Just finished this week’s reading. Got something to say about the second one by Cal Newport.
For the second reading, I first watched the video while making notes and skim through the articles. Newport has a theory that people end up loving their jobs for the following three reasons: 1. Don’t follow your passion. 2. Be so good they can’t ignore you. 3. Go deep. I actually quite agree with him in some ways.
“Don’t follow your passion.” My interpretation is this, that people should match their skills up with their passion. I don’t think we born knowing our likes and dislikes. It’s the instinct in our genes and the surroundings that influences our passion. So we grow up to do one most important thing which is to learn about ourselves. Since we don’t know our passion, then when people only had the passion for a thing rather than skills for it, it’s easy to lose that slight spark of interest.
“Be so good they can’t ignore you.” You can’t love doing it when you are not good at it, that’s what I really feel. However, followed by Newport’s second point, my thought for abilities is that passion doesn’t necessarily always grow with it. For example, one of my friends was very good at piano, but then she ended up quitting it, not liking it. The piano education was a forced one. In China(that’s where I’m from), many parents love to get their children attend various kinds of classes for skills. It’s a good thing, but some of them are too harsh on children. They get overwhelmed by learning and so it cause a complete opposite effect. The whole point is about the controlled pace and amount for learning. Therefore, I agree with what Newport said about the second reason, but I doubt him saying “passion grew along with their skills.” I think it takes coincidences and some unexpected matters or conditions for someone to start a skill and discover/ignite passion. Just like what Newport said about having a fun piano teacher instead of a stern one was enough to keep a person interested. There’s this one photographer I know. His studies in uni was totally unrelated to photography, but life is strange. One chance he had the opportunity to handle cameras, and that once was enough for him to know that’s what he really wanted to do. Passion sometimes just come out from nowhere, and thus become a life-long one. Maybe it was the fascination, maybe this was a childhood interest that was buried down when real life problems got in the way. It’s unexplainable.
“Go deep.” For this third reason, Newport also introduced three methods to “go deep”, including scheduling and increasing focus ability. I totally agree that we need deep work to love what we do. One simple case is when I go deep in writing essays, I’d enjoy it so much even if I actually hate writing them. In that 100% focus rate, I will have this satisfaction that I am really contributing to my work. Newport had also pointed out that for those deep work,”we persist even if we are uncomfortable.”
It’s interesting that “go deep” reminds me of the article about “deep and hyper attention”, which we read during this week’s lectorial. Deep attention is like the concept Newport said, and for the record, I doubt hyper attention is really plausible when we need a quality work. I can never focus on work while the music is on. The author propose that there’s a cognitive mode shift happening in our younger generation. I agree with her, it is happening; but is it a good shift? In my opinion, things happen for a reason; and our generation is facing a world with an overwhelming amount of information throwing at us, this never happened before. To cope with it, we learn to multi-task. The problem here is that we can’t remember all that stuff; since the information is always there, we choose not to remember them. Unlike before, people usually remember things in brain, we now just keep a note or simply bookmark a website. Hyper attention allows us to finish many tasks in a short time, deal with new information quickly, but do not apply to highly complex problems. It is a good shift to adapt to this new situation; meanwhile our generation should also not forget about the importance of deep attention, learning to adjust to both modes.
This post has really costed my time, the watching, reading, thinking and writing. I paused for many times when I watched the video, for this reminds me of my high school. I was struggling for the future. “Physics or what? Movies? Music?” I was really good at science stuff and I had a passion for them. Then choosing movies could be my wish to make it hard for myself because I am usually into working alone instead of teamwork which involves communication. Watching the video helps me to think over about my plan for life. Am I passionate? Do I have a little bit of skill? I hope I will end up liking my job. 🙂
“How do people end up loving what they do for a living?”
Having a balanced combination of passion and skill.
This is my answer.
