On Focus (and the Law of Complementary Accomplishments)

From one of my favorite posts in Cal's blog:

Once you accomplish something of a non-trivial impressiveness and effort score, you can achieve many complementary accomplishments that have similar impressiveness scores but require very little additional effort.

In sum: success begets success. Once one has achieved something significant and noteworthy, not only will subsequent opportunities appear more frequently, they'll be easier to tackle because momentum & credibility have already been established. In other words, noteworthy accomplishments possess scale advantages.

The trick, then, is to specialize. To maintain a narrow focus in order to burrow deeply into an industry, craft, or field of study. That's the most direct way to get to "significant and noteworthy" territory as quickly as possible.

When I think about particularly successful contemporaries of mine, a few themes emerge:

1. They focused narrowly.
2. They took advantage of complementary accomplishments to catapult themselves into ever-more exclusive opportunities.
3. They migrated to communities dominated by their particular industry.

Here's two examples:

• Andrew is one of my best friends from high school. During the fall of his H.S. freshman year (2002), he volunteered for the political campaign of U.S. Representative Mark Kirk. His responsibilities in that first election were modest: just typical campaign fare like handing out flyers and propping up lawn signs. Kirk won the election, and Andrew participated in roles of ever-increasing responsibility for the 2004, 2006, and 2008 Congressional elections, and then the 2010 U.S. Senate election. By that time, Andrew was one of a small group of full-time paid staff members (he took off a fall semester from Northwestern University to participate in the Senatorial election.) After Kirk won that final election, Andrew moved to Washington to work for the Senator as a legislative aide, where he handled campaign correspondence, met with constituents on the Senator's behalf, and helped craft policy. After gained several years of experience at the Capitol and a letter of recommendation from a U.S. Senator, he left D.C. to attend the University of Chicago Law School.

• Yuriy is a close friend and former roommate from college. He came to the University to study acting after being recruited by many top theater programs around the country. Yuriy spent the first two years of college balancing the life of a frat boy with that of a serious theater student. Unfortunately, after two years of mediocre success at managing these two conflicting lifestyles, he made the difficult but necessary decision to move out of the frat house to a remote corner of campus and dedicate himself to his craft. This single-mindedness paid off with several lead roles in campus productions and eventually a professional role in the Chicago run of The History Boys which necessitated a semester break from college. Yuriy parlayed these experiences into several feature film roles and, currently, a significant recurring role on the NBC TV series Chicago Fire.

It's easy to look at successful peers and say "how on earth did he get a job in the U.S. Senate?", or "I can't believe your old college buddy is on a network television show!" If they eventually become Congressmen or Oscar winners themselves, their accomplishments will seem even more stratospheric and unapproachable. But the truth is that both of these guys -- and most successful people I can think of -- followed a very simple formula to arrive at their present state:

1. Find a unique and challenging role to fill.
2. Remove all distractions.
3. Succeed impressively and unequivocally at that role.
4. Examine the opportunities that now present themselves and pick one.
5. Repeat step 2.

And that's it.