I tried to avoid this book for a while because the title seemed too catchy. But I loved Deep Work by the same author (Cal Newport), so I gave it a try.
The main thesis Cal Newport puts forth is that you should not base your career choice on passion. Passion is what follows when you become “So good they can’t ignore you” in whatever subject you chose to pursue.
Within four chapters or four “rules” he describes concepts that are paramount for building a good career:
- career capital
- gaining control
- finding a mission within the adjacent possibe
- remarkability
Don’t Follow Your Passion
The first chapter explains why passion should not be the main motivation to pursue a career in a certain field.
“I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That’s a tragic mistake.”
Complex careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.
There are different words to describe the thing we do to make a living:
- Job
- A way to pay the bills
- Career
- A path toward increasingly better work
- Calling
- Work that is an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity
This begs the question for what it is that helps us building a career and what lets us find a calling. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) tells us that motivation, in the workplace or elsewhere, requires that you fullfill three basic psychologocal needs — factors described as “nutriments” 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
Clarity of a Craftsman
The tape doesn’t lie!
The craftsman mindest describes the focus on the quality of the output. No little detail should disturb you. Perfection is in the quantity of finished deliberately performed acts of practice leading to increased quality over time.
The result of the skills you build while following the craftsman mindset is your career capital which reflects competence.
A job may be evaluated with these three disqualifiers:
- 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.
Any of these disqualify a job as a potential way to build career capital.
Deliberate Practice
To build career capital we have to work hard to build the skills that distinguish ourselves from others.
This means that we have to make use of deliberate practice to overcome any plateaus. Just “showing up and doing the work” is not enough.
Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
This is not to say that it won’t be pleasurable along the way!
“[I thought], if I stay with it, then one day I will have been playing for forty years, and anyone who sticks with something for forty years will be pretty good at it.”
Capital → Control → Mission
The goal of having career capital is control. Control helps us finding the autonomy to search for a mission. The mission may bring passion.
Traps Along the Way
Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.
The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.
Financial Viability
“Money is a neutral indicator of value. By choosing to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.” — Derek Sivers
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.
Adjacent Possible
This was an interesting thing for me. I observed that — naturally — all ideas are the result of all the input you receive either conscious- and sub-consciously from your everyday life. That includes your personal and work life.
These possible new combinations of existing information and knowledge is a good source to find a mission.
A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field.
So career capital increases your value and your sense of competency. This increases control. With that increase in competency we increase the amount of adjacent possibilities.
(This reminds me of the increase of available optionality from the book Antifragile; sounds reasonable).
Experiment to Find the Mission
Further the author encourages the reader to look for potential mission in this space of the adjacent possible, by performing little experiments towards one specific direction (following the same theme).
“Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance, they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins.” — Peter Sims
Marketing by being a purple cow
The book references a lot of authors. One is Seth Godin with Purple Cow.
“For his mission to build a sustainable career, it had to produce purple cows, the type of remarkable projects that compel people to spread the word.” — Seth Godin, The Purple Cow
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.
Summary
- Deliberate Practice is the key
- Perform all tasks deliberately or not at all
- Find the adjacent possible purple cow with my current career capital
-
I want to be open and find new subjects to combine with my current knowledge.
- Build career capital
- Look for the adjacent possible
- Perform little bets
- Adhere to the Law of Remarkability
- Accept Strain
- Mental strain is needed for hormesis. Like a muscle we become stronger by alterating between exhaustion and relaxation.