Highlights
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I tell this story because these are hardly the actions of someone passionate about technology and entrepreneurship, yet this was less than a year before Jobs started Apple Computer. In other words, in the months leading up to the start of his visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics only when it promised to earn him quick cash. It was with this mindset that later that same year, Jobs stumbled into his big break. He noticed that the local âwireheadsâ were excited by the introduction of model-kit computers that enthusiasts could assemble at home. (He wasnât alone in noticing the potential of this excitement. When an ambitious young Harvard student saw the first kit computer grace the cover of Popular Electronics magazine, he formed a company to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the new machine, eventually dropping out of school to grow the business. He called the new firm Microsoft.) Jobs pitched Wozniak the idea of designing one of these kit computer circuit boards so they could sell them to local hobbyists. The initial plan was to make the boards for 50. Jobs wanted to sell one hundred, total, which, after removing the costs of printing the boards, and a 1,000 profit. Neither Wozniak nor Jobs left their regular jobs: This was strictly a low-risk venture meant for their free time. From this point, however, the story quickly veers into legend. Steve arrived barefoot at the Byte Shop, Paul Terrellâs pioneering Mountain View computer store, and offered Terrell the circuit boards for sale. Terrell didnât want to sell plain boards, but said he would buy fully assembled computers. He would pay $500 for each, and wanted fifty as soon as they could be delivered. Jobs jumped at the opportunity to make an even larger amount of money and began scrounging together start-up capital. It was in this unexpected windfall that Apple Computer was born. As Young emphasizes, âTheir plans were circumspect and small-time. They werenât dreaming of taking over the world.â ^ref-9340 Page: 15
In 2001, a group of four friends, all recently graduated from college, set out on a cross-country road trip to interview people who â[lived] lives centered around what was meaningful to them.â The friends sought advice for shaping their own careers into something fulfilling. They filmed a documentary about their trip, which was then expanded into a series on PBS. They eventually launched a nonprofit called Roadtrip Nation, with the goal of helping other young people replicate their journey. What makes Roadtrip Nation relevant is that it maintains an extensive video library of the interviews conducted for the project1. Thereâs perhaps no better single resource for diving into the reality of how people end up with compelling careers. ^ref-30820 Page: 20
Not long into his popular TED talk, titled âOn the Surprising Science of Motivation,â author Daniel Pink, discussing his book Drive, tells the audience that he spent the last couple of years studying the science of human motivation. âIâm telling you, itâs not even close,â he says. âIf you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.â When Pink talks about âwhat science knows,â heâs referring, for the most part, to a forty-year-old theoretical framework known as Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is arguably the best understanding science currently has for why some pursuits get our engines running while others leave us cold.8 SDT tells us that motivation, in the workplace or elsewhere, requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needsâfactors described as the ânutrimentsâ required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people ^ref-40285 Page: 23
to leave a bad job or to experiment with their career, you might argue, then it has provided a service. The fact that this occupational fairy tale has spread so far should not cause concern. I disagree. The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that the passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere thereâs a magic ârightâ job waiting for them, and that if they find it, theyâll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, ^ref-46540 Page: 22
This young generation has âhigh expectations for work,â explains psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, an expert on the mindset of the modern postgrad. âThey expect work to be not just a job but an adventure[,]⊠a venue for self-development and self-expression[,]⊠and something that provides a satisfying fit with their assessment of their talents.â3 Even if you accept my argument that the passion hypothesis is flawed, itâs at this point that you might respond, âWho cares!â If the passion hypothesis can encourage even a small number of people to leave a bad job or to experiment with their career, you might argue, then it has provided a service. The fact that this occupational fairy tale has spread so far should not cause concern. I disagree. The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that the passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere thereâs a magic ârightâ job waiting for them, and that if they find it, theyâll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, such as chronic job-hopping and crippling self-doubt. ^ref-60904 Page: 26
Chapter Four The Clarity of the Craftsman In which I introduce two different approaches to thinking about work: the craftsman mindset, a focus on what value youâre producing in your job, and the passion mindset, a focus on what value your job offers you. Most people adopt the passion mindset, but in this chapter I argue that the craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating work you love. ^ref-40975 Page: 32
