In 2010, as author Cal Newport wrapped up his postdoctoral associate at MIT and started looking for a professorship, he began to wonder: What makes people love their work? As he waited to hear back about his job applications, he studied performance science, interviewed people about their professional successes and failures, and tested out his hypotheses on his own career and life.
Interestingly, he discovered that the best way to find or create work you love is not to follow your passion, as so many career counselors, books, and well-meaning mentors advise. In fact, the best way to love what you do is to become highly skilled—so good no one can ignore you. Then, you can offer your skills in exchange for work that allows you autonomy and the opportunity to change the world, two of the most significant contributors to workplace satisfaction.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You describes four rules to loving your work:
In this rule, we’ll debunk the “passion hypothesis”—the idea that a job that lets you exercise a pre-existing passion is guaranteed to make you happy. While the passion hypothesis is popular, the author believes it’s flawed for several reasons:
Reason #1: Scientists have uncovered three major discoveries that debunk the passion hypothesis:
Reason #2: Since the rise of the passion hypothesis, workplace satisfaction has actually decreased.
Reason #3: The people who have jobs they love didn’t get them by following their passions.
As we established in Rule #1, following your passion is unlikely to lead you to love your work. Rule #2 explains what will lead you to love your work—improving your scarce and prized skills (career capital) to the point where you’re so good people can’t ignore you.
The author’s interpretation of career capital theory includes three statements:
Statement #1: The traits that make a job desirable are scarce and prized. After looking at case studies of three people who enjoy their work, the author discovered three notable traits:
Statement #2: Careers are subject to the rules of supply and demand. The rules state that if you want something scarce and prized, you need to pay for it with something equally scarce and prized. You’ll “buy” the three desirable job traits using your career capital.
Statement #3: You must adopt the craftsperson mindset to build career capital. There are two different mindsets when it comes to work:
To develop your career capital, you need to adopt the craftsperson mindset and practice your skills to develop them. The best way to practice is “deliberately,” a method studied by psychologist Anders Ericsson. Most people in the workforce don’t practice deliberately, and as a result, their skill level plateaus. Therefore, if you do practice deliberately, you’ll have an advantage.
There are five steps to deliberate practice:
Step #1: Determine which skills will give you career capital. In some industries, there’s only one kind of career capital—for example, in TV writing, the only meaningful skill is scriptwriting. In other industries, multiple skills make up career capital—for example, venture capitalism makes use of a variety of skills, including entrepreneurship and market knowledge.
Step #2: Determine which skill or skills you want to develop. It’s fastest and easiest to develop skills in areas you already have a head start in.
Step #3: Determine your goals. Once you’ve decided what skill you’re going to develop, you need to decide how good you have to get at it.
Step #4: Seek out both appropriate challenge and immediate feedback. You need to push yourself beyond your comfort zone and be told what you’re doing right and wrong in order to improve.
Step #5: Stay focused and exercise diligence. Diligence refers to focusing on developing the skill you’ve chosen and not being distracted by other pursuits. It takes a long time to develop a skill, so you need to stick with it.
(Shortform note: To learn more about deliberate practice, read our summary of Anders Ericsson’s book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.)
There are certain jobs and situations that inhibit your ability to amass career capital. If your current job has any of the following factors, you should quit and look elsewhere:
Now that you’ve developed your scarce and prized skills, you can start cashing them in for the scarce and prized traits that make a job desirable. In Rule #3, we’ll look at the desirable trait of autonomy.
Autonomy is the ability to control what you work on and how you work, including, among other things, your schedule, responsibilities, and office space. Autonomy is such an important determiner of happiness that the author calls it the “dream-job elixir.” Most common dream jobs include autonomy, and people who have autonomy in their workplace tend to be happier and more productive.
