How to Be Better at Almost Everything
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That might sound unappealing to a lot of people, but think of the kind of character it builds if you profit for the sake of doing good rather than for the sake of stockpiling wealth. I guess you could see this as a metric of sorts, a way of measuring priority—the person who makes a lot of money but then gives most of it away is doing things for reasons other than making money, which is doing things for a better reason. We’ll get back to talking about practicing your interests in a second, but this is important.
I can tell you that Aristotle is absolutely right about this, because there was a time in my life when I had gotten pretty good at making money—and frankly, I still am. I had a goal upon leaving college of making a million dollars before I was twenty-seven, and I accomplished that goal. And I had the fast, yellow Porsche and ate at all the nice, fancy restaurants and vacationed at all the ritziest, goldenest places, and you know what? I’m not going to say I was miserable—that certainly was not the case. But I wasn’t particularly happy either. That is, I wasn’t particularly fulfilled. Rather, it was this constant game of cat and mouse, in which I’d chase a goal, an object, or something I wanted to do or buy, and then I’d reach that goal, get that object, or do or buy that something I wanted, and I’d enjoy it for a while, nibble on it, play with it, or take pictures of it, and then that feeling would fizzle out. It was very schizophrenic, now that I think about it. The problem was that I thought happiness was found in having accomplishments and a nice, big number in my bank account. It turns out I was mistaken. Happiness is not found that way. Happiness is found in exactly what Aristotle says—doing and knowing and making good things.
According to Aristotle, happiness is more of a cumulative quality, then, and something that can only be assessed at the end of one’s life. It’s not like the sort of happiness of having a “happy childhood” or being glad one moment and angry the next. It’s more “happy in the sense of flourishing and fulfillment” (eudaimonia is the word in Greek to describe this), and that can only happen over time. And then, Aquinas would say, to perfect our happiness, we need to come to know God. Maybe that means getting hit by a bus or something to figure that one out. Let’s not rush that part! In the meantime, we can simply pray.
The reason I bring all this up? Again, I just want you to have the right orientation when deciding on the things you want to get better at; I want you to engage in them and enjoy them because they are good things to enjoy, and just about anything can be a good thing to enjoy when done for the benefit of others and for the right reasons. I think we could even make a case for cage fighting. But certainly music and writing and mathematics and biology and really, honestly, just about anything. It’s so important—so very, very important—to keep the overall goal in mind. We’re moving toward happiness. We stack skills to not only create advantages but find fulfilment. OK, end of sermon. Let’s move on.
So, Integration > Isolation. Say you chose guitar and want to learn rock. Well, then start with a song. Either get someone to teach it to you or pull up an instructional video on the interweb and take it bit by bit. Right away, you’ll run into something you can’t do. That something may be learning to hold the pick the correct way. So you isolate that technique until you get it right, but don’t rush. Skills take time to set in, and it’s worth spending extra time on the basics. Your brain works very much like a Crock-Pot, in this way. You plop in all these ingredients by practicing them, and then at some point you just need to set it and forget it. Come back the next day and everything will have hopefully blended. As you get better, you sometimes need a longer cooking time. Initial skills are sort of like cooking lettuce. You don’t need all that much time to take in all the beginner stuff and ready it for use in a much larger recipe. Later, you’ll get onto roasting chuck, the higher-level skills that take a lot more time to soften and set in. Whether that’s sweep picking or doing a freestanding handstand, your patience will need to increase as your practice time remains steadfast and dedicated.
Remember, you’re always working toward some specific goal even as you are practicing techniques in isolation. Maybe that goal is to perform “Smoke on the Water” in your living room in front of your grandparents or to do your first set of five pull-ups—but whatever the goal is, be sure you have one, and be sure you’re working toward that goal in some capacity at all times. Don’t just practice techniques to practice techniques. Integration > Isolation. Practice the techniques you need to learn in order to do the things you want to do, and practice them in a context that is as close as possible to the context in which they’ll be performed.
Let’s take the example of another skill at this point: writing.
Say you want to be a humor writer and you want to write jokes, whether you want to do stand-up, write stories and columns, or perhaps be a staff writer for a comedy show. I think that’s great. Part of your practice then, will be reading and listening to all the funniest people you can find. Just like part of the practice for any musician would be listening to the musicians and instrumentalists they want to be like. After this, you’ll actually need to sit down and write. Obviously, if you want to be a humor writer, you’ll need to practice writing thoughts that make people laugh. Grammar and syntax may need to be isolated, but this should again be done in the direction of the goal. I think what you’ll find with humor writing is that sometimes you’ll want to intelligently break the rules of grammar and syntax to achieve a certain effect, like writer Ring Lardner was so exceptional at—for example, in his book The Young Immigrunts:
Are you lost daddy I asked tenderly.
Shut up he explained.
