tiene más capacidad para aprender. El que tiene su propio límite alejado.

[CORE] Cuestionario: Ventaja competitiva

Este cuestionario incluye una serie de preguntas personales. No es necesario que sigas el orden aquí fijado. Dedícales, eso sí, la máxima atención, sin distracciones externas. Regálate tiempo para pensar en ellas. Busca conexiones. Edita los textos. Y repite el proceso. Hasta encontrar la respuesta.

Revisa las instrucciones del Módulo 0: Escribe tu futuro.

Test 201. Perfil

A. Big Five, consenso científico para clasificar la personalidad humana en 5 dimensiones independientes.

• Responsabilidad: Disciplina, organización, cumplimiento de las reglas.
• Extraversión: Sociabilidad, entusiasmo, búsqueda de recompensas.
• Afabilidad: Calidez, compasión, modestia, cuidado del prójimo.
• Apertura al cambio: Curiosidad, imaginación, receptividad hacia nuevas ideas.
• Neuroticismo: Inestabilidad, ansiedad, emociones negativas.

Evalúate en las 5 áreas y comenta tu perfil. No existe aquí un posicionamiento único, hay mil formas de construir un perfil de éxito. La respuesta es correcta si describe tu personalidad. Dicho esto, ¿te gustaría cambiar algo? ¿Puedes hacerlo? ¿O es innato?

B. Dale Carnegie, Jeffrey Pfeffer y Bill Autlet hablando, en este orden, sobre inteligencia emocional, poder y emprendimiento.

• “En la universidad habían leído y releído libro tras libro, con la idea que, con el conocimiento, obtendrían su recompensa. Pero en el mundo de los negocios vieron que los éxitos correspondían a quienes poseían, además, la capacidad de hablar en público, de ganarse el favor de la gente y de vender una idea—o de venderse a si mismos.”
• “El poder puede explicarse desde un deseo natural y el desarrollo de habilidades. Toda voluntad de poder conlleva ambición, energía y concentración. Siendo autoconocimiento, confianza, empatía y gestión del conflicto las habilidades a trabajar.”
• “Los emprendedores exhiben características como visión, carisma, habilidades analíticas, conexión de conceptos dispares, humbition, una mezcla de humildad y ambición, y disciplina en la ejecución.” 

Evalúate en los 16 puntos. Comenta si necesario. ¿Qué cualidades deberías desarrollar para competir en tu industria? ¿Qué comparten los perfiles top en ella? ¿Existen diferencias entre un empresario y un asalariado de éxito? ¿Qué perfil tienes?

C. Hablemos de la ventaja competitiva. ¿Qué sabes hacer mejor que tus competidores? Identifica fortalezas, atributos únicos que te ayudarán a conseguir todo lo que te propongas. Prepara también una lista con tus debilidades. No queremos convertirlas en fortalezas (no te ganarás la vida en ellas), pero, ¿qué podrías hacer para que no te perjudicaran? ¿Cómo podrías solucionarlo?

D. Pregunta prestada del artículo de Fetherstonhaugh: Trabajos remunerados que he realizado a lo largo de mi vida y que he aprendido (en una línea) en cada uno de ellos.

Test 202. Market-fit

A. ¿En qué industria se ajusta el perfil previamente descrito? ¿Quién es mi mejor comprador? ¿Me gusta trabajar solo o acompañado? ¿En la oficina o desde casa? ¿O exterior? ¿Prefiero la parte técnica o el trato con el cliente / colegas del trabajo? ¿Soy organizado o caótico? ¿Tengo perfil metódico o creativo? ¿Teoría o práctica? ¿Dirigir equipos o recibir órdenes? ¿Sector público o privado? ¿Mi propia empresa o cobrar una nómina a final de mes? ¿Me definiría como una persona sensible? ¿Activa? ¿Intelectual? ¿Inquieta? ¿Conformista? Mi industria por aptitudes: ¿Científica? ¿Cultural? ¿Negocios? ¿Tecnológica? ¿Mecánica? Pregúntate esto si estás considerando una carrera académica: ¿Me gusta leer, investigar y escribir sobre un tema concreto? En función de las respuestas obtenidas, ¿qué nuevas posiciones debería considerar?

B. Si todavía no lo tienes claro. ¿En qué gastas tu tiempo libre? ¿Qué estudias cuando nadie te dice qué estudiar? ¿Qué secciones de la librería despiertan tu curiosidad? ¿Qué páginas del periódico lees con mayor interés? ¿Qué temáticas tienen gran importancia en tu vida pero parecen importar más bien poco a los demás? ¿Qué temáticas parecen tener sentido para la mayoría de los mortales y carecen de sentido para ti? ¿Hay alguna tarea a la que llames hobby que tus amigos calificarían como trabajo? ¿Cuáles serían (o hubieran sido) tus estudios si el dinero no resultase un problema? ¿Qué se te da bien enseñar? ¿Qué carrera estudiarías si firmaras una cláusula de confidencialidad—pero retuvieras el conocimiento?

C. Entrevista a una persona cercana—familiar o amigo. Incluimos 5 preguntas, pero tómate la libertad de preguntarle cualquier otra cuestión que consideres relevante. ¿Cómo me definirías? ¿Qué me diferencia? ¿Qué tengo pendientes de mejora? (Exígele sinceridad, no podrás corregir si antes no identificas el problema.) ¿Dónde me ves en 10 años? ¿Un consejo para mi futura carrera?

** What nobody teaches in America anymore is how not to act, not to keep busy, how to wait. (Ursula K. Le Guin.) **

[EXTRA] Cuestionario: Ventaja competitiva

Lanzamos más preguntas. Desordenadas. Raras. Relevantes. Consúmelas a tu gusto, siguiendo siempre unos intereses genuinos. Escoge tu el momento, no es urgente, lo dejamos a tu criterio. Justo después de finalizar los materiales [CORE], cuando la discusión todavía está fresca. O transcurridos 6 meses, buscando inspiración, otros puntos de vista, nuevas estrategias.

Test 203. Crecimiento

A. Define un objetivo de desarrollo. Generar un hábito o alcanzar una meta, ¿qué quieres conseguir? Explica detalladamente cómo piensas ejecutarlo y cómo evaluarás [por escrito] la consecución del mismo. ¿Qué variables piensas medir? No debe dirigirse exclusivamente a la parte de carrera—puede tratarse de un objetivo personal—pero justifica el porqué de tu selección. Asegúrate que esté relacionado con tu propósito vital (te ayudará a convertirte en la persona que quieres ser) y que establezca un listón moderadamente realista (ambicioso pero alcanzable). Una vez alcanzado el deadline del proyecto. ¿Correcciones realizadas sobre el plan original? 3 lecciones extraídas de esta experiencia. 

B. Eres producto de tu entorno. ¿Qué libros leerás en los próximos 12 meses? ¿Qué podcasts escucharás? ¿Tienes pensado cursar estudios de posgrado? ¿En qué modalidad? ¿Es una buena inversión—en dinero y, sobre todo, en tiempo? Evalúa opciones académicas alternativas (bootcamps de programación, habilidades sociales, etc.). ¿Qué idiomas te gustaría aprender / mejorar? Relaciona estas respuestas con futuros trabajos.

C. En su bestseller Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg cuenta los detalles de una reunión en 2001 con Eric Schmidt, CEO de Google en aquel momento. Sandberg buscaba trabajo en Silicon Valley pero no estaba convencida sobre la propuesta de Google, por cuestiones de rango. La respuesta de Schmidt: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship you don’t ask what seat.” Mayor desarrollo en industrias en crecimiento, con más oportunidades. ¿Por dónde pueden ir los tiros? El error es preocuparse por rango o salario al inicio de una carrera, no por aprendizaje y potencial de la apuesta. El libro de Sandberg es manual de un nuevo feminismo, que no reivindica cuotas, solo competir en igualdad de condiciones. El único cambio real pasa por las decisiones diarias de cada uno. Según la actual COO de Facebook, las mujeres infravaloran sus logros [a la hora de atacar una posición corporativa] para encajar en el estereotipo—menos competitivo—que tiene la sociedad de ellas, aumentando, en su autolimitación inconsciente, el gap salarial. ¿Buscas la validación social? ¿Quieres gustar en exceso?

Test 204. Pitch

A. ¿Dispones de un CV profesional? Revisémoslo, junto con la carta de presentación. Tus materiales de promoción en la búsqueda de empleo. Echa un vistazo a las guías de Harvard, Stanford (¡lectura altamente recomendable!) y la London School of Economics. El documento de Stanford puede servirte para preparar el proceso. Ajusta tu perfil en la sobriedad. Principio del understatement: Decir las cosas en las mínimas palabras, nunca exagerar. Así tu argumento gana fuerza. Incluye solo taras relevantes en el CV.

B. La entrevista. Las preguntas clásicas. Y las raras, para comprobar cómo respondes cuando no sabes la respuesta. Prepáralas frente a un espejo. ¿Sé cómo comportarme en una entrevista? ¿Cómo iré vestido? ¿Qué diré? Lo mejor que puedes hacer es entrenar con fuego real, aunque ahora no busques empleo. Analiza fallos a posteriori. Convencerás si respondes con profesionalidad, transmites expertise y generas complicidad.

C. Una última pregunta, antes de ofrecerte el puesto: ¿Por qué tendría que contratarte? Tu pitch, escríbelo en unas 100 palabras. ¿Podrías acortarlo? ¿Sabrías describir tu propuesta en 8-12 palabras? Prepara también una presentación informal (¿seria? ¿graciosa? ¿diferente?). Hemos abierto comunidad en LinkedIn para compartir esta información. Nos gustaría conocerte mejor.

Test 205. Outliers

A. Una reflexión de Toni Nadal, entrenador de Rafa, en el libro Todo se puede entrenar: “Talento es la capacidad para desarrollar un aprendizaje. Cuanta más capacidad tiene uno para desarrollar una disciplina, más talento tiene. El que tiene talento encuentra el camino que le conduce a sus objetivos. El que tiene talento es el que se da más oportunidades. El que tiene talento es, sobre todo y lo repito, el que tiene más capacidad para aprender. El que tiene su propio límite alejado.” ¿Cómo desarrollarás tu talento? ¿Tienes una estrategia para ser el mejor en tu campo? Muy recomendable el documental Jiro dreams of sushi, dentro de los materiales [EXTRA] de la semana. Persistiendo definirás tu misión profesional.

B. Práctica deliberada, actividad específicamente diseñada para mejorar tu rendimiento. El psicólogo sueco K. Anders Ericsson acuñó el término, popularizado por Malcolm Gladwell en Outliers. ¿Entrenas con enfoque de mejora? ¿Buscas las críticas de personas cualificadas? Más allá de las famosas 10.000 horas, ¿quién supervisará tu trabajo? Asegúrate que recibes las correcciones. Necesario cierto talento innato (no soltaremos el tópico que puedes conseguir todo lo que te propongas) pero la diferencia entre amateur y profesional suele explicarse en el número de horas que uno, siendo adolescente, esté dispuesto a dedicar al piano.

C. Teoría del dibujante Scott Adams: “Ser clase media no requiere planificación. Estudia, consigue un puesto que te interese y manténte alejado de problemas. Pero si quieres ser extraordinario, tienes dos caminos: (1) Ser el mejor en algo. (2) O ser muy bueno (top 25%) en 2 cosas. La primera estrategia es extremadamente difícil, pocos llegarán a la NBA. No recomiendo intentarlo. La segunda es más simple. Todos tenemos áreas en las que, con esfuerzo, llegaríamos al top 25%. (…) El capitalismo recompensa cosas raras y valiosas. Y te haces raro y valioso combinando, hasta que nadie esté ofreciendo tu mix de habilidades.” El concepto de la intersección como estrategia de diferenciación laboral. ¿Cuál es la tuya? Escribe distintas combinaciones de 2 elementos que formen una intersección rara y valiosa. ¿Tienes un mínimo común múltiple—una habilidad que aparezca en todos los perfiles?

D. El emprendimiento como una mentalidad—y no una profesión: Alerta constante hacia oportunidades futuras. Ganarás dinero si anticipas el mercado, desde tu propia empresa o dentro de una multinacional. ¿Te gustaría ser empresario? ¿Tienes una creencia en la que muy poca gente estaría de acuerdo? Thiel preguntaba esto en sus entrevistas de trabajo, buscando el perfil contrarian. Rehaciendo la pregunta empresarial. A nadie le importa qué quieres. Sí que es relevante el problema que puedes solucionar. ¿Cuál sería el tuyo? ¿Quién eres y en qué puedes ayudar a otras personas? ¿Es un problema suficientemente grande? ¿Tiene un impacto real? ¿Cómo podrías retener el valor generado?

** Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. (Richard Feynman.) **

[CORE] Fragmento: Schopenhauer (13:00)

Aforismos sobre la sabiduría de la vida. Arthur Schopenhauer.

→ Compra el libro

Cuando examinamos las cosas con mirada atenta, cuando vemos el ímpetu poderoso e incontenible con que las aguas de las cataratas se precipitan a las profundidades a las profundidades de la Tierra, con que el imán se orienta siempre hacia el polo magnético, la violencia con que los polos intentan reunirse y que, al igual que los deseos humanos, se acrecienta con los obstáculos; cuando observamos la cristalización repentina, con esa regularidad que no es más que la brusca detención del movimiento en diversas direcciones sometido, en su solidificación, a leyes rigurosas; cuando advertimos cómo los cuerpos sustraídos a la solidez y liberados por el estado de fluidez se buscan y se rehúyen, se unen y se separan; cuando, por último, sentimos como un lastre, al que nuestro cuerpo frena su atracción, lo presiona y lo empuja continuamente persiguiendo su único fin; entonces no deberemos hacer un gran esfuerzo de imaginación para reconocer, incluso a gran distancia, nuestra propia esencia, esa misma que en nosotros persigue sus fines bajo la luz del conocimiento pero aquí, en el más débil de sus fenómenos, se agita de ciega, sorda e invariablemente; y, empero, porque en todos los casos es una y la misma cosa—igual que las primeras luces del alba comparten con el mediodía el nombre de luz solar, también aquí debe llevar el nombre de voluntad, que designa el ser de todas las cosas en el mundo y el único núcleo de cualquier fenómeno.

Un temperamento sereno y alegre basado en una salud perfecta y en un buen régimen de vida, un entendimiento claro, animado, penetrante y acertado en sus juicios, una voluntad atemperada y apacible y su consiguiente conciencia limpia, son cualidades a las que ningún rango o riqueza puede sustituir. Pues lo que cada uno es para sí mismo, lo que lo acompaña en su soledad y nadie le puede proporcionar o arrebatar es obviamente mucho más importante para él que el resto de sus cualidades o lo que los demás puedan pensar de él. Un hombre ingenioso, aunque esté completamente solo, se entretiene de maravilla con sus propios pensamientos y fantasías, mientras que al torpe ni la alternancia constante de reuniones sociales, ni las obras de teatro, las excursiones o las parrandas lo libran del suplicio del aburrimiento. Un carácter bueno, moderado y manso puede estar satisfecho aun en circunstancias adversas; mientras que uno ávido, envidioso y malvado no lo estará aunque nade en la abundancia. 

Cuando, animado por la fuerza del espíritu, uno abandona el modo habitual de considerar las cosas y, a la luz de las diversas formas del principio de la razón, deja de esclarecer las relaciones recíprocas cuyo fin último siempre es la relación con la propia voluntad; cuando no considera ya el dónde, el cuándo, el porqué y el para qué de las cosas sino única y exclusivamente su naturaleza; cuando la conciencia ya no se interesa por el pensamiento abstracto, por los principios de la razón, y en lugar de ello se entrega con toda la fuerza de su espíritu a la intuición y se sumerge en ella por entero, y deja que su conciencia se llene con la apacible contemplación del objeto natural  presente en ese momento, sea un paisaje, un árbol, una roca, un edificio o cualquier otra cosa, a partir del momento en que uno «se pierde», esto es, olvida su individualidad, su voluntad, y solo es puro sujeto, límpido espejo del objeto, de tal manera que parece que el objeto está solo, sin nadie que lo perciba, y no se puede distinguir la intuición del sujeto que lo percibe, ya que ambos se confunden, porque la conciencia está totalmente llena y ocupada por una sola imagen intuitiva; cuando por fin el objeto se ha liberado de toda relación con las cosas y el sujeto con toda relación con la voluntad, entonces lo que se conoce ya no es la cosa particular sino la Idea, la forma eterna, la objetivación inmediata de la voluntad en ese grado. Y, sumido en esa contemplación, deja de ser un individuo, pues el individuo ha desaparecido en el instante de la contemplación: es el sujeto del conocimiento, liberado de la voluntad, del dolor y del tiempo. (…) El hombre corriente es incapaz de sostener de una manera constante la percepción completamente desinteresada que constituye la contemplación: solo puede dirigir su atención sobre las cosas en la medida en que estas guardan alguna relación por indirecta que sea con su propia voluntad.

En modo alguno creo estar incurriendo en algo indigno de mi pluma si recomiendo que se tenga sumo cuidado en conservar tanto el patrimonio adquirido como el heredado. Poseer de nacimiento lo necesario para vivir holgadamente de manera holgada y verdaderamente autónoma, es decir, sin tener que trabajar, aunque se esté solo y sin familia, es una ventaja invalorable, pues representa la exoneración y la inmunidad frente a las carencias y los infortunios que aquejan la vida humana, es decir, la emancipación de una servidumbre generalizada, de un destino natural de todos los hijos de esta tierra. Sólo gracias a este auténtico privilegio del destino se nace realmente libre, sólo así se es de verdad sui juris, o sea dueño de su propio tiempo y de sus propias fuerzas, y se puede decir cada mañana: «el día me pertenece». Por idéntica razón, la diferencia entre quien recibe una renta de mil talentos y el que la recibe de cien mil es mucho menor que la que existe entre el primero y quien no posee nada. El patrimonio heredado alcanza su máximo valor cuando quien lo recibe está dotado de facultades intelectuales de orden superior y persigue objetivos poco compatibles con los negocios, pues ello significa que ha sido doblemente favorecido por la fortuna y puede consagrarse a su genio, y saldará cien veces su deuda con la humanidad si logra aquello que nadie más alcanzó y produce algo que redunde en mayor provecho o gloria del conjunto de la misma. Acaso otra persona en situación igualmente ventajosa adquiera méritos ante el género humano con sus proyectos filantrópicos. Pero quien, habiendo nacido con bienes de fortuna, no lleve a cabo ni lo uno ni lo otro, aunque sea parcialmente, o al menos se esfuerce en realizarlo, o se ponga en condiciones de ayudar a la humanidad aprendiendo concienzudamente alguna ciencia, no pasará de ser un vulgar ladrón, digno del mayor desprecio. Pero tampoco será feliz: pues el estar exento de necesidades lo pondrá a merced del otro polo de la miseria humana, el aburrimiento, que lo atormentará tanto que habría sido más dichoso de haber tenido que trabajar para satisfacer sus carencias materiales. Y este aburrimiento lo desviará hacia extravagancias capaces de destruir incluso aquella otra ventaja, de la que demostró ser indigno. De hecho, son incontables las personas que se han visto sumidas en la pobreza porque, habiendo dispuesto de dinero, lo gastaron para mitigar temporalmente el aburrimiento que las agobiaba.

[CORE] Lectura: Musk (04:00)

Justine Musk sobre la personalidad obsesiva de su exmarido. 

Resumen: Solo serás el mejor si te gusta lo que haces, si piensas las 24 horas en tu proyecto.

How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Richard Branson?

There’s a fine line between genius and madness.