There are two reasons why I dislike the passion mindset (that is, two reasons beyond the fact that, as I argued in Rule #1, itâs based on a false premise). First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you donât like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomyâthese come later. When you enter the working world with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks youâre assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can become too much to handle. Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindsetââWho am I?â and âWhat do I truly love?ââare essentially impossible to confirm. âIs this who I really am?â and âDo I love this?â rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses. In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused, which probably explains why Bronson admits, not long into his career-seeker epic What Should I Do With My Life? that âthe one feeling everyone in this book has experienced is of missing out on life.â7 ^ref-35487 Page: 33
To summarize, Iâve presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions. As I concluded after meeting Jordan Tice, thereâs something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is âjust right,â and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn itâand the process wonât be easy. With this in mind, itâs only natural to envy the clarity of performers like Jordan Tice. But hereâs the core argument of Rule #2: You shouldnât just envy the craftsman mindset, you should emulate it. In other words, I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they canât ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer. ^ref-13701 Page: 34
Iâve heard this reaction enough times to give it a name: âthe argument from pre-existing passion.â At its core is the idea that the craftsman mindset is only viable for those who already feel passionate about their work, and therefore it cannot be presented as an alternative to the passion mindset. I donât buy it. First, letâs dispense with the notion that performers like Jordan Tice or Steve ^ref-3675 Page: 34
found their true calling. If you spend any time with professional entertainers, especially those who are just starting out, one of the first things you notice is their insecurity concerning their livelihood. Jordan had a name for the worries about what his friends are doing with their lives and whether his accomplishments compare favorably: âthe cloud of external distractions.â Fighting this cloud is an ongoing battle. Along these lines, Steve Martin was so unsure during his decade-long dedication to improving his routine that he regularly suffered crippling anxiety attacks. The source of these performersâ craftsman mindset is not some unquestionable inner passion, but instead something more pragmatic: Itâs what works in the entertainment business. As Mark Casstevens put it, âthe tape doesnât lieâ: If youâre a guitar player or a comedian, what you produce is basically all that matters. If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not youâve found your true calling, the ^ref-24479 Page: 34
When I began exploring the craftsman mindset on my blog, some of my readers became uneasy. I noticed them starting to home in on a common counterargument, which I should address before we continue. Hereâs how one reader put it: Tice is willing to grind out long hours with little recognition, but thatâs because itâs in service to something heâs obviously passionate about and has been for a long time. Heâs found that one job thatâs right for him. Iâve heard this reaction enough times to give it a name: âthe argument from pre-existing passion.â At its core is the idea that the craftsman mindset is only viable for those who already feel passionate about their work, and therefore it cannot be presented as an alternative to the passion mindset. I donât buy it. First, letâs dispense with the notion that performers like Jordan Tice or Steve Martin are perfectly secure in their knowledge that theyâve found their true calling. If you spend any time with professional entertainers, especially those who are just starting out, one of the first things you notice is their insecurity concerning their livelihood. Jordan had a name for the worries about what his friends are doing with their lives and whether his accomplishments compare favorably: âthe cloud of external distractions.â Fighting this cloud is an ongoing battle. Along these lines, Steve Martin was so unsure during his decade-long dedication to improving his routine that he regularly suffered crippling anxiety attacks. The source of these performersâ craftsman mindset is not some unquestionable inner passion, but instead something more pragmatic: Itâs what works in the entertainment business. As Mark Casstevens put it, âthe tape doesnât lieâ: If youâre a guitar player or a comedian, what you produce is basically all that matters. If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not youâve found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself out of work. ^ref-14626 Page: 35
In reality, as Iâll demonstrate, you adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows. ^ref-23498 Page: 35
The Power of Career Capital In which I justify the importance of the craftsman mindset by arguing that the traits that make a great job great are rare and valuable, and therefore, if you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuable skillsâwhich I call career capitalâto offer in return. ^ref-57740 Page: 36
TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREAT WORK Creativity: Ira Glass, for example, is pushing the boundaries of radio, and winning armfuls of awards in the process. Impact: From the Apple II to the iPhone, Steve Jobs has changed the way we live our lives in the digital age. Control: No one tells Al Merrick when to wake up or what to wear. Heâs not expected in an office from nine to five. Instead, his Channel Island Surfboards factory is located a block from the Santa Barbara beach, where Merrick still regularly spends time surfing. ( Jake Burton Carpenter, founder of Burton Snowboards, for example, recalls how negotiations for the merger between the two companies happened while he and Merrick waited for waves in a surf lineup.) ^ref-7380 Page: 38
1 âThe key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; thatâs the hardest phase,â he elaborated in his Roadtrip Nation session. In other words, this is not the story of a prodigy who walked into a radio station after college and walked out with a show. The more you read about Glass, the more you encounter a young man who was driven to develop his skills until they were too valuable to be ignored. ^ref-47598 Page: 39
THE CAREER CAPITAL THEORY OF GREAT WORK The traits that define great work are rare and valuable. Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital. The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming âso good they canât ignore you,â is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love. ^ref-42414 Page: 45
On reflection, it became clear to me that certain jobs are better suited for applying career capital theory than others. To aid John, I ended up devising a list of three traits that disqualify a job as providing a good foundation for building work you love: THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.7 A job with any combination of these disqualifying traits can thwart your attempts to build and invest career capital. If it satisfies the first trait, skill growth isnât possible. If it satisfies the second two traits, then even though you could build up reserves of career capital, youâll have a hard time sticking around long enough to accomplish this goal. Johnâs job satisfied the first two traits, so he needed to leave. ^ref-17861 Page: 56
Mike Jackson leveraged the craftsman mindset to do whatever he did really well, thus ensuring that he came away from each experience with as much career capital as possible. He never had elaborate plans for his career. Instead, after each working experience, he would stick his head up to see who was interested in his newly expanded store of capital, and then jump at whatever opportunity seemed most promising. ^ref-29070 Page: 58
One of my most vivid memories of Rocking Chair, for example, was my discomfort playing anything I didnât know real well. Thereâs a mental strain that accompanies feeling your way though a tune thatâs not ingrained in muscle memory, and I hated that feeling. I learned songs reluctantly, then clung to them fiercely once they had become easy for me. I used to get upset when our rhythm guitar player would suggest we try out something new during band practice. He was happy glancing at a chord chart and then jumping in. I wasnât. Even at that young age I realized that my discomfort with mental discomfort was a liability in the performance world. ^ref-10138 Page: 59
Not only did Jordanâs early practice require him to constantly stretch himself beyond what was comfortable, but it was also accompanied by instant feedback. The teacher was always there, Jordan explained, âto jump in and show me if I junked up a harmony.â Watching Jordanâs current practice regime, these traitsâstrain and feedbackâremain central. To get up to speed on the wide picking style he needs for his new tune, he keeps adjusting the speed of his practicing to a point just past where heâs comfortable. When he hits a wrong note, he immediately stops and starts over, providing instant feedback for himself. While practicing, the strain on his face and the gasping nature of his breaths can be uncomfortable even to watchâI canât imagine what it feels like to actually do. But Jordan is happy to practice like this for hours at a time. This, then, explains why Jordan left me in the dust. I played. But he practiced. ^ref-24586 Page: 65
As Ericsson explains, âMost individuals who start as active professionals⊠change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work⊠is a poor predictor of attained performance.â Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, youâll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. This is what happened to me with my guitar playing, to the chess players who stuck to tournament play, and to most knowledge workers who simply put in the hours: We all hit plateaus. When I first encountered the work of Ericsson and Charness, this insight startled me. It told me that in most types of workâthat is, work that doesnât have a clear training philosophyâmost people are stuck. This generates an exciting implication. Letâs assume youâre a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as youâll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they canât ignore you. ^ref-39737 Page: 70
For the sake of clarity, I will introduce some new terminology. When you are acquiring career capital in a field, you can imagine that you are acquiring this capital in a specific type of career capital market. There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it. Television writing is a winner-take-all market because all that matters is your ability to write good scripts. That is, the only capital type is your script-writing capability. An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection. The cleantech space is an auction market. Mike Jacksonâs capital, for example, included expertise in renewable energy markets and entrepreneurship, but there are a variety of other types of relevant skills that also could have led to a job in this field. ^ref-11777 Page: 72
