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Steve Jobs told us not to settle:
You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers… The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle… Like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
It sounds good, but in reality very few people have a relationship with their work they would compare to their lovers. And even if it does resemble a romance, the relationship with work does tend to settle with time, rather than getting better and better. An architect who fell in love with designs that jarred her with their originality finds herself doing work that is more conventional. An entrepreneur who fell in love with the impact great services could have on improving people’s lives finds himself spending too much of his time solving problems to keep his company afloat. And many more people find themselves doing jobs that never felt like a chosen passion. They make choices and climb ladders as the opportunities unfold in front of them.
Jobs’ vision was that we could and should expect more. From our vantage point, his perspective may look like that of a talented man lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. From his perspective, however, his path seemed like a natural way for people to live. Could we really not just love but be in love with our work? Could our vision become deeper and richer over time, as we progressed into our careers? Perhaps we could, if we felt ourselves making real progress with work we felt deeply was great and if we felt how it mattered to the world.
The Path to Quality and Why It Matters
One of the most striking aspects of research on human achievement is just how much we tend to remain on the surface of what is possible. Settling, it turns out, is built into the way we approach our world. Anders Ericsson, a leading researcher on expertise and expert performance, has shown that the normal path in most human endeavors is to become competent enough that we are not immediately aware of blatant limitations (usually about a year) and then not to improve after that. We continue to become more confident in our skills and abilities over the subsequent years, but we do not improve according to any objective standards. I have written here about why cognitive biases in the way that humans process information set up this situation. We have a bias to believe, in Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s term, “What You See Is All There Is.” Once we have a way of doing things, we fail to notice or correct for the fact that there may be many more effective possibilities. So we stop growing.
But it is not inevitable. Ericsson’s research is focused on how people overcome these barriers. He has shown that some people continue to learn and develop for years after most stop. These are the people who reach the tops of their fields. They spend their time differently than people who just continue to work and perform. They spend much of it in what he calls deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is pretty much what it sounds like – concentrated efforts to improve specific skills by practicing them with feedback until we are able to achieve a better result. It is, in a sense, the perfect antidote to “What You See Is All There Is.” You are forcing yourself to confront the discrepancy between what you can currently achieve and something more that might be possible. You struggle in the gap, using all of your creativity and problem solving capacity, until you can narrow it. A chess player engages in deliberate practice by playing through the recorded games of masters, ghosting the better player by trying to anticipate her moves. If she is unable to do so, she struggles until she understands the better move fully, using that understanding to try to anticipate the next move. A player who is playing match after match, even against challenging players, is not engaging in deliberate practice. Even when the player knows immediately that her move did not work, she is not then stopping the game and struggling to find what the better move would be until she can achieve it. As a result, she never internalizes the more successful play.
In fields where objective standards are central and information is easily accessible, the best people engage intensively in deliberate practice and, as a result, change what is possible. The level of play in chess has improved substantially over time. Sports represent another classic example. In running and swimming, the level of what humans can achieve has improved in every decade since we started keeping records. Olympic record holders from early in the 20th Century would have a hard time in a competitive high school meet today, and new records are broken in every Olympics as we keep shifting the line forward. The definitive performer of Chopin’s Etudes from the 1930s is now used as an example of inadequate technique, with one New York Times critic suggesting he could not get into Juilliard today. These examples are cases in point that, under certain circumstances, we can dig deeper into what is possible.
Ericsson became struck by the extraordinary power of practice in an experiment he attributes with shaping his future career. He started meeting daily with a college student and practiced reciting strings of digits to him of varying length with the goal of seeing whether the college student could develop the ability to repeat back longer and longer strings. The test is a classic one that is central to psychology’s understanding of IQ. There are natural constraints to how many items a person can hold in short term memory. The outer limit for most people is seven to nine units, and the test usually is treated as a stable measure of that capacity. The student did not know about this research. Even so after several days of practice, he came up against that barrier and commented that, no matter how much more he practiced or what strategy he used, he did not imagine he would get past nine digits. A couple of days later he had a breakthrough and made it to 11. At the end of four months he could recite back 82 digit strings without errors, more than even professional mnemonists.
But, even in activities that we care a great deal about, most of us do not practice in the way that the student did and thus do not push past the imaginary limits when we hit them. We continue to perform way below our capacity. One of Ericsson’s early studies compared people who developed expertise as musicians to those who played music for several hours every day but were not experts. The non-experts did not spend their time in deliberate practice, and so their playing never improved. It always seemed sad to me to think about musicians who loved music enough to play for hours every day but who never broke through and discovered the richer, more evocative music they were capable of. Many of them probably did not realize that more inspiring music was out there for them. But some must have realized they were playing music below the level of the work they really loved, and even they could not find their way there. I have written before about life-long learner Ben Franklin’s love of chess. He played passionately against great players, and he was always frustrated that his game stayed so far below the magic he saw in the games of the masters.
