low. We’ve become used to stories about factory jobs going overseas, but with technology and mobile capital and labor, almost any knowledge job can be outsourced, too. A book publisher can contract with an Indian cover designer just as easily as she can with an American one. To thrive in a world where someone else is always cheaper, you have to be distinctive at what you do. In some cases, just to survive, you have to be world class.
You do not get to be world class at anything without devoting long hours to the deliberate practice of your craft. In recent years, a number of books including Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers have popularized the findings of studies by K. Anders Ericsson (now of Florida State University) and his colleagues claiming that you need at least 10,000 hours of focused practice in order to achieve expert performance. Researchers found this, most famously, for violin students in Berlin, though these findings have been extended to other areas such as sports. Ten thousand hours is a lot of time.
To put that in perspective, back when I was playing the piano seriously as a teenager, I practiced about 5 hours a week. That comes out to 250 hours per year. Over ten years, this comes out to a measly 2,500 hours.
Parents can obviously force their children to practice musical instruments for some amount of time whether they want to or not, but it’s hard to force 10,000 hours unless you’re standing over the kid with a whip. And, indeed, since deliberate practice requires a focused concentration on getting better, you’d have to use that whip to enforce results, not just hours. Long term, it doesn’t work. Eventually, you have to want to practice. You do not do that unless you love the stuff of the job. Only if you love the stuff of the job will you relish thinking about problems and brainstorming solutions in the grocery store line. When Joe Kennedy, CEO of the Internet radio company Pandora, was deciding whether to take his current job, he realized (as he said in a speech I attended recently), “I’m thinking about it in the shower. I’m having fun thinking about it in the shower.” This is a man who spent his college years writing Gregorian chants.
Clearly he has a thing for obscure music.
This obsession is the only way to stay on top, because you can trust that your competitors are thinking about their jobs in the shower. Advantages do not stay static. These days, best practices are quickly dispersed. In 1896, the world record time for male marathoners was just under 3 hours, a time that amateurs post regularly now. Indeed, Paula Radcliffe’s world record women’s marathon time (2:15:25, set in 2003), would have been the world record men’s time up until 1958. Think about that and what it says about how much more intense and focused marathon training has gotten in 50 years. Half a century ago, if elite women runners were privy to modern marathon training methods, and men were not, we would have thought that women were faster than men.
So it goes in other fields. Once, people who took entry-level jobs at blue-chip companies might have expected to retire from the same place 40 years later, and so they didn’t need to keep their skills sharp enough to impress people at other companies. This is not an option now. The original premise behind consulting firms was that MBAs were rare and managers rarely moved between corporations, so these lords of strategy could show companies how to be more efficient. Now you may as well stick a revolving door on some C-level suites.
Plenty of people are willing to work hard and will do a reasonable job on the tasks in their job descriptions whether they love what they do or not. But it’s hard to go beyond that if you don’t love what you do. You’ll put in the hours you have to put in and do the things that are explicitly and immediately rewarded. Then you’ll come home and think of other things, like what’s on TV. Indeed, you’ll watch a lot of TV. One recent University of Maryland study found that unhappy people watched 20 percent more television than happy ones. Unhappy people like to escape. They don’t spend their time solving problems or thinking their way around personal obstacles.
People who are in the right jobs will. This is what happened to Lise Menn, a pioneering linguist. Like Kroo, she was a finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, in her case back in 1958 (as with
Kroo, I interviewed her for my ScientificAmerican.com “Where Are They Now?” column). She was inspired as a teenager by a book called The Story of Language, in which the author, M. Pei, claimed that by comparing the structures of different languages related to English, you could reconstruct the one that must have been spoken as an ancestor of our current Indo-European tongues. “The idea that you could peer that far back in time—when the actual words and speakers were dead but the patterns still survived without speakers, like the grin on the Cheshire cat—that made the hair on my arms stand up,” she told me.
“It was the most romantic, ghostly thing I’d ever read in science.”
But in the post-Sputnik era, the hard sciences seemed like a better bet to her parents. She majored in math as an undergrad, and went to Brandeis University in Massachusetts for graduate school in the subject. There, “I discovered what real mathematicians were and I wasn’t one of them,” she says. So, because she had married another graduate student and become a mom shortly thereafter (eventually having her hands full with two small boys by age twenty-four), she decided to pause her education and figure out what she wanted to do.
