Table of Contents
Pursue your passion. You won’t get this time back ever again. Life is but a pause between the first breath and the last. The only thing you can guarantee at somebody’s birth is his or her death; everything else is unpredictable. They say life is a journey from B to D, that is, from birth to death. But what about the C that comes between B and D? It is a choice. Our life is a matter of choices. Choose what makes you happy and your life will never go wrong. Some people die at age twenty-five but aren’t buried until they are seventy-five. Some people aren’t born until they are age twenty-five. Strive to be the latter.
“One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching.” – Gerard Way
Key Inputs from Steve Jobs
In 2004, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was informed that he only had a few weeks to live. This is what Jobs told the audience during his 2005 Stanford commencement speech:
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Jobs was echoing the thoughts of Mark Twain, who said, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Therein lies the big life lesson for all of us: this moment is all that we have with us, and we need to prioritize things we want to do now. Take young children. They are in a natural state of happiness; they are neither stuck in the past nor living in anticipation of the future.
“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.” – Robert Brault
Best Things in Life
The best things in life are not things. They are experiences. What we truly treasure in the long run comes from experiences. Engaging experiences trump material objects when it comes to deriving lasting happiness. The pleasure derived from things is transitory, but the joy that comes from experiences is enduring. Don’t chase things. Make memories. We are all on a journey. No one lives forever. Be generous to those who cross your path. Give to those who need it. Touch hearts and spread happiness, hope, and optimism through your words and actions.
All our worries and plans about the future, all of the replays in our minds of the bad things that happened in the past are all in our heads (the human mind has a tendency to create issues out of nothing when it’s idle). This worrying just distracts us from living fully right now. Let go of all that and instead focus on what you’re doing right at this moment. You cannot reconstruct the framework of your reactions unless you deconstruct everything first, which you can only do by leaving things behind. Many events in life are outside our control. So we should just let it go and continue putting our best foot forward every day.
In his Stanford speech, Jobs shared the thought that would set the tone for the rest of his day: “For the past thirty-three years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
Regret Minimization Framework
These thoughts of Jobs are in alignment with the “regret minimization framework” espoused by Jeff Bezos.
When Bezos first considered starting Amazon, he was working for D. E. Shaw, one of the biggest quant-driven hedge funds on Wall Street. Today, in hindsight, his decision looks like a no-brainer, but at the time, no one would have considered it a prudent career move to leave a well-paying hedge fund job to start an online bookstore.
Mixing up ambition and genuine interest is a common phenomenon. Because of societal constraints, we never truly experience freedom. Hence, what we perceive as interest is often distorted by society’s expectations and becomes what we think we should become, out of fear based on beliefs.
Every big decision we make in life usually involves some sort of a trade-off. At times, we have to accept small regrets to avoid large ones later. Many people spend so much time worrying about the risks of taking action that they completely overlook the risks of failing to act. Sure, if you don’t take any risk, there’s no failure associated. No pain.
No pain? Really? Regrets will haunt you for the rest of your life. Failure hurts but passes quickly. Conversely, regret hurts forever. It’s hard to look back and face the opportunities missed because of a lack of initiative. Failure doesn’t hurt as much as witnessing how fear led us to mistrust our intuition. You only need to succeed once to unlock a new world of possibilities. Regret is in the nondoing. Many people are experts at success, but amateurs at failure. But not Bezos:
The framework I found, which made the decision incredibly easy, was what I called—which only a nerd would call—a “regret minimization framework.” So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried [emphasis added]. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.
Don’t you think that this is a lovely framework because it doesn’t involve a spreadsheet or a business plan? It has more to do with personal fulfillment and life goals.
Once we have understood the significant importance of passion and focus in life, how can we harness their power more effectively to achieve excellence in our respective fields? By engaging in the process of deliberate practice.
Deliberate Practice
Many performance coaches and motivational gurus preach the mantra of “practice makes perfect.” Ten thousand hours of practice, they say, is the key to world-class performance. Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea in his bestselling book Outliers:
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours…. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”
Notice the statement that “this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do.” Practice alone doesn’t make perfect. As James Clear says, “Motion does not equal action. Busyness does not equal effectiveness.”
In his book Talent Is Overrated, Fortune magazine editor Geoff Colvin highlights studies that show that greatness can be developed by any individual, in any field, through the process of what he calls “deliberate practice.” It is one of the big ideas from science on human performance.
Deliberate practice is a highly structured activity with the specific goal of improving performance. It requires continuous evaluation, feedback, and a lot of mental effort.
The excerpt is from ‘The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning’ by Gautam Baid.
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