Archive for the 'Careers' Category

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, gave an interesting piece of advice on his blog last night: “Do something new every three years.” He writes:

For the first ten years of my career, I changed jobs every three years. Then, for the seven years I was at The Economist, I changed countries every three years (London, Hong Kong, and New York, although sadly not long enough at the last). Here at Wired, I seem to have achieved the same rhythm by publishing a book after my fifth year and, next summer, my eighth. Each time it changes my life and puts me back on a steep learning curve with a new subject to immerse in and a new pace of travel and speaking. I’ve got a new foreign land to explore.

Anderson goes on to tie his “three and flee” advice (my words) to a theory advanced by Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Outliers: that it takes about 10,000 hours of disciplined application to something to create a true master.  In an excerpt from the book provided by The Guardian, Gladwell writes:

This idea – that excellence at 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 a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… 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.”

Though I appreciate the unique insight he brings to interesting subjects — and I’ll also admit I haven’t yet read Outliers — I’ve always been slightly skeptical of Gladwell’s reductionist theories (see also: Thomas Friedman’s Flexible Deadlines and the F.U.).  My skepticism aside, Anderson calculates that (60 hours/week) x (50 weeks/year) x (3 years) = (a little under 10,000 hours).  And so, according to rough Gladwellian-Andersonian metrics, if you work your butt off for a little over three years, you can consider yourself a master in your field.

Having done that, Anderson writes: “Great. Now go do something else.”

Continue reading ‘Impatient Experts: Deciding When (Or If) To Try Something New’

I know many of you are with me when I offer a big round of congratulations to Jarred on his upcoming journey to the west coast and his new post at Google. Oddly enough I had this piece in my backlog of half-written posts that you may see in the coming weeks and decided this might be a timely reminder for Jarred and others about the possible frustrations of change and how they may not matter as much as you think.

This is a blog — if you couldn’t tell from the banner above — about change. For the most part, change is seen for its positive characteristics. Change means progress, change means advancement, change means opportunity. Sometimes, however, change means severing bonds and losing out on things you had in the past.  This leads to frustration and sometimes unhappiness.

Earlier this year I had an opportunity to work with a sub-group within my department and bring it up to speed with the rest of the group. While I initially jumped at the opportunity, I hesitated when I realized that the switch meant I would have to move groups and physically move my desk away from the comfort of the small team that I had worked with for the previous five months. In those five months we carefully built a well oiled business machine that produced high quality work tailored to those above us. These bonds were forged over late nights and pressing deadlines that I was, in many ways, afraid of giving up.

Continue reading ‘Changing The Way We Think About Change’