And 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
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. 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 is 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.”8
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 a 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.9
I love this 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 [emphasis added]. 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.”10
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.”11
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.”12 It is one of the big ideas from the 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.
Following are some of the key elements of deliberate practice:
1. It’s repeatable. If you’re a writer, you write a lot. If you are a musician, you know the importance of repeating your notes.
2. It receives constant feedback. Learning occurs when you get lots of feedback tied closely in time to decisions and actions. And deliberate practice constantly refers to results-based feedback. No mistakes go unnoticed. In fact, every error is a crucial piece of information for further improvement. The feedback can come from your observations or from a coach or mentor who notices the things that aren’t always visible to you.
3. It is hard. Deliberate practice takes significant mental effort.
4. It isn’t much fun. Most people don’t enjoy doing activities that they’re not good at. It’s no fun to fail time and time again and to receive criticism about how to improve. Yet deliberate practice is designed to focus specifically on those things you are weak at, and this requires you to practice those skills repeatedly until you master them.
While practicing deliberately, you are at the boundary of your limits and knowledge, stretching out for a goal that is just a little out of reach. When you reach for something, the idea is pounded in even better.
Deliberate practice is all about having a blue-collar mind-set. In his book The Little Book of Talent, Daniel Coyle wrote:
From a distance, top performers seem to live charmed, cushy lives. When you look closer, however, you’ll find that they spend vast portions of their life intensively practicing their craft. Their mind-set is not entitled or arrogant; it’s 100-percent blue collar: They get up in the morning and go to work every day, whether they feel like it or not.
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