24.05.21 - So Good They Can't Ignore You

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2		So Good They Can't Ignore You
3		By Cal Newport
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5		Amazon: Link
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7		#	Pg.	TC Highlight
8		1	119	He had reached the zenith of his passion—he could now properly call himself a Zen practitioner—and yet, he was not experiencing the undiluted peace and happiness that had populated his daydreams. “The reality was, nothing had changed. I was exactly the same person, with the same worries and anxieties. It was late on a Sunday afternoon when I came to this realization, and I just started crying.” Thomas had followed his passion to the Zen Mountain Monastery, believing, as many do, that the key to happiness is identifying your true calling and then chasing after it with all the courage you can muster. But as Thomas experienced that late Sunday afternoon in the oak forest, this belief is frighteningly naïve. Fulfilling his dream to become a full-time Zen practitioner did not magically make his life wonderful. As Thomas discovered, the path to happiness—at least as it concerns what you do for a living—is more complicated than simply answering the classic question “What should I do with my life?”
9		2	130	When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.
10	X	3	158	The narratives in this book are bound by a common thread: the importance of ability. The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.
11		4	226	As Jeffrey S. Young notes in his exhaustively researched 1988 biography, Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward, Jobs eventually grew tired of being a pauper and, during the early 1970s, returned home to California, where he moved back in with his parents and talked himself into a night-shift job at Atari.
12		5	253	I shared the details of Steve Jobs’s story, because when it comes to finding fulfilling work, the details matter. If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers. But he didn’t follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break—a “small-time” scheme that unexpectedly took off. I don’t doubt that Jobs eventually grew passionate about his work: If you’ve watched one of his famous keynote addresses, you’ve seen a man who obviously loved what he did. But so what? All that tells us is that it’s good to enjoy what you do.
13		6	276	“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass tells them. “But I don’t believe that. Things happen in stages.” Glass emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to the point where he had interesting options. “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” he says. Noticing the stricken faces of his interviewers, who were perhaps hoping to hear something more uplifting than work is hard, so suck it up, Glass continues: “I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That’s your tragic mistake.”
14	X	7	285	Al Merrick, the founder of Channel Island Surfboards, tells a similar tale of stumbling into passion over time. “People are in a rush to start their lives, and it’s sad,” he tells his interviewers. “I didn’t go out with the idea of making a big empire,” he explains. “I set goals for myself at being the best I could be at what[ever] I did.”
15		8	292	Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.
16		9	303	At the core of the passion hypothesis is the assumption that we all have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered. This experiment puts that assumption to the test. Here’s what it found: 84 percent of the students surveyed were identified as having a passion. This sounds like good news for supporters of the passion hypothesis—that is, until you dive deeper into the details of these pursuits. Here are the top five identified passions: dance, hockey (these were Canadian students, mind you), skiing, reading, and swimming. Though dear to the hearts of the students, these passions don’t have much to offer when it comes to choosing a job. In fact, less than 4 percent of the total identified passions had any relation to work or education, with the remaining 96 percent describing hobby-style interests such as sports and art. Take a moment to absorb this result, as it deals a strong blow to the passion hypothesis. How can we follow our passions if we don’t have any relevant passions to follow? At least for these Canadian college students, the vast majority will need a different strategy for choosing their career.
17		10	329	This result deals another blow to the passion hypothesis. In Wrzesniewski’s research, 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. On reflection, this makes sense. If you have many years’ experience, then you’ve had time to get better at what you do and develop a feeling of efficacy. It also gives you time to develop strong relationships with your coworkers and to see many examples of your work benefiting others. What’s important here, however, is that this explanation, though reasonable, contradicts the passion hypothesis, which instead emphasizes the immediate happiness that comes from matching your job to a true passion.
18	X	11	335	Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery
19		12	335	Not long into his popular TED talk, titled “On the Surprising Science of Motivation,” author Daniel Pink, discussing his book Drive, tells the audience that he spent the last couple of years studying the science of human motivation. “I’m telling you, it’s not even close,” he says. “If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” When Pink talks about “what science knows,” he’s 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 needs—factors described as the “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 The last need is the least surprising: If you feel close to people at work, you’re going to enjoy work more. It’s the first two needs that prove more interesting. It’s clear, for example, that autonomy and competence are related. In most jobs, as you become better at what you do, not only do you get the sense of accomplishment that comes from being good, but you’re typically also rewarded with more control over your responsibilities. These results help explain Amy Wrzesniewski’s findings: Perhaps one reason that more experienced assistants enjoyed their work was because it takes time to build the competence and autonomy that generates this enjoyment.