It helps to think about skill acquisition like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once itâs moving is easy. In other words, itâs hard to start from scratch in a new field. ^ref-37825 Page: 72
Once youâve identified your market, you must then identify the specific type of capital to pursue. If youâre in a winner-take-all market, this is trivial: By definition, thereâs only one type of capital that matters. For an auction market, however, you have flexibility. A useful heuristic in this situation is to seek open gatesâopportunities to build capital that are already open to you. ^ref-24733 Page: 72
Itâs at this point, once youâve identified exactly what skill to build, that you can, for guidance, begin to draw from the research on deliberate practice. The first thing this literature tells us is that you need clear goals. If you donât know where youâre trying to get to, then itâs hard to take effective action. Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune magazine who wrote a book on deliberate practice,7 put it this way in an article that appeared in Fotune: â[Deliberate practice] requires good goals.â8 ^ref-37301 Page: 73
If you show up and do what youâre told, you will, as Anders Ericsson explained earlier in this chapter, reach an âacceptable levelâ of ability before plateauing. The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little competition. The bad news is that the reason so few people accomplish this feat is exactly because of the trait Colvin warned us about: Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. I like the term âstretchâ for describing what deliberate practice feels like, as it matches my own experience with the activity. When Iâm learning a new mathematical techniqueâa classic case of deliberate practiceâthe uncomfortable sensation in my head is best approximated as a physical strain, as if my neurons are physically re-forming into new configurations. ^ref-37796 Page: 75
Summary of Rule #2 Rule #1 took on the conventional wisdom about how people end up loving what they do. It argued that the passion hypothesis, which says that the key to loving your work is to match a job to a pre-existing passion, is bad advice. Thereâs little evidence that most people have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered, and believing that thereâs a magical right job lurking out there can often lead to chronic unhappiness and confusion when the reality of the working world fails to match this dream. Rule #2 was the first to tackle the natural follow-up question: If âfollow your passionâ is bad advice, what should you do instead? It contended that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable. If you want these traits in your own life, you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. I called these rare and valuable skills career capital, and noted that the foundation of constructing work you love is acquiring a large store of this capital. With this in mind, we turned our attention to this process of capital acquisition. I argued that itâs important to adopt the craftsman mindset, where you focus relentlessly on what value youâre offering the world. This stands in stark contrast to the much more common passion mindset, which has you focus only on what value the world is offering you. Even with the craftsman mindset, however, becoming âso good they canât ignore youâ is not trivial. To help these efforts I introduced the well-studied concept of deliberate practice, an approach to work where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where youâre comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance. Musicians, athletes, and chess players know all about deliberate practice. Knowledge workers, however, do not. This is great news for knowledge workers: If you can introduce this strategy into your working life you can vault past your peers in your acquisition of career capital. ^ref-41606 Page: 83
The more time you spend reading the research literature, the more it becomes clear: Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment. ^ref-41247 Page: 85
The First Control Trap Control thatâs acquired without career capital is not sustainable. ^ref-29324 Page: 85
In Rule #2, I introduced the idea that career capital is the foundation for creating work you love. You must first generate this capital by becoming good at something rare and valuable, I argued, then invest it in the traits that help make great work great. In the last chapter, I argued that control is one of the most valuable traits you can invest in. Jane recognized the second part of this argument: Control is powerful. But she unfortunately skipped the first partâyou need something valuable to offer in return for this powerful trait. In other words, she tried to obtain control without any capital to offer in return, and ended up with a mere shadow of real autonomy. Ryan of Red Fire Farm, by contrast, avoided this trap by building up a decadeâs worth of relevant career capital before taking the dive into full-time farming. ^ref-52219 Page: 86
The more I studied examples of control, the more I encountered people who had made these same mistakes. Janeâs story, for example, is just one of many from the growing lifestyle-design community. This movement argues that you donât have to live life by other peopleâs rules. It encourages its followers to design their own path through lifeâpreferably one thatâs exciting and enjoyable to live. Itâs easy to find examples of this philosophy in action, because many of its disciples blog about their exploits. At a high level, of course, thereâs nothing wrong with this philosophy. The author Timothy Ferriss, who coined the term âlifestyle design,â is a fantastic example of the good things this approach to life can generate (Ferriss has more than enough career capital to back up his adventurous existence). But if you spend time browsing the blogs of lesser-known lifestyle designers, youâll begin to notice the same red flags again and again: A distressingly large fraction of these contrarians, like Jane, skipped over the part where they build a stable means to support their unconventional lifestyle. They assume that generating the courage to pursue control is what matters, while everything else is just a detail that is easily worked out. ^ref-11192 Page: 86