When trying to cash in your career capital for autonomy—for example, by asking your manager if you can change your hours—there are two possible pitfalls:
Pitfall #1: You don’t have enough career capital. If you attempt to seize autonomy before you’ve earned it, it won’t last because you won’t make money—if you prematurely demand autonomy from your boss, you’ll either be denied the request or fired. If you choose to start your own business, you won’t be able to find clients because you have no experience. Either way, you’ll shortly have to take on a non-autonomous job in order to support yourself.
Pitfall #2: Resistance. Once you have career capital, you become so valuable to your employer that they don’t want to give you any autonomy (such as a reduced schedule) for fear of losing you and your skills. Therefore, as you gain career capital, anticipate that your employer will resist your bids for autonomy. They’ll offer you more money or status to try to keep you, but if you want autonomy, you’ll have to turn them down. Additionally, you may encounter resistance from your friends and family, because they think it’s a bad idea to turn down raises or promotions.
When presented with a professional decision or opportunity to gain more autonomy, you need to assess whether you risk falling into either of the pitfalls. To decide what to do, you can take a simple test called the law of payment. The law states that you should only choose to do something that will give you more autonomy if you have evidence that people will pay you to do it. “Pay” could refer to the classic case of a customer giving you money, or to getting a job, loan, or outside investment. If someone is willing to pay you to do something, this shows that your skills are valuable.
For example, entrepreneur Derek Sivers, who came up with the idea behind the law of payment, only took on projects after he had evidence that someone would pay him to complete them. He became a full-time musician only after music was making him more money than his day job. He started a company that sold CDs only after he knew enough people to be confident he’d have lots of clients.
In Rule #3, we looked at how to cash in your scarce and prized skills for autonomy. Now, we’ll look at how to cash them in for a mission, which is a useful, potentially world-changing goal that focuses your career.
A mission needs to be innovative and never-seen-before in order to change the world. As a result, missions come from a space called the “adjacent possible”: a place just beyond the cutting edge of human knowledge that can be reached by building incrementally upon the current understanding.
You need to have enough career capital to see into the adjacent possible before you can discover your mission. For example, Pardis Sabeti was only able to find her mission of using genetics to cure old diseases after she became an expert on genetics.
Coming up with an idea for a mission is only the first step to cashing in your career capital—next, you need to figure out which projects to pursue to transform that idea into a reality.
There’s a three-step process to developing a mission. Each step of the process forms one level of a pyramid:
Bottom level: research. The bottom level is research in your field, which will help you develop career capital and approach the adjacent possible. For example, to create a strong base for his pyramid, the author read papers, talked to experts, went to lectures, and then summarized his findings. He also went for walks to give himself time to brainstorm.
Middle level: little bets. A little bet is a small experiment that will give you feedback about pursuing a particular direction. Each little bet should have the following characteristics:
For example, archaeologist Kirk French’s mission was to popularize archaeology, and his first little bet was to digitize an old archaeological film. A series of film-related little bets led him to become a host of the Discovery Channel’s American Treasures.
Top level: tentative mission. The top level is a statement that describes an approximate mission. The statement can be frequently edited as you acquire career capital in the bottom level and get feedback from your little bets in the middle level. For example, the author’s tentative mission at the time of writing was to use distributed algorithm theory in new settings to create results.
Once you’ve found your mission and started to develop it by pursuing projects, adopt a marketing mindset in order to share it with the world—the more people who interact with your mission, the greater your world-changing ability. The marketing mindset states that mission-driven projects need two criteria:
Criteria #1: They need to be remarkable—they need to be so novel and interesting people want to talk about them.
Criteria #2: They need to be displayed on a visible and respected platform so that lots of people hear about them, which increases your reach.
In 2010, author Cal Newport was a postdoctoral associate at MIT and just about to start his job search for a professorship. He had three things working against him: His research specialty was niche, the academic job market was particularly bad as a result of the 2008 recession, and he wasn’t willing to relocate. He was facing the very real possibility that he might not be able to secure a professorship.