Extreme success results from an extreme personality and comes at the cost of many other things. Extreme success is different from what I suppose you could just consider ‘success,’ so know that you don’t have to be Richard or Elon to be affluent and accomplished and maintain a great lifestyle. Your odds of happiness are better that way. But if you’re extreme, you must be what you are, which means that happiness is more or less beside the point. These people tend to be freaks and misfits who were forced to experience the world in an unusually challenging way. They developed strategies to survive, and as they grow older they find ways to apply these strategies to other things, and create for themselves a distinct and powerful advantage. They don’t think the way other people think. They see things from angles that unlock new ideas and insights. Other people consider them to be somewhat insane.

Be obsessed.

Be obsessed.

Be obsessed.

If you’re not obsessed, then stop what you’re doing and find whatever does obsess you. It helps to have an ego, but you must be in service to something bigger if you are to inspire the people you need to help you (and make no mistake, you will need them). That ‘something bigger’ prevents you from going off into the ether when people flock round you and tell you how fabulous you are when you aren’t and how great your stuff is when it isn’t. Don’t pursue something because you “want to be great.” Pursue something because it fascinates you, because the pursuit itself engages and compels you. Extreme people combine brilliance and talent with an insane work ethic, so if the work itself doesn’t drive you, you will burn out or fall by the wayside or your extreme competitors will crush you and make you cry.

Follow your obsessions until a problem starts to emerge, a big meaty challenging problem that impacts as many people as possible, that you feel hellbent to solve or die trying. It might take years to find that problem, because you have to explore different bodies of knowledge, collect the dots, and then connect and complete them.

It helps to have superhuman energy and stamina. If you are not blessed with godlike genetics, then make it a point to get into the best shape possible. There will be jet lag, mental fatigue, bouts of hard partying, loneliness, pointless meetings, major setbacks, family drama, issues with the Significant Other you rarely see, dark nights of the soul, people who bore and annoy you, little sleep, less sleep than that. Keep your body sharp to keep your mind sharp. It pays off.

Learn to handle a level of stress that would break most people.

Don’t follow a pre-existing path, and don’t look to imitate your role models. There is no “next step.” Extreme success is not like other kinds of success; what has worked for someone else probably won’t work for you. They are individuals with bold points of view who exploit their very particular set of unique and particular strengths. They are unconventional, and one reason they become the entrepreneurs they become is because they can’t or don’t or won’t fit into the structures and routines of corporate life. They are dyslexic, they are autistic, they have ADD, they are square pegs in round holes, they piss people off, get into arguments, rock the boat, laugh in the face of paperwork. But they transform weaknesses in ways that create added advantage—the strategies I mentioned earlier—and seek partnerships with people who excel in the areas where they have no talent whatsoever.

They do not fear failure—or they do, but they move ahead anyway. They will experience heroic, spectacular, humiliating, very public failure but find a way to reframe until it isn’t failure at all. When they fail in ways that other people won’t, they learn things that other people don’t and never will. They have incredible grit and resilience.

They are unlikely to be reading stuff like this. (This is not to slam or criticize people who do; I love to read this stuff myself.) They are more likely to go straight to a book: perhaps a biography of Alexander the Great or Catherine the Great* or someone else they consider Great. Surfing the ‘Net is a deadly timesuck, and given what they know their time is worth—even back in the day when technically it was not worth that—they can’t afford it.

I could go on—it’s a fascinating subject—but you get the idea. I wish you luck and strength and perhaps a stiff drink should you need it.

This question originally appeared on Quora: How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Richard Branson?

[CORE] Lectura: Colvin (11:00)

Colvin presenta la teoría de Ericsson sobre la práctica deliberada.

Resumen: Para ser el mejor en una tarea necesitas invertir en ella unas 10.000 horas. ¿Cuál es—según él—el mayor freno de carrera? No competir en el sitio correcto. Entrenar una hora más marca la diferencia. Si no te gusta, nunca llegarás a obsesionarte.

FORTUNE: Secrets of Greatness

 

What it takes to be great

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work

By Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large

(Fortune Magazine) — What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it - or you don’t.

Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful.

Tip Sheet: Perfect Practice

1. Approach each critical task with an explicit goal of getting much better at it.
2. As you do the task, focus on what’s happening and why you’re doing it the way you are.
3. After the task, get feedback on your performance from multiple sources. Make changes in your behavior as necessary.
4. Continually build mental models of your situation - your industry, your company, your career. Enlarge the models to encompass more factors.
5. Do those steps regularly, not sporadically. Occasional practice does not work.

Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.

Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, “The evidence we have surveyed … does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.”

To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.

The irresistible question - the “fundamental challenge” for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.

Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.

No substitute for hard work

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.

What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, “The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.” In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith.

So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?

Practice makes perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that’s deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.”

Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

The skeptics

Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game?

Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude.

Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn’t do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you’d expect: Ericsson notes, “Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s.” The more research that’s done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes.

Real-world examples

All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.” He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti.

Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he’d have been cut from his high school team.)

In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.

Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that’s what it took to get even better.

The business side

The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all.

Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude.

Instead, it’s all about how you do what you’re already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.

Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company’s strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.

Adopting a new mindset

Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they’re doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren’t just doing the job, you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.

Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it’s the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.

Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don’t seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won’t come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, “it’s as if you’re bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don’t know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don’t get any better, and two, you stop caring.” In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren’t lucky enough to get that, seek it out.

Be the ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business” - pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.

Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways.

That’s a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.

Why?

For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That’s the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn’t be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from.

The authors of one study conclude, “We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice.” Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer - why.”

The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life’s inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren’t gifted and give up.

Maybe we can’t expect most people to achieve greatness. It’s just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.

[CORE] Lectura: Konnikova (14:00)

Konnikova cuestiona todo lo que afirma Ericsson en el anterior artículo.

Resumen: El éxito no es exclusivamente una cuestión de trabajo duro y voluntad. Genética y entorno son las otras piezas del puzzle.

Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect

By Maria Konnikova

September 28, 2016

Practice matters, but in many fields it matters much less than you might think.Illustration by Wren McDonald

Zach Hambrick has always been fascinated by exceptional performance, or what he calls “the extremes of human capabilities.” Growing up, he’d devour Guinness World Records, noting the feats it described and picturing himself proudly posing in its pages. By the time he reached college, though, he’d moved on to a new obsession: becoming a golf pro. “I was very serious about it,” he told me. “I practiced religiously. It was very deliberate practice.” Every day, for hours, he’d be out swinging and putting. He expected to find himself on his way to glory. Except it didn’t quite­ work out that way. Instead, young Zach was confronted with an uncomfortable truth: “I just wasn’t very good.” He saw other students, even kids around town—many of them, far less devoted and far less driven—and many of them played a better game. When he tried out for the college team, he didn’t even come close to making it. “I thought, What is the deal here?”

This was Hambrick’s introduction to an age-old debate: nature versus nurture, genetics versus effort. We’ve been having it long before we knew what DNA was. Right around the same time Gregor Mendel was messing about with his famous peas, Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, was positing that genius tends to run in families. Take almost any enterprise and find its most famous voices, he argued, and you’re led to family trees of great accomplishment, much like his own. (He would take this notion to an extreme with his eugenics program.) And, while that view hasn’t survived in its extreme form, the basic question still guides modern research—not nature versus nurture so much as just how much nature, and just how much nurture?

After finishing college, Hambrick began graduate work in psychology at Georgia Tech, with Timothy Salthouse, looking at aging and expertise in older adults. Despite his failures at golf, Hambrick was still very much of the belief that, given enough effort, you could reach excellence. Maybe golf just hadn’t been the right thing for him. In 1996, when the Olympics came to Atlanta, the students had to leave campus to make way for the athletes and visitors, and Salthouse suggested that Hambrick spend a few months at Florida State University. There, he ended up working with Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology. A couple of years earlier, Ericsson and Neil Charness had published a provocative paper arguing that training and so-called deliberate practice could describe performance differences that had been previously ascribed to innate talent. “The traditional view of talent, which concludes that successful individuals have special innate abilities and basic capacities, is not consistent with the reviewed evidence,” Ericsson and Charness wrote. “Differences between expert and less accomplished performers reflect acquired knowledge and skills or physiological adaptations effected by training, with the only confirmed exception being height.” In other words, training was everything. Hambrick could have become a world-class golfer with enough practice. Maybe he’d given up too soon.

It’s a provocative argument, and one that Ericsson still espouses over two decades later, having made a single modification to his list of exceptions: body size joined height as one of only two areas with any possible genetic influence. When we spoke recently, I presented him with multiple papers from different labs, from studies on the heredity of talent in twins to genetics papers on specific gene variants implicated in performance. But he held firm to his argument. He told me he had yet to encounter someone presenting him with evidence that anything other than practice matters. (He did, in a later conversation, add that the age at which one begins practicing can make a difference in someone’s achievement level.) “I have no problem conceptually with this idea of genetic differences,” he said when we first spoke, “but nothing I’ve seen has convinced me this is actually the case. There’s compelling evidence that if it’s length of bones, that cannot be explained by training. We know you can’t influence diameter of bones. But that’s really it.”

If that’s true, it means that the sky is the limit, especially if you’re dealing with areas other than athletics, where length of bones can offer no competitive edge. Follow your dreams and, with enough training—an average of ten thousand hours, as the famous formulation goes—you can reach them, whether they involve golf or poetry. (It’s important to note here that Malcolm Gladwell, who popularized Ericsson’s work in his book “Outliers,” takes a much more nuanced position and has argued that practice isn’t sufficient. “I could play chess for 100 years and I’ll never be a grandmaster,” he has written. “The point is simply that natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest.”)

But Hambrick obviously didn’t become a golf pro. And, if you look closely at ten thousand hours as an average, rather than absolute, number, you can start to see a problem with it. If, as shown even in Ericsson’s own data, some people require fewer hours and some require more to reach an identical point, doesn’t that imply that some individual difference other than practice is at play? When I brought this issue up with Hambrick, he noted that, in his introductory psychology course, some of the students who study very little do better than the ones who study a lot.

So I asked Ericsson if, given all the advances in genetics research and all the work on the science of expertise and élite performance that has taken place since his original formulation, he still believed in the preëminent importance of training. Do natural, heritable abilities really mean nothing? If, for instance, he himself could choose my trainer and design the perfect training plan, could I become a world-class pianist? (I chose this example since I played for many years in my youth and easily have ten thousand hours in hand.) At first, Ericsson demurred, refusing a straight yes-or-no answer in favor of asking questions about my past. Why hadn’t I been better as a child? Perhaps I wasn’t motivated? No, I assured him, I was. Perhaps my teacher wasn’t qualified? No, I responded. She was a former professor at a music conservatory in Russia. Maybe, I countered, I’m just not particularly talented at piano. He refused to accept that, and ultimately blamed my teacher. Clearly, she didn’t provide the right deliberate practice. I’d be in a different profession today if only she’d been better.

Hambrick blames something else. That summer in Florida, in 1996, he and Ericsson grew close. He remembers meeting often at Ericsson’s F.S.U. office, going to his house to peruse his book collection, taking in F.S.U. basketball games on later visits. “It was fantastic. Wonderful, inspiring conversations,” he recalls. Together with one of Ericsson’s own students, Len Hill, they decided to tackle the golf question head-on. Hambrick spent weeks tracking down data for P.G.A. tour stats and running analyses to determine how the pros reached their level of success. The work continued when he returned to Atlanta, and even went on into the first years of his professorship at Michigan State University. But the analyses weren’t turning out quite as expected—training was not explaining nearly as much as it should. So, while the work languished in unpublished state, Hambrick began to focus more and more on the other possible components of expert accomplishment. Of course, training was important—but how important? “I started to ask, Well, wait a second, can these strong claims about the primacy of practice actually hold up—is there the evidence to back it up?” The more he researched, the more he concluded that the answer was no. No matter how much he had practiced as a teen-ager, he would never have reached the P.G.A. tour. Of course, he’d known that all along, on some level—after all, he quit golf. People do have natural ceilings to their talent in any given area, and after a certain point their success arose from things other than deliberate practice.

In one study, for instance, Hambrick looked at pianists and measured their working memory, or the ability to keep chunks of information in mind and accessible for short periods of time. In the past, working-memory capacity has been found to be heritable. In his sample, it predicted success even when you accounted for the effects of practice; pianists with better working memory were better at sight reading—and increased practice did not alter the effect. When he looked back to one of the most frequently studied groups in expertise research, chess players, he found that, in addition to working or short-term memory, three more components of cognitive ability—fluid reasoning, comprehension knowledge, and processing speed, all abilities that are, to some extent, heritable—were related to performance. This was especially true of younger and less experienced players. If you’re naturally better, you don’t have to practice quite as much to get good.

So how much did practice actually explain? In a 2014 meta-analysis that looked specifically at the relationship between deliberate practice and performance in music, games like chess, sports, education, and other professions, Hambrick and his team found a relationship that was even more complex than they had expected. For some things, like games, practice explained about a quarter of variance in expertise. For music and sports, the explanatory power accounted for about a fifth. But for education and professions like computer science, military-aircraft piloting, and sales, the effect ranged from small to tiny. For all of these professions, you obviously need to practice, but natural abilities matter more.

What’s more, the explanatory power of practice fell even further when Hambrick took exact level of expertise into account. In sports—one of the areas in which deliberate practice seems to make the most difference—it turned out that the more advanced the athlete, the less of a role practice plays. Training an average athlete for a set number of hours yields far more results than training an élite athlete, which, in turn, yields greater results than training a super-élite athlete. Put differently, someone like me is going to improve a great deal with even a few hundred hours of training. But within an Olympic team tiny differences in performance are unlikely to be the result of training: these athletes train together, with the same coach, day in and day out. Those milliseconds come from somewhere else. Some may be due to the fact that genetic differences can account for some of the response to training. At Stanford’s elite study, which looks at the most accomplished athletes in the world, Euan Ashley, a professor of medicine and genetics, is studying how an Olympian’s body may respond differently to a given training regimen. Some changes are due to genetic variants that may affect blood transport or oxygen uptake or fat metabolism, or any other number of factors. Some are due to sheer luck—How much sleep did you get? How are you feeling? And some, of course, are due to hours of training. But at the top of the top of the top, the power of additional training falls off sharply.

So where else, exactly, do performance differences come from? While Hambrick’s work has been focussed more explicitly on practice and genetics, David Lubinski, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, has been approaching the question from a slightly different angle: through what’s called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (smpy), a longitudinal study of the lives of students who, by the age of thirteen, had scored in the top one per cent of mathematical-reasoning ability and were then selected to take part in an enriched educational environment. (The study, co-directed for many years by Lubinski and his wife, Vanderbilt’s education-school dean, Camilla Benbow, was described in detail in a recent article in Nature.) It’s a crucial supplement to work like Hambrick’s; the data you get from close observation of the same sample and the same individuals over time can answer questions other approaches can’t. “What kinds of practice are more effective? What approaches more effective for some people than others?” Hambrick asks. “We need all the pieces to the puzzle to maximize people’s potential. Lubinski’s work on mathematically precocious youth is an essential piece.”

Now, more than four decades since the smpy observation began, we are beginning to see some answers. Perhaps not surprisingly, kids in both the smpy sample and an unrelated cohort of talented students identified by Duke University excel at measures like academic accomplishment, patents, publications, academic tenure, and organizational leadership. They reach full professorship and C.E.O. status at rates far above any population norm. They were selected on nothing more than measurable intellectual promise, and here they are.

That is not the whole story, though, as Lubinski points out. To him, the interesting finding is the striking range of abilities within this élite sample. “Individual differences in the top one per cent matter,” Lubinski told me. “People think of the top one per cent, whether in I.Q. or reasoning or what have you, as categorical. But that top contains one-third of the ability range you see in other samples. There is a huge amount of psychological diversity among the gifted.” Some accomplish a lot, but some, even with all their promise, end up indistinguishable from their initially less gifted counterparts. Genes give everyone a possible peak, but whether you reach that peak depends on a constellation of other factors.

Part of the difference in accomplishment, it turns out, really is due to practice, just like Ericsson argues. “What separates intellectually talented kids from their intellectual peers when it comes to actual creative advances? A lot of it is how much people are willing to work,” Lubinski told me. Some people are gifted, or “intellectually talented,” as he prefers to refer to them, but don’t want to work forty hours a week, while some want to work more than sixty hours. “That has huge implications. Chance always favors the prepared mind.” Practice, work ethic: differences that aren’t apparent at age thirteen will, in their presence or absence, become magnified by the time you hit your forties or fifties. (As it turns out, though, even work ethic may be heritable. Hambrick has recently published a study on the heritability of practice, using eight hundred pairs of twins. “Practice is actually heritable. There have now been two reports of this—ours, and one using ten thousand twins. And practice is substantially heritable.”)

Also crucially important is one of the first things that critics of studies like this point out: environment. These kids aren’t just identified young; they are then nurtured in a way others are not. How much of their success lies in opportunity? It’s a question Lubinski and Benbow have studied in some detail. In three educational-intervention studies, they have demonstrated that, if you compare intellectually talented children who have had the sorts of developmental opportunities the smpy affords, they end up doing better in terms of measurable intellectual achievements like number of patents and publications than their intellectual peers—individuals matched on general intellectual ability—who have not had that enriched experience.

Opportunity must be there. Genes are great, but they need to have the right environment in which to flourish. You don’t just give birth to a “genius,” whether an academic or an athletic or an artistic one. You also give her the right environment, train her, encourage her, support her, challenge her, respond to her individuality. And who knows what else may ultimately matter. “All the abilities we assess, we still miss things,” Lubinski points out. Lewis Terman, the intellectual forefather of giftedness studies, famously missed two Nobel laureates in his selection. They were cut from the initial samples for not being gifted enough and never had a chance to take part in his study. “You’re tapping potential, but there’s also passion, commitment to work, people who want to do any one thing. People really vary. The diversity of human individuality is breathtaking.”

That diversity originates in our genetic code. But it becomes infinitely more complex as you add life into the mix. We cannot predict with accuracy who will become élite in a given field, but we know that genes and environment matter and that we all have different natural peaks that we can reach through application and training. Saying that training is everything may be tempting, but it’s wrong. “One of the criticisms people direct at us is that we’re killing people’s dreams,” Hambrick says. “But I think in fact it’s the contrary: the more we can know about the origins of expertise, including training but everything else, the more we can help people be their best selves.” Perhaps it’s just enough to know that no matter how many hours I spend in the pool, I won’t be Katie Ledecky. And I’m pretty sure I’m not going to become Brad Mehldau, either, even if I get a better teacher.

[EXTRA] Media: Dubner (52:00)

Dubner invita a Ericsson para seguir debatiendo qué porcentaje del éxito corresponde a las decisiones conscientes.

Resumen: Todos tienen razón. Trabajar bien conduce al éxito, pero hay también una parte dada.

→ Accede al podcast

[EXTRA] Lectura: De Fez (06:00)

De Fez, en un texto lleno de spoilers, desenreda la oscura trama de La La Land.

Resumen: Deberías cuestionarte, de vez en cuando, si tus objetivos profesionales están absorbiendo el resto de metas vitales.

‘La La Land’ es más oscura y perversa de lo que parece

La última obra de Damien Chazelle se presenta como un musical bello e inofensivo, pero realmente está conectada con el resto de su cine por corrientes subterráneas algo perturbadoras.

Por Desirée de Fez

Una película que, aun al compás de la melodía más hermosa, se encarga de tumbarlos uno a uno. Foto: ‘La La Land’ (Damien Chazelle, 2016)

Siempre que voy a ver una película de Damien Chazelle acabo con el cuerpo raro. Es superior a mí. No salí eufórica de ‘Whiplash’ (2014), ni tampoco me entraron ganas de aprender a tocar la batería. Salí con un cabreo monumental. Y al salir de ‘La La Land’, mientras los amigos con los que fui caminaban a un palmo del suelo, me dio un bajón increíble. Qué tristeza. Y lo mejor de todo es que ninguna de las dos películas me parece mala, sino que es algo que tiene que ver con el fondo tremendamente oscuro de ambas. No me gusta nada la expresión, pero son caramelos envenenados. Me incomoda mucho la visión que Chazelle da en ellas del éxito, uno de los dos temas centrales de su cine. (“¿El cine de Chazelle?”, pensarás. “¡Pero si sólo tiene tres películas!”. Pues no, el Chazelle guionista también tiene miga). El otro tema, abordado también de una forma más bien siniestra, sería una visión muy poco amable del espectador. Y, obviamente, el enfoque de este otro asunto también contribuye a mi desasosiego.

