Joys of Compounding Chapter 4: Harnessing the Power of Passion & Focus through Deliberate Practice

• Finding ikigai (a reason for living or having a purpose) is the key to a happy life.
• Finding our calling in life, pursuing it with strong passion and intense focus, and engaging in deliberate practice results in ikigai.

How to find your calling

• Follow your passions. It is wise to be passionate about things under our control, or else we risk being dejected.
• Choose what makes you happy
• Explore. Dream. Discover.

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. — Steve Jobs

Focus

• Once we have discovered our calling in life, we need to embrace the power of focus.
• Relentless focus on one specific passion leads to achievement. That means pushing aside other ideas and interests until you achieve the goal.

Deliberate Practice

• A highly structured activity with the specific goal of improving performance. It requires continuous evaluation, feedback, and a lot of mental effort.
• Key elements of deliberate practice:

1. Repeatable: Mastery requiresrepetition.
2. Constant feedback: Regular and timely feedback to decisions/actions for continuous improvement. A mentor/coach may notice things that we may have missed.
3. Hard: Deliberate practice requires significant mental effort.
4. Not fun: Specific focus on weaker/uncomfortable areas.

Jeff Bezo’s Regret Minimization Framework

The framework I found, which made the decision [starting Amazon] incredibly easy, was what I called — 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 if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried.

I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.

- Jeff Bezo

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