If Cal didn’t become a professor, he’d have to do something else, and this made him wonder: What makes people love their work? As he waited to hear back about his job applications, he studied performance science, interviewed people about their professional successes and failures, and tested out his hypotheses on his own career and life.
Interestingly, he discovered that the best way to find or create work you love is not to follow your passion, as so many career counselors, books, and well-meaning mentors advise. In fact, the best way to love what you do is to become highly skilled—so good no one can ignore you. Then, you offer your skills in exchange for work that allows you autonomy and the opportunity to change the world, two of the most significant contributors to workplace satisfaction.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You describes four rules to loving your work:
Each of the following sections will define the rule in more detail, offer strategies to put its recommendations into action, and showcase examples of both successful and failed applications of the rule.
(Shortform note: For clarity and coherence, we’ve moved the information in the original book’s conclusion into earlier chapters.)
In this rule, we’ll look at the “passion hypothesis”—the idea that a job that lets you exercise a pre-existing passion will be enjoyable. Then, we’ll look at the evidence that suggests following your passion isn’t going to make you happy.
The “passion hypothesis” is the idea that you can find a job you like by first figuring out what you’re passionate about, and then looking for a job that allows you to use this passion.
The author doesn’t know exactly when this idea evolved, but he thinks it was sometime around 1970 when Richard Bolles published What Color Is Your Parachute? The book’s thesis is that the best way to change careers is to figure out what you enjoy doing, and then find somewhere you could get paid to do the activities you like. (Shortform note: To learn more about Bolles’s ideas, read our summary of What Color Is Your Parachute?)
This message was groundbreaking at the time, and readers liked it and passed it on to younger generations. It's now a staple of culture. Most career counselors teach it, most career books cover it, and people who have followed their passions, such as professional athletes, are admired. Additionally, a spin-off theory states that traditional office jobs are inherently devoid of passion and that if you want to be happy, you have to avoid them.
For a select few, the passion hypothesis does describe how they found their work. For example, Peter Travers, a film critic for Rolling Stone, has taken notes on movies since he was a child, and most professional athletes have loved the sports they play since childhood. However, these cases are outliers—there’s far more evidence against the passion hypothesis.
The author believes the passion hypothesis is flawed and there are three pieces of evidence to support this: scientific research, Conference Board surveys, and Roadtrip Nation interviews.
Scientists who study passion have discovered that there are several reasons people enjoy their work. Interestingly, having a pre-existing passion for the work is not one of the reasons. Scientific research about career satisfaction has discovered:
Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the best scientific understanding of what motivates people, states that there are three crucial ingredients to motivation, whether in the workplace or elsewhere. These traits are applicable to any field:
In 2002, Robert J. Vallerand, a psychologist, surveyed Canadian university students about their passions. He discovered that 84% of students had a passion, but less than 4% of the passions were related to work. The passions were mostly hobbies and the most popular ones were swimming, reading, dance, hockey, and skiing.
Amy Wrzesniewski, an organizational behavior professor, surveyed workers from a variety of fields and discovered that most people slot their occupations into one of three categories:
A believer in the passion hypothesis would expect to find that people who consider their occupation a calling would be working in fields that match common passions. For example, helping people is a common passion, so doctors would probably describe their work as a calling.
However, that’s not what Wrzesniewski found. When she looked at college administrative assistants—a position that doesn’t match any common passions—she discovered that about a third of people who held this position saw their work as a calling. This suggests that jobs of all types have the potential to be enjoyable and passion-satisfying, not just the ones commonly seen as aspirational.
Next, Wrzesniewski asked the college assistants why they categorized their work the way they did. She discovered that the assistants who saw their work as a calling had been working the job the longest, which suggests that people develop passion for their work as they acquire the ingredients of motivation such as becoming more capable and connecting with coworkers. Additionally, the longer someone is on the job, the more opportunity they have to see evidence of their work’s positive effect on others, which also increases their job satisfaction and helps them learn to love their work.
