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CHAPTER 4

HARNESSING THE POWER OF PASSION AND FOCUS THROUGH DELIBERATE PRACTICE

You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.

—Upanishads

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.

—Swami Vivekananda

According to the Japanese, everyone has an ikigai—a reason for living. And according to the residents of the Japanese village with the world’s longest-living people, finding it is the key to a happy life. Having a strong sense of ikigai—where passion, mission, vocation, and profession intersect—means that each day is infused with meaning.

Although there is no direct English translation, the word ikigai is thought to combine the Japanese words ikiru, meaning “to live,” and kai, meaning “the realization of what one hopes for.” Together these definitions create the concept of “a reason to live,” or the idea of having a purpose in life (figure 4.1).

FIGURE 4.1 Ikigai.

Source: Thomas Oppong, “Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life Might Just Help You Live a More Fulfilling Life,” Medium, January 10, 2018, https://medium.com/thrive-global/ikigai-the-japanese-secret-to-a-long-and-happy-life-might-just-help-you-live-a-more-fulfilling-9871d01992b7.

When you can use your skills to make a difference in someone’s life and get paid for it, that’s a happy life. When you’re passionate about it as well, that’s a calling. The feeling is almost divine.

—Ed Latimore

The only way to deep happiness is to do something you love to the best of your ability.

—Richard Feynman

Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you.

—Naval Ravikant

According to Gordon Matthews, professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, how people understand ikigai can, in fact, often be mapped to two other Japanese ideas—ittaikan and jiko jitsugen. Ittaikan refers to “a sense of oneness with, or commitment to, a group or role,” while jiko jitsugen relates more to “self-realization.”

Self-realization is closely linked to the concept of self-actualization, best known in the field of psychology in the context of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Self-actualized people are those who are fulfilled and are doing all that they are capable of. Maslow described the good life as one directed toward self-actualization, the higher need. Self-actualization occurs when you maximize your potential by doing your best. Maslow shared the names of those individuals he believed to be self-actualized, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein, to elaborate the common characteristics of the self-actualized person. According to humanistic psychologist Albert Ellis, “self-actualization involves the pursuit of excellence and enjoyment; whichever people choose to desire and emphasize.”¹ This focus on achieving excellence and enjoyment (even more than a focus on the realization of potential) prioritizes well-being and shows the relation between self-actualization and positive psychology.

Once we have discovered our calling in life, we need to embrace the power of focus.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

—Bruce Lee

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

—Abraham Lincoln

Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

—Samuel Johnson

When Bill Gates met Warren Buffett for the first time, their host at dinner, Gates’s mother, asked everyone around the table what they believed was the single most important factor in their success in life. Gates and Buffett gave the same one-word answer: “focus.” Both men agree that relentlessly focusing on one specific passion leads to achievement. And that means pushing aside other ideas and interests until a goal is reached.

Intensity is the price of excellence.

—Warren Buffett

Buffett biographer Alice Schroeder writes about Buffett’s intense focus: “He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business—art, literature, science, travel, architecture—so that he could focus on his passion.”² This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Many of the highly successful people in the world attribute their success to a singular focus—a deep commitment to the pursuit of one main goal. Focus directs your energy toward your goals. The more focused you are, the more energy you put toward what you’re working on.

Having the ability to focus on what is “important and knowable” is valuable in a world in which we are constantly bombarded with distracting and disparate ideas, information, and opinions. This has important implications for investors. Focus on those investments for which the microeconomics are going to dominate the outcome. This approach will allow you to call upon your accumulated experience in analyzing companies and industries and to utilize the same to your advantage. Fifty years ago, the best investors were the ones with an informational edge. Today, the best investors are the ones with a behavioral edge. As the speed of information dissemination in the markets and competition for short-term outperformance among money managers increased over the years, time horizons and patience levels significantly decreased. Today, an investor’s edge is less about knowing more than others about a specific stock and more about the mind-set, discipline, and willingness to take a long-term view about the intrinsic value of a business.

Achievement is so ingrained in our culture that we often ignore the fact that gunning to maximize short-term productivity usually comes at the expense of slower but more consistent and durable long-term progress. We live in a society in which inactivity is often frowned upon, but part of our focus should be not just on doing but also on deeply understanding the parameters of what we need to do, now and in the future. Learning and understanding the upfront and changing parameters of the field in which you are participating will help you focus on the right place. As Albert Einstein said, “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” These are incredibly powerful words in the context of focus. Buffett’s genius is that he prioritizes learning so that he can have higher quality insights.

