Because fatherhood has kept me away from fuller essays, and I still want to maintain a practice of writing and posting, I'll share a few bullets on how I've thought about success over the years.
- I've realized that most people actually don't define success for themselves. It's usually some combination of inherited and imposed. Make it a practice to write down what "success" means at your current stage. Be explicit, and measure your actions and results against that definition.
- 90% of it is positioning. Most advice doesn't matter. Environment, location, context, place. It will overdetermine what you're exposed to, who can enable you, who can unblock you, and what you imagine to even start working towards. People often make this a passive decision. Most Americans live very close to where they grew up. And that might be great! Just be intentional about why, and if it is your view of success.
- Which means, the first and foremost priority in success of all kinds is to get to a place where this is achievable. In terms of career, we often think about it in terms of a company. But I believe that before you even start to consider the company you have to consider the city - where will you live?
- I mentioned this in the first bullet, but I think it is deeply underestimated how much imagination plays into the success that you want. Before I ever left my hometown, I had my father in my ear telling me "go to the best school you can go to". That was inherited ambition, but it led to some early travels (one of my first plane flights was to Princeton's campus for a summer program) that started me towards imagining a different reality for myself. That was the beginning.
- Marriage and parenting are versions of success that I've deeply underestimated. There have been few things in my life that have simultaneously felt like intense progress and a weighty call to the present moment like growing a family. Fatherhood has created that draw more than marriage, but I know that parenting is not appealing to (or an option for) everyone. That's all simply to say, insofar as it is in your power, consider it deeply and early as a type of success beyond your career.
- Hard work actually has significantly more to do with outcomes and success than people like to attribute to it. It's simply sequencing - if you haven't accumulated the right combination of location, relationships, knowledge / context, and health (of all sorts), hard work won't matter. But once you have the right place, people, proficiency, and posture, hard work is such a bare minimum requirement that it hardly bears mentioning. In other words, if you know enough to know that you're in the right room, you know that hard work matters.
- The problem is, most people do not have a standard of hard work in mind. They have a standard of busy work, or great exertion. But hard, effortful work is not easy to see. It takes hard work to find out what hard work looks like! But one thing that self-teaching the trumpet has taught me as an adult is, for just about every field, there is a universe of bite-sized pieces. In music, these are notes, or intervals, or scales. Repetition of those pieces, across multiple vectors (direction, speed, volume, etc) daily is the way to work hard. Break down your field into atomic pieces, then do the atomic piece in a structured, repetitive way daily. You will outwork everyone around you - quickly.
- Studying is almost always secondary to the repetition. As a child, the studying is critical because you usually don't have a foundation to build from. But as an adult, studying is almost always a distraction without the effort of doing the repetition. The exception is in fields where your primary output is writing. Study, reading, and reflection are critical inputs to being a better writer, and simply writing without the requisite study is often like trying to drive a car on an eighth of a tank of gas. It can go for a bit, but not long.
- You can find a lot of good fortune by being biased to action over thinking / procrastinating / talking about ideas.
- I heard something on a podcast recently, I think it was James Clear, who paraphrased someone saying you need to live an A-B-Z life. A means you have a clear-eyed view and assessment of the current state. Where are you now? Z means you know where you want to go. What is your goal? And B is about the very next step. We know where we are, where we're going, and our immediate next step, so we can get comfortable, and critically, act, while not knowing C through Y. I liked this philosophy.