He descubierto que lo que me angustia de sus películas es que, en ellas, el éxito no es sinónimo de realización personal, sino un deseo ciego de reconocimiento. Y, más aterrador aún, no es que los personajes principales pierdan lo que más quieren en su camino hacia la fama, hacia el aplauso. Es que, directamente, pasan de intentar compatibilizar las dos cosas. No es el típico caso de pérdida de la cabeza en el proceso (desarrollo común en los filmes sobre ascenso-descenso a la fama). No lo es porque, simplemente, no hay proceso que valga. ¿Para qué? Si quiero triunfar, mejor me bajo de la realidad (adiós familia, adiós pareja, adiós cabeza) y me ahorro dramas.

[A partir de aquí, spoilers]

¿Cómo que no hay proceso? ¿Y cuando Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) triunfa en la música y Mia (Emma Stone) se lo echa en cara? Pues eso no cuenta porque: a) Dejan bien claro que Sebastian ahí no está persiguiendo un sueño, sino la estabilidad económica; y b) El tono con el que se narra su ascenso a la fama es deliberadamente paródico (¿Una sesión de fotos para Mojo? ¿En serio?).

Dos rupturas idénticas

No hay proceso de aprendizaje, no. Los personajes vienen aprendidos de casa: para triunfar, es decir, para que te aplaudan como si no hubiera un mañana (el terrorífico final de ‘Whiplash’) tienes que liberarte de cargas tan grandes como el amor. Las escenas de ruptura romántica de ‘Whiplash’ y ‘La La Land’ son un ejemplo clarísimo. Además, ambas son idénticas, ya que hablamos de dos películas muy parecidas en el fondo. Lo que pasa es que siempre será más amable un musical de colores sobre dos soñadores enamorados que un thriller sobre la relación de dependencia entre dos sociópatas (porque ‘Whiplash’ es un poco eso).

En ‘Whiplash’, el personaje de Miles Teller es más bruto que un arado dándole a su novia las razones por las que la deja. En resumen, sería algo así: “Mira, yo voy a ser de los grandes y tú, a mí lado, no serás nada. Por eso te dejo, porque eres un estorbo”. Sebastian es más dulce (claro, encima tiene la cara de Ryan Gosling), pero está diciéndole a Mia que, cuando empiece a triunfar, empezará también a pensar como el protagonista de ‘Whiplash’. Y ella le da la razón. Y lo dejan. Y soy incapaz de leer todo eso como un acto de amor, o de entender ‘La La Land’ como un bello ejercicio de nostalgia sobre las cosas que tiene la vida, que nos ata y nos desata. No creo que sea eso.

Foto: ‘La La Land’ (Damien Chazelle, 2016)

Primero, por el exceso de racionalidad con la que los personajes encaran su futuro : son demasiado conscientes del plan a seguir para alcanzar su sueño. De hecho, es lo único que les preocupa. Segundo, porque sueñan con el aplauso del público, no con la realización personal (no les han pasado tantas cosas como para tirar la toalla, no nos engañemos). Tercero, porque la película considera esa realización personal como un triunfo imposible o, al menos, relativo. Sebastian no es feliz al final. Sí, el club está muy bien y va mucha gente, pero Chazelle tira unos planos de la intimidad del personaje y es un cuadro. No intentéis convencerme de lo contrario.

Un francotirador apunta a tu corazón

No culpo a Chazelle de la visión del éxito que demuestra. Hay días que me parece pesimista y otros, simplemente realista. Pero sí me inquieta el conflicto entre lo que cuenta en sus películas y la alegría con la que lo cuenta. Me pasó con ‘Whiplash’: como a todo el mundo con un poco de sangre en las venas, la secuencia final me parece formalmente prodigiosa, pero ese tono épico la hizo pasar por lo que no era. Es decir, como la fiesta del éxito tras el esfuerzo, el triunfo de la consecución de los sueños. En realidad, el final de ‘Whiplash’, diferencias de todo tipo al margen, no es ni el de ‘Flashdance’ (1983) ni el de ‘Dirty Dancing’ (1987). Es algo más complejo y sombrío. No salí del cine eufórica. Salí cabreada, pues el fondo siniestro de la película quedaba silenciado: ahí estábamos todos, aplaudiendo eufóricos la historia de un chaval inestable, con una visión muy chunga del éxito, que destroza a los que le rodean para triunfar.

Foto: ‘La La Land’ (Damien Chazelle, 2016)

En ‘La La Land’ pasa algo similar: el dispositivo es tan bello que es fácil pasar por alto su oscuridad. No seré yo quien cuestione su superficie, proteste porque está hecha con escuadra y cartabón o diga que no aporta nada al género musical (de hecho, pienso que le aporta una tristeza actualizada, muy de su tiempo). Es una preciosidad, pero también una jugada perversa. Chazelle tiene muy mala leche: ‘La La Land’ es la película romántica menos romántica del mundo. El director hace una película sobre la ciudad de los sueños, donde se respira cine, donde todos persiguen su sueño. Pero también nos dice que la manera de soñar es distinta, que ha cambiado por completo, que ahora triunfar es hacerse famoso (me muero por saber qué esconde la espléndida elipsis final de ‘La La Land’, qué lleva a Mia a convertirse en la diva absurda que parece al final) y creemos que hay que sacrificarlo todo para conseguirlo.

El director, listísimo, es totalmente consciente de cómo nos las cuela. Por eso le quiero y le odio a la vez. El ejemplo más claro está en su guión para ‘Grand Piano’ (2013), la película de Eugenio Mira. Ahí está resumido su cine: el público vibra con el pianista (Elijah Wood) sin saber que hay un francotirador controlando sus movimientos, que el estallido de virtuosismo esconde cosas terribles. Corte a: ‘La La Land’ tiene catorce nominaciones a los Oscar. Ahí está Chazelle, a punto de arrasar en la ciudad de los sueños con una película que, aun al compás de la melodía más hermosa, se encarga de tumbarlos uno a uno.

[CORE] Lectura: Fetherstonhaugh (21:00)

Fetherstonhaugh desarrolla una carrera profesional en 3 fases.

Resumen: Acumular capital (combustible de carrera) en tu primera fase. Trabajar fortalezas en la segunda. Y pasar el testigo en la tercera.

Career Rocket Fuel: Whether You’re A Millennial Or Eyeing Retirement, Here’s What You Really Need To Get Right About Work

Ogilvy One’s Brian Fetherstonhaugh spends a lot of time thinking and talking about careers. Here, he offers a detailed plan for each stage of work life, designed with long-term success in mind.

BY BRIAN FETHERSTONHAUGHLONG READ

Having spent over 35 years in business in global firms, I have seen tens of thousands of career trajectories–from the first steps of entry-level millennials to the long journeys of Fortune 500 CEOs.

What I see: Most people have the wrong approach to careers. They think about the immediate next step, not the pathway. They treat a career like a sprint, when in fact it is a 40-plus-year marathon. They are more focused on getting promoted on Tuesday than about having great choices when it really matters–in their 40s and 50s.

I have been thinking about careers for decades and lecturing on the topic for the last dozen years at places like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, McGill and NYU. Here are some of the things that you might not be thinking about your career, but should be.

START WITH CAREER MATH

To understand the right mindset for career planning, we first need to do a bit of math.

1. Take the number 62 and deduct your current age.
This is the number of years you have left until early retirement. Of course, nobody retires early anymore. This number is a shock to most people. If you’re in your late 20s, you have almost 35 years of your career left. Even if you are 40, you are not even at the halfway pole.

2. How many hours does it take to become truly “excellent” at something?

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell studied super-performers in various fields such as sports, music, art, and business. He estimated that it takes about 10,000 hours of intense effort and practice and rehearsal to become excellent at something. The key point is that innate talent is not enough. No matter how many IQ points or natural abilities or gifts you have, being successful takes intense and sustained hard work.

3. What percentage of your personal wealth do you accumulate after your 40th birthday?

Most people guess about 60%. Young people tend to guess smaller percentages like 40%. The real answer is 90%. The vast majority of personal wealth occurs after the age of 40. The reasons are pretty simple. First, as we saw in Question 1, you have more years of career after 40 than before, and they tend to be the high-paying ones. Second, you enjoy the effects of compound interest. And third, many expenses tend to taper off once mortgages and child-related expenses are covered. It is true that personal wealth can decline later in life (especially after 80 due to health care expenses), but the big point is that the wealth game for most people is heavily back-end loaded into the 40s, 50s and even 60s. Most people totally miss this.

4. How many Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts do you have?

The purpose of this question is to understand how many social and business relationships people think they have. The answers I get to question #4 are always in the hundreds, and often in the thousands, especially among young people. Many people think that the key to a successful career is to have the most social connections. But that is not the whole answer.

5. How many people do you think you will meet in “career heaven”–those people who really made a difference to your career and life?

Of course, there is no one correct answer to this question, but I use it to compare and contrast with question #4. In my experience, when people reflect on their long careers at awards dinners and retirement parties, they often focus on a few individuals who made a major mark on their careers. They don’t say, “I’d like to thank my 1,632 LinkedIn connections.” They say, “There are three (or four or five) special people who made it all possible.”

We all discover people in the course of our careers who become our mentors, teachers, and advocates. They are the people who champion us and say nice things about us behind our backs. They nominate us for jobs and awards. They are like a 15-mile-per-hour tailwind for our careers, a benevolent hidden hand that propels us forward. We accumulate these champions over the course of our lives. People ask me, “Where do I find them, and how do I sign them up?” The best approach is to be patient and open, and when you discover a champion, appreciate and nurture the mentorship.

Even people in their early 20s probably already have at least one mentor in their lives. Who was the person who recommended you for college? Or that person who proposed you for your first job or promotion? Over time, additional mentors will emerge and, occasionally, some will fade. But always remember there is someone out there who is in your corner.

Once you discover a mentor or champion, the main thing is to appreciate them, and to stay engaged with them. Periodically send them a note to let them know how you’re doing. Share victories and failures. Ask advice. Remember, to your mentor, this kind of communication isn’t a burden, it is a reward.

What does this Career Math mean ?

The big and stunningly obvious conclusion from Career Math is that a career is a long journey, often lasting more than 40 years. Most people vastly under-estimate how long a career is and miss opportunities as a result. Like a marathon runner, you need an ambition, a plan, some preparation, and a smart sense of pacing. You need nourishment and refreshment along the way. You need the drive to carry forward despite the inevitable pain and hardship. You need fans.

To me, successful careers are written in three great chapters, each lasting up to 15 years. The stages are quite different. And your career strategy needs to evolve along the way.

IMAGE: FLICKR USER STEVE JURVETSON

STAGE 1: TAKE ON ROCKET FUEL

The entire first stage of a career is designed to prepare and equip you for the long journey ahead. In my opinion, most people do not focus enough on this rocket fuel stage and run out of momentum midway through their career, just when it should be getting the most interesting and rewarding.

Career rocket fuel comes in three forms. And to take full advantage of Stage 1, you should accumulate all three types of fuel:

1. Transportable Skills

2. Meaningful Experiences, and

3. Enduring Relationships

4. Transportable skills are not just technical knowledge or jargon, but fundamental abilities that will lay the tracks for a successful long-term career.

• Problem-solving: Can you assess a business problem and create a plan?
• Communications: Can you write and speak persuasively?
• Selling: Can you sell, negotiate, and close a deal?
• Analysis: Can you look at a set of data and draw important insights?
• Team: Can you mobilize a team to accomplish a meaningful goal?
• Talent: Can you attract and develop good talent around you?
• Risk and Judgment: Do you know how to make decisions and take appropriate risks?

A transportable skill worth special note is “Internet leverage.” Are your Internet skills a competitive advantage or disadvantage in your professional effectiveness ?

By Internet leverage, I do not just mean your keyboarding speed, or the number of apps you have or Internet devices you own. To me, it is your ability to leverage three things:

Internet Research: Are you excellent at finding multiple authoritative sources quickly. It is not just about finding data, because the Internet is a veritable landfill of data. It is about finding the good stuff, the credible stuff, the fresh stuff, the convincing stuff. People who can research effectively on the Internet have a distinct advantage in their careers.

Digital Content Creation: As a starting point, do you have the ability to take decent photos and create basic blog posts? In addition, I believe that every modern professional needs to be able to create a good 10-minute selling presentation (Keynote, Powerpoint, Presi, etc.) and a persuasive three-minute video for YouTube.

Digital Publishing: Once you have some content, do you know how to effectively amplify it using the Internet? What does it take to get 1,000 YouTube views? How do you get others to share your links? This skill means that you increase your professional impact dramatically.

These transportable skills form the foundation of your skill set. They are transportable because you can carry them with you from job to job and company to company.

Meaningful experiences are situations which challenge and develop you. They take you outside your comfort zone and build new career muscle. Have you worked in a corporate environment and an entrepreneurial one? Have you worked in a foreign country? Created or pitched a new business? Managed through a crisis? Started something risky? Put on a major event or show where there is visible risk of personal failure?

A range of meaningful experiences will make you more adaptable and agile. You do not thrive only in one kind of controlled environment, like a hothouse flower. You are robust enough to land on your feet and be effective in many different and fast-changing situations.

Stage 1 is the time to explore and heal your weaknesses. If you are terrible at public speaking, take improv classes. If you are too tough or too weak with team members, get personal leadership coaching. Learning is more important than unadulterated success. It is okay to fail sometimes, as long as you learn and apply it to future victories.

Enduring relationships include both the brands you associate with and the people you connect with early in your career and carry with you throughout the journey.

The employers you are associated with have always mattered, and they matter more now than ever before. Social platforms like LinkedIn now make your employment brands visible to the world. Are you proud of the companies you have worked for? What do they say about you? What reputation do you carry forward (positive or negative) because you worked at Company X and Company Y?

If you want to see what employer brands carry the best reputations, consult sources like the WPP Brandz list of the World’s Most Valuable Brands or Fortune’s Most Admired Companies. I do not recommend working for famous brands alone, but it doesn’t hurt.

Personal relationships are every bit as important. All kinds of them. They include:

1. Your Bosses. This is the #1 relationship you will experience. No one has more impact (for better or for worse) than your immediate boss. Are you learning best practices and good habits? Are you working for a respected career professional who is going places? Have you learned from an entrepreneur who will teach you about risk-taking and other transportable skills?

2. Clients/customer relationships. These personal connections can be crucial in any career–but especially for those in marketing, sales or professional services. It sends a powerful message when your clients and customers value you so much they follow you around as you move into different roles, firms, or even industries. One test I ask my employees at Ogilvy is the eBay Factor: If you were put up on eBay, what clients would “bid” for you and ask for you by name?

3. Business Partners. Are you working with excellent business partners such as consultants, agency partners, technology vendors or talent recruiters who can support and propel your career down the road? Jobs later in your career can be scary and lonely. As a senior person, you often feel like you need to know all the answers, and your peers can sometimes be your competitors. It is great to have a roster of talented and supportive partners on your side.

4. Talent around you. Are you meeting top-rate leaders and subject matter experts early in your career? Here’s a good question to ask yourself: “If I started my own company, who from around here would I want to bring with me (and would they come if I asked them)?”

Here is an important message to people in Stage 1–especially high-performing millenials. DO NOT FREAK OUT. Do not panic if you are not an SVP or a start-up CEO by your 28th birthday! The game isn’t over. It has barely begun. Focus on the learning and the journey. Think about progress and the pathway. Instead of fretting and obsessing, take some constructive daily actions that build value in your career skill set.

If you are taking on lots of transportable skills, meaningful experiences and enduring relationships in Stage 1, you are taking on career rocket fuel and positioning yourself well for the road ahead. You want to leave Stage 1 with a great base and lots of pent-up career energy.

IMAGE: FLICKR USER BLAIR STIRRETT

STAGE 2: POUR GASOLINE ON YOUR STRENGTHS

• Find your sweet spot
• Align to your passions
• Set a high ambition
• Differentiate or perish

As you enter Stage 2 (perhaps 15 years into your career), you should have a pretty clear picture of what you are good at and what you love to do. If you are not sure, get some candid outside opinions–ideally from your mentors and advocates.

Now is the time to differentiate yourself from the pack and create great choices in your career pathway. Build on your core strengths and push yourself to make them great. By the time you are into Stage 2, it is very hard to fix weaknesses. It is often much better to stay focused on your strengths and surround yourself with people who complement you and compensate for the things you do not do as well.

Early in Stage 2, you need to plot out two or three really rewarding pathways and start to pursue them. I do mean pathways, because too many things can happen for you to bank your career on just one route.

To get started, write down some ambitions and directions of where you might like to end up. You don’t need to put a precise timetable on it, just plot out some broad options and start to assess them. To home in on the top two or three, ask:

1. Does this play to my personal strengths?

Is this something that I can be really good at? Do people (especially trusted mentors) agree that this is in my sweet spot?

2. Is this pathway aligned to my interests and passions?

A good career avenue can sometimes be directly linked to your strongest interests (love of sports, or music or gardening or animals or travel or whatever), but any valid path must at least allow room for you to pursue your passions. In my own case, I love music and travel. I do not work in music or the travel industry everyday, but my job in global advertising at least keeps me around music and travel as part of my career experience.

3. Does this pathway have a viable future for me in terms of employability and financial rewards?

Do some homework into the longer term outlook for the industries, categories and professions you are considering. Not all career pathways are created equal. There are many publicly available sources which can help you assess the long-term viability. It is NOT just about money. But you really do need to pay attention to industries that are either growing or shrinking fast. It is hard to enjoy a job in a category that is destined to long-term shrinkage.

Your “pathway analysis” should reveal a few good ambitions. For example,

• Become a regional director of current firm
• Become a world-class guru in topic X
• Start up a small business in a category that you love

What would it take to get you from where you are today to ”winning” one of those jobs? And I do mean winning. There is lots of luck in career success, but after 35 years of observation I would still say that the vast majority of people earn their jobs by being better than the other known alternatives.

You are a career brand. You are on the shelf with other competent and well-intentioned brands. Some boss with a job opening or promotion is shopping for a solution to their problem and you need to get them to pick you.

Some people find the notion of career brands distasteful. Whether you like it or not, bosses and companies are constantly shopping for talent, and you are either on the menu or you’re not.

People ask me what it takes to win the battle of the brands–to be well differentiated and come out ahead. One factor that is becoming increasingly important in career momentum is “social eminence”–a measure of your activity and respect in social networks. Employers routinely look at your LinkedIn profile and the publicly visible parts of Facebook. Some employees offer you a chance to link your Twitter handle or blog on your resume. What happens when they search your name on Google or Bing? Do not be surprised or offended. They are not invading your privacy, they are just doing modern due diligence into how you behave in social circles.

I am not a believer that career advancement comes from blatant self-promotion or aggressive confrontation (aka “winning through whining.”) It’s more important to be good at something, to stand out, and to earn a reputation as someone who delivers.

If you are a good communicator, work to become the best public speaker in your company. If you are a talented connector, take on tough team challenges that show your special abilities to integrate where others have failed. If you are a highly effective doer, then celebrate it. One of my mid-level colleagues had a business card printed up naming her CEO. She proudly said it stood for “chief execution officer.” Stand for something that others value. Fly your flag.