One such blogger I found, to give another example from among many, quit his job at the age of twenty-five, explaining, âI was fed up with living a ânormalâ conventional life, working 9â5 for the man [and] having no time and little money to pursue my true passions⊠so Iâve embarked on a crusade to show you and the rest of the world how an average Joe⊠can build a business from scratch to support a life devoted to living âThe Dream.â â The âbusinessâ he referenced, as is the case with many lifestyle designers, was his blog about being a lifestyle designer. In other words, his only product was his enthusiasm about not having a ânormalâ life. It doesnât take an economist to point out thereâs not much real value lurking there. Or, put into our terminology, enthusiasm alone is not rare and valuable and is therefore not worth much in terms of career capital. This lifestyle designer was investing in a valuable trait but didnât have the means to pay for it. Not surprisingly, things soon turned bleak on this fellowâs blog. After three months of posting several times a week about how to fund an unconventional life through bloggingâeven though he wasnât making any money himself from his own siteâsome frustration crept into his writing. In one post, he says, with evident exasperation, âWhat I noticed is that [readers] come and go. Iâve put in the hard yards, writing quality posts and finding awesome people⊠but alas many of [you] just come and go. This is as annoying as trying to fill up a bucket with water that has a bunch of holes in it.â He then goes on to detail his ten-point plan for building a more stable audience. The plan includes steps such as â#2. Bring the ENERGYâ and â#4. Shower Your Readers with Appreciation,â but the list still excludes the most important step of all: giving readers content theyâre willing to pay for. A few weeks later, the posts on the blog stopped. By the time I found it, there hadnât been a single new post in over four months. ^ref-32140 Page: 88
Luluâs first job after graduating Wellesley College with a mathematics degree was at the bottom rung of the software-development career ladder: She was working in Quality Assurance (QA), a fancy term for software tester. âSo your job would be, for example, to put text in bold and then make sure it worked?â I asked her, as she explained this first job. âWhoa, whoa, letâs not exaggerate the amount of responsibility they gave me!â she joked in response. This was not a great job. In fact, this was not even a decent job. Itâs here that Lulu could have easily fallen into the first control trap: Finding yourself stuck in a boring job is exactly the point where breaking away to pave your own non-conformist path becomes tempting. Instead, she decided to acquire the career capital required to get somewhere better. ^ref-35258 Page: 93
This is the irony of control. When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably donât have enough career capital to do anything interesting. But once you do have this capital, as Lulu and Lewis discovered, youâve become valuable enough that your employer will resist your efforts. ^ref-21526 Page: 94
The Second Control Trap The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when youâve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change. ^ref-63156 Page: 94
In light of the second control trap, I need to moderate my previous disdain. Courage is not irrelevant to creating work you love. Lulu and Lewis, as we now understand, required quite a bit of courage to ignore the resistance generated by this trap. The key, it seems, is to know when the time is right to become courageous in your career decisions. Get this timing right, and a fantastic working life awaits you, but get it wrong by tripping the first control trap in a premature bid for autonomy, and disaster lurks. The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the complexity involved in deploying this boldness in a useful way. ^ref-50371 Page: 98
âI have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules,â he said. âDo what people are willing to pay for.â Derek made it clear that this is different from pursuing money for the sake of having money. Remember, this is someone who gave away $22 million and sold his possessions after his company was acquired. Instead, as he explained: âMoney is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, youâre aiming to be valuable.â He also emphasized that hobbies are clearly exempt from this rule. âIf I want to learn to scuba dive, for example, because I think itâs fun, and people wonât pay me to do that, I donât care, Iâm going to do it anyway,â he said. But when it comes to decisions affecting your core career, money remains an effective judge of value. âIf youâre struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea.â ^ref-26611 Page: 99
The Law of Financial Viability When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on. ^ref-52697 Page: 100
