Penn & Teller and doing more work than anyone can fathom.

Issue #276 of the Better Humans Newsletter. Subscribe here for inspiration and knowledge. [Tony Stubblebine](coachtony?source=email-c7f27b30bfea-1663187982663-newsletter.subscribeToProfile-7038e003d060------------------------59096897_17ad_4195_8581_5fbe9133adef--------de6e5ad096a9)[Tony Stubblebine](coachtony?source=email-c7f27b30bfea-1663187982663-newsletter.subscribeToProfile-7038e003d060------------------------59096897_17ad_4195_8581_5fbe9133adef--------de6e5ad096a9) in [Better Humans](   ∙  5 min read   ∙  [View on Medium]( Penn & Teller and doing more work than anyone can fathom. Issue #276 of the Better Humans Newsletter. [Subscribe here]( for inspiration and knowledge. ··· The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth. ~ Penn Jillette ··· Lately I’ve been in discussions with authors and creators about how to succeed, i.e. how do you make a living on Medium? Most people want early validation before they decide to invest more time or effort. I’m in this boat. I’ll try something new and expect to be a success right away. That leads to frustration and, usually, I quit. It’s made me look back with gratitude on the expectations of college. I went to college expecting to put four years of work into becoming a computer science major with the hope that there would be a good job for me afterward. But imagine if the length of college attendance was optional and I had paid day by day. Then I would have walked out of my first computer science lecture and asked myself: is it worth paying for the next class? To find out, I might have gone and tried to get a programming job. It’s sort of ridiculous to think about getting paid work after only an hour of learning. But writing, and a lot of creative endeavors, have confusing expectations about how much work is required to succeed. On Medium, a new writer can show up and make a few pennies after just a few hours of work. Is it a good sign that you are making pennies or a bad sign? The answer comes down to expectations. Without a doubt, many authors make incredible livings. But how much work is required to be one of those authors? In my experience, both personal and as a coach, many things require more work than you want, but less than you fear. In other words, if you knew how much work was actually required you’d begrudgingly do it. ··· To get this across, I’ve been telling a Penn & Teller anecdote about magic tricks. It’s a story about how much work goes into success. It’s in the quote above but the slightly longer version is that you can pull off a magic trick if the explanation is more work than the audience thinks you are willing to do. So for example, imagine you want to do a card trick where you chop down a tree, revealing inside the tree some audience member’s card. Bear with me on the infeasibility of whether a tree could grow around a card or climate concerns of chopping down trees. If you want the trick to work this way, how do you get the card inside the tree? One way is that you planted the tree years ago and grew the tree around the card. Most people would discount this explanation as more work than it’s worth. From the Penn & Teller perspective, this is exactly how to pull off the magic trick. ··· The way this shows up in writing is that most new writers don’t have any idea what an appropriate amount of work is in order to succeed. So I tell this Penn & Teller story to open up the idea of at least attempting to work harder than anyone would think is worthwhile. It’s a reframe from a world where people are trained to look for short cuts and minimum efforts. What does your maximum effort look like? Often that will look like magic to everyone else. In writing I have a couple of anecdotes. ··· One is from Malcom Gladwell’s MasterClass. He spends most of the class giving various tips and tricks about how to capture and keep the readers’ interest. A lot of the tips are kind of hack-y, like opening a loop at the beginning of an article and not closing it until the end. But then in the middle of the class he casually mentions his notes from a day he’d spent researching a town in Pennsylvania. It had been an interesting day that had ended with him having dinner with the mayor. But at the end of the day he didn’t have anything useful to do with his notes so he filed them away in one of his filing cabinets. Ten years later he found a way to use those notes in a book. This filing cabinet should have been the headline of the class. He is willing to do a full day of research and get no value from it for years. That implies that he is doing tons and tons of research. It’s probably the bulk of his work. To me, the magic of Malcom Gladwell is that he has collected so many stories that he can’t help but to have found many interesting ones. But collecting that many stories looks like more work than its worth and so nobody else does it. ··· Another is [my iPhone article]( which was more work than most people will ever put into a blog post. It’s a 75 minute read and took me more than two years to write. It begs the question: was that much work worth it? Well, it did get 2M views and made several tens of thousands of dollars. But a nice thing about writing is that writers often get paid in multiple ways for their work. I also used that article in paid coaching. I almost used it to get a book deal. I used it to bolster a partnership deal with Medium that then ended up leading to me taking over here as CEO. In other words, that work did pay off. ··· But what if it hadn’t paid off? That’s a risk I was willing to take. But risk is a personal decision. You might choose differently. In this newsletter I’ve often tried to refute the one-size-fits-all nature of advice. Instead, you should treat any advice as an optional tool that you can put into your toolbox. That’s what I’m recommending here. If you’ve tried all of the easy hacks and shortcuts and aren’t getting the results you want, then try working harder than anyone else thinks is worthwhile. Think of “an unreasonable amount of work” as a tool that you can pull out of your toolbox every now and then. Last, for related reading, [here is another article I wrote]( about people secretly doing slightly more work than the people around them. For example, my high school valedictorian was reading her textbooks before the semester started. That’s just slightly more work than the other straight A students were doing. But it’s the kind of extra work that many of us could have done. 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