What’s in it for me?
Do you have the feeling like you might have missed your true calling in your career? Or maybe you fantasize about your “dream job.” When it comes to career advice, common wisdom you have probably heard at commencement speeches or from mentors is to “follow your passion.” Fortunately, you can breathe a sigh of relief if you think you have missed out your fantasy career. Georgetown University Professor Cal Newport logically explains in So Good They Can’t Ignore You why following your passion is misguided career advice, often leading to heartbreak and frustration. The book explains a better way to approach your career and ultimately find a job you love. The conclusions drawn in the book can be helpful regardless of where you are in your career. This is the book you wish you would have read back in high school or college so you could have focused energy away from worrying about matching a pre-existing passion with a career, and instead spent your time understanding how enjoyable careers are developed.
The Big Idea
The central idea of the book is the conventional career advice that one should follow their passion is simply bad advice. Instead, Cal Newport argues that 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 types of traits that define compelling careers. Newport draws on extensive research and real-life examples of why this a superior approach to career development and had a much higher likelihood of leaving you with a career you truly enjoy. Unfortunately there are no short-cuts, as deliberate practice is definitely required to get you to a point where you acquire enough career capital to have valuable skills. However, research shows that as you begin to acquire skills, your enjoyment will begin to increase. Think back to the first time you may have tried learning a new instrument, hobby, or even riding a bike. It probably wasn’t very fun in the beginning, but if you stuck with it and practiced, over time it became enjoyable. Once you have acquired sufficient career capital, the book argues that cashing it in for more control/autonomy typically leads to a more enjoyable career. Additionally, connecting your career to a greater mission, which can be tricky, is also proven to enhance your job satisfaction.
Key Concept #1
Don’t Follow Your Passion
In 2005, Steve Jobs delivered one of the most famous commencement speeches of all time. In the press release following the event, Stanford’s news service reported Jobs “urged graduates to pursue their dreams.” When you dig a little deeper, however, you will realize this is advice Jobs did not follow himself. If you had met Steve Jobs in the years leading up to Apple, you would not have labeled him as someone who was passionate about starting a technology company. Jobs dropped out of Reed College after his first year and moved back in with his parents in California. He took a night shift job at Atari and frequently commuted to a country commune north of San Francisco. Jobs left his job at Atari for several months to take a spiritual trip through India, and upon returning home he began training at a Zen center. Jobs long-time friend Steve Wozniak, an electronics wiz, approached him to help out on the business operations of a computer time-sharing company. All was going well until the fall of 1975, when Jobs left the company to spend time at the commune, failing to tell anyone he was leaving. When jobs returned, he was replaced. The details of of this story may sound trivial, but this was less than a year before Jobs started Apple Computer, and they hardly paint the picture of someone who was passionate about technology or entrepreneurship. The truth is Steve Jobs was a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and only dabbling in electronics when it gave him the chance to earn quick cash. To say that Steve Jobs was passionate about technology and destined to become a business icon from his early days would simply be inaccurate.
In conducting extensive research from many different career professionals, Newport concluded that compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion. Why do some people enjoy their work while so many other people do not? There are three conclusions the author draws:
Career Passions Are Rare: A study of over 500 Canadians university students identified their top five passions as: dance, hockey, skiing, reading, and swimming. Not surprisingly, these passions don’t exactly translate into careers. How can we follow our passions if we don’t have any relevant passions to follow?
Passion Takes Time: The strongest predictor of an employee viewing their work as a calling, instead of just a job, was the number of years spent on the job. In other words, the happiest employees were the ones who had been on the job long enough to become good at what they do.
Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery: Science has developed a 40 year old theoretical framework known as Self Determination Theory (SDT), which helps explain why some pursuits get us excited and others leave us with no motivation. SDT tells us that motivation in the workplace is driven from three requirements:
- Autonomy: the feeling you have control over your day, and that your actions are important.
- Competence: the feeling you are good at what you do.
- Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people.
Key Concept #2
Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
The author argues that instead of following your passion, you need to develop rare and valuable skills. There are two distinct approaches to thinking about your work. The craftsman mindset focuses on what value you can produce in your job, while the passion mindset focuses on what value your job offers you. Most people adopt the passion mindset, but the craftsman mindset is really the foundation for creating work you love.
Before we jump in to the craftsman mindset, it is helpful to understand why the passion mindset is problematic. First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you aware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which are unlikely to be filled with autonomy or exciting projects. Second, the deep questions driving the passion mindset, such as “what do I truly love” lead you to be perpetually unhappy and confused, as rarely is there a clear answer to this question. Adopting the craftsman mindset first will then typically lead to a job you are passionate about. Once you have acquired the valuable skills, you are more likely to be in a career that offers compelling traits of great work, such as creativity, impact, and control.
Although adopting the craftsman mindset works in most job situations, it is important to distinguish a few situations where it may not be as successful:
- The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing skills that are rare and valuable.
- The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even bad for the world.
- The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.
If your job has any of the above combination of traits, it can prevent any attempt to build and invest career capital.
The craftsman mindset is more than just showing up and working hard. To successfully adopt the craftsman mindset requires deliberate practice, a form of practice that involves stretching yourself outside your comfort zone and then receiving ruthless feedback on your performance. It is important to have clear goals for yourself and to always be pushing for more. Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. The good news is, outside of professional athletes and musicians, very few knowledge workers employee deliberate practice in an office setting, creating an opportunity for you to really set yourself apart.