Since the rise of the passion hypothesis, workplace satisfaction has actually decreased. The Conference Board has been studying job satisfaction since 1987. In 1987, 61% of Americans said they were happy with their jobs. By 2010, only 45% of Americans were. Of young people specifically, 64% aren’t happy with their jobs. These numbers aren’t attributable to recessions—there have been both busts and booms since 1987 and the satisfaction has been steadily declining regardless of the economic conditions.
Additionally, anecdotal evidence shows that even people who have jobs that match their passions aren’t happy. For example, 27-year-old Scott, who works in politics, admits that his job is practically perfect. He’s passionate about his field and he loves his company and coworkers. However, even though everything seems right, Scott isn’t convinced that his job is living up to the standards of the passion hypothesis because he doesn’t enjoy every single task.
Roadtrip Nation, a nonprofit organization that helps people find careers, interviewed a large sample of people who liked their jobs. Most of the people found their careers not by following their passions, but by taking a circuitous, messy route—it’s difficult to guess in the abstract what you might learn to like.
For example, Andrew Steele, an astrobiologist who loves his job, didn’t know where he was going to end up when he started his Ph.D. program. He signed up because it gave him options, not because he was passionate about the subject.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You contains many case studies. For each rule, we’ll look at an example of someone who failed to apply the rule, someone who successfully applied the rule, and the author’s personal application of the rule.
Thomas decided on his passion—discovering the meaning of life—early in his life and committed to it. He earned two bachelor’s degrees, one in theology and the other in philosophy, and then completed a master’s degree in comparative religion. After graduating, he decided that he wanted to become a practicing lay monk and live in a Zen monastery.
However, Thomas needed to earn money first, so he worked a variety of jobs including teaching English overseas. He was so enraptured with his passion that he didn’t enjoy any other jobs because he was constantly comparing them to his dream job.
When Thomas learned about the Zen Mountain Monastery, he applied and was accepted. He spent months working on the Mu koan, which is a word puzzle designed to inspire enlightenment. Passing the Mu koan is the first step to becoming a serious student. One day, Thomas solved the koan. He was exactly where he wanted to be—he’d followed and officially achieved his passion to become a Zen practitioner—but this didn’t magically make him happy. He was still the same person he’d been before—a person who was never satisfied with reality because his expectations, based on the passion hypothesis, were so unrealistic.
Unlike Thomas, Steve Jobs didn’t try to follow his passion. Like many people who end up loving what they do, Jobs’s route to a satisfying career was messy and complex.
Jobs initially wasn’t interested in technology or business. After graduating from high school, Jobs went to Reed College, where he studied dance, Western history, and a little bit of Eastern mysticism. After a year, he dropped out of college and eventually moved back in with his parents. He got a job with Atari because he needed money, it was convenient, and the ad said it would be fun.
While working for Atari, Jobs spent his free time at a commune near San Francisco. He went to India and when he returned, he trained at the Los Altos Zen Center. If Jobs had followed his passion, he probably would have become a teacher at the Zen Center.
Instead, Jobs took opportunities as they came. Jobs’s friend Steve Wozniak hooked him up with a job at a computer company, which went well until he went to the commune for a season without telling his boss. Jobs clearly wasn’t that committed to business or electronics at this point. He was only interested in technology when it made him money.
Less than a year later, Jobs came up with the idea to sell computer circuit board kits to hobbyists and asked Wozniak to work with him. The plan was to sell 100 kits and make $1,000, not to create a major technology company. The project only scaled when Jobs approached a computer store about selling the kits and the store asked for computers instead. This break resulted in the founding of Apple, which ultimately provided Jobs with work he was passionate about—work he would never have found if he’d tried to follow his pre-existing passion.
The author learned that passion isn’t a prerequisite for a desirable job in high school, when he and his friend Michael started a web design company. Neither boy was passionate about designing websites, but they couldn’t think of a better idea. They weren’t passionate about entrepreneurship either—they just thought starting a company would be more fun than a regular summer job.