20		13	349	Of equal interest is what this list of basic psychological needs does not include. Notice, scientists did not find “matching work to pre-existing passions” as being important for motivation. The traits they did find, by contrast, are more general and are agnostic to the specific type of work in question. Competence and autonomy, for example, are achievable by most people in a wide variety of jobs—assuming they’re willing to put in the hard work required for mastery. This message is not as inspiring as “follow your passion and you’ll immediately be happy,” but it certainly has a ring of truth. In other words, working right trumps finding the right work.
21		14	379	The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that 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. We can see this effect in the statistics. As I just established, the last several decades are marked by an increasing commitment to Bolles’s contagious idea. And yet, for all of this increased focus on following our passion and holding out for work we love, we aren’t getting any happier.
22		15	404	The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous. Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.
23		16	411	Some people I’ve talked to about my ideas have used examples of this type to dismiss my conclusions about passion. “Here’s a case where someone successfully followed their passion,” they say, “therefore ‘follow your passion’ must be good advice.” This is faulty logic. Observing a few instances of a strategy working does not make it universally effective. It is necessary instead to study a large number of examples and ask what worked in the vast majority of the cases. And when you study a large group of people who are passionate about what they do, as I did in researching this book, you find that most—not all—will tell a story more complex than simply identifying a pre-existing passion and then pursuing it.
24		17	430	In which I introduce two different approaches to thinking about work: the craftsman mindset, a focus on what value you’re 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.
25	X	18	479	“Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,” Martin said. “What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’… but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’ ”
26		19	490	It took Martin, by his own estimation, ten years for his new act to cohere, but when it did, he became a monster success. It’s clear in his telling that there was no real shortcut to his eventual fame. “[Eventually] you are so experienced [that] there’s a confidence that comes out,” Martin explained. “I think it’s something the audience smells.”
27		20	493	Be so good they can’t ignore you. When I first heard this advice, I was watching the Martin interview online. It was the winter of 2008 and I was approaching my final year as a graduate student. At the time, I had recently started a blog called Study Hacks, which was inspired by the pair of student-advice guides I had published, and focused mainly on tips for undergraduates. Soon after hearing Martin’s axiom, however, I dashed off a blog post that introduced his idea to my readers.5 “Sure, it’s scary,” I concluded. “But, even more, I find it liberating.” As my graduate student career had been winding down, I had become obsessed with my research strategy—an obsession that was manifested in the chronic working and reworking of the description of my work on my website. This was a frustrating process: I felt like I was stretching to convince the world that my work was interesting, yet no one cared. Martin’s axiom gave me a reprieve from this self-promotion. “Stop focusing on these little details,” it told me. “Focus instead on becoming better.” Inspired, I turned my attention from my website to a habit that continues to this day: I track the hours spent each month dedicated to thinking hard about research problems (in the month in which I first wrote this chapter, for example, I dedicated forty-two hours to these core tasks).
28	X	21	507	Listening to Tice talk about his routine, I was struck by his Martin-esque focus on what he produces. As you’ll recall, he’s happy to spend hours every day, week after week, in a barely furnished monastic room, exhausting himself in pursuit of a new flat-picking technique, all because he thinks it will add something important to the tune he’s writing. This dedication to output, I realized, also explains his painful modesty. To Jordan, arrogance doesn’t make sense. “Here’s what I respect: creating something meaningful and then presenting it to the world,” he explained.
29	X	22	511	Inspired by meeting Jordan, I got in touch with Mark Casstevens to gain a cynical veteran’s perspective on the performer’s mindset. Mark is a studio musician from Nashville who has certainly earned his stripes: He’s played on ninety-nine number one hit singles on the Billboard charts. When I told Mark about Jordan, he agreed that an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music. “It trumps your appearance, your equipment, your personality, and your connections,” he explained. “Studio musicians have this adage: ‘The tape doesn’t lie.’ Immediately after the recording comes the playback; your ability has no hiding place.”