Summary of Rule #3 Rules #1 and #2 laid the foundation for my new thinking on how people end up loving what they do. Rule #1 dismissed the passion hypothesis, which says that you have to first figure out your true calling and then find a job to match. Rule #2 replaced this idea with career capital theory, which argues that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable, and if you want these in your working life, you must first build up rare and valuable skills to offer in return. I call these skills âcareer capital,â and in Rule #2 I dived into the details of how to acquire it. The obvious next question is how to invest this capital once you have it. Rule #3 explored one answer to this question by arguing that gaining control over what you do and how you do it is incredibly important. This trait shows up so often in the lives of people who love what they do that Iâve taken to calling it the dream-job elixir. Investing your capital in control, however, turns out to be tricky. There are two traps that commonly snare people in their pursuit of this trait. The first control trap notes that itâs dangerous to try to gain more control without enough capital to back it up. The second control trap notes that once you have the capital to back up a bid for more control, youâre still not out of the woods. This capital makes you valuable enough to your employer that they will likely now fight to keep you on a more traditional path. They realize that gaining more control is good for you but not for their bottom line. The control traps put you in a difficult situation. Letâs say you have an idea for pursuing more control in your career and youâre encountering resistance. How can you tell if this resistance is useful (for example, itâs helping you avoid the first control trap) or something to ignore (for example, itâs the result of the second control trap)? To help navigate this control conundrum, I turned to Derek Sivers. Derek is a successful entrepreneur who has lived a life dedicated to control. I asked him his advice for sifting through potential control-boosting pursuits and he responded with a simple rule: âDo what people are willing to pay for.â This isnât about making money (Derek, for example, is more or less indifferent to money, having given away to charity the millions he made from selling his first company). Instead, itâs about using money as a âneutral indicator of valueââa way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that itâs a critical tool for navigating your own acquisition of control. This holds whether you are pondering an entrepreneurial venture or a new role within an established company. Unless people are willing to pay you, itâs not an idea youâre ready to go after. ^ref-22901 Page: 111
We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. Iâm arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. âThe truth,â Johnson explains, âis that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.â ^ref-37574 Page: 111
A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthroughâitâs an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edgeâthe only place where these missions become visible. This insight explains Sarahâs struggles: She was trying to find a mission before she got to the cutting edge (she was still in her first two years as a graduate student when she began to panic about her lack of focus). From her vantage point as a new graduate student, she was much too far from the cutting edge to have any hope of surveying the adjacent possible, and if she canât see the adjacent possible, sheâs not likely to identify a compelling new direction for her work. According to Johnsonâs theory, Sarah would have been better served by first mastering a promising nicheâa task that may take yearsâand only then turning her attention to seeking a mission. ^ref-5858 Page: 133
The Law of Remarkability For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking. ^ref-4482 Page: 134
Summary of Rule #4 The core idea of this book is simple: To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers. Mission is one of those traits. In the first chapter of this rule, I reinforced the idea that this trait, like all desirable career traits, really does require career capitalâyou canât skip straight into a great mission without first building mastery in your field. Drawing from the terminology of Steven Johnson, I argued that the best ideas for missions are found in the adjacent possibleâthe region just beyond the current cutting edge. To encounter these ideas, therefore, you must first get to that cutting edge, which in turn requires expertise. To try to devise a mission when youâre new to a field and lacking any career capital is a venture bound for failure. Once you identify a general mission, however, youâre still left with the task of launching specific projects that make it succeed. An effective strategy for accomplishing this task is to try small steps that generate concrete feedbackâlittle betsâand then use this feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next. This systematic exploration can help you uncover an exceptional way forward that you might have never otherwise noticed. The little-bets strategy, I discovered as my research into mission continued, is not the only way to make a mission a success. It also helps to adopt the mindset of a marketer. This led to the strategy that I dubbed the law of remarkability. This law says that for a project to transform a mission into a success, it should be remarkable in two ways. First, it must literally compel people to remark about it. Second, it must be launched in a venue conducive to such remarking. In sum, mission is one of the most important traits you can acquire with your career capital. But adding this trait to your working life is not simple. Once you have the capital to identify a good mission, you must still work to make it succeed. By using little bets and the law of remarkability, you greatly increase your chances of finding ways to transform your mission from a compelling idea into a compelling career.