The company did well in spite of its owners’ lack of passion and the experience helped the boys get into good colleges.
Following your passion isn’t going to make you happy—the three factors that most contribute to workplace satisfaction are independence, capability, and connection.
Think back on all the jobs you’ve had in your life. Describe two or three jobs that you’ve enjoyed.
Of the jobs you’ve enjoyed, what characteristics did they have in common? Did they offer independence, capability, or connection?
Of the jobs you’ve enjoyed, did any of them match a pre-existing passion? Why or why not?
List two or three jobs that you didn’t enjoy. What characteristics did they have in common? Did they discourage independence, capability, or connection?
Of the jobs you didn’t enjoy, did any of them match a pre-existing passion? Why or why not?
As we established in Rule #1, following your passion is unlikely to lead you to love your work. Rule #2 explains what will lead you to love your work—improving your scarce and prized skills (career capital) to the point where you’re so good people can’t ignore you.
First, we’ll look at the theory of career capital. Then, we’ll look at how to acquire this capital.
The career capital theory includes three statements:
After looking at case studies of three people who enjoy their work, the author came up with three scarce and prized traits that make a job desirable:
Trait #1: The job provides the opportunity for autonomy. (We’ll look more at this trait in Rule #3.)
Trait #2: The job provides the opportunity to change the world. (We’ll look more at this trait in Rule #4.)
Trait #3: The job provides the opportunity to use imagination. (Shortform note: While the author lists creativity as one of the three traits that are inherent to great work, he hasn’t included a rule about it.)
The rules of supply and demand state that if you want something scarce and prized, you need to pay for it with something equally scarce and prized. This also applies to careers—you’ll “buy” the three desirable traits using your career capital.
There are two different mindsets when it comes to work, the passion mindset and the craftsperson mindset. The passion mindset, like the passion hypothesis, will set you up to fail while adopting the craftsperson mindset is the first step to loving your work.
The passion mindset is concerned with what the universe can do for you. People who subscribe to this mindset expect the universe to quickly provide them with a job that perfectly matches their passion.
This mindset leads to the following negative consequences:
Courage Culture
A spinoff of the passion mindset is courage culture, which suggests that the main obstacle that’s keeping you from following your passion is a lack of courage. It suggests that there’s a perfect job out there with your name on it, and the only reason you don’t have it yet is that you’re too scared to leave your conventional job. This is inaccurate—as we’ve learned, it takes scarce and prized skills, not merely courage, to acquire a desirable job.
The craftsperson mindset is the opposite of the passion mindset—instead of concerning yourself with what the universe can do for you, you focus on what you can do for the universe. The craftsperson mindset offers a much clearer roadmap to loving your work—all you have to do is work hard to get good at something. You don’t have to think about whether your job is perfect or represents your identity—you simply focus on developing your skills.
You must adopt the craftsperson mindset to end up in work you love no matter what field or industry you’re involved with.
For example, Steve Martin, comedian and actor, is an example of an adopter of the craftsperson mindset. When he was first starting his career, stand-up comedy was founded on delivering punch lines. He wanted to do something less formulaic and came up with a groundbreaking act. It took ten years of hard practice for him to develop his joke-writing skills enough to make the act work.
Rebutting Criticism of the Craftsperson Mindset
Some people, particularly supporters of the passion hypothesis, argue that it’s only possible to adopt the craftsperson mindset after you’ve discovered your passion. For example, musicians are only able to practice hours every day because they love music so much.
In fact, this isn’t the case. Musicians and other entertainers are often unsure about whether their jobs are right for them because jobs in the arts tend to be insecure. For example, when Steve Martin was developing his new act, he was so uncertain that it was the right thing to do that he regularly experienced panic attacks. Performers adopt the craftsperson mindset not because they know they’re on the right path, but because they know it’s the only way to succeed in their industry.
