#49 Measuring what matters and training like an athlete

Plus: A big announcement

Hi friends 👏

Welcome to Issue #49 of Curiosity > Certainty. We’re approaching a half-century. That doesn’t mean we’re closing in on a year though. Because I did not start with tabula rasa. I had a legacy collection that I imported over when I began.

This bit of information out of the way, I’ve some news (for those who don’t know me from LinkedIn). I’ve been accepted into the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Program India. It’s the first cohort in India and I’m kicked to be part of it, along with 199 other fabulous creators! The practice of putting together this newsletter has helped me with writing discipline (and if you trace that back, with reading and learning discipline). So thank you, dear readers!

It’s only been a few days since the announcement and I’m just getting to know my cohort members, yet two things are unmistakable: the batch is eclectic (from sustainability to agritech to personal finance to whatnot). These are topics that you’ll have covered in your morning newspaper months, even years, later. Only shows the gap between what is in demand in the mainstream today and what will be valuable tomorrow.

Second, it’s funny how little strength peer pressure loses over time. Suddenly, there’s talk of follower count, engagement, analytics tools all around. Suddenly, you find yourself comparing yourself with others. Suddenly, you feel some doubt creeping in. I tell myself that this is normal. This has happened before. Boards, engineering, MBA entrance exams—this is life. And this will pass. Life is one long poker game.

Let’s dive into this week!

Not all that you can measure matters. Not all that matters you can measure.

Could the starting point in your search for meaning change? 

Before, you looked at a career by how much it paid (not how much you loved it); at a house by the number of rooms in it (not its architecture); at a holiday by the destination (not your frame of mind).

Before, you lumped together all that you could measure and declared them sacred because it was easier to choose that way. 

What if you started your search differently? What if you could look for beauty first? Or happiness? Or for whatever matters to you?

Human motivation is much more diverse than the filters of career by pay, houses by number of rooms, or vacations by location allow. When we chuck the filters the world has handed us and look beyond, we escape the crowd. The world is not as cut-throat anymore because thankfully we’re all a little different from one another. Or at least we’re not as grumpy about the relentless world because we’re doing things we like. This chance to be ourselves is more real than it ever has been in human history. 

A decade ago, it would have been hard, if not unimaginable, for a creator of any persuasion to make a living without the consent of gatekeepers (record labels, galleries, publishers). That is no longer true. 

How much would you pay for a procedure that would save your life if you were guaranteed to die without it? 

This is the question that Forbes writer Michael Simmons asks.

The answer is, it depends. On how many are skilled enough to save your life. If everyone in the world is, you would pay hardly anything. If only one person is, you would give her everything. 

Being valuable has little import unless what you’ve is rare too. Turns out being yourself comes close to being rare because each of us has a unique talent stack. Being yourself has never carried more value. That is at the heart of the creator economy. 

You can turn your uniqueness into an audience and an income. You only need 1000 or a 100 true fans to be able to do what matters to you. These will be much more than just customers. They will be your patrons, your cheerleaders, your evangelists. 

There’s no reason for you to live someone else’s life because there’s no easy way to measure the worth of yours.

Building an open feedback loop in a profession without it

Knowledge workers are the opposite of athletes. Their learning curve is shallow, feedback loop closed, and there’s nothing specific they train for. Harsh but true.

By and large, they live through the same set of days many times over. Fortnightly review, quarterly planning, big presentations. On these days they may learn by exposing their thinking and letting others poke holes in it. Most other days are rinse-repeat days. For an athlete those are the training days—the very days that fuel growth. Get the difference?

Here are four ways curated from the best to level up like an athlete.

1️⃣ Ignore performance incentives where you cannot directly link outcomes to skill. In the absence of a clear link, going after performance incentives is like ‘climbing the ladder only to find it leaning against the wrong wall’ (Stephen R Covey). When you ignore external incentives, you will be forced to ask ‘what matters?’ That’s a start. 

2️⃣ Craft a learning plan. Knowledge work is not measured in matches, seasons, or leaderboards. But that shouldn’t stop you from reimagining professional development. Base a learning plan on deliberate practice. As James Clear says, deliberate practice lets you ‘break the overall process down into parts, identify your weaknesses, test new strategies for each section, and then integrate your learning into the overall process.’ Hard but only because you don’t see much of it around. What you do next should make it easier.

3️⃣ Build a system. It’s common to find people who treat each problem as if for the first time. That slows things down. So, write things down. Explain your thinking. A writing practice leads to, as Jeff Bezos says, ‘better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related’. People tend to goof up the how-things-are-related bit. Correlation for causation, leading indicator for lagging indicator, luck for skill. Writing is putting cogs in your internal system for pattern-matching and error-correction.

4️⃣ Finally, get an outsider’s perspective. Call them a coach, mentor, or intellectual sparring partner. You need someone to hold you to higher standards. Laying out your thinking to those better than you and asking them to pick it apart nails down growth. My wife and I are big fans of Masterchef Australia and it always amazes me how quickly home cooks level up to professional chefs when challenged right. One mentor who helps me level up is sneaky artist Nishant Jain.  

What habits and actions do you practice to get better at what you do?

Thank you, dear reader, for adding Curiosity > Certainty to your inbox. I am glad for your time and attention.