Cal Newport and Scott H. Young are collobarating to form a start deliberate practice course by email. Here’s an excerpt from on Cal’s emails to inquiring people:
The goal of the course is simple: to teach you how to apply the principles of deliberate practice to become a stand out in your job.
Why is this important? The Career Capital Theory I teach in my latest book and on Study Hacks maintains that the skills that make you remarkable are also your leverage for taking control of your working life, and transforming it into a source of passion.
The goal for Scott and I in offering a limited pilot run of the course at this point, is to get feedback from real people in real jobs. Adapting deliberate practice to knowledge work is difficult. We think experiments of this type are the only way to keep advancing our understanding.
The course lasts four weeks and is e-mail based. During each week you will receive three e-mails concluding with a concrete action step to help you solidify what you learned and start applying it to your life immediately.
Here is the curriculum:
Week One: Mapping out How Success Actually Works in Your Field
Week Two: Hard Facts, Driving Your Career by Metrics
Week Three: Designing and Choosing Projects to Build Skills Faster
Week Four: Enabling Deep Work
On an uncharitable reading, this sounds like two wide-eyed broscientist prophets who found The One Right Way To Have A Successful Career (because by doing this their career got successful, of course), and are now preaching The Good Word by running an uncontrolled, unblinded experiment for which you pay 100$ just to be one of the lucky test subjects.
Note that this is from someone who’s never heard of “Cal Newport” or “Scott H. Young” before now, or perhaps just doesn’t recognize the names. The facts that they’ve sold popular books with “get better” in the description and that they are socially-recognized as scientists are rather impressive, but doesn’t substantially raise my priors of this working or not.
So if you’ve already tried some of their advice in enough quantity that your updated belief that any given advice from them will work is high enough and stable enough, this seems more than worth 100$.
Just the possible monetary benefits probably outweigh the upfront costs if it works, and even without that, depending on the kind of career you’re in, the VoI and RoI here might be quite high, so depending on one’s career situation this might need only a 30% to 50% probability of being useful for it to be worth the time and money.
Note that this is from someone who’s never heard of “Cal Newport” or “Scott H. Young” before now, or perhaps just doesn’t recognize the names.
They seem to get more respect on LW than average career advice bloggers, so I was hoping someone who was familiar would comment. Nonetheless, I’m upvoting you because it’s good to hear an outsider’s opinion.
Cal Newport and Scott H. Young are collobarating to form a start deliberate practice course by email. Here’s an excerpt from on Cal’s emails to inquiring people:
Does this sound like it’s worth $100?
Errh
On an uncharitable reading, this sounds like two wide-eyed broscientist prophets who found The One Right Way To Have A Successful Career (because by doing this their career got successful, of course), and are now preaching The Good Word by running an uncontrolled, unblinded experiment for which you pay 100$ just to be one of the lucky test subjects.
Note that this is from someone who’s never heard of “Cal Newport” or “Scott H. Young” before now, or perhaps just doesn’t recognize the names. The facts that they’ve sold popular books with “get better” in the description and that they are socially-recognized as scientists are rather impressive, but doesn’t substantially raise my priors of this working or not.
So if you’ve already tried some of their advice in enough quantity that your updated belief that any given advice from them will work is high enough and stable enough, this seems more than worth 100$.
Just the possible monetary benefits probably outweigh the upfront costs if it works, and even without that, depending on the kind of career you’re in, the VoI and RoI here might be quite high, so depending on one’s career situation this might need only a 30% to 50% probability of being useful for it to be worth the time and money.
They seem to get more respect on LW than average career advice bloggers, so I was hoping someone who was familiar would comment. Nonetheless, I’m upvoting you because it’s good to hear an outsider’s opinion.