IMAGE: FLICKR USER ZACH DISCHNER

STAGE 3: PASS THE TORCH

• Succession
• Tribal Wisdom
• Teach
• Mentor
• Stay Fresh

Traditionally, the last years of a career were marked by a distinct fall-off (Retirement Day) or a sad drift. In my view, the third stage of a career can be exceptionally fulfilling and enduring. But it takes the right mindset and expectations and preparation.

The purpose of Stage 3 is to pass the torch: closing the loop on succession planning and evolving from a doing/leading role to an advisory/contributory role.

This is where the student becomes the teacher and the mentee becomes the mentor and the leader becomes the valued contributor.

Succession: How do I equip the next generation in my company to succeed? This can range from a simple, thoughtful hand-off of duties and lessons learned to a much more formal hand-over of leadership or ownership.

Consultancy and paid advisory boards: Consulting jobs and board appointments can be great Stage 3 gigs if you can get them. But you need to have laid the tracks in Stage 2 to get asked. These roles are in hot demand now as Boomers age out of the traditional workforce in record numbers. The tight competition brings us back to that rude eBay question: “Are you now skilled and connected enough that someone would bid for you?” Nobody owes you a paid consultancy or Board position. You need to earn it.

Teaching: To me, teaching is a critical part of a rewarding Stage 3 experience. Think broadly about what you know and who you could teach. You can aim as loftily as a college professorship or as down-to-earth as tutoring local kids to read. Adult schools offer hundreds of courses in business, the arts, languages, life skills, hobbies and crafts. What tribal wisdom do you have to pass along?

Community: Recent retirees often talk about their hopes of “sitting on a few community Boards,” but they are startled to find how competitive and demanding these roles can be. Frankly, I wouldn’t want someone on my Board who wants to sit around and preside. But I would welcome a volunteer who says they want to “contribute to this exciting mission.” You need to be productive. Do things. Contribute, or you won’t be asked back.

To be effective in Stage 3 you must stay fresh and relevant. People value history, but only to the extent that it informs present-day conditions and challenges. If you don’t stay at least broadly informed and relevant, don’t expect people to listen to you. And certainly not to hire you. Staying relevant is part of your job in Stage 3.

YOUR TIME PORTFOLIO: HOW DO YOU INVEST IN YOU?

If you ask a skilled financial advisor how to get the best yield out your investments over the long haul, they’ll tell you that asset allocation is the key. Are you investing in the right kinds of things at the right time–stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.

The same in true of careers, but the question is how do you invest your time?

The pie charts shown below are based on real examples for myself and other executives I know. Conveniently, there are about 100 waking hours in the average week, so it’s easy for you to do this exercise, too.

I classified my 100 hours into broad categories like Work, Family, Health & Wellness, Teaching & Learning, Community. It’s not critical that you use exactly the same categories or that you have precise hourly estimates. Do it for a few people you know, and you’ll get the point.

This first pie chart is me in my early 30s. This is pretty reflective of me in Stage 1. I was an up and coming executive at Ogilvy Canada. I was married, with two young children.

WORK–60%. Like lots of my peers, I worked hard. I could do 80 hours a week for a short burst if I absolutely needed to, but found that I maxed out at 60 hours per week on a sustained basis

FAMILY–about 20%. This included a few hours a day with the kids at bedtime and some family activities on the weekend. Not exactly Dad-of-the-Year stuff, but Child Services was never called!

CHILLING WITH FRIENDS–10%. The occasional dinner out and some weekly zombie time, usually in front of the TV.

HEALTH & WELLNESS–5% In my 30s I joined a gym and reactivated my beer-league hockey career.

COMMUNITY–2%. Minimal volunteer service. I started to get involved with a local charity: Goodwill Industries.

LEARNING & TEACHING–maybe 3%. I did a few industry lectures a year plus some training at work.

For contrast, Chart #2 is me in my 50s.

WORK in a traditional sense is now down to 45%, but as discussed below I have re-invested a lot of my work time into teaching and advisory activities. So I still put in about 60 hours a week, but the nature of the work is quite different

FAMILY time is down a touch as my wife and I are now empty-nesters. Family time is now often focused around travel together.

CHILLING is steady at 10%. I still need my down time and zombie time. In addition to time socializing with friends, my chilling time now includes playing a guitar—often while watching really bad television.

TEACHING & LEARNING is the big change as training, mentoring, lecturing and a range of industry and advisory board roles now takes up to 20% of my time. It also includes an active learning component, which is an important dimension. For me, every Saturday morning begins at 8:30 am with a guitar lesson. It’s hard to think of work when you are playing Hendrix.

HEALTH & WELLNESS is steady at 5%. A few trips to the gym and Sunday night hockey are a critical part of my weekly balance.

COMMUNITY plays a bigger role in my fifties than before. There are a few organizations where I like the people and the mission, and feel I can contribute in some meaningful way. I use non-work for energy. To me it’s the vitamins and nourishment that keeps me going.

Remember this: All work, all the time is a recipe for burn-out. It’s like a severely monotonous diet. I really like chicken. But eating only chicken all the time would make me very tired and angry. The same is true of work. At least some change of pace is needed for inspiration and refreshment.

Below is a time portfolio for a very talented colleague of mine in his thirties. He worked incredibly hard–not just occasionally but all the time. He barely had time for his young family. He tried to meet with friends, but often had to cancel “because I’m too busy with work.” He let his cycling and photography lapse, again citing work reasons. This executive burned out at forty, was unemployed for almost two years and suffered a near breakdown. I believe that the lack of diversity in his time portfolio was a clear contributing factor.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON CAREERS

IMAGE: FLICKR USER STEVE JURVETSON

If you are like most people, you spend a lot of time stressing about work. Why not re-invest some of this time and effort into periodically thinking about your career strategy and pathway. Do your basic career math. Take inventory of the transportable skills that you have already acquired, and the ones you will need to propel yourself forward. Talk to your bosses, and at least one trusted advisor. Begin to define your sweet spot, and how to evoke your passions. Work out your time portfolio and think about how you are investing your precious time. Is it changing over time? Is it building new skills and relationships? Is it leading you somewhere better in your career?

Most of all, enjoy the long, long ride.

PAID JOBS I’VE DONE IN MY LIFE AND WHAT I LEARNED

Gardener: First job
The value of a dollar

Snow removal contractor
Montreal winters last forever

Window cleaner
Pricing by job, not by hour

House painter
The power of word-of-mouth referrals

Baby sitter
Responsibility

Dog sitter
Coping with allergies

Golf caddie
Customer service, stamina

Baseball umpire
Judgement, dealing with angry adults

Carpet salesman
Bundling products together

Door-to-door newspaper salesman
Overcoming fear of rejection

Dishwasher
Humility

Bartender
Customer empathy

Insurance accountant
GAAP accounting methods

Market researcher
Making data into insights

Whiskey barrel salesman
Advertising actually works

Marketing consultant
How to make clear recommendations

Exam invigilator
There’s money in compliance

College lecturer
Statistics and HR

President of a small company
How to budget and pay off bank loans

Brand manager
A brand is more than a product

Advertising executive
Stay very close to customers

Professional musician
There’s no money in rhythm guitar and blues harmonica

[EXTRA] Fragmento: Nietzsche (15:00)

Nietzsche; el superhombre y la voluntad de poder. Toni Llàcer.

→ Compra el libro

Para Nietzsche el conocimiento es una operación peligrosa de la que uno no sale indemne. No es un frío proceso mental en el que adquirimos informaciones que perfeccionan nuestra visión del mundo y en el que nos afianzamos (nos re-conocemos) en nuestra condición de seres racionales. Al contrario, el auténtico conocimiento está basado en una experiencia tras la cual no volvemos a pensar ni a sentir del mismo modo.
El acto cognoscitivo que Nietzsche propone se acerca más a la vivencia estremecedora de sumirse en un paisaje natural o en una obra de arte que al aprendizaje técnico o científico. Al conocer sufrimos una sacudida que altera profundamente nuestra mirada, como si se rompieran para siempre las gafas con las que, a nivel individual y social, estamos acostumbrados a ver(nos).
Nietzsche concibe sus libros como artefactos destinados, en su contenido y en su forma, a provocar ese tipo de conocimiento transformador. Por eso debemos enfrentarnos a ellos con la actitud de quien entra en un laboratorio, preparados para experimentar con nosotros mismos. El lector debe adentrarse en su obra con una mezcla de curiosidad e ironía, sí, pero sobre todo compartiendo con el autor una determinada apertura de espíritu, una disposición a la aventura que le permita exclamar: «¡Queremos ser nuestros propios experimentos y conejillos de Indias!».

La formulación más completa de la muerte de Dios se encuentra en el célebre pasaje titulado «El loco», incluido en su libro La ciencia jovial. Dice así:
¿No habéis oído hablar de ese loco que encendió una linterna, en la claridad del mediodía, y corrió por la plaza gritando sin cesar: «¡Busco a Dios!, ¡Busco a Dios!»? Como allí estaban reunidos muchos que no creían en dios, sus gritos provocaron grandes risas. […] El loco saltó en medio de ellos y los atravesó con la mirada. «¿Que adónde ha ido Dios? —exclamó—, os lo voy a decir lo hemos matado. Vosotros y yo. Todos nosotros somos sus asesinos. Pero ¿cómo hemos podido hacer esto? ¿Cómo hemos podido vaciar el mar? ¿Quién nos ha dado la esponja para borrar el horizonte? ¿Qué hemos hecho para desprender la tierra de su sol? ¿Hacia dónde se mueve ahora? ¿Hacia dónde iremos nosotros? ¿Lejos de todos los soles? ¿No nos caemos continuamente? ¿Hacia adelante, hacia atrás, hacia los lados, hacia todas partes? ¿Hay todavía un arriba y un abajo? ¿No erramos como a través de una nada infinita? […] La grandeza de este acto, ¿no es demasiado grande para nosotros? ¿No tendremos que convertimos en dioses para parecer dignos de ella? No hubo nunca un hecho tan grande y quienes nazcan después de nosotros formarán parte, a causa de este hecho, de una historia más elevada que todas las historias que hubo nunca hasta ahora». Aquí el loco se calló y volvió a mirar a sus oyentes. También ellos se callaron y le miraron extrañados. Finalmente, arrojó su linterna al suelo, que saltó en pedazos y se apagó.
«He llegado demasiado pronto —dijo entonces—, aún no es mi tiempo. Este enorme acontecimiento todavía está en camino y no ha llegado hasta los oídos de los hombres.»
Pero ¿por qué Nietzsche, a través del personaje del loco, cree que la muerte de Dios es un «enorme acontecimiento»? ¿Por qué afirma que algo que ya sabemos «no ha llegado hasta nuestros oídos»?
La clave está en que la palabra «Dios» no designa únicamente al dios de la Biblia, sino toda una manera de pensar que va mucho más allá del ámbito estrictamente religioso. “Dios simboliza la metafísica occidental. (El prefijo «meta» significa «más allá»; así, «meta-física» significa literalmente «lo que está más allá de la física»).
El loco sabe que Dios es una invención humana y que, como tal, no es algo fijo sino que evoluciona históricamente. Llegado un momento, los seres humanos asesinan a Dios, es decir, dejan de creer en él, expulsan la idea de Dios de sus cabezas. Y el loco, a diferencia de los que se encuentran en la plaza y se ríen de él, sabe que «Dios» no es solamente esa figura más o menos antropomórfica que todos conocemos (el Todopoderoso que habita en los cielos, el Padre de Jesucristo, etc.). El Dios cristiano es también el dios de los idealistas, de los metafísicos, de los filósofos.
De este modo, el asesinato de Dios no solo significa la pérdida de la fe religiosa, sino la desaparición de ese nivel privilegiado de realidad que hasta ahora servía de fundamento y daba sentido a nuestro mundo. Significa nada menos que la pérdida de la principal herramienta con la que los occidentales han estructurado el mundo durante veinticinco siglos. «Dios ha muerto» es el anuncio del fin del monoteísmo en sentido amplio, es decir, de la tendencia a comprender todas las cosas a partir de un único principio. Es también el anuncio de que cualquier deseo de alcanzar un conocimiento objetivo de la realidad se ha vuelto ridículo. Sin Dios, el mundo pierde su razón de ser.

En el fragmento que hemos citado, Nietzsche utiliza tres metáforas «terrestres» para ilustrar las consecuencias de la muerte de Dios: el mar se vacía, se borra el horizonte y el sol se separa de la tierra. Que Dios haya muerto implica que ya no podemos saciar nuestra sed de infinitud y trascendencia (el mar se vacía); se desvanece el referente último de nuestras acciones, el origen de nuestros valores y normas (se borra el horizonte); y, en suma, perdemos aquello que proporcionaba luz y calor a nuestra vida mental (la tierra se desprende de su sol).
Sin mar, sin horizonte, sin sol. Una vez que Dios ha muerto, como nos dice el loco de la linterna, «nos caemos continuamente», «erramos como a través de una nada infinita». En esto consiste el nihilismo como etiqueta que Nietzsche utiliza para nombrar el espíritu de su tiempo (y el «de los próximos dos siglos», añade). El nihilismo es un momento único en la historia de Occidente caracterizado por la «desvaloración de todos los valores» producida por la muerte de Dios.
Los nihilistas habitan un mundo absurdo, instalados en el enorme hueco que ha dejado el Dios muerto. Saben que ha desaparecido aquello que en última instancia daba sentido a la vida y, sin embargo, siguen aferrados a la necesidad de que la vida tenga un sentido. En su extremo, el nihilismo se autodestruye y conduce al suicidio. El nihilista acabaría de este modo aplastado por la verdad de Sileno.
Nietzsche interpreta el nihilismo europeo como la consecuencia natural del desarrollo de la metafísica. De hecho, considera que el nihilismo representa la culminación de la historia de la metafísica occidental (es decir, de la historia de la filosofía).
Y es que el pensamiento metafísico es a su vez nihilista en la medida en que supone una negación de la vida, de esta vida. (Recordemos que unas páginas atrás vimos cómo el racionalismo científico-socrático era también «nihilista» en tanto que negaba la vida en su dimensión dionisíaca y monstruosa). Para el metafísico el mundo sensible es insuficiente y por ello se tiene que inventar un mundo suprasensible que le proporcione criterios de orientación. La necesidad constante de recurrir a principios trascendentes, situados más allá, no es sino una muestra de desprecio hacia el más acá, una forma de «nihilizar» o devaluar la vida en nuestro planeta. Como decíamos, la muerte de Dios supone la plenitud del nihilismo implícito en la metafísica y la filosofía occidentales. No se trata únicamente de que el lugar que ocupaba Dios haya quedado vacío, sino de que ese lugar ha desaparecido como tal. Que Dios haya muerto anula la posibilidad misma de fundamentar y otorgar un sentido a las cosas.
Dicho de otro modo: con el hundimiento del mundo suprasensible se nos escapa también el mundo sensible. Nos quedamos sin todo aquello que brotaba exclusivamente del suelo suprasensible, a saber, todas las categorías, normas y valores a las que nos hemos aferrado durante más de dos mil quinientos años.
En El crepúsculo de los ídolos Nietzsche resume la situación del siguiente modo: «Hemos eliminado el mundo verdadero: ¿qué mundo ha quedado?, ¿el aparente quizá?… ¡No!, ¡al eliminar el mundo verdadero hemos eliminado también el aparente!». O dicho con las palabras del loco de la linterna: al quedarnos sin el «arriba», nos quedamos también sin el «abajo». La muerte de Dios, pues, nos arroja a la Nada absoluta.
Y, sin embargo, ante un suceso tan grave, todo sigue igual. La muerte de Dios no ha supuesto ningún terremoto. El nihilismo no ha impedido que la civilización occidental haya continuado avanzando de forma imparable. ¿Cómo es esto posible? Nietzsche responde: porque los individuos contemporáneos no están dispuestos a reconocer todo el alcance del nihilismo que les ha tocado vivir. Porque se afanan en llenar el lugar que Dios ha dejado vacío antes que admitir que ese lugar ya no existe. Porque prefieren seguir disfrutando de la comodidad de la vieja ontología en lugar de atreverse a imaginar una manera no metafísica de estar en el mundo.
Mientras Dios agonizaba. Occidente activó el piloto automático. El proyecto de la Ilustración, el gran relato de la Modernidad, no alteró en lo esencial la manera heredada de comprender el mundo. La fe en el Dios cristiano fue sustituida por otra fe más sutil: la fe en la Razón.
Cualquier intento de ordenar el mundo, de proyectar en él leyes que lo hagan comprensible, supone un esfuerzo por apresar lo que es inapresable, por dominar la naturaleza irreductiblemente anárquica de las cosas.
Y eso es precisamente lo que hace la ciencia. Gracias a una ficción muy robusta y sofisticada, las matemáticas, los científicos proyectan un orden sobrenatural sobre el mundo natural. El positivismo científico convierte el mundo entero en datos empíricos, neutralizando la infinita complejidad de lo existente, negando el caos dionisíaco de la vida. Y aquí la ciencia vuelve a actuar del mismo modo que la religión. Ambas actúan como un ganadero que se apropia de un animal salvaje y lo marca con fuego. A su manera, el científico también es, como el teólogo, un nihilista.
Estamos ya en condiciones de hacemos una idea de la profundidad que tiene el cuento de «El loco». Los que se encuentran en la plaza ejemplifican una actitud pasiva y conservadora típica de la modernidad. Se ríen del loco porque no entienden que el anuncio de la muerte de Dios es mucho más que una simple declaración de ateísmo. Reconocen que Dios ha muerto, pero al mismo tiempo quieren mantener los privilegios de un mundo regido por una visión metafísica. Sin darse cuenta han reemplazado la fe religiosa por la confianza en el progreso económico y científico. Para ellos, «cualquier sentido es mejor que ningún sentido». Son, pues, unos «nihilistas incompletos».
Aunque la muerte de Dios es un hecho consumado, los hombres de la plaza se comportan como si no hubiera sucedido. Creen que el hombre que va con una linterna a plena luz del día está «loco» precisamente porque les comunica una noticia para la que todavía no están preparados. Una noticia que pone en peligro la paz mediocre de su presente. Por ello el loco —como Zaratustra, como Nietzsche— es un «filósofo del mañana». Su mensaje «todavía está en camino y no ha llegado hasta los oídos de los hombres». Consciente de su soledad, afirma: «He llegado demasiado pronto, aún no es mi tiempo».