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As I researched these ideas, I became increasingly worried about the current state of my academic career. I feared that my rate of acquiring career capital was tapering off. To understand this worry, you should understand that graduate school, and the postdoctoral years that often follow, provide an uneven growth experience. Early in this process youâre constantly pushed into intellectual discomfort. A graduate-level mathematics problem setâsomething I have plenty of experience withâis about as pure an exercise in deliberate practice as youâre likely to find. Youâre given a problem that you have no idea how to solve, but you have to solve it or youâll get a bad grade, so you dive in and try as hard as you can, repeatedly failing as different avenues lead you to dead ends. The mental strain of mustering every last available neuron toward solving a problem, driven by the fear of earning zero points on the assignment, is a nice encapsulation of exactly what the deliberate-practice literature says is necessary to improve. This is why, early in their careers, graduate students experience great leaps in their abilities.1 But at a research-oriented program like the one offered by MITâs computer science department, your course work winds down after the first two years. Soon after, your research efforts are expected to release themselves from your advisorâs orbit and follow a self-directed trajectory. Itâs here that if youâre not careful to keep pushing forward, your improvement can taper off to what the performance scientist Anders Ericsson called an âacceptable level,â where you then remain stuck. The research driving Rule #2 taught me that these plateaus are dangerous because they cut off your supply of career capital and therefore cripple your ability to keep actively shaping your working life. As my quest continued, therefore, it became clear that I needed to introduce some practical strategies into my own working life that would force me to once again make deliberate practice a regular companion in my daily routine. ^ref-13393 Page: 143
To initiate these efforts, I chose a paper that was well cited in my research niche, but that was also considered obtuse and hard to follow. The paper focused on only a single resultâthe analysis of an algorithm that offers the best-known solution to a well-known problem. Many people have cited this result, but few have understood the details that support it. I decided that mastering this notorious paper would prove a perfect introduction to my new regime of self-enforced deliberate practice. Here was my first lesson: This type of skill development is hard. When I got to the first tricky gap in the paperâs main proof argument, I faced immediate internal resistance. It was as if my mind realized the effort I was about to ask it to expend, and in response it unleashed a wave of neuronal protest, distant at first, but then as I persisted increasingly tremendous, crashing over my concentration with mounting intensity. To combat this resistance, I deployed two types of structure. The first type was time structure: âI am going to work on this for one hour,â I would tell myself. âI donât care if I faint from the effort, or make no progress, for the next hour this is my whole world.â But of course I wouldnât faint and eventually I would make progress. It took, on average, ten minutes for the waves of resistance to die down. Those ten minutes were always difficult, but knowing that my efforts had a time limit helped ensure that the difficulty was manageable. ^ref-11313 Page: 144
The second type of structure I deployed was information structureâa way of capturing the results of my hard focus in a useful form. I started by building a proof map that captured the dependencies between the different pieces of the proof. This was hard, but not too hard, and it got me warmed up in my efforts to understand the result. I then advanced from the maps to short self-administered quizzes that forced me to memorize the key definitions the proof used. Again, this was a relatively easy task, but it still took concentration, and the result was an understanding that was crucial for parsing the detailed math that came next. After these first two steps, emboldened by my initial successes in deploying hard focus, I moved on to the big guns: proof summaries. This is where I forced myself to take each lemma and walk through each step of its proofsâfilling in missing steps. I would conclude by writing a detailed summary in my own words. This was staggeringly demanding, but the fact that I had already spent time on easier tasks in the paper built up enough momentum to help push me forward. I returned to this paper regularly over a period of two weeks. When I was done, I had probably experienced fifteen hours total of deliberate practiceâstyle strain, but due to its intensity it felt like much more. Fortunately, this effort led to immediate benefits. Among other things, it allowed me to understand whole swaths of related work that had previously been mysterious. The researchers who wrote this paper had enjoyed a near monopoly on solving this style of problemânow I could join them. Leveraging this new understanding, I went on to prove a new result, which I published at a top conference in my field. This is now a new research direction open for me to explore as I see fit.