30	X	23	516	I liked that phrase—the tape doesn’t lie—as it sums up nicely what motivates performers such as Jordan, Mark, and Steve Martin. If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. This clarity was refreshing.
31		24	523	People] thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are—and connecting that to work that they truly love.”6 Po Bronson wrote this in a 2002 manifesto published in Fast Company. This should sound familiar, as it’s exactly the type of advice you would give if you subscribed to the passion hypothesis, which I debunked in Rule #1. With this in mind, let’s call the approach to work endorsed by Bronson the passion mindset. Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.
32		25	542	No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy.
33	X	26	543	With this in mind, it’s only natural to envy the clarity of performers like Jordan Tice. But here’s the core argument of Rule #2: You shouldn’t 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 can’t ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer.
34		27	571	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 skills—which I call career capital—to offer in return.
35		28	592	Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101.
36		29	606	The radio host Ira Glass was given the opportunity to create his genre-defining radio show This American Life only after he had proven himself as one of public radio’s best editors and hosts. Glass started as an intern and then moved on to become a tape cutter for All Things Considered. There are many young people who start down the same path as Glass: landing an internship at a local NPR station and then moving up to a low-level production position. But Glass began to break away from the pack when he turned his focus on making his skills more rare and more valuable. The crispness of his segment editing eventually gained him the opportunity to host a few of his own segments on air. And even though Glass has a voice that mocks everything sacred about what a radio personality should sound like, he began to win awards for his segments. It’s possible that a latent natural talent for editing may be playing a role here, but recall from Rule #1 that Glass emphasizes the importance of the hard work required to develop skill. “All of us who do creative work… you get into this thing, and there’s like a ‘gap.’ What you’re making isn’t so good, okay?… It’s trying to be good but… it’s just not that great,” he explained in an interview about his career.1 “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” 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. This strategy worked.
37	X	30	633	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 “so good they can’t ignore you,” 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.
38	X	31	641	The traits that define great work require that you have something rare and valuable to offer in return—skills I call career capital. The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on what you produce, is exactly the mindset you would adopt if your goal was to acquire as much career capital as possible. Ultimately, this is why I promote the craftsman mindset over the passion mindset. This is not some philosophical debate on the existence of passion or the value of hard work—I’m being intensely pragmatic: You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life, and the craftsman mindset is focused on achieving exactly this goal. But there is, I must admit, a darker corollary to this argument. The passion mindset is not just ineffective for creating work you love; in many cases it can actively work against this goal, sometimes with devastating consequences.
39		32	674	Career capital theory disagrees. It tells us that great work doesn’t just require great courage, but also skills of great (and real) value. When Feuer left her advertising career to start a yoga studio, not only did she discard the career capital acquired over many years in the marketing industry, but she transitioned into an unrelated field where she had almost no capital.
40		33	716	This chapter has argued in favor of the craftsman mindset and against its passion-centric alternative. Part of what makes the craftsman mindset thrilling is its agnosticism toward the type of work you do. The traits that define great work are bought with career capital, the theory argues; they don’t come from matching your work to your innate passion. Because of this, you don’t have to sweat whether you’ve found your calling—most any work can become the foundation for a compelling career. John had heard this argument and wrote me because he was having a hard time applying it to his life as a tax consultant. He didn’t like his work and he wanted to know if, like a good craftsman, he should just suck it up and continue to focus on getting good. This is an important question, and here’s what I told John: “It sounds like you should leave your job.” 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 isn’t possible. If it satisfies the second two traits, then even though you could build up reserves of career capital, you’ll have a hard time sticking around long enough to accomplish this goal. John’s job satisfied the first two traits, so he needed to leave.
41		34	775	To recast the job in the terms I introduced in the last chapter, television writing is attractive because it has the three traits that make people love their work: impact, creativity, and control.
42		35	836	To understand Alex Berger’s various breaks, you need to understand the career capital that enabled them. For example, it was certainly a big deal for Michael Eisner to ask Alex to help him create a show, but think about what this break required: At the time, Alex had been a staff writer for a network show and had a quality-comedy spec script—polished over many rounds of aggressive feedback—in his portfolio. That’s an important collection of capital.