El ateísmo de Nietzsche no es una postura fácil. Es un ateísmo de la voluntad: no creer en Dios implica querer no creer en Dios. Un ateísmo que se propone luchar sin cuartel contra todo atisbo de metafísica y nihilismo presente en nuestras conciencias. El aforismo titulado «Nuevos combates» de La ciencia jovial nos da una idea de la magnitud de la tarea: «Dios ha muerto: pero tal como es la especie humana, quizá durante milenios todavía habrá cavernas en las que se muestre su sombra. —Y nosotros— ¡también nosotros tenemos aún que vencer su sombra!».
Nietzsche cree que, de una manera u otra, Dios impregna toda la cultura europea de su tiempo. A sus ojos, todo el pensamiento occidental se mueve de un modo u otro dentro de las coordenadas de la metafísica idealista cristiana. Como acabamos de ver; Dios está presente en la religión y en su hermana la filosofía, e incluso en la ciencia. Su huella es también evidente en la moral, cuya forma y contenido son fundamentalmente cristianos, así como en la política. El arte, por su parte, tampoco se salva: la corriente artística dominante, el romanticismo, también funciona metafísicamente desde el momento en que confía en que la experiencia estética puede transportarnos a un nivel superior de la realidad, un reino en el que el individuo se funde con el Todo y se disuelven todas las contradicciones de la vida. (Esta concepción del arte es la que el propio Nietzsche, influido por el romanticismo wagneriano, había defendido en El nacimiento de la tragedia).
Ante este hecho, y por boca del profeta Zaratustra. Nietzsche se autoproclama el primer filósofo antimetafísico de la historia. El primer filósofo que puede al fin desprenderse del viejo mapa trazado por Platón. El único filósofo que no es un «cristiano disfrazado» y que asume de veras que Dios ha muerto.
Tratando de establecer lo que nos diferencia del resto de los animales, el ser humano tradicionalmente ha sido definido como «animal racional», «animal social», «animal religioso», «animal simbólico», etcétera. Nietzsche, en cambio, prefiere hablar de un «animal fantástico»: para habitar el mundo, los seres humanos necesitamos fabricar ficciones o ilusiones. Recordemos que Fantaso era uno de los dioses griegos encargados de los sueños.
Desde esta perspectiva, la muerte de Dios es una pérdida terrible: se esfuma nuestra «creación poética» más importante, la más útil, la que nos daba el mayor cobijo. Pero se trata también de una ocasión única: nos libramos de la ficción que más nos empequeñecía, la más venenosa. Los «animales fantásticos» estamos al fin en condiciones de inventar nuevas ficciones que por fin estén hechas a nuestra medida.
Los huérfanos de Dios tenemos una oportunidad histórica de conquistar la autonomía perdida, de devolver al ser humano lo que durante miles de años regalamos a la divinidad. Como insinuaba el loco de la linterna, para ser dignos de la muerte de Dios tenemos que «convertirnos en dioses». Pero no se trata de poner otra cosa en el lugar que ocupaba Dios (la Humanidad, la Razón, el Progreso, la Nación…). Se trata de que cada uno de nosotros se convierta en un dios. Frente al monoteísmo de raíz cristiana, Nietzsche propone el politeísmo más extremo.
La muerte de Dios es una mala noticia para los conservadores y los débiles de voluntad. Para los espíritus libres, en cambio, se trata de la más fabulosa de las noticias. Al nihilismo pasivo y negativo, propio de la modernidad, Nietzsche contrapone un nihilismo activo y positivo, el nihilismo de quienes anhelan destruir el viejo mundo para poder crear un nuevo orden a la medida del hombre. Ellos se atreven a llevar el nihilismo hasta el final porque saben que es la única manera de salir de él. Quieren dar carpetazo al «error» de la metafísica y con ello poner a cero el contador de la historia de la cultura occidental. Anhelan asistir al comienzo de «una historia más elevada que todas las historias que hubo nunca hasta ahora», como decía el loco de la linterna.
Para estos espíritus audaces, el mundo huérfano de Dios ya no aparece como un territorio sin mar, sin horizonte y sin sol.
Ante sus ojos se presenta un nuevo y extraordinario amanecer. Ven cómo la mañana del nihilismo avanza hacia el gran mediodía: «Mediodía; instante de la sombra más corta; fin del error más largo». Y, bajo el cielo, se abre un mar inmenso: «Ahí está el mar, nuestro mar, abierto de nuevo, como nunca». Sus barcos «están dispuestos a zarpar, rumbo a todos los peligros». Al fin ha llegado el momento: «punto culminante de la humanidad; INCIPIT ZARATUSTRA [comienza Zaratustra]».
Zaratustra es el filósofo de lo abierto, el filósofo aventurero, capaz de reír y danzar a la intemperie. No llora la muerte de Dios porque interpreta toda pérdida como una apertura, un suceso que abre posibilidades nuevas e imprevistas. Una pérdida es también un desprendimiento, una ocasión para la ligereza. Zaratustra el de «los pies ligeros», el primer filósofo que sabe bailar. ¡Qué diferente de los filósofos dogmáticos e idealistas, de todos esos pensadores que necesitan siempre sentirse seguros, que solo saben pensar apoltronados en sus butacas y encerrados en sus grandes sistemas!
La principal tarea que le espera al nuevo filósofo es la de repensar el ser. Encontrar una manera no metafísica de concebir el ser íntimo de las cosas. Se trata de un reto descomunal. Vimos más arriba que el problema de la muerte de Dios radica en que nos arroja a un nihilismo completo, a una «desvaloración de todos los valores». Vimos también que, al hundirse el mundo suprasensible, nos quedamos también sin todos los criterios, principios, normas, etcétera, con los que nos guiamos en el mundo sensible. En definitiva, la desaparición del más allá metafísico comporta la pérdida de nuestro más acá, del mundo tal y como lo conocemos.
Por todo lo anterior, las preguntas que se le presentan a Zaratustra son de la máxima envergadura. ¿Cómo valorar la vida cuando todos los valores han dejado de valer? ¿Cómo dar un sentido y un fundamento a la vida cuando se ha evaporado el único lugar desde el que era posible fundamentar y dar sentido a las cosas?
A partir de este momento, Nietzsche tratará sin descanso de abordar el problema de la vida de forma inmanente, es decir, sin recurrir a principios trascendentes, a nada que esté por encima o por debajo de ella misma. Todos sus esfuerzos se dirigirán a construir un pensamiento que, sorteando las infinitas trampas del nihilismo, sea capaz de afirmar la vida, esta vida, de forma absoluta.

[EXTRA] Lectura: Marber (18:00)

Marber nos descubre el método de la universidad de St. John’s, en la que sus estudiantes leen los clásicos durante 4 años.

Resumen: Estudia Humanidades—para competir en la tecnológica economía del siglo XXI.

The most forward-thinking, future-proof college in America teaches every student the exact same stuff

Great books.

Peter Marber

6/21/17 7:00AM

College is supposed to help young people prepare for the future. But as headlines warn that automation and technology may change—or end—work as we know it, parents, students, and universities are grappling with a new question: How do you educate a new generation for a world we can’t even imagine?

A recent Pew Research Center survey of 1,408 technology and education professionals suggested that the most valuable skills in the future will be those that machines can’t yet easily replicate, like creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability and collaboration. In short, people need to learn how to learn, because the only hedge against a fast-changing world is the ability to think, adapt and collaborate well.

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But many American college students may not be learning them at all. In the 2011 book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Richard Arum and Jarip Roksa chronicled how few American students really improved cognitively–and learned to learn–during their undergraduate education. Few bachelor’s programs require sufficient amounts of the reading, writing, and discourse needed to develop critical thinking skills. In fact, forty percent of American undergraduates now major in business and management-related subjects, reading mainly textbooks and short articles, and rarely writing a paper longer than three pages. Further, the social bonds and skills formed in college today often center on extracurriculars that have little connection to cognitive development and collaborative problem-solving.

But perhaps instead of reinventing higher education, we can give students what they need for the future by returning to the roots of liberal arts. Consider St. John’s College, America’s third-oldest institution of higher education, founded in 1696. With fewer than 700 students between two campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe, St. John’s is a bit under the radar. But it’s emerged as one of the most distinctive colleges in the country by maintaining a strict focus on the classics of the Western canon.

The Program

Image: All article photos courtesy the author

Many fine schools in the US organize classes and curriculum around Western classics, and St. John’s two campuses look much like hundreds of small colleges across America. So what makes St. John’s unique? First, as David Brooks of the New York Times recently wrote, the college has the “courage to be distinct” amid a marketplace of more than 5,000 colleges and universities in the US. A big part of that distinction is due to a strict adherence to its own curated curriculum and teaching methods, know simply as “the Program” implemented back in 1937.

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In contrast to some liberal arts stalwarts like Brown or Wesleyan that allow students to choose from a vast array of classes with few restrictions, St. John’s offers only the Program; it’s prix fixe in a higher education world of a la carte. Four years of literature, language, philosophy, political science and economy, and math. Three years of laboratory science, and two of music. That’s it. No contemporary social studies. No accounting. No computer classes. No distinct majors or minors.

The Great Books, or “texts” as they are referred to at St. John’s, flow largely in chronological order. Starting with the Greeks and working through the 20th century including some “recent” science readings from the 1950s and 1960s, the curriculum is rarely altered. The college adds only what it believes are seminal works, and often it takes decades to reach consensus on what may be worthy of inclusion. Juniors and seniors have “electives” and can suggest texts for a class or two. The sequencing of classes is very important to the St. John’s method, with knowledge building over the semesters and years.

Another unique feature of St. John’s is a resistance to placing texts in a political, social or historic context for discussion. Context is viewed as ideology, something that St. John’s believes distorts true education and the ability to form one’s own opinion. This is crucial to the school’s philosophy; by freeing texts from context, St. John’s claims it frees students’ minds to ponder the multiple possibilities and meanings that are actually in the text. Those possibilities are then discussed and debated, and discarded when weak or specious, leaving better interpretations space to surface. St. John’s is not a cloister, and of course students and faculty are well aware of the history and social settings of their studies. But an attempt is made to focus on the texts themselves, and understand their content, meaning and merit deeply through debate. This is what creates independent thinking.

Sure, compared to the telephone book size course catalogs most colleges and universities offer in the 21st century, St. John’s curriculum may seem limited. But “Johnnies,” as St. John’s students call themselves, and faculty would argue just the opposite. This curriculum is carefully designed not only to build knowledge, but also to understand how knowledge is ultimately created; it is teaching students how to learn. In this respect, St. John’s students de facto major in epistemology. And for those of us who never studied Ancient Greek (a St. John’s requirement for two years), epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge, or the investigation of what distinguishes substantiated and supportable belief from mere opinion. Now that sounds like it could come in handy these days.

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We live in an age when 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, with much being intentionally misleading, “fake” or just plain wrong. What could be more valuable than developing an intellectual filter, cultivating the capacity to know what is important to know, distilling enormous amounts of information to form a rational position, or knowing how to listen and respond to—or perhaps integrate—someone else’s point of view?  In this vein, St. John’s uses traditional texts taught in ancient methods to impart skills that have never been more crucial.

The Program’s philosophy and practice

You will not find 100-person lectures, teaching assistants or multiple-choice tests at St. John’s. Instead classes are led by “Tutors” who guide students through Socratic inquiry (and yes, students do read about the Socratic practice during freshman year in Plato’s Theaetetus). Despite its reputation as a sadistic exercise in student humiliation, the Socratic method is actually an interactive form of intellectual sandpapering that smooths out hypotheses and eliminates weak ideas through group discourse.  Tutors lead St. John’s discussions but rarely dominate; they are more like conversation facilitators, believing that everyone in class is a teacher, everyone a learner.  And you won’t find Johnnies texting or surfing social media while in class; there is no place to hide in classrooms that range from small (seminars, 20 students led by two tutors) to smaller (tutorials, 10 to 15 students, one tutor) to smallest (preceptorials, 3 to 8 students, one tutor).

There is a formality in a St. John’s classroom—an un-ironic seriousness—that feels out of another era. Students and Tutors address each other by “Mr.” or “Ms.” (or the gender-inclusive honorific of choice). Classrooms have a retro feel, with rectangular seminar tables and blackboards on surrounding walls, and science labs filled with analog instruments, wood and glass cabinets, old school beakers and test tubes.

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You have to observe a few St. John’s classes to get a sense of what’s happening between and among the students and Tutors. Discussions are often free-flowing, with students thinking out loud and talking to the ceiling; you can almost hear the gears turning in their brains. There are many “a-ha” moments in a St. John’s classroom, sometimes coaxed out by Tutors in Socratic fashion. But often they are triggered by students theorizing and responding among themselves.

In one class I attended, students were covering Ptolemy, the second century mathematician. Ptolemy believed that all the celestial bodies and sun revolved around the earth in a circle, and based all his mathematical calculations on this perspective. Students were buzzing at the blackboard, working with a geometry sphere around the table, talking about diameters, meridians and equators, tilts, and horizons. Keep in mind this is all prep for what will be studied in a few months, when these Johnnies will learn that it would be another 1400 years before Copernicus proved Ptolemy’s calculations correct but his conclusion wrong: the earth and planets actually revolve around the sun.  These same students will eventually feel the excitement learning of Kepler’s conclusion 150 years later, that Copernicus was also right and wrong: yes, the earth and planets revolved around the sun—but in an elliptical, not circular, orbit. This curricular layering is central to the St. John’s Program.  Later texts respond to and build upon previous texts. In essence, students intellectually follow modern thought as it has been built over the last 2000+ years instead of just memorizing the end results.

The cognitive rigor, immersion, and passion so present at St. John’s are rare on American campuses these days. Johnnies read roughly 100-150 books during their four years and write 25 to 30 papers that are more than 10 pages long. Seniors choose a writer or single text and do a deep dive thesis that typically runs 40-50 pages. Here are a few of the senior capstone topics for the class of 2017: 19th century English scientist Michael Faraday’s heuristic description of electromagnetic phenomena; 17th-century mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s treatment of curvature in what’s called the “chain line” problem; the use of Aristotelian terminology by 20th century physicist Werner Heisenberg in describing quantum mechanics; and the possible revision of “space” from Immanuel Kant’s  The Critique of Pure Reason into a plurality of “spaces.” Few college-educated outsiders may have a clue what any of these papers are about, but they are not atypical of what’s being studied, discussed, and written about at St. John’s.

After class

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Many mainstream college students downshift when the classroom bell rings and don’t revisit course material until they cram for finals. Not at St. John’s. Hallways and dorms are brimming with chatter about Dante, Schubert, Freud, and Watson and Crick. Since everyone takes the same courses, freshman immediately can strike up a cafeteria conversation with a sophomore or senior who’s already taken the class. The Program is what binds the St. John’s community, and what also binds alumni: everybody has studied the same texts, whether they graduated in 1962 or 2015.

Johnnies like to have fun, too, but in a quaint, quirky Big Bang Theory kind of way. Dancing is favorite pastime at St. John’s, but as the college website warns: “Monthly waltz and swing parties are serious business at St. John’s. The year begins with the Convocation Waltz, where students decorate the quad with lights and dance all night. Fortunately, the Waltz Committee offers emergency dance lessons for the heretofore unexperienced.” Many of the students wear fancy dresses or suits. It’s not exactly Undergrads Gone Wild.

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Sports are important at St. John’s too—if you consider croquet a sport. Yes, croquet. It’s one of only four NCAA teams St. John’s fields (including sailing, fencing and rowing). About 35 years ago, St. John’s and the Naval Academy organized the Annapolis Cup, the first NCAA croquet match, which has grown into one of the sport’s great events. The Johnnies have beaten the crosstown rival Midshipmen 28 out of 35 times (this year narrowly 3-2 in the rain). The Cup routinely brings 8000 people to St. John’s classic campus, with Midshipmen wearing traditional croquet whites while the Johnnies don some creative costumes. Johnny spectators often wear Gatsby-era clothes and a good time, as they say, is had by all.

The Santa Fe campus is purportedly more laid back than Annapolis and offers outdoorsy-types 250-acres in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Students there hike, bike, and tend to get off campus more than their Maryland counterparts. Walking on either campus, you hardly see any Johnnies glued to their phones; this is so unusual compared with most campuses, you may wonder if cell and WiFi signals have been blocked (they haven’t). Solitary reflection is encouraged and indulged at St. John’s. You’ll often see students sitting alone under a tree, on a bench, lying on the grass. They may be thinking big thoughts or just relaxing; either way it evidences a culture of contemplation rarely witnessed among today’s college students.

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Warning label

Clearly St. John’s is not for everyone. First, you need to be a voracious reader to cover the Program texts at a brisk pace. You also need the capacity for and love of writing because St. John’s requires a lot of it. It helps to feel comfortable speaking in public, since so much of St. John’s learning occurs out loud around a table with your classmates and tutors.

Geek. Nerd. Dork. These words come to mind when thinking about what kind of high schooler would choose St. John’s from among the myriad colleges available. But not only straight-A achievers choose the Program (though there are plenty of them at St. John’s). Many Johnnies were outsiders who didn’t necessarily fit into traditional high school cultures, nor did particularly well academically by typical high school metrics. There are a decent number of legacy students with parents or grandparents who’ve attended. Regardless of how they got there, successful Johnnies all share a sincere love of learning and a willingness to think really hard.

Most graduating students told me they had found their lost tribe at St. John’s, but a not-insignificant number of students (about 15%) wind up leaving after the freshman year. Some find the curriculum too rigid and want to explore different things. Some complain of cabin fever after a year or two; there’s only 80 to 125 students per graduating class in Santa Fe and Annapolis, and you get to know everyone–students, faculty, staff–pretty quickly.  Because of the staged coursework, students from each campus can escape for a semester or two on the other campus without interrupting the Program. But that same curriculum makes things like study abroad very difficult without taking off a full year from St. John’s—adding time and expense to an already costly bachelor’s degree. There are no fraternities (though plenty of parties); no rah-rah football games (unless you walk to the nearby Naval Academy in Annapolis or drive to Albuquerque from Santa Fe); no food courts or swanky dorms. But the Johnnies who stay express heartfelt pleasure and pride in the idiosyncrasies of St. John’s. 

The Program vs. programming?

While it’s fair to say most liberal arts students live in a “bubble” cut off from reality, St. John’s is unapologetic about, and in fact encourages, a four-year respite from the pressures and distractions of the outside world. The college focuses on the intellectual growth of students while they attend, not necessarily on what comes after graduation. Although there is little vocational discussion and modest career guidance at the school, Johnnies seem to do just fine after graduation. About two-thirds eventually go on for further degrees—including law school (a favorite), master’s and doctoral programs (the school produces more students who go on to earn PhDs per capita than almost any other US college), and some to medical and business schools.

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Perhaps because of the independent thinking cultivated by the Program, many Johnnies wind-up with interesting life paths. In my research of St. John’s alumni I discovered an editorial board member at a major New York newspaper; a research psychiatrist investigating the neurochemistry of drug addiction; several celebrated winemakers; and an assistant district attorney in Alaska.

Josh Rogers, Annapolis class of 1998, told me St. John’s boosted his “why not me?” personality trait, and explained how it freed him to believe he could think up novel ideas like those that he read about. And he did. Within a few years of graduating St. John’s, Rogers – with no formal coding or computer training—filed 16 patentable applications embedded in many popular websites. He then founded his own financial services company with more than 150 employees.

A fourth-generation portrait painter, 1992 alumna Anastasia Egeli has built a successful career connecting with clients through talking. “A St. John’s education focuses on the importance of dialogue and ideas…I’ve found myself painting a historian and discussing the Federalist Papers. During my sittings with private equity managers, we examined whether serving in a political office was the responsibility of a man who had benefited so much from that society.”

Ted Merz, an alumnus from the late 1980’s, was one of the first fifteen employees at Bloomberg News. Starting there in 1990, Merz went on to oversee news operations in the Americas before moving into the Product division where he works on strategic projects ranging from building news analytics to piping Twitter into Wall Street trading platforms. “Not a day goes by, “Merz told me, “that I don’t rely on the thought processes I developed at St. John’s.”

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The creative and critical thinking that develops in the St. John’s bubble may be just what the future will require. While most college students have been rushing to study computer science and other technical skills for better employment outcomes, these fields may be less lucrative over time with machine learning and artificial intelligence.

As the vociferous Shark Tank host and entrepreneur Marc Cuban has recently observed about business careers: “I personally think there’s going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data. [You need] someone who is more of a freer thinker.”

Even further afield, recently, former Google and Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee, an expert in AI, told Quartz that, “Given AI is more objective, analytical, data driven, maybe it’s time for some of us to switch to the humanities, liberal arts, and beauty.”

The crossroads

Like other US liberal arts colleges since the Great Recession, St. John’s has been dealing with two common headwinds: rising costs and declining traditional student enrollment. The college has a relatively low endowment per capita, making it tuition dependent like many small schools. While the sticker price of St. John’s seems expensive (about $50,000perannumjustfortuition),theschoolhasbeenextremelygenerouswithfinancialaid,bringingtheeffectivecostdownmorethan50$200,000 on an education you could get for $1.50 in late fees at the public library?  True. Every text studied at St. John’s can be found at a public library. But that’s missing the point. As one alumni, Columbia Law School professor Shawn Watts, said, “St. John’s is less about the books than the process and the community.  It trains your mind and frees it at the same time. This allows you to truly follow your own passions and interest in life without the subconscious impositions and prodding of our wired world.” In the face of a very uncertain future, a St. John’s education may be money very well spent.