Additionally, musicians aren’t good examples because they’re not representative of the general public. Musicians often succeed because of a lucky break or because of some unusual circumstances from their early life (for example, their parents were also musicians).
As we learned in the previous section, to develop your career capital, you need to adopt the craftsperson mindset and practice your skills in order to develop them. The best way to practice is “deliberately,” a method studied by psychologist Anders Ericsson.
(Shortform note: To learn more about Ericsson’s research, read our summary of his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.)
There are two requirements for deliberate practice:
Requirement #1: Appropriate challenge. You need to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Repeating things you’re already good at is fun, but it doesn’t make you improve.
Requirement #2: Immediate feedback. You need to be told what you’re doing right and wrong in order to improve. Feedback can come from a teacher, coach, yourself, or the result of your actions.
Productivity and getting things done isn’t the goal of deliberate practice. The goal is to improve your skills.
Neil Charness, a psychologist, studied how chess players practice to see if different practicing methods made a difference to their skill level. Charness only looked at people who had acquired 10,000 hours of practice, a number generally agreed upon to be the amount of time required to become an expert. (This time requirement suggests that becoming an expert has less to do with natural talent and more to do with effort. Scientists haven’t found that experts have a natural predisposition towards their fields, except that physical characteristics like being tall might make you better at basketball.)
Of the players who had 10,000 hours of practice, some had achieved the rank of grandmaster and others were at an intermediate level. Since they all had the same amount of experience, there must have been another factor that determined who became an expert and who didn’t progress and stayed intermediate.
At the time, there was a debate among chess players about which of two practice methods was most effective. The methods were:
Charness discovered that seriously studying the game was far more effective than any other practice method. The people who became grandmasters had spent half of their 10,000 hours on serious study. The people who stayed intermediate had spent only 10% of their time on serious study.
This is because playing in tournaments doesn’t offer an appropriate challenge, the first ingredient of deliberate practice. In a tournament, chess players often aren’t evenly matched against their opponents. Face off against a far more skilled opponent than you and you won’t be challenged, you’ll be destroyed. Face off against a far less skilled opponent and you won’t be challenged because winning is too easy.
Serious study, on the other hand, is tailored to your skill level at any point in time. As you improve, you can adjust your study to make it more challenging. Additionally, serious study also offers the second requirement of deliberate practice, immediate feedback. You can look up how to solve a chess problem if you can’t figure it out by yourself, or if you have a coach, she can tell you what you’re doing wrong.
If you’re not playing chess, music, or a sport, it’s less obvious what deliberate practice involves—the workplace doesn’t have a strict competition schedule or training regime. As a result, most professionals improve their skills for a little while and then get caught in plateaus. Ericsson discovered that after reaching an acceptable performance level at work, people’s skills didn’t improve with additional practice time.
This means that if you can be one of the first people to figure out how to apply deliberate practice in your field, you’ll quickly acquire more career capital than your coworkers and surpass them. We’ll look at how to do this in the next section.
There are five steps to figuring out how to deliberately practice in your workplace:
Step #1: Determine your career capital market. There are two types of career capital markets:
It’s less obvious than you might think to determine which market you’re in, and many people mistake a single-skill market for a multi-skill one.
Step #2: Determine what kind of capital you want to develop. In a single-skill market, you don’t have a choice—there’s only one type of capital—but in a multi-skill market, you can choose which skills you want to develop. It’s fastest and easiest to develop skills in areas you already have a head start in.
Step #3: Determine your goals. Once you’ve decided what skill you’re going to develop, you need to decide how good you have to get at it.
Step #4: Strive for discomfort. Seek out the feeling of mental strain and discomfort to challenge yourself, and also seek out and learn from feedback.
If you encounter mental resistance to discomfort, such as wanting to give up on your practice session, you can try implementing two types of structure:
Step #5: Stay focused and exercise diligence. In this context, “diligence” refers to focusing on developing the skill you’ve chosen and not being distracted by other pursuits. It takes a long time to develop a skill, so you need to stick with it.
