Author: Cal Newport

ISBN: 978-0349415864

Some great advice on how to seek satisfaction on your career path.

EXCERPTS

[Disclaimer: This title on Derek Sivers' blog grabbed my attention so I checked it out. I've read his excerpts and did a selection of my own, so here they are.]

"Follow your passion" might just be terrible advice.

Move your focus away from finding the right work, toward working right, and eventually build a love for what you do.

The happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

Motivation requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs:

  • 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.

Notice, scientists did not find "matching work to pre-existing ability, interests, passions, or personality" as being important for motivation.

The passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there's a magic "right" job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they'll 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.

The deep questions driving the passion mindset - "Who am I?" and "What do I truly love?" - are essentially impossible to confirm. "Is this who I really am?" and "Do I love this?" rarely reduce to a clear yes-or-no response. In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused.

If you're 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 you've found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself out of work.

There were plenty of other engineers in the Bay Area's Homebrew Computer Club culture who could match Jobs's and Wozniak's technical skill, but Jobs had the insight to take on investment and to focus this technical energy toward producing a complete product. The result was the Apple II.

This learning is not done in isolation: You need to be constantly soliciting feedback from colleagues and professionals.

Do projects where you'll be forced to show your work to others.

When running his start-up, this feedback took the form of how much money came through the door. If he ran the company poorly, there would be no escaping this fact: His critique would arrive in the form of bankruptcy.

You have to get good before you can expect good work.

It's dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange.

A hard truth of the real world: It's really hard to convince people to give you money.

Do what people are willing to pay for.

"I didn't quit my day job until I was making more money with my music."

The synthesis of Purple Cow and Passionate Programmer is that the best way to market yourself as a programmer is to create remarkable open-source software. There's an established infrastructure in this community for noticing and spreading the word about interesting projects. [Just make sure that the venue where you show your work is visited by the people, who are willing to pay for your work; either customers or HR people. Remember, recognition isn't worth much if they aren't decision makers.]

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.

Working right trumps finding the right work.

The craftsman mindset is that you should focus on gaining rare and valuable skills, since this is what leads to good career outcomes.

Mastery of rare and valuable skills is how you get the things you want in your career.

It turns out that autonomy is the dominating factor for job satisfaction. Newport opens this section with an anecdote: the more control you have in your job, the more likely you are to stay and enjoy doing it. Case studies abound. When Best Buy adopted Results-Only Work Environment (or ROWE, for short), they saw rates of employee attrition plummet by up to 90 percent.

Newport than parlays this into two observations about seeking more autonomy:

  1. If you seek autonomy in your current role before gaining enough career capital, you won’t get the autonomy you seek. To put this simply: control demands capital.
  2. Once you’ve gained sufficient career capital to seek control, the universe conspires to prevent you from gaining that control. Put simply: control benefits only you.

Control demands capital because you can’t demand special treatment without creating enough value for your employers. Even if you strike out on your own, you’ll have to have skills that people are willing to pay for, or your attempt at controlling your own future will fall flat for lack of money. [Usually it's not an issue of career capital, but an issue of trust! It's high time I write a post about it... ?]

Control benefits only you implies that employers will attempt to prevent you from gaining that control. This applies to both individuals in salaried work, as well as individuals seeking to start something of their own. This is logical: when you have the rare and valuable career skills needed to demand more control, people will want to tap those skills for their own benefit — and will pay you handsomely for that privilege. Attempting to seek control is thus an invitation for resistance. Learn to expect it.

Siver’s ‘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.”

If people are willing to pay you for your expertise, then you know you have rare and valuable skills. This rule is how Sivers eventually went from musician to entrepreneur.

Sivers: Newport ends the book with what I consider to be his weakest argument: that finding a unifying mission to your working life ‘can be a source of great satisfaction’. And perhaps you should be comfortable with the idea that mission and purpose are elusive, rare things — things you may never find in your career.

First, Newport argues that mission is capital-driven. You can’t skip straight to a great mission without first building mastery in your field. Good career missions are like scientific innovations, waiting to be discovered at the ‘adjacent possible’ of your field; you need to advance first before you are able to see if there are compelling missions to be pursued. [I can't agree with this one entirely. Sure, most of the time it's true. But great ideas also happen to complete outsiders.]

Pursue mastery and autonomy, force yourself to gain rare and valuable skills — the very definition of a career moat — let yourself rest in the knowledge that you will be paid well for those skills. Ignore mission; you’ll probably turn out just fine.

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