As an example, the typical office worker likely checks email constantly throughout the day, since it is an easy distraction from the task at hand. A worker employing deliberate practice would have their calendar scheduled with blocks of time to work on specific projects, scheduling the most difficult tasks to be completed during the time when they know they will be at their best to push themselves.
Key Concept #3
The Power of Control
“Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense fo fulfillment.” So Good They Can’t Ignore You p. 113
Once you have enough career capital acquired, cashing that in for more control is a proven way to increase career happiness. In Dan Pink’s 2009 bestselling book Drive, Pink concluded that more control leads to better grades, better sports performance, improved productivity, and more happiness. As a real life example, companies such as Best Buy that have implemented a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) saw that the rate that people left the corporate headquarters plummet by 90 percent. In a ROWE company, all that matters is results. When you show up to work and when you leave, take vacations, or even check e-mail are all irrelevant. It is up to the employee to decide the optimal structure that works best for them. Gap’s corporate headquarters also implemented ROWE, and a manager concluded that he had never seen his employees happier.
However, the Newport warns that there are two control traps employees should be aware of:
- Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable. In other words, you cannot expect to have success asking your boss to only come into the office 3 days a week if you are not already making exceptionally valuable contributions to the organization. Similarly, quitting your job as a finance professional to start a yoga studio is unlikely to be successful unless you have significant experience with yoga.
- Once you have enough career capital to acquire more control in your working life, you have become valuable to your employer and they will fight your efforts to gain more autonomy. The book describes the story of an employee who turns down a promotion to work as a freelance contractor for her employer, creating more control and ultimately the chance to work with outside clients to increase income potential.
It is important that you only pursue a bid for more control if you have evidence that it is something people are willing to pay for. The author refers to this concept as the law of financial viability. Money, in many respects, is a neutral indicator of value because by aiming to make money, you are aiming to be valuable. This obviously does not apply to hobbies, but when it comes to decisions affecting your core career, money remains an effective judge of value. Therefore, to help navigate the two control traps above, ask yourself if your next move is something people are willing to pay for. This applies whether you are pondering an entrepreneurial venture or a new job within an established company.
Key Concept #4
The Importance of Mission
“People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work.” So Good They Can’t Ignore You p. 152
In researching people who love what they do for work, Newport concluded having a mission was a key component. To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. Missions are powerful because they your energy towards a useful goal that in turn maximizes your impact on your world.
How do you make incorporating a mission a reality in your working life? Any desirable trait in a career, such as having a mission, requires that you first build career capital. However, career capital alone is not enough to make a mission a reality. The book gives the example of a woman that dropped out of college to start a non-profit, but quickly ran into a harsh financial reality when she failed to raise enough money to support the organization. Just because you organize your work around a mission does not mean you can easily make it happen. The author suggests that you should make little bets to allow you to tentatively explore the specific avenues surrounding general mission, looking for those with the highest likelihood of leading to outstanding results. This systematic exploration can help you uncover an exceptional way forward that you might not have otherwise noticed.
In addition to making little bets, it also helps to adopt the mindset of a marketer. For a project to transform a mission into a success, it should be remarkable in two ways. First, it must compel people to remark about it, and second, it must be launched in a venue conducive to such remarking.
Key Concept #5
Working Right Trumps Finding the Right Work
The beginning of the book starts with a story of Thomas, a young banking employee that decided to follow his passion for Zen practice by moving to a remote monastery in the Catskills mountains. He immersed himself in the study of Zen and meditation, pondering endless Dharma lectures. Unfortunately, he did not find the happiness and contentment he was expecting, as he realized that although his surroundings had changed, he was still the exact same person as before he arrived at the monastery.
Fast forward ten years, and the author interviewed Thomas again, who was at a dramatically different place in his life. After leaving the monastery, Thomas returned to the banking job he had left two years earlier. This time, however, he approached his working life with a new awareness and focus, freed from the fantasy jobs that had once dominated his mind. He was able to focus on the tasks given to him and accomplished them extremely well, no longer having the burden of thinking about some magical future occupation waiting to be discovered. The new focus was appreciated by management, as Thomas was promoted multiple times within a few years and suddenly found himself managing the computer systems for the bank that processed over $6 billion of investment assets. The work was challenging, but it provided him with a sense of respect, impact, and autonomy-exactly the kind of traits needed to create work you love.
Thomas realized that working right trumps finding the right work, which fittingly sums up the core message of So Good They Can’t Ignore You. He didn’t have to have the perfect job to find occupational happiness.
Apply It
*Instead of obsessing over “finding your true calling”, focus your energy at your current job at acquiring rare and valuable skills. Ask to be assigned to a niche project at work and focus on giving that your best effort.
*If you feel like you are at a point where you have acquired enough career capital, try incorporating more control into your working life. Start by asking to work from home one day a week, or ask for a more flexible work schedule. Reference the ROWE companies that have implemented this with success.
*Focus on adopting the craftsman mindset at work. Deliberate practice (i.e. stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone and getting feedback for improvement) is well known among musicians and professional athletes for creating exceptional results, but few people apply it in the office world. This leaves an incredible opportunity for you to “be so good they can’t ignore you.”