You might analyze that snippet to try to examine what makes it funny. Part of it, certainly, would be the element of surprise. Nobody really explains “shutting up” to someone, do they? (As if this needs to be explained—and such is the problem with attempting to dissect humor; it dies in the process.) But when coming from the perspective of a kid, it kind of makes sense. It gave you an idea, though: maybe you want to try to write a short story from the perspective of your childhood, and maybe you want to bring out the absurdities of family road trips. Great. I think that’s a surefire way to get a laugh out of almost anybody. Who doesn’t have material they can use from family road trips gone awry? If you want, you could borrow some of mine. I’ve got quite a surplus.
This is Integration > Isolation. You’re practicing writing, but you’re practicing specifically in the context you want to get better at. Now, if I were doing this, I’d want to highlight something about how my mom would fall asleep in the passenger seat while driving out east, and how half the time she’d still have a cigarette in her mouth. What would happen next is that the cigarette would drop onto her lap and my dad would scream, “Goddamnit, Judy!” and we’d all become hysterical and the whole van would start to rock and swerve. My mom would awake with a start and search frantically for the lit cigarette and attempt to flick it out the window. The only problem was that half the time the window wasn’t open, so it would typically bounce and burn itself out on one of the armrests. This isn’t much of a story in this format, but that’s OK. The first operation of any writing project is to just get something down. You can shape it into something more exciting later. Start with a very rough first draft.
All creative efforts are done in segments. You write songs by coming up with simple melodies and stories by devising simple themes. The details, the nuances, the tone, the decoration of language—all that can be added in layers. The key for any skill, whether you’re practicing technique or actively creating, is to get started and work toward the goal in mind.
Obviously, Repetition and Resistance are also tucked into this. You can’t integrate or isolate if you’re not practicing a skill and increasing the demands as you go. Perhaps you move from learning to hold a pick to strumming a chord, or from writing three hundred words to writing five hundred to a thousand. Just be sure that however you’re increasing resistance, it remains in line with the goal. Don’t make things harder without maki
ng them relevant, in other words. I used to do this with guitar a lot: I’d learn a number of high-level techniques that took immense amounts of time to master (like sweep picking), but they just weren’t all that useful for the kinds of music I wanted to play, especially for the kinds of music people want to listen to. I was falling into the snare of specialization, of wanting to be better just to be better rather than wanting to be better in order to be good.
Let’s look at martial arts now. Anybody here have an interest in fighting? Great. Because maybe you had a rough childhood or maybe you’ve got a lot of pent-up frustration. I’m not saying martial arts is going to cure that, but I can say it helped me find a productive, physical outlet. But what would the principles of generalism look like when applied to this? Well, pretty much the same. You start with the end in mind. Is your goal to compete, or do you want to be more of a showman? When I first started tae kwon do, I wanted to compete. That meant I spent most of my time practicing the strikes that were most useful as part of the sport, particularly roundhouse kicks. But eventually I got deeper into the aesthetic side of the martial art, which meant I could then spend more time on some of the high-flying acrobatics and techniques—moves that aren’t especially useful when fighting people but certainly look cool.
I remember my coach would have me drill kicks for thousands of reps and sometimes we’d have to break the kicks down into steps. That was isolation, but it was all toward integration, as well. We never practiced a kick I wasn’t going to use soon. The same with punches and forms and self-defense. A lot of times we had to break things down on a granular level. I think this is something you have to do with pretty much any skill, but you should always know why you’re doing it. The reason for such slow, technique isolation is that the goal is eventual, seamless integration. Sometimes (often, actually) you need to pull things out of context to get them to work while in context. So you repeat and repeat (repetition), and you get closer and closer (resistance) to bringing that technique into its final form, whether that’s a competition, performance, or act of creation. It doesn’t matter what the goal is. The process is ultimately the same.
What about something that isn’t particularly artsy or fantastic? I know I’ve talked a lot about activities that I’m personally interested in, but there are also a lot of things that I don’t get particularly excited about, but maybe you do. For example, forensic analysis. Anybody here want to become a forensic analyst? No? OK, yup. That’s about what I would expect. What about marine biology, then? Anybody got a thing for whales or tiger sharks? Sea stars, maybe? Let’s say that you do. Because this is something I have no interest or ability in, but I assure you the principles of generalism still apply. Take the skill of dissection, for example. I don’t particularly know how relevant this is to marine biology, but I’m guessing marine biologists dissect things, and certainly dissection is a skill. I know because in second grade I had to cut open an octopus. Frankly, it was disgusting. But I remember we started with just a small procedure for practice and then moved on to the final operation. We were isolating so we could integrate. I forget now what we were even trying to discover, but I remember distinctly that there was progression to it. There was a goal. And that goal was broken down into small, little bits for us to practice. Obviously, none of us conducted a clean operation. (One kid just put the octopus on his head and pretended it was sucking his brains out. This boy quickly became a classroom hero.) It would be insulting to any great dissector to insinuate that a second grader could master the skill in just one lesson. I don’t know enough about dissection to say how long this skill takes to develop, but I know enough about skills in general to say that it can’t be acquired overnight.
The point is this: it doesn’t matter what you’re interested in. The only thing that matters is that you figure out how to apply the principles of generalism so you practice it in the most efficient way, toward the outcome you want. And you do so while keeping the bigger picture in mind: in some capacity, you remain oriented toward happiness and flourishing and helping others.