43		36	844	The Alex Berger who first arrived in LA, fresh out of college, did not have this writing-skill capital. By the time he was working for Commander in Chief, however, he was ready for his first major transaction. In this telling, the story of Alex’s fast rise is not one of passion triumphing over setbacks: It’s much less dramatic. Alex, the former debate champion, coolly assessed what career capital was valuable in this market. He then set out with the intensity once reserved for debate prep to acquire this capital as fast as possible. What this story lacks in pizazz, it makes up in repeatability: There’s nothing mysterious about how Alex Berger broke into Hollywood—he simply understood the value, and difficulty, of becoming good.
44	X	37	858	What interests me about Mike is that, like Alex Berger, he didn’t arrive at his outstanding job by following a clear passion. Instead he carefully and persistently gathered career capital, confident that valuable skills would translate into valuable opportunities. Unlike Alex, however, Mike started gathering capital before he knew what he wanted to do with it. In fact, he had never given a moment’s thought to cleantech venture capital until a couple weeks before his first interview.
45		38	891	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. One could argue that luck also played an important role in Mike’s story. He was, for example, lucky to find a personal connection to a venture capitalist and then to hit it off when they met in person. But these types of small breaks are common. What mattered most in Mike’s story is that once he stumbled through the door, his career capital went to work getting him a fantastic job offer.
46		39	925	One of my most vivid memories of Rocking Chair, for example, was my discomfort playing anything I didn’t know real well. There’s a mental strain that accompanies feeling your way through a tune that’s 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 wasn’t. Even at that young age I realized that my discomfort with mental discomfort was a liability in the performance world.
47		40	935	Not only did Jordan’s 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, “to jump in and show me if I junked up a harmony.” Watching Jordan’s current practice regime, these traits—strain and feedback—remain 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 he’s 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 watch—I can’t 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.
48		41	975	The 10,000-Hour Rule The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours [emphasis mine].
49		42	983	What interests me about Charness’s study, however, is that it moves beyond the 10,000-hour rule by asking not just how long people worked, but also what type of work they did. In more detail, they studied players who had all spent roughly the same amount of time—around 10,000 hours—playing chess. Some of these players had become grand masters while others remained at an intermediate level. Both groups had practiced the same amount of time, so the difference in their ability must depend on how they used these hours. It was these differences that Charness sought. In the 1990s, this was a relevant question. There was debate in the chess world at the time surrounding the best strategies for improving. One camp thought tournament play was crucial, as it provides practice with tight time limits and working through distractions. The other camp, however, emphasized serious study—pouring over books and using teachers to help identify and then eliminate weaknesses. When surveyed, the participants in Charness’s study thought tournament play was probably the right answer. The participants, as it turns out, were wrong. Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity.
50		43	1006	In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a colleague of Neil Charness at Florida State University, coined the term “deliberate practice” to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.”4 As hundreds of follow-up studies have since shown, deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse array of fields, among which are chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, sports, typing, juggling, dance, and music.5 If you want to understand the source of professional athletes’ talent, for example, look to their practice schedules—almost without exception they have been systematically stretching their athletic abilities, with the guidance of expert coaches, since they were children. If you instead turned the tables on Malcolm Gladwell, and asked him about his writing ability, he too would point you toward deliberate practice. In Outliers he notes that he spent ten years honing his craft in the Washington Post newsroom before he moved to the New Yorker and began writing his breakout book, The Tipping Point.
51	X	44	1015	“When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents,” Ericsson notes. “However, when scientists began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers… no general superiority was found.”6 In other words, outside a handful of extreme examples—such as the height of professional basketball players and the girth of football linemen—scientists have failed to find much evidence of natural abilities explaining experts’ successes. It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.
52	X	45	1122	Some top blogs in this space have notoriously clunky designs, but they all accomplish the same baseline goal: They inspire their readers. When you correctly understand the market where blogging exists, you stop calculating your bounce rate and start focusing instead on saying something people really care about—which is where your energy should be if you want to succeed.
53		46	1149	Returning to Geoff Colvin, in the article cited above he gives the following warning about deliberate practice: Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.
54	X	47	1180	This is why Martin’s diligence is so important: Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need. I think the image of Martin returning to his banjo, day after day, for forty years, is poignant. It captures well the feel of how career capital is actually acquired: You stretch yourself, day after day, month after month, before finally looking up and realizing, “Hey, I’ve become pretty good, and people are starting to notice.”
