Although I am no longer a student, I really enjoy reading Cal Newport's StudyHacks blog. In particular, I like its focus on achieving success through good time management, hard focus, deliberate practice, and obtaining outstanding skill.
In this post on James McLurkin, Cal discusses an interesting concept called Stretch Churn. Paraphrased from Cal's post:
- Stretch Project: A project that requires a skill you don't have at the outset. Importantly, a stretch project is hard enough to stretch your ability but reasonable enough to be completed.
- Stretch Churn: The number of stretch projects you complete per unit time.
The premise is that the higher your stretch churn rate the more likely you are to obtain the kind of skill required to be a leader in your chosen field. As the interview with James demonstrates, highly successful people are adept at maintaining a high stretch churn rate. I suspect this is one of the underlying attributes of Outliers.
I think the stretch churn concept is an important insight because it clarifies how to apply the deliberate practice concept in engineering and research environments. Instead of working on a single problem over a long period of time - a common approach in research - the stretch churn concept suggests that it is better to work on a series of related, hard-but-achievable projects. In a way, this strikes me as the agile development model applied to becoming a domain expert.
On a personal level, I found the stretch churn concept interesting for two reasons. First, it explains why I highly value my advanced development experience - the very nature of the work has allowed me to maintain a high stretch churn rate for years. Second, it helped me realize that if I want to become a real domain expert that I'll have to more tightly focus my stretch projects so that they build upon each other. It's a vector math problem - stretch projects in many different directions result in little change when added together.
I suspect the stretch churn concept will be a valuable addition to my self-development toolbox.