It didn’t take her long to come back to linguistics. Earning her degree in the field, however, was slow work. “There wasn’t any money for babysitters,” she says. She would trade babysitting duties with other mothers. But in the larger sense, because she was so drawn to linguistics, she turned the hours she spent caring for her sons and other children from an impediment to her linguistic career into a boon.
Supportive graduate student girlfriends volunteered to loan her books on children’s language development from the Harvard University library. What Menn read was “not like what I was seeing in my own kitchen with my second kid,” she says. Textbooks said that children learning to speak would say the first consonant of a word and the vowel (“mih” for milk, “doh” for dog). “That is the majority pattern, but in fact lots of kids don’t do that,” she says. “Instead, if a word ends in a consonant, they’ll change the first consonant to match it.” Little Danny Menn was—contrary to expert opinion—calling dogs “gogs.”
So Menn called up the famed child language researcher Roger Brown in the Harvard psychology department and asked if he’d heard anything like that. He told her to write up her observations. She did and, using her home address because she had no institutional affiliation, sent the paper to the journal Lingua, where it was published in 1971.
Cheered by this success, Menn decided to earn a PhD in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where her husband had landed a job (although she soon moved back to Boston after the marriage ended—and started building an academic career with help from a new partner). For her dissertation, she did a case study of how one child named Jacob learned to speak. She transcribed about 100 hours of his babbling and early words as she babysat him from twelve to twenty-one months old and saw that he, like Danny, would experiment with saying the same word in different ways. She discovered that before a child would come up with regular patterns to simplify words, he would go through a period where similar words influenced each other.
What’s fascinating about this story is that you’d think people in the field of children’s language development might have done such case studies before, but much of the theory of children’s language development, Menn notes, had been proposed by people who weren’t moms and “if they were dads, I don’t think they listened to kids a lot when they were babies.” Instead, they took a more standard approach to building their academic careers by writing papers in quiet, child-free offices.
Menn loved her work so much, though, that she turned personal obstacles into an opportunity to change the field. Her work “served as inspiration for much of the fieldwork and diary studies of children that followed,” says Andrea Feldman, a former student of Menn’s who has also taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Menn took a job in 1986. Her notes on Jacob “are still being studied by child language researchers,” she told me.
Many times, this sheer motivation translates into earning more, and some studies have found a link between happiness and income—proof of the adage to “do what you love and the money will follow”—
though it doesn’t always hold true.
But even in the absence of income guarantees, there’s a second part to the business case for being in the right job. If you take a job you don’t like just to make money, there is a good chance you won’t do it very well, and it will suck the life out of the rest of your 168 hours.
That’s what Danny Kofke discovered. A few years ago, he was teaching first-graders to read and write in Sebastian, Florida. He loved seeing their eyes light up when they figured out the connections between letters and the concepts they represented. Unfortunately, as a teacher, he was earning only $35,000 a year, so when his first daughter was born, he decided to try something more lucrative that he felt would better support a family. A friend who managed a company that sold high-end floor coverings offered him a job.
Some of the salesmen were making six figures.
Now, there is nothing wrong with selling flooring. In the case of high-end, hand-crafted rugs, it’s like selling art. Plenty of people become obsessed with the intricacies of Oriental rugs, and would consider expertise in this art form to be a core competency.
Danny Kofke was not one of those people. He started out enthusiastic, but “I slowly realized I wasn’t passionate about it. I made a pretty bad salesman,” he says. When people came in wanting a four- thousasnddollar rug, he’d find himself thinking, “I don’t care if you like it.” There was no way he was going to hit the top end of his potential income range, and looking forward, he realized that if he hated his job, he was going to be spending a lot of the additional salary he earned above his teaching income trying to make himself happy.
But he figured the opposite was true, too. “If you do have a job you like, if you’re happy in life, you don’t need those materialistic things to make you happy,” he says.
So when a job working with autistic children opened up, he quit and went back to teaching. Now he’s supporting his family on about $40,000 a year and has written a book called How to Survive (and Perhaps Thrive) on a Teacher’s Salary. The Kofkes live frugally, but when you love what you do, it’s a lot easier to come home and sit on a secondhand sofa than if you’re miserable for 8 hours a day.