After all, true expertise is a kind of magic. Gary Klein is a psychologist and researcher who has spent his career studying expert intuition. He has shown the uncanny ability of experts to have exactly the right idea at the right time. For example, he described a fire chief who evacuated a building of his entire crew seconds before it collapsed. There was nothing specific that led him to make that decision, just a sense that “something didn’t feel right.” Mathematicians can have a very accurate gut sense of whether a problem is solvable in a flash, before they have made any progress on the solution. And Steve Jobs could have a feeling that innovations he was looking at in the Xerox lab could become the future of computing, where others passed them by. Like all magic, however, expert intuition is easily explained when you pull back the curtain. Klein has showed that intuition is at its heart pattern recognition. Humans have an extraordinary ability to learn and react unconsciously to patterns that are more complex than what they are aware of consciously. Experts have exposed themselves to thousands of relevant situations; and, if they have clear feedback, they learn to discriminate the patterns indicating the direction to the richest solutions.
But it takes a lot of training with clear feedback to produce the ability to recognize powerful solutions. Chess masters and grandmasters have an astonishing ability to generate in seconds better moves than the rest of us can grasp, which is why they can play many players at once and still defeat almost all of them. Being smart or thinking hard does not save the amateur player – even if he is Ben Franklin. Researchers are clear why master players can see so much farther than the rest of us: pattern recognition. By recognizing a set of patterns that they have internalized from studying other chess positions, they can comprehend the implications of a unique position. The ideas for extraordinary play come to them like magic. But the hitch is that they need to recognize about 50,000 patterns to play at the master level and more to play at the grandmaster level – a full, rich language that provides a powerful map to the most fertile and interesting spots in a wilderness of possibilities. It takes years and years of practice, internalizing the central features of hundreds of thousands of positions, to extract those patterns. Once they are present, however, expert intuition can bring extraordinary ideas to our fingertips instantly. We have a beautiful internal map for negotiating the territory that we care about.
The problem, and it is a big problem, is that we develop intuitions whether they are optimal or not, and we cannot tell the good ones from the bad. Once we have learned how to do anything, ideas about how to solve the problems that arise as we move forward come to mind at each step based on our experience. Because we have negotiated similar territory successfully enough, they feel “right.” “What You See Is All There Is” biases mean that we do not consider that the ideas that come to mind are only a limited set of the possibilities. Consequently, Franklin could work hard at each step and feel he was doing the best he possibly could, but he was working within the ideas that would come to him. He would be mystified at the mediocrity of the destination he ended up reaching. He did not receive the clear feedback he would have gotten during deliberate practice. Comparing his response to the move of a master in the same situation, he would have had to say to himself: “Your intuition was not as good as it should have been. Work harder and search until you can see your way to the better answer.” If he had that feedback at each step, he could have stretched at exactly the points he needed to learn novel patterns and thus to grow and improve his map.
The impact on our world of this implicit trust in mediocre intuitions is difficult to overestimate. Even when contradictory facts are available, it is difficult to grab onto them and use them. There are only a few fields where the goals are universally agreed upon, so that we can know clearly whether we make progress or not. Those fields expose just how hard it can be for us to absorb new facts and challenge our existing way of doing things. Active asset management is an entire field that data has long showed does not add value for the vast majority of investors, and yet we continue to pay these managers over 100 billion dollars a year. Only after decades of confronting the facts has enthusiasm for paying these investors exorbitant fees begun to wane. I have written here about my own field, psychotherapy, where the facts indicate advanced degrees do not improve the clinician’s effectiveness, but this fact has had little impact on either the way we train clinicians (where deliberate practice is largely absent) or on the higher levels of compensation paid to clinicians with advanced degrees.
The field of medicine is full of examples in which procedures that improve outcomes are adopted only at a glacial pace, because doctors and nurses are much more likely to trust their existing intuitions than hard evidence that better procedures would save lives. If the negative outcome is not visible and immediate, they ignore the facts. Research in top medical journals made clear in 1867 that appropriate methods for cleaning and sterilization saved an astonishing number of lives; but, decades later, doctors at Massachusetts General were still operating in coats stiffened with the blood and viscera of past patients. By the time their patients were dying of sepsis days or weeks later, they would never make the connection to their sartorial choices. The writer and doctor Atul Gawande writes of nurses today who know that skin-to-skin contact between babies and their mothers saves lives days later but who choose to ignore this fact because their intuition is that the baby is happy and fine. The negative consequence is not immediate enough to jolt us out of our default intuitions.