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And St. John’s is on the move, preparing for the next 300 years. In the last 18 months the college hired new presidents at each campus. With fresh leadership in place, the school is gearing-up for a major $250 million capital campaign. St. John’s is strengthening its enrollment pipeline, too. New admission director Ben Baum and his team have boosted applications to more than 1100 this year (up 35% from post-recession lows), with some 250 freshman expected to enroll in Annapolis and Sante Fe this fall. A seasoned admissions professional, Baum was drawn to the school in 2015 because of its unique educational offering. “Most colleges and universities struggle for a special identity in the crowded higher education marketplace,” he says, “That’s not an issue with St. John’s.”

The college offers a summer program for high school juniors that has been a good source of recruits, as has the international marketplace. The growing demand around the world for liberal arts education, as I’ve recently chronicled, has boosted overseas applications to St. John’s unique program. In recent years, between 20-25% of classes have been filled by international students (often paying full tuition), adding a nice mix of cultural and racial diversity to the student body.

Then there is the issue of rankings. For years, St. John’s resisted even filling out survey data requested by US News and World Reports. Culturally, some faculty and staff were (and still are) incensed by the rankings fetish that has gripped most of higher education. But determined to continue its mission into the future without sacrificing the curriculum and culture that makes it unique, St. John’s realized it needed to boost its profile and applications. Ranking surveys were filled. The number of admission application essays was reduced. US News now ranks St. John’s as the 53rd best national liberal arts college. In recent years, Forbes ranked the Santa Fe campus as the “Most Rigorous” in the US (with Annapolis ranked eighth, odd given the same Program), way ahead of the big Ivies like Harvard (17th), Princeton (20th), Yale (23rd), and Stanford (25th).  The school’s tutors are often cited as among the best teachers in the country. Application numbers are rising and acceptance rates falling, all of which contribute to positive ratings momentum.

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The future

Life in the 21st century is remarkably different than the late 20th century; it has been “disrupted,” to borrow an overused word from Silicon Valley, on many levels in the blink of an eye. A college degree is an indisputable asset in today’s world, but the uncertain and rapidly changing job market raises questions about whether college is really worth the investment of four years and a lot of money. But perhaps that question is too broad. Maybe we should be asking not whether college will adequately educate tomorrow’s citizens, but what kind of college will prepare them for an unimagined and even unimaginable future. St. John’s is facing the unknown by holding steady with the same approach to intellectual development, discourse, collaboration and rigor it has pursued for over 80 years. Maybe the “old school” way will produce the kind of innovative thinkers we will need in the brave new world.

[EXTRA] Lectura: Parker-Pope (05:00)

Parker-Pope, en busca de conexiones profundas, cuestiona los modelos de relación en redes sociales.

Resumen: La vida es corta. Rodéate de gente que se preocupe por ti y que piense de forma positiva.

The Power of Positive People

Are your friendships giving you a boost or bringing you down?

By Tara Parker-Pope

• July 10, 2018

Leer en español

Are you spending time with the right people for your health and happiness?

While many of us focus primarily on diet and exercise to achieve better health, science suggests that our well-being also is influenced by the company we keep. Researchers have found that certain health behaviors appear to be contagious and that our social networks — in person and online — can influence obesity, anxiety and overall happiness. A recent report found that a person’s exercise routine was strongly influenced by his or her social network.

I was reminded recently of the power of the crowd during a wellness cruise sponsored by Times Journeys. The event attracted a group of like-minded travelers who, despite experiencing various levels of adversity in their lives, including cancer, vision loss and the recent loss of a loved one, were remarkably optimistic and upbeat. The group ranged in age from 17 to 90. One inspiring man, in his 80s, had adopted a vegan lifestyle and a strict exercise routine to control his diabetes. Another new friend, a woman in her 50s who had survived lung cancer, cheered me on and kept me going during a particularly difficult workout.

After the trip, we all promised to keep in touch. Buoyed by the experience, I returned home with a renewed commitment not only to exercise and healthful living, but to simply step up my social life and spend more time hanging out with happy people.

Dan Buettner, a National Geographic fellow and author, has studied the health habits of people who live in so-called blue zones — regions of the world where people live far longer than the average. He noted that positive friendships are a common theme in the blue zones.

“Friends can exert a measurable and ongoing influence on your health behaviors in a way that a diet never can,” Mr. Buettner said.

In Okinawa, Japan, a place where the average life expectancy for women is around 90, the oldest in the world, people form a kind of social network called a moai — a group of five friends who offer social, logistic, emotional and even financial support for a lifetime.

WELL

Thinking positive thoughts and surrounding yourself with positive people really does help. Here’s a guide on how to be happy.

“It’s a very powerful idea,” Mr. Buettner said. “Traditionally, their parents put them into moais when they are born, and they take a lifelong journey together.”

In a moai, the group benefits when things go well, such as by sharing a bountiful crop, and the group’s families support one another when a child gets sick or someone dies. They also appear to influence one another’s lifelong health behaviors.

Mr. Buettner is working with federal and state health officials, including the former United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, to create moais in two dozen cities around the country. He recently spent time in Fort Worth, Tex., where several residents have formed walking moais — groups of people who meet regularly to walk and socialize.

“We’re finding that in some of these cities, you can just put people together who want to change health behaviors and organize them around walking or a plant-based potluck,” he said. “We nudge them into hanging out together for 10 weeks. We have created moais that are now several years old, and they are still exerting a healthy influence on members’ lives.”

The key to building a successful moai is to start with people who have similar interests, passions and values. The Blue Zone team tries to group people based on geography and work and family schedules to start. Then they ask them a series of questions to find common interests. Is your perfect vacation a cruise or a backpacking trip? Do you like rock ’n’ roll or classical music? Do you subscribe to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal?

“You stack the deck in favor of a long-term relationship,” said Mr. Buettner.

One of my fellow travelers, Carol Auerbach of New York City, noted that surrounding herself with positive people has helped her cope with the loss of two husbands over the years. Ms. Auerbach was widowed at 30, when her children were just 2 and 5. With the support of her family and friends, and her own tenacity, she was able to support her family, and she eventually remarried. And then in 1992, her second husband died unexpectedly. To cope the second time, she focused on volunteer work and contributing to her community.

Ms. Auerbach said she believes that she learned to have a positive outlook from her mother, a Holocaust survivor who left Germany at the age of 19 and never saw her parents again.

WELL Here’s how you can practice skills that foster positivity.

“When I was growing up we were not affluent, and the four of us lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and my parents slept on a pullout sofa,” she said. “My mother never complained. I think she quietly knew that difficult things happen, but you feel very appreciative of the life you do have, and you feel a responsibility to make the most of it.”

Ms. Auerbach eventually found love again and has been married to her third husband for 15 years. “Life is too short to be around negative people,” she said. “I need people around me who care about me and are appreciative, and see the world as a glass half full, not half empty.”

The Blue Zone team has created a quiz to help people assess the positive impact of their own social network. The quiz asks questions about your friends and the state of their health, how much they drink, eat and exercise, as well as their outlook. The goal of the quiz is not to dump your less healthy friends, but to identify the people in your life who score the highest and to spend more time with them.

“I argue that the most powerful thing you can do to add healthy years is to curate your immediate social network,” said Mr. Buettner, who advises people to focus on three to five real-world friends rather than distant Facebook friends. “In general you want friends with whom you can have a meaningful conversation,” he said. “You can call them on a bad day and they will care. Your group of friends are better than any drug or anti-aging supplement, and will do more for you than just about anything.”

[CORE] Lectura: Vickers (31:00)

Vickers estudia el caso de empleados que destacan en su profesión, intentando encontrar un patrón de conducta en su alto rendimiento.

Resumen: Hay una parte de método y disciplina. En ocasiones obsesiva. Repiten una rutina incansablemente hasta que alcanzan la perfección.

→ Accede a la lectura (pdf)

[CORE] Lectura: Godin (30.00 + 17.00)

Godin cuenta la historia de la vaca púrpura, desde la que define una estrategia para mercados ultracompetitivos.

Resumen: De nada sirve interrumpirme, cuando quieres venderme algo. Ya vendré yo, si destaca en ti algo.

→ Accede a la lectura

→ Accede al video

In Praise of the Purple Cow

Remarkably honest ideas (and remarkably useful case studies) about making and marketing remarkable products.

For years, marketers have talked about the “five _P_s” (actually, there are more than five, but everyone picks their favorite handful): product, pricing, promotion, positioning, publicity, packaging, pass along, permission. Sound familiar? This has become the basic marketing checklist, a quick way to make sure that you’ve done your job. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but it used to be that if you dotted your _i_s and paid attention to your five _P_s, then you were more likely than not to succeed.

No longer. It’s time to add an exceptionally important new P to the list: Purple Cow. Weird? Let me explain.

While driving through France a few years ago, my family and I were enchanted by the hundreds of storybook cows grazing in lovely pastures right next to the road. For dozens of kilometers, we all gazed out the window, marveling at the beauty. Then, within a few minutes, we started ignoring the cows. The new cows were just like the old cows, and what was once amazing was now common. Worse than common: It was boring.

Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring. A Purple Cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow — the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows — is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to. Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible.

The world is full of boring stuff — brown cows — which is why so few people pay attention. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not just slapping on the marketing function as a last-minute add-on, but also understanding from the outset that if your offering itself isn’t remarkable, then it’s invisible — no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.

This is an essay about what it takes to create and sell something remarkable. It is a manifesto for marketers who want to make a difference at their company by helping create products and services that are worth marketing in the first place. It is a plea for originality, for passion, guts, and daring. Not just because going through life with passion and guts beats the alternative (which it does), but also because it’s the only way to be successful. Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be remarkable.

And that means you have to be a leader. You can’t be remarkable by following someone else who’s remarkable. One way to figure out a great theory is to look at what’s working in the real world and determine what the successes have in common. With marketing, it’s puzzling though. What could the Four Seasons and Motel 6 possibly have in common? Other than the fact that both companies have experienced extraordinary success and growth, they couldn’t be more different. Or Neiman Marcus and Wal-Mart, both growing during the same decade? Or Nokia (bringing out new hardware every 30 days or so) and Nintendo (marketing the same Game Boy for 14 years in a row)?

It’s like trying to drive looking in the rearview mirror. Sure, those things worked. But do they help us predict what will work tomorrow? The thing that all of those companies have in common is that they have nothing in common. They are outliers. They’re on the fringes. Superfast or superslow. Very exclusive or very cheap. Extremely big or extremely small.

The reason it’s so hard to follow the leader is this: The leader is the leader precisely because he did something remarkable. And that remarkable thing is now taken — so it’s no longer remarkable when you decide to do it.

Stand out from the herd I: Going Up!
Elevators aren’t a typical consumer product. They can easily cost more than a million dollars, they generally get installed when a building is first constructed, and they’re not much use unless the building is more than three or four stories tall.

How, then, does an elevator company compete? Until recently, selling involved a lot of golf, dinners, and long-term relationships with key purchasing agents at major real-estate developers. No doubt that continues, but Schindler Elevator Corporation has radically changed the game by developing a remarkable Purple Cow.

Every elevator ride is basically a local one. The elevator stops 5, 10, 15 times on the way to your floor. This is a hassle for you, but it’s a huge, expensive problem for the building. While your elevator is busy stopping at every floor, the folks in the lobby are getting more and more frustrated. The building needs more elevators, but there’s no money to buy them and no room to put them. Walk into the Times Square offices of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, and you’re faced with a fascinating solution to this problem.

Schindler’s insight? When you approach the elevators, you key in your floor on a centralized control panel. In return, the panel tells you which elevator is going to take you to your floor. With this simple presort, Schindler Elevator Corporation has managed to turn every elevator into an express. Your elevator takes you immediately to the 12th floor and races back to the lobby. This means that buildings can be taller, they need fewer elevators for a given density of people, the wait is shorter, and the building can use precious space for people rather than for elevators. A huge win, implemented at a remarkably low cost.

Is there a significant real-estate developer in the world who is unaware of this breakthrough? Not likely. And it doesn’t really matter how many ads or how many lunches the competition sponsors: Schindler now gets the benefit of the doubt.

The Sad Truth About Marketing Just About Anything
Forty years ago, Ron Simek, owner of the Tombstone Tap (named for a nearby cemetery) in Medford, Wisconsin, decided to offer a frozen version of his pizza to his customers. It caught on, and before long, Tombstone Pizza was dominating your grocer’s freezer. Kraft eventually bought the brand, advertised it like crazy, and made serious dough. This was a great American success story: Invent a good product that everyone wants, advertise it to the masses, earn billions.

That strategy didn’t just work for pizza. It worked for most everything in your house, including aspirin. Imagine how much fun it must have been to be the first person to market aspirin. Here’s a product that just about every person on earth needed and wanted. A product that was inexpensive, easy to try, and promised huge immediate benefits. Obviously, it was a big hit.

Today, a quick visit to the drugstore turns up lots of aspirin and aspirinlike products: Advil, Aleve, Alka-Seltzer Morning Relief, Anacin, Ascriptin, Aspergum, Bayer, Bayer Children’s, Bayer Regimen, Bayer Women’s, BC Powder, Bufferin, Cope, Ecotrin, Excedrin Extra Strength, Goody’s, Motrin, Nuprin, St. Joseph, Tylenol, and, of course, Vanquish. Within each of those brands, there are variations, sizes, and generics that add up to more than 100 different products to choose from.

Think it’s still easy to be an analgesics marketer today? If you developed a new kind of pain reliever, even one that was a little bit better than the ones that I just listed, what would you do? The obvious answer, if you’ve got money and you believe in your product, is to spend everything you’ve got to buy tons of national TV and print advertising.

There are a few problems that you’ll face, though. First, you need people who want to buy a pain reliever. While it’s a huge market, it’s not for everyone. Once you find people who buy pain relievers, then you need people who want to buy a new kind of pain reliever. After all, plenty of people want the “original” kind, the kind they grew up with. Finally, you need to find the people who are willing to listen to what you have to say about your new pain reliever. The vast majority of folks are just too busy and will ignore you, regardless of how many ads you buy. So you just went from an audience of everyone to an audience a fraction of that size. Not only are these folks hard to find, they’re picky as well.

Being first in the frozen-pizza category was a good idea. Being first in pain relievers was an even better idea. Alas, they’re both taken. Which brings me to the sad truth about marketing just about anything, whether it’s a product or a service, whether it’s marketed to consumers or corporations: Most people can’t buy your product. Either they don’t have the money, they don’t have the time, or they don’t want it.

And those are serious problems. An audience that doesn’t have the money to buy what you’re selling at the price you need to sell it for is not a market. An audience that doesn’t have the time to listen to and understand your pitch treats you as if you and your product were invisible. And an audience that takes the time to hear your pitch and decides that they don’t want it … well, you’re not going to get very far.

The old rule was this: Create safe products and combine them with great marketing. Average products for average people. That’s broken. The new rule is: Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.

As I write this, the top song in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and a dozen other countries in Europe is about ketchup. It’s called “Ketchup,” and it’s by two sisters you’ve never heard of. The number-two movie in America is a low-budget animated film in which talking vegetables act out Bible stories. Neither is the sort of product you’d expect to come from a lumbering media behemoth.

Sam Adams beer was remarkable, and it captured a huge slice of business from Budweiser. Hard Manufacturing introduced a product that costs 10 times the average (the $9,945 Doernbecher crib) and opened up an entirely new segment of the hospital-crib market. The electric piano let Yamaha steal an increasingly larger share of the traditional piano market away from the entrenched leaders. Vanguard’s remarkably low-cost mutual funds continue to whale away at Fidelity’s market dominance. Bic lost tons of market share to Japanese competitors that had developed pens that were remarkably fun to write with, just as Bic had stolen the market away from fountain pens a generation or two earlier.

Stand out from the herd II: Mail Call
Very few organizations have as timid an audience as the United States Postal Service. Dominated by a conservative bureaucracy and conservative big customers, the USPS has an awfully hard time innovating. The big direct marketers are successful because they’ve figured out how to thrive under the current system, and they’re in no mood to see that system change. Most individuals are in no hurry to change their mailing habits either.

The majority of new-policy initiatives at the USPS are either ignored or met with nothing but disdain. But “zip + 4” was a huge success. Within a few years, the USPS was able to diffuse a new idea, making the change in billions of address records in thousands of computer databases.

How? First, it was a game-changing innovation. Zip + 4 makes it far easier for marketers to target neighborhoods and much faster and easier to deliver the mail. The product was a true Purple Cow, completely changing the way customers and the USPS would deal with bulk mail. It offered both dramatically increased speed in delivery and significantly lower costs for bulk mailers. That made it worth the time it took for big mailers to pay attention. The cost of ignoring the innovation would be felt immediately on the bottom line.

Second, the USPS wisely singled out a few early adopters. These were organizations that were technically savvy and that were extremely sensitive to both pricing and speed issues. These early adopters were also in a position to sneeze the benefits to other, less astute, mailers.

The lesson here is simple: The more intransigent your market, the more crowded the marketplace, the busier your customers, the more you need a Purple Cow. Half-measures will fail. Overhauling the product with dramatic improvements in things that the right customers care about, on the other hand, can have an enormous payoff.

Why There Are So Few Purple Cows
If being a Purple Cow is such an effective way to break through the clutter, why doesn’t everyone do it? One reason is that people think the opposite of remarkable is “bad” or “poorly done.” They’re wrong. Not many companies sell things today that are flat-out lousy. Most sell things that are good enough. That’s why the opposite of remarkable is “very good.” Very good is an everyday occurrence, hardly worth mentioning — certainly not the basis of breakthrough success. Are you making very good stuff? How fast can you stop?

Some people would like you to believe that there are too few great ideas, that their product or their industry or their company simply can’t support a great idea. That, of course, is absolute nonsense. Another reason the Purple Cow is so rare is because people are so afraid.

If you’re remarkable, then it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise — ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.

Playing it safe. Following the rules. They seem like the best ways to avoid failure. Alas, that pattern is awfully dangerous. The current marketing “rules” will ultimately lead to failure. In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.

In Marketing Outrageously (Bard Press, 2001), author Jon Spoelstra points out the catch-22 logic of the Purple Cow. If times are tough, your peers and your boss may very well point out that you can’t afford to be remarkable. There’s not enough room to innovate: We have to conserve, to play it safe. We don’t have the money to make a mistake. In good times, however, those very same people will tell you to relax, take it easy. There’s not enough need to innovate: We can afford to be conservative, to play it safe.

So it seems that we face two choices: Either be invisible, uncriticized, anonymous, and safe or take a chance at true greatness, uniqueness, and the Purple Cow. The point is simple, but it bears repeating: Boring always leads to failure. Boring is always the riskiest strategy. Smart businesspeople realize this and work to minimize (but not eliminate) the risk from the process. They know that sometimes it’s not going to work, but they accept the fact that that’s okay.

Stand out from the herd III: The Color of Money
How did Dutch Boy Paint stir up the paint business? It’s so simple, it’s scary. They changed the can.

Paint cans are heavy, hard to carry, hard to close, hard to open, hard to pour, and no fun. Yet they’ve been around for a long time, and most people assumed that there had to be a reason why they were so bad. Dutch Boy realized that there was no reason. They also realized that the can was an integral part of the product: People don’t buy paint, they buy painted walls, and the can makes that process much easier.