55	X	48	1206	The Dream-Job Elixir In which I argue that control over what you do, and how you do it, is one of the most powerful traits you can acquire when creating work you love.
56		49	1255	Here’s what struck me about Ryan’s story: He didn’t just decide one day that he was passionate about produce and then courageously head off into the countryside to start farming. Instead, by the time he made the plunge into full-time farming in 2001, when he bought his first land, he had been painstakingly acquiring relevant career capital for close to a decade. This might be less sexy than the daydream of quitting your day job one day and then waking up to the rooster’s crow the next, but it matches what I consistently found when researching the previous two rules: You have to get good before you can expect good work.
57		50	1269	This, I came to realize, is what’s so appealing about the Red Fire lifestyle: control. Ryan and Sarah invested their (extensive) career capital into gaining control over what they do and how they do it. Their working lives aren’t easy—if I learned anything from my visit to Red Fire, it’s that farming is a complicated and stressful pursuit—but their lives are their own to direct, and they’re good at this. In other words, the Red Fire appeal is not about working outside in the sun—to farmers, I learned, the weather is something to battle, not to enjoy. And it’s not about getting away from the computer screen—Ryan spends all winter using Excel spreadsheets to plan his crop beds, while Sarah spends a healthy chunk of each day managing the farm operations on the office computer. It is, instead, autonomy that attracts the Granby groupies: Ryan and Sarah live a meaningful life on their own terms.
58	X	51	1298	Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.
59		52	1310	The First Control Trap In which I introduce the first control trap, which warns that it’s dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange.
60		53	1350	At a high level, of course, there’s nothing wrong with this philosophy. The author Timothy Ferriss, who coined the term “lifestyle design,” 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, you’ll 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.
61		54	1431	Lurking in this story, however, is a hidden danger. Though Lulu’s career was satisfyingly self-directed, the path to acquiring this freedom generated conflict. Almost every time she invested her career capital to obtain the most control, she also encountered resistance. When she leveraged her value to obtain a thirty-hour schedule at her first job, for example, her employer couldn’t say no (she was saving them too much money), but they didn’t like it. It took nerve on Lulu’s part to push through that demand. Similarly, when she turned down a major promotion to take an ill-defined position at a seven-person start-up, people in her life didn’t understand. “You had just bought a house,” I reminded her. “To turn down a big important job to go work with an unknown little company, that’s a big deal.” “People thought I was nuts,” she agreed. Leaving this start-up after it was acquired was similarly difficult. Lulu was hesitant to get into details, but the subtext was that her value was so high at this company that its new owners tried every tactic they could to keep her on board. And finally, her transition to freelance work came with its own difficulties. Her first client really wanted to hire her full-time to work on the project, but she refused. “They really didn’t want a contractor,” she recalls, “but they didn’t have anyone else who could do this type of work, so they eventually had no choice but to agree.”
62		55	1441	The more I met people who successfully deployed control in their career, the more I heard similar tales of resistance from their employers, friends, and families. Another example is someone I’ll call Lewis, who is a resident in a well-known combined plastic surgery program, which is arguably the most competitive medical residency. Three years into his residency, he was starting to chafe under hospital bureaucracy. When I met him for coffee, he gave me a vivid example of the frustrations of life as a modern doctor.
63		56	1464	This is the irony of control. When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably don’t have enough career capital to do anything interesting. But once you do have this capital, as Lulu and Lewis discovered, you’ve become valuable enough that your employer will resist your efforts. This is what I came to think of as the second control trap: 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 you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.
64	X	57	1480	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.
65		58	1503	“A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous,” Derek says.
66	X	59	1532	“I have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules,” he said. “Do what people are willing to pay for.” 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: “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”
67		60	1538	“If you’re 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.”
68		61	1547	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.