Eventually, most areas of medicine do come around to a process like deliberate practice, where they use facts as feedback in order to modify and optimize procedures. You can only ignore that a procedure kills babies for so long. But what about the fields where standards are not so clear – which, after all, include most fields that shape our lives? There are no objective standards for cultural enrichment, for the ethics we want to shape our societies, for beauty, for fun, or for inspiration. Consequently, most producers of entertainment, politicians, real estate developers, architects, and entrepreneurs lose sight of the possibilities to exceed the intuitions that come from learning the beaten path. As a result, we accept as “all there is” a world that is limited and often pretty mediocre.
But it is not always so. There are people who do not settle and who find a means to practice in a way that allows them to develop the maps they need in order to do extraordinary things in walks of life where there are no black-and-white standards. Steve Jobs was one of those people. How did he find the magic of a well-tuned map for navigating beyond the wide path?
The Fundamentals
1. Clarity of vision
In order to reach a better place than you can find traveling the beaten path, you have to have a clear idea of your intended destination. Without that clarity, your feet will drift back to the path that makes for the most natural walking. A guiding vision is surprisingly difficult to maintain. The reason is a phenomenon called “attribute substitution,” which underlies many of the cognitive biases that psychologists have identified. When a goal is complex or difficult to access, our minds substitute a simpler goal without even noticing.
An architect may have the goal of creating work that transforms people’s experience of their environment, but that is a goal that will take years to reach. Striking originality will often confuse others at first, whereas she can feel herself making progress more immediately if she explores in directions people already understand well. As she learns the familiar language, she will find over time that her most developed ideas – the ones that make her feel she is making progress – all arise from the conventional vocabulary. She has never learned the less accessible language that really intrigued and inspired her. The same is true of almost any profession where creativity is possible. The goal of stretching to bring extraordinary humanity into what we produce becomes subtly obscured by the more immediately accessible goals of professional success in terms the world is used to.
Avoiding that fate requires clarity of vision that hits us in the emotional centers of our brains and reminds us that the beaten path will rob us of a more personal vision. On the surface, Jobs’ vision does not sound that different from many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. He spoke of “bending the universe” in the way many entrepreneurs speak of “changing the world” or “disruptive innovation.” But his goal had a less common humane quality to it. It hit the emotion centers of his brain. He once cited some research that showed humans were a middling species in terms of efficiency of locomotion – but, with a bicycle, they blew all of the other species out of the water. He saw a computer as “a bicycle for our minds.” You can feel his excitement in the way that innovation can extend and unfold people’s child-like creativity and curiosity. That humanity at the center gives his vision a sense of meaning that is personal. And for him that personal conviction translated into caring an enormous amount about small differences in how richly humane a product was:
The problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste…. They don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products. Proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. If it were not for the Mac, they would never have those in their products…. Their products have no spirit of enlightenment about them…. And the sad part is that most customers don’t have a lot of that spirit either. But the way we are going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and spread it around to everybody, so everybody grows up with better things and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft is just McDonald’s. That is what saddens me.
The essential quality of Jobs’ vision was two-fold: (1) He cared deeply about it. He had a personal conviction that moved him to the core and thus motivated him enough for the long journey to develop expertise off the beaten path. And (2) he was acutely aware that even small differences in what was achieved had enormous consequences. Good products (like Microsoft’s) were the enemy, because they were the beaten path: People never discovering the richness that was possible for them. If he kept striving for better, it had enormous consequences. It will “ratchet up our species.” He was setting himself up to be able to train like an athlete, where every detail mattered in reaching a desired pinnacle.
Whatever field we pursue, a romance involves enchantment with a potential world you love more than the one you are in now. And every move along the way matters if you are going to be part of the birth of that better possibility. For a surgeon, the beaten path can lead to becoming chief resident and then a respected professional. But a surgeon who is in love with what he does needs a more human motivation. If he believes that he can change the course of many patients’ lives through small differences in the care that he and his hospital provides, he may have that hook. Images of babies with heart defects living to old age could drive the emotion centers of his brain hard enough that he looks outside the bubble of what his world normally considers. He could question standards of care and pay attention to information about their impact. He will realize that he will have to push against the established grain, which favors the status quo and thus threatens the future possibility he loves. If he develops over time the expertise to see more clearly just what is possible, then he will feel the reality of his vision drawing closer and closer. His romance will be growing deeper and deeper with the years.