There are certain jobs and situations that inhibit your ability to amass career capital. If your current job has any of the following factors, you should look for a new job:
Lisa Feuer was a marketing and advertising professional who was getting tired of the corporate setting she worked in. At age 38, she had acquired a fair amount of career capital in marketing, but she decided to make a change and start a yoga business, inspired by courage culture.
Lisa took a 200-hour yoga course and started Karma Kids Yoga. 200 hours of training isn’t very much career capital, especially in a popular, competitive field, and as a result, Lisa wasn’t so good she couldn’t be ignored.
In 2008, when the recession hit, Lisa struggled. People stopped wanting private lessons, one of the gyms she worked at closed, and her classes at schools were cut. By 2009, she was applying for food stamps. Her move into yoga didn’t work out because while she had had enough courage to quit her job, she didn’t have enough scarce and valuable skills to succeed in her new job.
Like Lisa, Joe Duffy was an advertising professional who was getting tired of the corporate setting he worked in. He originally trained as an artist and wanted to do something more creative. Instead of immediately quitting his job like Lisa, however, he embraced the craftsperson mindset and began developing career capital. He stayed at his agency and developed his skills in brand icons and logos.
Joe became so good at branding and logos that Fallon McElligott offered him a job running a subsidiary of their organization. This new job offered him more autonomy, the first of the traits that make people enjoy their work.
Joe worked for Fallon McElligott for twenty years, continuing to practice deliberately and earn career capital. Then, he started his own marketing company, Duffy & Partners. He was very successful—everyone wanted him to design their logos because he had so much experience. This move also offered him more autonomy and the opportunity to be creative.
By the time Joe retired, he likely had all three traits that make a job enjoyable—in addition to autonomy and creativity, his advertising impacted the world.
The author acquired career capital throughout his education, especially in the first two years of graduate school, when he was forced to practice deliberately. Classwork in graduate school is inherently challenging and there’s constant feedback from instructors.
The last two years of graduate school, however, are mainly self-directed study, so if the author didn’t push himself, he would plateau. He came up with ideas to force himself to practice deliberately and his first exercise was to figure out the math behind a complicated paper.
The author was met with internal resistance the moment he encountered the first difficulty. He forced himself to continue by using both time and information structure. He estimates it took him 15 hours over two weeks to fully understand the paper. He used this new career capital to publish on a topic similar to the paper’s.
Then, he came up with a routine for deliberate practice that includes three elements:
Deliberate practice requires two elements: challenging yourself and immediate feedback.
What’s one skill you could develop to increase your career capital?
How good at this skill do you want to get? (For example, if you’re an aspiring TV writer, you might want to write a script good enough to land you an agent.)
How could you challenge yourself while you practice this skill? (For example, you might write about a subject you’re unfamiliar with.)
Who could you ask, or what resources could you consult, to get feedback on your skill development? (For example, you might sign up for a critiquing workshop.)
Now that you’ve developed your scarce and prized skills, you can start cashing them in for the scarce and prized traits that make a job desirable. In Rule #3, we’ll look at the desirable trait of autonomy. We’ll also look at two autonomy pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Autonomy is the ability to control what you work on and how you work, including, among other things, your schedule, responsibilities, and office space. Autonomy is such an important determiner of happiness that the author calls it the “dream-job elixir.” Most common dream jobs include autonomy—for example, many people want to own a farm not only to get away from screens and escape their cubicles, but also because the country lifestyle offers so much autonomy.
People who have autonomy in their workplace tend to be happier and more productive. There are several examples that demonstrate this:
When trying to cash in your career capital for autonomy—for example, by asking your manager if you can change your hours—there are two possible pitfalls:
As we learned in Rule #2, you need to develop career capital before you can buy autonomy. If you attempt to seize autonomy before you’ve earned it, it won’t last because you won’t make money—if you prematurely demand autonomy from your boss, you’ll either be denied the request or fired. If you choose to start your own business, you won’t be able to find clients because you have no experience. Either way, you’ll shortly have to take on a non-autonomous job in order to support yourself.