Finally, as you build your interests on top of the foundational skills we covered earlier, you’ll develop a strong and sturdy base from which to launch a career or a business. There is one last, remaining element, however. Even if you build those foundational metaskills to prepare and direct yourself, and even if you get really, really good at the things that interest you on top of that, there often remains a chasm. That chasm is the gap between taking your good-to-great ability and combining it with all the other skills you have, and then bringing it forward into the world and, preferably, getting paid to do so.
And it is to that particular topic that we turn now.
Chapter Seven
SKILLS YOU MAY NEED (BUT MAY NOT BE INTERESTED IN)
Now you’ve gotten good at all these different things, and you want to do something with everything you’ve learned; you want to bring your skills into the world. Awesome. Great. Fantastic. Superb. The good news is you might not have all that much work to do. Between making friends, being able to think straight, and being good at skills people are interested in, you’d be surprised at how things simply start to align. People might want to pay you to teach them something, or they might want you to perform or to do a service. But things may not always align so easily. There may be times when you need to reposition yourself and what you offer to make it attractive to people.
Let’s see if we can cover the entire study of economics in just a few short sentences, because I think that will help you see how you should position your skills to the world.
People are rational animals, remember. That means they think about things and make decisions for themselves. But what are they deciding about? At first, it may seem like people make all kinds of different choices, but mostly that’s a mirage.
People typically make only one decision, and that is based on whatever they think will make them happiest. They’re trying to be content, and there’s pretty much no scenario we can think of where people make choices they think will lead to their unhappiness. Even people who perform amazing acts of self-sacrifice are doing so because they’ve shaped their character to such an extent that those self-sacrificial acts are what makes them happy. (This would be an example of aligning your interests to something that is really good, as opposed to aligning your interests to something that is not. Either way, you are interested in something because you think that something will make you happy. But if Aristotle was right, then certain things have a greater propensity to produce happiness than others, and those are the things you should desire—but all that is really for another book.) But we don’t need to analyze every decision people make in order to arrive at the obvious conclusion that they make choices they think will make them happy either now or later. In fact, even if people are doing something they don’t particularly feel like doing now, like waking up early to go to work, that’s only because they know they will be far less happy later if they don’t go to work and then get fired.
What have we covered so far?
Point 1:People are rational.
Point 2:They make decisions because they want to be happy.
Now, sometimes people also make mistakes. Just because humans are rational doesn’t mean they make all the right decisions; sometimes they make very wrong decisions. But that isn’t what we mean by rationality. By rationality, we simply mean that people think about things and weigh decisions, but they may do this imperfectly. They may make a wrong choice, or they may not have the information they need in order to make that correct decision, even if there is one. But again, people make decisions, and they use their rationality to pursue what they think will make them happy. This is the most fundamental principle of economics: purposeful behavior.
People will do what they think is best in order to get the things they want—whether they are right or not is another story. A very large part of this process means trading things with other people, in the form of either buying or selling. That’s another fundamenta
l principle of economics: voluntary exchange. A person will buy or sell something only because they believe they will be better off as a result of the exchange. In other words, people will buy or sell something only when they believe they are going to profit from it, and by profit, we simply mean increase their subjective level of happiness. Nobody will ever buy anything, and nobody will ever sell anything, if they think they’ll be less happy after doing so—that is, at a loss. You can’t even imagine a situation when this would be the case, unless, of course, the situation was forced, as in a robbery or taxes.
An economy grows because different people think different things will make them happy. People value different items and services, and to different extents, so they can make exchanges and both parties can profit. Somebody who sells a car for $1,300 is happier with the $1,300, and the person who buys the car for $1,300 is happier with the car. Both parties have profited, assuming the exchange was voluntary. We needn’t worry that everybody will want the same things and fight over them, because not everybody wants the same things, to the same extent, or at the same time. This is why the principle of voluntary exchange is so powerful and productive; it allows people to increase their subjective level of happiness by trading goods and services freely with others, whereby everybody benefits.
At this point, maybe you’re asking, “OK, Pat, why does all of this matter to me?” It matters because it helps us to understand why people buy things and why they might be willing to pay us. Here we are with these really cool sets of skills, but just because we have these skills doesn’t mean people are going to pay us to use them. We have to make a value proposition; we have to show people how our skills can make them happier. Maybe you’re solving some problem they’re having, or maybe you’re helping them grow in some way. We don’t need to know exactly what that value proposition is—and, to be fair, it will vary wildly from person to person and from skill to skill—we only need to know that in order to get paid to do what we love, we must understand how what we love can make other people happy and, furthermore, how to convey that message most effectively to them. You can’t just say, “Hey, I know martial arts,” and expect people to pay you for it. But maybe there’s a parent whose kid keeps getting beat up and they want to teach them how to defend themselves. So maybe that’s your value proposition—you teach anti-bullying. Certainly, people are willing to pay for that. We know this because they do.