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:
- Repeatable: Mastery requiresrepetition.
- Constant feedback: Regular and timely feedback to decisions/actions for continuous improvement. A mentor/coach may notice things that we may have missed.
- Hard: Deliberate practice requires significant mental effort.
- 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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