In Jobs’ words: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change … life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” We have to ask ourselves what we most hope for from what we do. We have to spend the time to feel and imagine that as the destination that ultimately matters to us, setting us against the passive acceptance of a beaten path. Then we have enough sustained focus to start to develop expertise.
2. Training personal intuition
We hear within Jobs’ words what his standard was: It was “taste.” He wanted “to take the best and spread it around.” Rather than having an objective standard, Jobs fully embraced a subjective one. There is no other way. What seems more beautiful or powerful or “best” to us is always a personal judgment. Nevertheless, Jobs, like many others, was able to set personal judgment as a standard that organized practice and drove him to excellence. He had trained his intuition. The great chess moves came to him. He had the intuition that the graphical user interface he saw languishing at Xerox labs could revolutionize computing and that the struggling Pixar, which had never made a film, could produce amazing work. And, at each step of the way in turning his great ideas into great products, he made decisions guided by a well-honed sense of personal taste. It was no different than an athlete experimenting in the challenge of honing in on a more excellent standard of performance.
But, before personal judgment can be a standard, it has to be an object of practice. We all have taste and judgment; but, for most of us, it is untrained intuition and guides us in the same way intuition guides an amateur chess player with no concept of practice. What is easy to overlook is how much of Jobs’ energy went into calibrating his sense of taste. In the same way a musician might study music by comparing extraordinary work to more ordinary work in order to understand what made it amazing, Jobs moved through the world making subtle judgments about what seemed more or less good to him. When designing the Macintosh, he had noticed how often rectangles with curved corners appear in the world and how much better they look. He took team members, who had never noticed this detail and thought it was unnecessary, out into the world to show them the distinction. In his memorial, his wife talked about his devastating critique of sconces at a restaurant: “No object was too small or insignificant to be exempt from Steve’s examination of the meaning, and the quality, of its form.” In one famous incident when Jobs was delirious during a medical crisis, he refused to wear an oxygen mask, ostensibly because he hated the design. He demanded that they bring him five masks, and he would pick the one he liked. Even in his delirium, his reflex was to make discriminations between objects in order to arrive at which one fit most closely to his personal sense of taste.
Judgment has to be trained. People can become much more effective at discriminating shades of color by making judgments between slightly darker and lighter shades. The first time in a museum, the paintings can mostly look like paint and canvas. It is only with learning the language and nuance of painting and making comparisons between them that we can begin to know what we really love and what we do not. Most people never learn. They hang paintings on their walls that seem pleasant, and that is enough. They never learn to make the judgments about what is really beautiful to them. That choice is fine for the paintings on our walls; it is hardly a place most of us want to spend our energy. But if our personal judgment is the compass that directs what we choose to strive for with our lives and if we do not know how to read it, then our lives will either follow the beaten path mapped by habit or go nowhere in particular.
This issue is devastatingly easy to overlook. I have had so many clients comment on work that amazes them and moves them to tears, and it is rare for them to “study the meaning, and the quality of its form.” One client who is a writer was overwhelmed in reading a writer who she found so profound “I will never be able to write like that.” It did not occur to her to read and re-read the book in order to excavate the patterns that made it so wonderful to her.
At the beginning of this post I mentioned an architect and an entrepreneur who had fallen in love with an initial vision for their careers, but that vision settled into a more mundane and typical way of doing things over time. They probably have not even noticed that their initial judgment of good taste is not one that they continue to cultivate and sharpen. Perhaps the architect occasionally looks at books of work she loves, and the entrepreneur probably still admires certain peers and predecessors, expounding on them over drinks after work, but they do not take hours of every week making the distinctions between good and great work, studying carefully what it is that they love about it. They do not move through the world making these distinctions. Because they do not, that standard of excellence will neither be sharp enough nor at the front of their minds enough to guide the course of their careers. This is just as true for the person who has not yet picked an area she could love. If she is not discriminating what she loves more or less, she is very likely going to get swept up in the tide of climbing the ladders that she finds in front of her. She will not look at that ladder and go “that is good, but I am looking for better and know what better looks like and how to look for it.” She will just hang the painting on her wall. Except the painting she is hanging is her life.
3. Training the map
The ultimate goal is to have a mind trained with the full map needed to reach extraordinary destinations –our personal version of the 50,000 patterns for master-level play. Rich, effective ideas are readily at our fingertips. Our minds hone in with precision on the tactics for making them reality, lighting us up with the thrill of the chase. It is the development of expertise at what we really love that brings the romance to our work. Only then do we have the means to create magic.