Many people would see this as totally unproductive, but many of my best business solutions and money problem answers have come from periods of just sitting and thinking.

—Warren Buffett

In a knowledge economy, learning and thinking are the best long-term investments you can make in your career. Learning and thinking determine our decisions, and those decisions, in turn, determine our results. Buffett spends the major part of his daily time reading and very little time actually taking action. He says, “In allocating capital, activity does not correlate with achievement. Indeed, in the fields of investments and acquisitions, frenetic behavior is often counterproductive.”³ Investing is a field in which success can flow from passively observing the world, reading, thinking, and doing nothing more than making an occasional telephone call. Most investors would perform better if they thought more and did less. One of the best hacks in the investment field is learning to be happy doing nothing.

Successful investing is a practical craft and is made up of heuristics: a tool kit of approximate, experience-based rules for making sense of the world. The rules are local rather than global and slowly change over time—they are sufficiently static to make experience valuable but sufficiently fluid to keep the craft interesting. Having a strong passion for lifelong learning is a durable competitive advantage for an investor. What differentiates successful investors from mediocre ones is passion. To be a truly passionate investor means you are always thinking about the future and the direction of the world. It means you are always enthusiastically observing everything around you. Investing isn’t just a process of wealth creation; it is a source of great happiness and sheer intellectual delight for the truly passionate investor. It is great to be passionate in life, but it is wise to be so only for things that are under our control, or else we risk being dejected because of unfavorable outcomes. Value investors derive satisfaction from the mental process of investing and from the learnings embedded in the outcomes. Those who love the process end up with results naturally, unlike others who worship only outcomes.

The only way to gain an edge is through long and hard work. Do what you love to do, so you just naturally do it or think about it all the time, even if you are relaxing…. Over time, you can accumulate a huge advantage if it comes naturally to you like this [emphasis added].

—Li Lu

Buffett has always held the opinion that the people who discover their passion in life are lucky. His early passion for money management resulted in his studying, by age eleven, every book the Omaha Public Library had on investing, some of them twice.

In an interview with Fortune magazine in 2012, Buffett was asked how other people can “tap dance to work” the way he does. He provided the following answer: “Follow your passion…. I always tell college students to take the job that you would take if you were independently wealthy.”⁴ By doing that, the logic goes, you’ll bring more energy to your work than anybody else does. There is power in passion.

“The truth is, so few people really jump on their jobs, you really will stand out more than you think,” Buffett explains. “You will get noticed if you really go for it.”⁵

As the well-known saying goes, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” You know that you are doing things right in your life when you go to bed at night and cannot wait to wake up and live the next day.

Instead of merely trying to live a long life, we should endeavor to infuse life into our lives. Too often, life appears short to us because we all seem to have so much to do. But the reality is that life is long if you know how to use it well.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it…. Life is long if you know how to use it.

—Seneca

Old too soon, wise too late. It is a sad irony that it often takes us a lifetime to learn to live in the moment. To just “be” in the moment. We put off “living happily ever after” for another year because we assume we have another year. We don’t tell the ones we love how much we love them often enough because we assume there’s always tomorrow. We ignore the warning of Socrates: “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” Having all the money in the world is pointless if you don’t have the time or the health to enjoy it. In appendix A of this book, I share a beautiful poem written by David Weatherford, which I read a few years ago and continue to read from time to time. It has inspired me to work toward changing my life—from deferring living for tomorrow to trying to live today as happily as possible.

We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we have only one.

—Confucius

When you find your North Star, that is, the most important thing that sets your life’s course, you learn where you’re headed. And that is such a good feeling. It is fine for your North Star to change over time. But whatever it is right now, let it guide you. Your North Star is highly meaningful and vital in a personal context, so aiming toward this beacon of light will bring great happiness to you every day.

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 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

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… [emphasis added].

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 [emphasis added]. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.⁶

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.”

Twain’s quote reminds me of one of my favorite advertisements. It came from United Technologies. It runs:

Most of us miss out on life’s big prizes. The Pulitzer. The Nobel. Oscars. Tonys. Emmys. But we’re all eligible for life’s small pleasures. A pat on the back. A kiss behind the ear. A four-pound bass. A full moon. An empty parking space. A cracking fire. A great meal. A glorious sunset. Hot soup. Cold beer. Don’t fret about copping life’s grand awards. Enjoy its tiny delights. There are plenty for all of us.⁷

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.

As the artist Chuck Close says, “Inspiration is for amateurs.”¹³

Finding our calling in life, pursuing it with a strong passion and intense focus, and engaging in deliberate practice results in ikigai. Will Durant put it best when he said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”¹⁴