Dutch Boy used that insight and introduced an easier-to-carry, easier-to-pour, easier-to-close paint jug. “Customers tell us that the new Twist & Pour paint container is a packaging innovation that was long overdue,” says Dennis Eckols, group vice president of the home division for Fred Meyer stores. “People wonder why it took so long for someone to come up with the idea, and they love Dutch Boy for doing it.”

It’s an amazing innovation. Worth noticing. Not only did the new packaging increase sales, but it also got them more distribution (at a higher retail price!).

That is marketing done right. Marketing where the marketer changes the product, not the ads.

Why It Pays (Big) to Be a Purple Cow
As the ability to be remarkable continues to demonstrate its value in the marketplace, the rewards that follow the Purple Cow increase. Whether you develop a new insurance policy, make a hit record, or write a groundbreaking book, the money and satisfaction that follow are extraordinary. In exchange for taking the risk, creators of a Purple Cow get a huge upside when they get it right.

Even better, you don’t have to be remarkable all the time to enjoy the upside. Starbucks was remarkable a few years ago. Now they’re boring. But that burst of innovation and insight has allowed them to expand to thousands of stores around the world. Compare that growth in assets to Maxwell House. Ten years ago, all of the brand value in coffee resided with them, not with Starbucks. But Maxwell House played it safe (they thought), and now they remain stuck with not much more than they had a decade ago.

Once you’ve created something remarkable, the challenge is to do two things simultaneously: One, milk the Purple Cow for everything it’s worth. Figure out how to extend it and profit from it for as long as possible. Two, build an environment where you are likely to invent an entirely new Purple Cow in time to replace the first one when its benefits inevitably trail off.

These are contradictory goals. The creator of a Purple Cow enjoys the profits, accolades, and feeling of omniscience that come with a success. None of those outcomes accompany a failed attempt at a new Cow. Thus, the tempting thing to do is to coast. Take no chances. Take profits. Fail to reinvest.

AOL, Marriott, Marvel Comics, Palm, Yahoo — the list goes on and on. Each company had a breakthrough, built an empire around it, and then failed to take another risk. It used to be easy to coast for a long time after a few remarkable successes. Disney coasted for decades. Milton Berle did too. It’s too easy to decide to sit out the next round, rationalizing that you’re spending the time and energy to build on what you’ve got instead of investing in the future. So here’s one simple, tangible suggestion. Create two teams: the inventors and the milkers. Put them in separate buildings. Hold a formal ceremony when you move a product from one group to the other. Celebrate them both, and rotate people around.

Stand out from the herd IV: Chewing my own cud
So, how does an author get his new book to stand out from all of the other marketing books? By trying to create a remarkable way to market a book about remarkable marketing. How? By not selling it in stores. Instead, a copy of the book version of Purple Cow is available for free to anyone reading this article. You pay for postage and handling ($5), and Fast Company will send you one copy of the book-length version of this article for free (visit www.fastcompany.com/keyword/purplecow67 for details). How does this pay? Visit the site and I’ll show you my entire marketing plan.

What It Means to Be a Marketer Today
If the Purple Cow is now one of the _P_s of marketing, it has a series of big implications for the enterprise. In fact, it changes the definition of marketing. It used to be that engineering invented, manufacturing built, marketing marketed, sales sold, and the president managed the whole shebang. Marketing, better called “advertising,” was about communicating the values of a product after it had been developed and manufactured.

That’s clearly not a valid strategy in a world where product attributes (everything from service to design) are now at the heart of what it means to be a marketer. Marketing is the act of inventing the product. The effort of designing it. The craft of producing it. The art of pricing it. The technique of selling it. How can a Purple Cow company not be run by a marketer?

Companies that create Purple Cows, such as JetBlue Airways, Hasbro, Poland Spring, and Starbucks, have to be run by marketers. Turns out that the CEO of JetBlue made a critical decision on day one: He put the head of marketing in charge of product design and training as well. It shows. JetBlue sells a time-sensitive commodity just like American Airlines does, but somehow it manages to make a profit doing it. All of these companies are marketers at their very core.

The geniuses who managed to invent 1-800-COLLECT are true marketers. They didn’t figure out how to market an existing service. Instead, the marketing is built into the product — from the easy-to-remember phone number to the very idea that MCI could steal the collect-call business from the pay-phone companies.

But isn’t the same idea true for a local restaurant, a grinding-wheel company, and Citibank? In a world where anything we need is good enough and where just about all of the profit comes from the Purple Cow, we must all be marketers.

You’ve got a chance to reinvent who you are and what you do. Your company can reenergize itself around the idea of involving designers in marketing and marketers in design. You can stop fighting slow growth with mind-numbing grunt work and start investing in insight and innovation instead. If a company is failing, it’s the fault of the most senior management, and the problem is probably this: They are just running a company, not marketing a product. And today, that’s a remarkably ineffective way to compete.

Sidebar: 10 ways to raise a purple cow

Making and marketing something remarkable means asking new questions — and trying new practices. Here are 10 suggestions.

1.  Differentiate your customers. Find the group that’s most profitable. Find the group that’s most likely to influence other customers. Figure out how to develop for, advertise to, or reward either group. Ignore the rest. Cater to the customers you would choose if you could choose your customers.
2.  If you could pick one underserved niche to target (and to dominate), what would it be? Why not launch a product to compete with your own that does nothing but appeal to that market?
3.  Create two teams: the inventors and the milkers. Put them in separate buildings. Hold a formal ceremony when you move a product from one group to the other. Celebrate them both, and rotate people around.
4.  Do you have the email addresses of the 20% of your customer base that loves what you do? If not, start getting them. If you do, what could you make for them that would be superspecial?
5.  Remarkable isn’t always about changing the biggest machine in your factory. It can be the way you answer the phone, launch a new brand, or price a revision to your software. Getting in the habit of doing the “unsafe” thing every time you have the opportunity is the best way to see what’s working and what’s not.
6.  Explore the limits. What if you’re the cheapest, the fastest, the slowest, the hottest, the coldest, the easiest, the most efficient, the loudest, the most hated, the copycat, the outsider, the hardest, the oldest, the newest, or just the most! If there’s a limit, you should (must) test it.
7.  Think small. One vestige of the TV-industrial complex is a need to think mass. If it doesn’t appeal to everyone, the thinking goes, it’s not worth it. No longer. Think of the smallest conceivable market and describe a product that overwhelms it with its remarkability. Go from there.
8.  Find things that are “just not done” in your industry, and then go ahead and do them. For example, JetBlue Airways almost instituted a dress code — for its passengers! The company is still playing with the idea of giving a free airline ticket to the best-dressed person on the plane. A plastic surgeon could offer gift certificates. A book publisher could put a book on sale for a certain period of time. Stew Leonard’s took the strawberries out of the little green plastic cages and let the customers pick their own. Sales doubled.
9.  Ask, “Why not?” Almost everything you don’t do has no good reason for it. Almost everything you don’t do is the result of fear or inertia or a historical lack of someone asking, “Why not?”
10.  What would happen if you simply told the truth inside your company and to your customers?

Sidebar: Now That’s Remarkable

Schindler Elevator Corporation

When is a bank of elevators more than a bank of elevators? When it’s smart enough to tell you which elevator will provide the quickest ride to the floor you need to reach. A product that smart changes how people move, how buildings get designed — and how companies, in this case Schindler Elevator Corporation, market their innovation.

Tombstone Pizza

It’s good to be first with an innovation that the world is hungry for. Ron Simek learned that lesson when he launched the first successful line of frozen pizza. The product was a hit. Kraft bought it and advertised like mad. The rest is history. Of course, 40 years later, introducing another brand of frozen pizza seems less appetizing. Me-too products lead to also-ran companies.

U.S. Postal Service

The runaway success of “zip + 4” might give new meaning to the term “going postal.” This simple innovation makes it quicker for the Postal Service to deliver mail, easier for marketers to target neighborhoods, and cheaper for marketers to send bulk mail. But the innovation would never have taken hold without savvy marketing by an organization not famous for its savviness.

Contributing editor Seth Godin (sgodin@fastcompany. com) has written some of Fast Company’s most influential articles, from “Permission Marketing” (April : May 1998) to “Unleash Your Idea Virus” (August 2000). This essay is adapted from his book, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Becoming Remarkable (Do You Zoom, February 2003).

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Modelo 201. Intersección

Llamaremos intersección a la combinación de disciplinas, en la construcción de un perfil único. Quítate de la cabeza la idea de ser el mejor en algo, es demasiado peligroso. Regresando a la competencia perfecta: El Barça tiene 20 dorsales y millones de futbolistas dispuestos a competir por ellos, invirtiendo todas sus energías. Más inteligente plantearte una diferenciación desde la intersección, intercalando disciplinas. Consejo de Scott Adams: Todos tenemos áreas en las que, con esfuerzo, llegaríamos al top 25%. El capitalismo recompensa cosas raras y valiosas. Y te haces raro y valioso combinando, con un mix único. La segunda derivada en la creatividad. Los descubrimientos ocurren cuando alguien se atreve a pensar distinto. Ideas revolucionarias raramente vienen de dentro del sector—suele ser el outsider, desde un punto de vista virgen, quien plantea el cambio de paradigma. La especialización bloquea innovación: 10 años de formación te impiden pensar fuera de los esquemas. Lee raro para después conectarlo.

[EXTRA] Lectura: Trout & Ries (27:00)

Trout & Ries comparten su ya clásico artículo en Advertising Age.

Resumen: Posicionamiento. def. Ocupar un territorio inexplorado en la mente del consumidor.

→ Accede a la lectura (pdf)

[EXTRA] Fragmento: Haidt (03:00)

The righteous mind. Jonathan Haidt.

**→ Compra el libro **

It used to be risky for a scientist to assert that anything about human behavior was innate. To back up such claims, you had to show that the trait was hardwired, unchangeable by experience, and found in all cultures. With that definition, not much is innate, aside from a few infant reflexes such as that cute thing they do when you put one finger into their little hands. If you proposed that anything more complex than that was innate—particularly a sex difference—you’d be told that there was a tribe somewhere on Earth that didn’t show the trait, so therefore it’s not innate.
We’ve advanced a lot since the 1970s in our understanding of the brain, and now we know that traits can be innate without being either hardwired or universal. As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains, “Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.”
To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. Marcus’s analogy leads to the best definition of innateness I have ever seen:
Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.… “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.”
The list of five moral foundations was my first attempt to specify how the righteous mind was “organized in advance of experience.” But Moral Foundations Theory also tries to explain how that first draft gets revised during childhood to produce the diversity of moralities that we find across cultures—and across the political spectrum.

Particular rules and virtues vary across cultures, so you’ll get fooled if you look for universality in the finished books. You won’t find a single paragraph that exists in identical form in every human culture. But if you look for links between evolutionary theory and anthropological observations, you can take some educated guesses about what was in the universal first draft of human nature. I tried to make (and justify) five such guesses:

• The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering.
• The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.”
• The Loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust and reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or even kill those who betray us or our group.
• The Authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position.
• The Sanctity/degradation foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore’s dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values—both positive and negative—which are important for binding groups together.

[EXTRA] Media: Riley (01:43:00)

Riley recupera unas cintas perdidas de Marlon Brando, para entender al carismático personaje.

Resumen: El carácter y la personalidad ganan a todo. Hoy más que nunca, en la compleja economía digital.

→ Accede al trailer

People have routines. Acting routines, dancing routines, painting routines. The same thing over and over again. Everything is a cliché. When an actor takes a little too long as he’s walking to the door, you know he’s going to stop and turn around and say: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Never let the audience know how it’s gonna come out. Get them on your time. And when that time comes and everything is right, you just fuck, let fly. Jersey Joe Walcott, terrific fighter. He’d be boxing, he’d be throwing some punches and bing! He’d have his fist in somebody’s face. You’d think it was coming out of the southwest and there it comes out of the northeast. He would never let you know where he was going to hit you. Be surprising. With an attitude, with a word, with a look. Figure out a way to do it that has never been done before. You want to stop that movement from the popcorn to the mouth. Get people to stop chewing. The truth will do that. Damn, damn, damn, damn. When it’s right, it’s right. You can feel it in your bones. Then you feel whole, then you feel good.

[CORE] Lectura: Hardy (16:00)

Hardy descompone los factores que pueden estar repercutiendo en la consecución de tus objetivos más ambiciosos.

Resumen: Curiosidad, estructura, consistencia… y muchas horas de trabajo.

How to Become the Best in the World at What You Do by Benjamin Hardy, PhD Medium

http://bit.ly/2jX2OBl

It can feel impossible to move toward your dreams. You know exactly what you want to do, but there are endless obstacles in your way.

There is so much competition — thousands or millions of people competing to do exactly what you want to do.

How do you get out of the rat race?

How do you advance quick enough to not have your dreams smashed into submission by society and imploded by “reality”?

How do you make the needed leaps to move beyond the masses vying for a similar position?

After all, you have bills to pay and tons of other responsibilities. You only have a limited amount of time each day. After work and everything else you’ve got going on, it’s easy to justify waiting until tomorrow. Even if you have the raw energy to do your work, you may feel guilty breaking from your relational obligations.

It truly can feel hopeless and overwhelming. There’s so much to learn. It can be easy to doubt our own abilities. Maybe we should just give up and accept reality for what it is?

The Truth Is…

Most of the competition are not hard to surpass. They’re dealing with the same existential and practical challenges you are. Their life isn’t structured for optimal creative expression. They are the primary obstacle in the path. Most will quit long before they ever really begin — always remaining mediocre at what they do.

With a few tweaks, you’ll quickly drop through a wormhole placing you in the top 5–10 percent in your field. The challenge then becomes to move from there to the top — which movement is the real contest. Getting to the top 5–10 percent merely requires a change in lifestyle. Getting to the top 1 percent requires a fundamental change in your being.

This post is a framework to quickly get you into the top 5–10 percent of your field so you can begin the real quest of becoming the best at what you do.

Phase One will get you to the top 5–10 percent of your field. Once you’re at this level, you are getting paid enough for your art to live on. This is key, as Paul Graham has said, “Once you cross the threshold of profitability, however low, your runway becomes infinite.” He calls the lowest tier of profitability, “Ramen Profitable,” which means a startup (or business of any sort) makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses.

Infinite runway means you can now dedicate all your “work” time to your work. You are no longer moonlighting or squeezing time in the margins of your life. You can pay your bills and eat Ramen. This is where Phase Two begins, and is really the beginning of your artistic journey — becoming the best in the world at what you do.

Let’s begin:

Phase One: Getting To Ramen Profitable (Or Sustainable)

1. Start As An Amateur

Kenzie and Harris were recently married. They had both dropped out of Brigham Young University and were working at the Apple store in downtown Salt Lake City. On the side, they were recording music covers and posting them on YouTube and Vine.

They had enough money in savings to live on a year, so they quit at Apple to make a run at becoming professional musicians. Every day, they would post Vines. For several months, their work went mostly unnoticed. They had a few thousand followers tops.

Then, everything changed. They posted a Vine that immediately went viral.The next day, they were contacted by some of the top Viners as well as agents who gave them contracts. They were now Ramen Profitable, had amazing connections, and on their way to making an amazing career as musicians.

Kenzie and Harris wouldn’t have had their breakthrough if they didn’t start as amateurs. They had some raw talent. But more than anything, they were willing to put themselves out there over and over and over. Quantity became quality. And then they put something out that people loved.

Very few people have the humility to start as amateurs. They procrastinate doing the work they want in the name of perfectionism. You know these people. The one’s who have been saying for years that they’re going to do something but never do. Yet inwardly, they’re terrified of what other people will think of them.

They’re caught in a state of paralysis by analysis — too busy calculating and never reaching a state of flow. Rather than doing work their own way, they do what they think will be well-received — being merely imitators of what is already popular.

2. Get Coaching/Education

Take your dreams seriously. Most people don’t. Take them serious enough to become amazing and move beyond mediocre. Get education and coaching.

“When the student is ready the teacher will appear.” — Buddha

Ever since returning from a two-year mission trip, I’ve always known I wanted to be a writer. However, my dream remained a figment of my imagination until I became serious enough to get a mentor.

I’ve had two mentors that have changed how I write. One of my mentors was a young professor who taught me more in three months than I had learned in the previous four years.

Actually, he taught me more about academic writing and research in three months than most people learn through an entire PhD. With his help, I was easily able to get into the graduate school of my choice.

I started blogging about 21 months ago. Knowing this is something I’m serious about, I decided to get coaching. However, this time, I did it in the form of a virtual online course.

Within a month of taking the course, I wrote a blog post that was read over five million times across multiple outlets and in several languages. This online course was not the reason for my success; but it was an important part of the progression I would inevitably get one way or another.

You’ll know when you’re ready for the next level, because you’ll make the proper investments in the teachers to help you get there. You’re level of commitment can directly be measured to how invested you are. Once, committed, you’ll be willing to make whatever changes are needed to upgrade into the person you desire to become.

3. Stop Living The Broken Rules Everyone Else Is Living

If it’s popular it’s wrong. Most people are mediocre at what they do for a reason. They’re playing by rules that halt optimal performance. They are climbing traditional ladders intended to slow them down and keep them average.

When everyone else is zigging, that’s when you zag. Darren Hardy says you should run “toward the thing everyone else is running from” in order to stand out from the crowd.

As Peter Diamandis says, “The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.” If what you’re doing doesn’t seem slightly crazy to you, and very crazy to other people, you’re probably following the safe path.

Instead of following the rules set by society, create your own rules.Restructure the game to automate your success. Dismiss the haters, convention, and conformity. Follow your heart and the voice inside you encouraging faith and forward movement. In order to be happy, you must build a lifestyle around being true to yourself. If you’re true to yourself, good things will follow.

4. Be Consistent Until You Have A Break Through

Patience.

If you haven’t had your big break yet, keep going. Consistency is the most fundamental virtue to becoming the person you want to be. Almost everyone can sprint for a while. But most burn-out and quit. Everything meaningful in life is a marathon — meant to test your commitment and will.

If this is what you love doing, you’ll do it regardless of the outcome. In fact, obsession with a particular outcome will keep you from attaining your desired results. Your work will be forced rather than organically lived.

There is a natural law known as the compound effect. If you invest a small amount of money consistently, eventually compound interest takes over and growth becomes exponential. The same holds true for any habit, whether good or bad. If you do something long enough, compounding will take effect, momentum will surge, and you’ll begin to experience exponential results.

If you want it bad enough, you will do whatever it takes to make it happen. If you don’t, you won’t. You’ll be willing to reduce time with friends and hobbies, make big asks, take risks, find a mentor, get educated, and look foolish. You’ll be surprised how quickly you become Ramen Profitable when you take your work seriously.

Phase Two: Becoming The Best In The World At What You Do

The person who succumbs to temptation knows far less about its power than the person who resists it. Experience is key. Knowledge only becomes wisdom when it’s properly and consistently applied. Thus, the importance of learning from people who have actually been there, as opposed to sideline spectators. Never take advice from someone you wouldn’t want to switch places with.

Getting to the top 5–10 percent in your field can be done by following principles taught by other people. However, in order to become the best at what you do, at some point you leave it all behind. You become an innovator.A pioneer. An artist.

In order to get to the top 1 percent of performers, you must come up to the razor’s edge — the brink of disaster — where probability of failure is high. At this point, everything you’ve been taught is opposed by what you feel you should do. But your intuition is operating at a higher level.

5. Structure Your Entire Life To Optimize Your Performance

Entering the realm of the best in the world requires becoming holistic about your art. Everything you do matters. Every moment of your life either contributes to or takes away from what you’re trying to accomplish — the food you eat — activities you do — people you spend time with — and how you spend your mornings and evenings.

Most people’s lives are structured in a reactive way. The first thing they do in the morning is check their email or social media. They may even read a good book. But all of these things are highly addictive inputs.

In order to become a creative master, you must focus your efforts on outputs by leveraging your subconscious mind. While you’re away from your work, like sleeping, spending time with friends, or other activities, your subconscious is working through and mulling over the problems you’re trying to solve.