Jobs made study into a lifestyle. Remote associations often are at the heart of creativity, so a library of patterns extending beyond our area of work is often useful. Jobs really did apply the lessons he learned from objects like those sconces to his computers. His favorite example was the development of variable fonts for the Mac, an innovation that led to the fonts available on all personal computers today. He attributed the creation of that idea to his unrelated study of calligraphy years before.
But, like every future expert, Jobs studied most intensively the people doing work closest to the game he was playing. Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid, was one of his heroes. His influence was present in Jobs’ performances when presenting new products. When he bought Pixar, he was fascinated with how their team worked. One of his biographers, Brent Schendler, demonstrated how carefully he observed Ed Catmull, John Lassiter, and the Pixar team and how much he applied what he learned there in his successful return to Apple. These people inspired him. He bought their company, he went to their meetings, he watched what they did, and he experimented with it in his own work. In so doing, he was studying the games of his masters.
Jobs’ method of experimentation had the hallmarks of deliberate practice. During practice, the individual is comparing herself to a standard she is not yet able to attain and stretching towards it. Jobs was famous for creating a “reality distortion field” in which he set expectations for himself and others that were impossibly high and then pushed with focus, energy, and determination until the “impossible” was accomplished. The way that he cloistered his team during the development of the Macintosh, driving them to accomplish what they often did not believe was possible, is reminiscent of an intensive Olympic training facility in its obsessive practice towards goal attainment.
Jobs was not initially skillful in using feedback to optimize his practice, and he made a number of disastrous career decisions because of this failure. If personal inspiration is your ultimate standard, receiving outside feedback is tricky business. You ultimately need to ensure that others do not divert you from the standard of your personal judgment – compromising your beacon of inspiration with self-doubt and leading back to the beaten path, but you are still subject to “What You See Is All There Is” biases. We often fail to perceive important information that others see, and we need that information to build and grow. People around Jobs knew that his computer at Next was troubled, for example, and he ignored them. But one of the main lessons that Jobs learned from Catmull and the Pixar crew was how to listen and respond to coaching. Most great chess players have coaches. Most people who are great at anything find coaches of one sort or another. We have to find the right people, who understand what you are shooting for but who also have an independent perspective. And we have to know how to distinguish valuable information from misplaced judgments.
Jobs never lost focus on the importance of the practice that was related to his deep love, which is why it got better with the years. Great products of exceptional design inspired him; and, even at the height of his career, he spent hours daily with his chief designer Jony Ives – experimenting, tinkering, learning, and developing. His heart stayed front and center in his work, and the 50,000 patterns that guided his intuitions were all organized around that heart. They provided the intuitions that mapped the way to make the world more and more what he loved. Jobs was not born as someone who could bend the universe. He was a man who had taken the time to collect the tools he needed to do work that seemed magical to others. We watch him in awe because, like the lesser players playing the grandmaster, we have not done the work to have the extraordinary map that he did.
A Life-Long Romance with Great Work
Most of us work; we do not practice. Even when we do practice, we do not organize our practice around what most deeply inspires us. Both the architect and the entrepreneur we described at the beginning had great skill, and they practiced to develop it. Over time, however, the standards they used to practice veered away from what they deeply loved and towards standards that gave their careers momentum in more immediate ways. As a result, they became well respected and good at their jobs, but no one would say they ratchet up the species.
They still could. The architect could start to take hours of every day to study what she deeply loves in architecture and in the world at large, examining the features and trying to understand the patterns. She could experiment boldly outside of her usual work, allowing herself to fail and holding herself to standards that are defined by the work in the world that inspires her the most. She could develop a community of people who understand her search. They could be her coaches and teachers. Only then will she begin to learn the fifty thousand patterns that form the language of what really inspires her. Until she has put in the time and attention to learning that language, inspiring ideas will not come any more than ideas will emerge in a language we do not know. She will return to the more familiar language she does know, the more conventional work that she has learned well. It will never express her heart, though. The ideas will die inside of her.
It is something for all of us to think about. We all are inspired, which means we all see work that strikes us as exceptional and provocative. It gives us a sense more is possible. But more often than not we do not treat those moments as cracks in the screen around us that could lead us into a richer world beyond. Like the musician that never knows the beautiful chords he was capable of, we may be living within a map of a smaller, less interesting world than we could. If practice towards what we deeply love guided our lives, then people all around us would be building a world that inspired them more than the one they entered. The world would be built with more human heart and more skilled hands, rather than so often being an extension of the beaten path.
Or we could skip all that. We could settle.