69		62	1563	On the flip side, when you look at stories of people who were unsuccessful in adding more control to their careers, you often find that this law has been ignored. Remember Jane from earlier in Rule #3: She dropped out of college with the vague idea that some sort of online business would support a lifestyle of adventure. If she had met Derek Sivers, she would have delayed this move until she had real evidence that she could make money online. In this case, the law would have served its purpose well, as a simple experiment would have likely revealed that passive-income websites are more myth than reality, and thus prevented her rash abandonment of her education. This doesn’t mean that Jane would have had to resign herself to a life of boring work. On the contrary, the law could have provided her structure to keep exploring variations on her adventurous life vision until she could find one to pursue that would actually yield results.
70		63	1591	I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that it’s 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, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.
71	X	64	1676	Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.
72		65	1706	This example of joint discovery surprised me, but it would not have surprised the science writer Steven Johnson. In his engaging 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson explains that such “multiples” are frequent in the history of science.
73		66	1734	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. I'm 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. "The truth," Johnson explains, "is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible."
74		67	1741	Scientific breakthroughs, as we just learned, require that you first get to the cutting edge of your field. Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative ideas are almost always discovered. Here's the leap I made as I pondered Pardis Sabeti around the same time I was pondering Johnson's theory of innovation: 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. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge - the only place where these missions become visible.
75		68	1746	This insight explains Sarah's 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 can't see the adjacent possible, she's not likely to identify a compelling new direction for her work. According to Johnson's theory, Sarah would have been better served by first mastering a promising niche - a task that may take years and only then turning her attention to seeking a mission.
76		69	1784	After Oxford, Pardis returned to Harvard Medical School to earn her MD. Amazingly, even as she was finishing up a PhD in genetics, she wasn't ready yet to abandon her earlier premonition that she was somehow meant to be a doctor. The result was that she became a young med student finishing a PhD thesis during her spare time. "If you want to write a thing about having a quality enjoyable life, don't ask me about my time at Harvard," she warned. "Harvard was a tough time."
77		70	1919	Here's what I noticed: Kirk's path to American Treasures was incremental. He didn't decide out of nowhere that he wanted to host a television show and then work backward to make that dream a reality. Instead, he worked forward from his original mission (to popularize archaeology) with a series of small, almost tentative steps. When he stumbled on the old film reels for Land and Water, for example, he decided to digitize them and produce a DVD. After this small step he took the slightly larger step of raising money to shoot exploratory footage for a new version of the documentary. When George Milner played him that fateful answering machine tape, Kirk took another modest step by launching The Armchair Archaeologist project with no real vision of how it would prove useful, other than perhaps as fodder for his intro archaeology courses. This final little step, however, turned out to be a winner,
78		71	1926	As I was struggling to make sense of Kirk's story, I stumbled across a new business book that had been making waves. It was titled Little Bets, and it was written by a former venture capitalist named Peter Sims.2 When Sims studied a variety of successful innovators, from Steve Jobs to Chris Rock to Frank Gehry, as well as innovative companies, such as Amazon and Pixar, he found a strategy common to all. "Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance," he writes, "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" [emphasis mine]. This rapid and frequent feedback, Sims argues, "allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes."
79		72	1964	Missions Require Marketing In which I argue that great missions are transformed into great successes as the result of finding projects that satisfy the law of remarkability, which requires that an idea inspires people to remark about it, and is launched in a venue where such remarking is made easy.
80	X	73	2020	"You're either remarkable or invisible," says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.1 As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: "The world is full of boring stuff (brown cows) which is why so few people pay attention. A purple cow - now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing. When Giles read Godin's book, he had an epiphany: 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.
81		74	2061	Once again, this notion of remarkability applies beyond just Giles's world of Ruby programming. If we return to my example of writing career-advice books, I realized early on in my process that blogging was a remarkable venue for introducing my ideas. Blogs are visible and the infrastructure is in place for good ideas to quickly spread, through, for example, linking, Tweets, and Facebook. Because of this conduciveness to remarking, by the time I pitched this book to publishers, I not only had a large audience who appreciated my views on passion and skill, but the meme had spread: Newspapers and major websites around the world had begun to quote my thoughts on the topic, while the articles had been cited online and Tweeted thousands of times. If I had instead decided to confine my ideas to paid speaking gigs, for example, my mission to change the way we think about careers would have likely stagnated the venue would not have been sufficiently remarkable.
82		75	2069	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.
83		76	2095	We're a society trained to watch what's on and then discuss what caught our attention the next day.
84	X	77	2108	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.
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