The first thing to do when you wake up is output. This may be in the form of writing in a journal to capture all the work your subconscious has been doing while you were sleeping.

Or immediately getting to the project you’re working on. When you get out of a meeting or finish any form of activity, rather than going directly to your email or other input, maximize your subconscious by going directly to output — your work. Creative and insightful eruptions of intellectual inspiration will flow.

Being healthy and free from physical pain is also crucial for enhanced performance. In his book, The Great Pain Deception, Stephen Ozanich wrote:

“Pain and other chronic symptoms are physical manifestations of unresolved internal conflict. Symptoms surface as the instinctual mechanism for self-survival. They are messages from the inner self wanting to be heard, but ego takes center-stage, and hides the truth within the shadows of the unconscious mind: which is the body.”

In the 1990’s neuroscientist Candice Pert, Ph.D., shared her discovery that the body, not the brain, is the subconscious mind which communicates via neuropeptides. Indeed, human beings are holistic. Our body and mind work in unison.

When we have unresolved tension in our lives, this tension is generally manifest in physical illness. When we clear ourselves of this tension, we allow our body to naturally and organically heal. When our bodies are healthy, we’re far more prone to inspiration.

6. Allow Time For Recovery

Less is more. When you focus on results, rather than being busy, you’re 100 percent ON when you’re working and 100 percent OFF when you’re not. This not only allows you to be present in the moment, but allows you the needed time to rest and recover.

The science is very compelling. Psychological-detachment from work is essential for being engaged while you’re working! Here are other benefits of psychological detachment from work:

• If you don’t detach from work, you’re more likely to procrastinate and get fatigued on the job.
• Although this is obvious, if you don’t detach from work, you’re less likely to have marital satisfaction.

Your ability to work at a high level is like fitness. If you never took a break between sets, you wouldn’t be able to build strength, stamina, and endurance. However, not all “rest” produces recovery. Certain things are more soothing than others.

Recovering from my work generally consists of writing in my journal, listening to music, spending time with my wife and kids, preparing and eating delicious food, or serving other people. These things rejuvenate me. They make my work possible, but also meaningful.

How do you recover?

Do you have a regular environment optimized for resetting and recovery?

7. Have A Pre-Performance Routine That Gets You In Flow

Josh Waitzkin is a genius when it comes to learning and optimal human performance. He was a Chess prodigy as a child — he won five National Championship titles in Tai Chi Chuan — and is now focusing on becoming world-class at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He takes the fundamental principles of learning from the ground up and applies them laterally to different disciplines.

In order to “get in the zone,” Josh recommends a Pre-Performance routine.The goal is to reduce stress and anxiety so you can be present. These routines often take 20–60 minutes to put you in the zone. However, Josh recommends incrementally reducing the routine time to the point where simply thinking about it clicks you into the zone.

The purpose of the pre-performance routine is to alter your emotional state. Most people experience emotional resistance before engaging in a task, like say, writing.

That resistance could be a number of negative and suppressed emotions such as fear, uncertainty, and feelings of inadequacy. You don’t want these emotions to influence you while you work. They will negatively influence how you perform.

The pre-performance routine is intended to alter your emotional state to one of courage, peace, acceptance, and love. From these emotional states, your work will be far superior. Without question, how you feel in the moment you do you work determines how well you do.

8. Embrace Fear And Suffering

“The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It’s the same thing, fear, but it’s what you do with it that matters.” — Cus D’Amato

The idea of fearlessness is a false concept that is imposed by spectators. True performers feel fear and experience suffering. However, they learned to settle-into it like a yoga stretch.

Cycling is a sport notorious for the amount of suffering required. As Tyler Hamilton has said, “I discovered when I went all out, when I put 100 percent of my energy into some intense, impossible task — when my heart was jack-hammering, when lactic acid was sizzling through my muscles — that’s when I felt good, normal, balanced.”

Cyclists often refer to “the pain cave,” which is a mental place they go deeper and deeper into as they’re competing. “I went deeper than I thought I would.” “I was at the limit.” “I was totally pinned.” You often hear phrases like these in interviews after a cycling race.

“Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuously. Left to my own devices, I am always looking for ways to become more and more psychologically impregnable. When uncomfortable, my instinct is not to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it. My instinct is always to seek out challenges as opposed to avoiding them.” — Josh Waitzkin

When you begin feeling uncomfortable, that’s when you start feeling good. That’s when you’re growing. No pain no gain. That’s your happy place. That’s where most people stop. But not you.

9. Do It Because Of Love

In the end, there’s nothing more important than deep connection with humanity. The love you feel for other people is an experience that eclipses all others in life.

Your level of success is based on your level of contribution. It’s not about what you can get, it’s about what you can give. The world gives to the givers and takes from the takers. You don’t need to worry about what you’ll get, because you know your contribution is huge.

So much of training and personal progress is introspective — focused on the self. However, moving outward and focusing on the needs of others provides new meaning for your work. Become the best at what you do, not because of the legacy you’ll leave, but because of the lives you’ll bless.

There is a four stage hierarchy of motivations in psychology.

At stage one, you are motivated by fear. Everything you do is to avoid punishment or negative outcomes. You only do what you think others want you to do, being completely dependent on them. According to decision theory, this form of motivation is prevention focused.

At stage two, you are motivated by reward. Everything you do is to get what you want. If you are in business, you do only that which you believe will get you ahead. Thus, you are promotion focused and although highly independent, you can’t see outside of your own limited worldview. You’re too fixated on what you want, so much so that you’re unable to truly collaborate or get genuine feedback.

Both stage one and stage two demonstrate extrinsic motivation, which is far less powerful than intrinsic motivation.

At stage three, you are motivated by duty. You’re going to do what you believe you should whether you receive a reward or not. You have no fear of punishment. You are intrinsically motivated. You’re willing to do whatever it takes to get the result, even if that means changing your initial mindset, ideas, or strategies. Even still, there’s a lack of something truly magical when you do something only out of duty.

At stage four, you are motivated by love. You have moved beyond worry for your own needs. Your aim is to bring as much joy to each individual as you possibly can. Your love transcends human reasoning. It drives you to do things most would consider crazy. You no longer live by conventional rules or wisdom. You have a plan, yet that plan is continually upgraded through connecting new dots via collaborations and inspiration. You’re no longer tied to a specific outcome but you have conviction and faith that the best outcome will occur.

Conclusion

You can quickly get to the point where you do what you love for a living. This will require hard work, sacrifice, and consistency. However, what got you here won’t get you there. Becoming the best involves transcending guidelines and following your instinct.

You get to decide the level of impact or quality of the work you do. You can become the best in the world. It begins with elevated thinking.

Are YOU going to get to the top 1 percent?

[CORE] Media: Thiel (50:00)

Thiel disputa la especialización tradicional hacia mercados en competencia perfecta.

Resumen: Frena y analiza el entorno competitivo, para encontrar una diferenciación monopolista.

→ Accede al vídeo

There is always this question about competition as a form of validation. And it’s not wisdom of crowds. There are 20.000 people a year who move to L.A. to become movie stars, about 20 of them make it. There is always the question: Does the tournament make sense as you keep going? There is the classic Henry Kissinger line describing his fellow faculty at Harvard: “The battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small.” Why would people fight like crazy when the stakes are so small? But when it’s been really hard to differentiate yourself from others, when the differences are small, you have to compete ferociously to maintain it. That’s often more imaginary than real. In my eighth grade junior high school yearbook one of my friends wrote, “I know you’re going to get into Stanford.” I ended up at a big law firm in New York where, from the outside, everybody wanted to get in, and, from the inside, everybody wanted to leave. I left after seven months and three days. Other people down the hall told me: “It’s really reassuring to see you leave, Peter, I had no idea that it was possible to escape from Alcatraz? Which of course all you had do was go out the front door and not come back. But so much of people’s identities got wrapped up in winning these competitions that they somehow lost sight of what was important, what was valuable. Competition does make you better at whatever it is that you’re competing, figuring out how to beat the people next to me. I’m not questioning that, I’m not denying that, but often comes this tremendous price that you stop asking some bigger questions about what’s truly important and truly valuable. Don’t always go through the tiny little door that everyone’s trying to rush through, go around the corner through the vast gate that nobody is taking.

[CORE] Media: Nadal (18:00)

Toni Nadal, entrenador de Rafa, comparte la receta del éxito en la formación de su sobrino.

Resumen: Mejorar desde la exigencia máxima, la sinceridad genuina y la responsabilidad individual.

→ Accede al video

Siempre charlo con Rafael antes de salir a la pista; me preguntó cómo veía el partido. De nuevo era contra Federer. Le dije que bastante mal: tiene mejor drive que tú, su revés también, la volea es mucho mejor y cuando le fui a hablar del saque me mandó parar. “¡Vaya moral que me das!” Le contesté que podía engañarlo pero que en dos horas Federer no le engañaría y más valía saber a qué nos enfrentamos. ¿Qué tenía Rafael mejor? Quizá la ilusión y el saber correr. Así que le digo: “Ilusiónate y empieza a correr”. En otra ocasión, en el US Open, Rafael se estaba quejando continuamente de las bolas, le botaban poco, todo le iba mal. Le dije “lo mejor es que pierdas y nos vamos a casa porque con estas bolas no se puede jugar”. Y el tío me hizo caso, perdió. De ahí voló a Pekín, donde tenía otro torneo, en que jugó con las mismas bolas, y le ganó al número 3 del mundo. Mi objetivo ha sido no engañar más de la cuenta a Rafael.

[EXTRA] Fragmento: Taleb (04:00)

El cisne negro. Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

→ Compra el libro

Every morning you leave your cramped apartment in Manhattan’s East Village to go to your laboratory at the Rockefeller University in the East Sixties. You return in the late evening, and people in your social network ask you if you had a good day, just to be polite. At the laboratory, people are more tactful. Of course you did not have a good day; you found nothing. You are not a watch repairman. Y our finding nothing is very valuable, since it is part of the process of discovery—hey, you know where not to look. Other researchers, knowing your results, would avoid trying your special experiment, provided a journal is thoughtful enough to consider your “found nothing” as information and publish it.Meanwhile your brother-in-law is a salesman for a Wall Street firm, and keeps getting large commissions—large and steady commissions. “He is doing very well,” you hear, particularly from your father-in-law, with a small pensive nanosecond of silence after the utterance—which makes you realize that he just made a comparison. It was involuntary, but he made one.
Holidays can be terrible. You run into your brother-in-law at family reunions and, invariably, detect unmistakable signs of frustration on the part of your wife, who, briefly, fears that she married a loser, before remembering the logic of your profession. But she has to fight her first im pulse. Her sister will not stop talking about their renovations, their new wallpaper. Your wife will be a little more silent than usual on the drive home. This sulking will be made slightly worse because the car you are driving is rented, since
you cannot afford to garage a car in Manhattan. What should you do? Move to Australia and thereby make family re unions less frequent, or switch brothers-in-laws by marrying someone with a less “successful” brother? Or should you dress like a hippie and become defiant? That may work for an artist, but not so easily for a scientist or a businessman. You are trapped.
You work on a project that does not deliver immediate or steady results; all the while, people around you work on projects that do. You are in trouble. Such is the lot of scientists, artists, and researchers lost in society rather than living in an insulated community or an artist colony. Positive lumpy outcomes, for which we either collect big or get nothing, prevail in numerous occupations, those invested with a sense of mission, such as doggedly pursuing (in a smelly laboratory) the elusive cure for cancer, writing a book that will change the way people view the world (while living hand to mouth), making music, or painting miniature icons on sub way trains and considering it a higher form of art despite the diatribes of the antiquated “scholar” Harold Bloom.
If you are a researcher, you will have to publish inconsequential articles in “prestigious” publications so that others say hello to you once in a while when you run into them at conferences. If you run a public-corporation, things were great for you before you had shareholders, when you and your partners were the sole owners, along with savvy venture capitalists who understood uneven results and the lumpy nature of economic life. But now you have a slow-thinking thirty-year-old security analyst at a downtown Manhattan firm who “judges” your results and reads too much into them. He likes routine re wards, and the last thing you can deliver are routine rewards.
Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. “How was your year?” brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the out side. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come. Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.

[EXTRA] Lectura: Alsop (09:00)

Alsop habla con distintos responsables de Recursos Humanos, preguntando por sus conflictos con los trabajadores más jóvenes.

Resumen: Baby boomers quejándose de las actitudes millennials en el trabajo.

→ Accede a la lectura (¡ERROR! ¡NO EXISTE!)

[EXTRA] Media: Sinek (15:00)

Sinek narra los inquietantes y tecnológicos problemas de la generación millennial en el mercado laboral.

Resumen: No eres especial. Controlar adicción a la tecnología. Tener paciencia. Cambiar cultura corporativa.

→ Accede al vídeo

T2. Ventaja competitiva.

The generation that is called the millennials, too many of them grew up subject to “failed parenting strategies.” Where they were told that they were special - all the time, they were told they can have anything they want in life, just because they want it. Some of them got into honors classes not because they deserved it, but because their parents complained. Some of them got A’s not because they earned them, but because the teachers didn’t want to deal with the parents. Some kids got participation medals, they got a medal for coming in last. Which the science we know is pretty clear is that it devalues the medal and the reward for those who actually work hard and that actually makes the person who comes in last embarrassed because they know they didn’t deserve it so that actually makes them feel worse. You take this group of people and they graduate and they get a job and they’re thrust into the real world and in an instant they find out they are not special, their mom’s can’t get them a promotion, that you get nothing for coming in last and by the way you can’t just have it because you want it. In an instant their entire self image is shattered. So we have an entire generation that is growing up with lower self esteem than previous generations.”

T5. Capital social.

There should be no cellphones in conference rooms. None, zero. When sitting and waiting for a meeting to start, instead of using your phone with your head down, everyone should be focused on building relationships. We ask personal questions, “How’s your dad? I heard he was in the hospital.” “Oh he’s really good thanks for asking. He’s actually at home now.” “Oh I’m glad to hear that.” “That was really amazing.” “I know, it was really scary for a while there.” — That’s how you form relationships. “Hey did you ever get that report done?” “No, I totally forgot.” “Hey, I can help you out. Let me help you.” “Really?” — That’s how trust forms. Trust doesn’t form at an event in a day. Even bad times don’t form trust immediately. It’s the slow, steady consistency and we need to create mechanisms where we allow for those little innocuous interactions to happen.

[EXTRA] Media: Gelb (01:21:00)

Gelb acompaña durante una semana a Jiro Ono, maestro del sushi, en la búsqueda de unos valores que nos acerquen a la excelencia.

Resumen: La perseverancia es el secreto del éxito. No busques activamente una pasión. Solo puedes encontrarla si trabajas con convicción durante mucho tiempo.

→ Accede al trailer

Once you decide on your occupation you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That’s the secret of success and is the key to being regarded honorably.

Modelo 202. Interés compuesto

Con dinero y relaciones. La popularidad conlleva oportunidades, el éxito genera más éxito. Un nuevo contacto te conectará a sus amigos. ¿Quién podría abrirte puertas? ¿Tienes mentor? ¿Tu estrategia para convencerle? No decides tú, decidirá ella. Si ve algo en ti. Tu rendimiento en estos primeros años determinará tu suerte, marca la diferencia. Empieza con buen pie y corrige rápido.

Referencias complementarias

Materiales adicionales

Naval Ravikant. Shane Parrish.
→ Accede al podcast

La parábola de los talentos. Pablo Malo. → Accede a la lectura

La confusión de los cachorros. Benito Arruñada.
→ Accede a la lectura

Late bloomers. Malcolm Gladwell.
→ Accede a la lectura

What is extreme ownership? Jocko Willink.
→ Accede al vídeo

David Ogilvy. Daniel Gross.
→ Accede a la lectura

Bill Bernbach. Doris Willens.
→ Accede a la lectura

Entrepreneurship. Gary Vaynerchuk.
→ Accede al vídeo

Libros recomendados

Ogilvy on advertising. David Ogilvy. → Compra el libro

Hey, whipple, squeeze this. Luke Sullivan.
→ Compra el libro

Phishing for phools. George Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller.
→ Compra el libro

The righteous mind. Jonathan Haidt. → Compra el libro

Glosario: Ventaja competitiva

Toma mejores decisiones. Añadiendo nuevas referencias.

Concepto 201. Hipótesis del mundo justo

Mucha gente prefiere creer que este mundo ofrece una historia coherente y comprensible y, por tanto, potencialmente controlable. En esta visión causal, se compite en un juego meritocrático. Si quieres un empleo, saca buenas notas. Si quieres la promoción, esfuérzate. Sigue las órdenes y ganarás un premio. No las sigas y serás castigado. ¿Estrategia? Yo hago mi trabajo y espero sentado mi recompensa. ¿Problema? Nadie vendrá a buscarte por tu cara bonita, en el mundo real no gana quien sigue las reglas al pie de la letra. El engaño viene del sistema educativo y su marco 100% estructurado. ¡Toca cambiar el chip para diferenciarte! Trabaja el networking honesto (demostrando interés genuino) y genera alianzas (identificando los incentivos de tu superior). Aprende a pedir cosas y recuerda que todo (repito: ¡todo!) puede negociarse. Cuenta Keith Ferrazzi que aceptó su primera oferta de trabajo bajo una condición: Cenaría con el entrevistador una vez al mes. Al socio le encantó la idea. El arte de jugar fuera de las reglas.

Concepto 202. Competencia perfecta / Monopolio

Existen dos modelos de competencia: Uno es la competencia perfecta. La oferta pública de empleo con 100 CV por una posición. No te interesa jugar a esto, porque la diferenciación es en el margen. Si ella habla 5 idiomas, tú tienes que hablar 6. Serás reemplazable a pesar del perfil top, porque habrá 4 clones esperando. Y, siguiendo las leyes económicas, podemos afirmar que cobrarás menos. Henry Kissinger decía, sobre la carrera académica, que “la lucha era feroz porque el premio era muy pequeño.” Uno estaba dispuesto a todo para proteger su mínima ventaja. El modelo alternativo en el monopolio. No gusta a los reguladores pero tú, como empleado o empleador, tienes que buscar el tuyo. Ser irremplazable, a través de una ventaja competitiva no replicable. Frena y analiza el entorno competitivo. Todos hacen cola en la entrada principal, pero, si sabes montártelo, tienes una puerta en el backstage. El problema, a veces, es un exceso de foco. Recuerda por qué compites y pelea allí donde tenga sentido. Piensa cuándo y cómo frenar, para así ser más exitoso. O perderás tu identidad en la competición. O, incluso peor, definirás tu identidad en ella.

Concepto 203. Humanidades / Tecnología

¿Dónde especializarme? ¿Debería aprender a programar? ¿O debería estudiar los discursos de Platón? En la universidad de Saint John’s leen los clásicos durante 4 años. Para comprender el mundo actual, discuten las ideas de los grandes pensadores. Historia, filosofía y ética. Y literatura. Desde las grandes novelas, profundizan en la fascinante psicología humana. Tú, con esto, ya te buscarás un trabajo. Porque, pensando bien sabrás resolver los problemas. Encontrando buenas ofertas de empleo. La alternativa a las humanidades pasa por desarrollar un perfil técnico. También viable. El mundo sigue necesitando a ingenieros e informáticos. Posiciones muy especializadas. Búscate, eso si, una habilidad no reemplazable. Las amenazas son dos: Globalización y máquinas. Se externalizan empleos a países con salarios bajos. Y la tecnología elimina tareas mecánicas. No siempre un robot, a veces un algoritmo, sustituye a trabajadores cualificados que creían estar a salvo. Pregúntate antes de empezar: ¿Podrá un ordenador hacer este trabajo en 20 años? ¡Suerte con tu elección!