Thoughts on highlight:
Most IT concepts would be top-down, considering the levels of abstraction that are eventually uncovered Page: 146
The insights of Rule #2 fundamentally changed the way I approach my work. If I had to describe my previous way of thinking, I would probably use the phrase âproductivity-centric.â Getting things done was my priority. When you adopt a productivity mindset, however, deliberate practice-inducing tasks are often sidestepped, as the ambiguous path toward their completion, when combined with the discomfort of the mental strain they require, makes them an unpopular choice in scheduling decisions. Itâs much easier to redesign your graduate-student Web page than it is to grapple with a mind-melting proof. The result for me was that my career capital stores, initially built up during the forced strain of my early years as a graduate student, were dwindling as time went on. Researching Rule #2, however, changed this state of affairs by making me much more âcraft-centric.â Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice. This is a different way of thinking about work, but once you embrace it, the changes to your career trajectory can be profound. ^ref-33762 Page: 148
in Georgia Techâs computer science department during the period when it, too, was first transitioning toward a research-centric program. ^ref-29108 Page: 148
Throughout my job-hunt process, my PhD advisor at MIT had been telling me about her experiences, early in her own career, working in Georgia Techâs computer science department during the period when it, too, was first transitioning toward a research-centric program. âIn a growing program, youâll always have a say,â she told me. ^ref-28000 Page: 149
wait until later in your career. In his famed âLast Lecture,â the late Carnegie Mellon ^ref-16566 Page: 148
open positions, they can get away with this.) If your specialty is newâas mine isâand they canât therefore find experts with an opinion on it either way, youâre going to have a real hard time keeping your position, as thereâs no one out there to validate your stature. Because of this, the system rewards conformity for junior faculty: That is, the safest route to tenure is to take a robust research topic that already has lots of interest and then outwork your peers. If you want to innovate, ^ref-37039 Page: 148
If your specialty is newâas mine isâand they canât therefore find experts with an opinion on it either way, youâre going to have a real hard time keeping your position, as thereâs no one out there to validate your stature. Because of this, the system rewards conformity for junior faculty: That is, the safest route to tenure is to take a robust research topic that already has lots of interest and then outwork your peers. If you want to innovate, wait until later in your career. In his famed âLast Lecture,â the late Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Randy Pausch captured this reality well when he quipped, âJunior faculty members used to come up to me and say, âWow, you got tenure early; whatâs your secret?â I said, âItâs pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at ten oâclock and Iâll tell you.â â Georgetown, by contrast, made it clear that they werenât interested in this explicit comparison-based approach to tenure. At this stage in its growth, the computer science department was more focused on developing star researchers than trying to hire them away. In other words, if I published good results in good venues, I could stay. Without pressure to choose a safe, pre-existing area to dominate, I would therefore have much more flexibility in how my research program unfolded. ^ref-45071 Page: 150
While researching Rule #3, I came across a useful tool for navigating between these two traps. I called it the law of financial viability, and described it as follows: âWhen deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.â ^ref-705 Page: 152
It wasnât until I got started in earnest in my Rule #4 research, however, and met mission mavens such as Pardis, Kirk, and Giles Bowkett, that I understood just how tricky it is to make this trait a reality in your working life. The more you try to force it, I learned, the less likely you are to succeed. True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea. This requires a dedication to brainstorming and exposure to new ideas. Combined, these two commitments describe a lifestyle, not a series of steps that automatically spit out a mission when completed. ^ref-27807 Page: 153
Hereâs my rule: Every week, I expose myself to something new about my field. I can read a paper, attend a talk, or schedule a meeting. To ensure that I really understand the new idea, I require myself to add a summary, in my own words, to my growing âresearch bibleâ (which I introduced earlier in this conclusion when discussing how I applied Rule #2). I also try to carve out one walk each day for free-form thinking about the ideas turned up by this background research (I commute to work on foot and have a dog to exercise, so I have many such walks to choose from in my schedule). The choice of what material to expose myself to is guided by my mission description at the top of the pyramid. ^ref-38201 Page: 154
As explained in Rule #4, an effective strategy for making the leap from a tentative mission idea to compelling accomplishments is to use small projects that I called âlittle betsâ (borrowing the phrase from Peter Simsâs 2010 book of the same title). As you might recall, a little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: Itâs a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didnât exist before). It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback. I use little bets to explore the most promising ideas turned up by the processes described by the bottom level of my pyramid. I try to keep only two or three bets active at a time so that they can receive intense attention. I also use deadlines, which I highlight in yellow in my planning documents, to help keep the urgency of their completion high.