For example, many followers of the lifestyle-design movement—a movement to break free of the rat race and live life on your own terms—fall into this trap. They think all they need to succeed is the courage to quit their day jobs and forget about the necessity of career capital. One young professional the author encountered quit his day job to write a blog about how blogging funded his lifestyle. However, his blog wasn’t actually making him any money, so his content was weak and his only piece of career capital was enthusiasm. Enthusiasm isn’t scarce and prized and wasn’t enough to buy him autonomy. Few people read his blog and he eventually gave up posting.
(Shortform note: Read our summary of Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek for more on lifestyle design.)
The first step to buying autonomy is acquiring enough career capital to pay for it. However, once you have this career capital, you become so valuable to your employer that they don’t want to give you any autonomy for fear of losing you and your skills. Autonomy might make you happy, but it doesn’t do anything for your employer. It’s typically in your employer’s best interest to keep you working for them as many hours as possible, on their terms.
Therefore, as you gain career capital, anticipate that your employer will resist your bids for autonomy. They’ll offer you more money or status to try to keep you, but if you want autonomy, you’ll have to turn them down. Additionally, you may encounter resistance from your friends and family, because they think it’s a bad idea to turn down raises or promotions.
For example, Lulu Young started developing her career capital by earning a degree in math. She then took an entry-level job as a software tester. She figured out a way to automate the testing, which saved the company money, and she was promoted. Only at this point, after acquiring capital, did Lulu make a small bid for autonomy—she asked to reduce her working hours so she could go back to school part-time. Her employers didn’t want her to work fewer hours—they wanted her to spend as much time using her skills to help them as possible—but she was so valuable they had to agree because they didn’t want to lose her.
Lulu also encountered resistance outside the workplace. Later in her career, when the company she was working for shut down, Lulu received several job offers, one of which was a huge promotion. Lulu had just bought a house and everyone expected her to take the job, but she took a different job that offered her more autonomy. Her friends and family thought she was “nuts,” but she pushed past this resistance and eventually ended up as a freelancer with full autonomy.
While courage culture can lead you into Pitfall #1, courage is required for avoiding this second pitfall. You’ll need to be brave to overcome the resistance you encounter. The trick is knowing when to apply this courage, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
To decide when to use courage and seek autonomy, you can take a simple test called the law of payment. The law states that you should only choose to do something that will give you more autonomy if you have evidence that people will pay you to do it. “Pay” refers to the classic case of a customer giving you money, or to getting a job, loan, or outside investment. If someone is willing to pay you to do something, this shows that your skills are valuable.
For example, entrepreneur Derek Sivers, who came up with the idea behind the law of payment, only took on projects after he had evidence that someone would pay him to complete them. He became a full-time musician only after music was making him more money than his day job. He started a company that sold CDs only after he knew enough people to be confident he’d have lots of clients.
Jane did well in school but didn’t want to follow the traditional path of going straight from college to a steady, full-time job. She wanted to have adventures ranging from traveling the world to learning to breathe fire to starting a non-profit, all of which required autonomy.
Jane planned to create this lifestyle by building low-maintenance websites that would passively earn her money. Without considering the law of payment—which would have told her that passive-income websites aren’t very viable—she dropped out of college to work on her websites and other moneymaking ideas.
In addition to ignoring the law of payment, Jane also didn’t take into account her lack of career capital. She didn’t have experience with websites or working freelance, and she hadn’t finished college.
In theory, Jane’s choices gave her autonomy, but the autonomy wasn’t real—since her business ideas didn’t make her enough money to eat, she wasn’t free to do whatever she liked.
Ryan, the owner of a farm, was successful in his bid for autonomy because unlike Jane, he acquired career capital before embarking on autonomous projects, and he considered the law of payment.
Ryan first became involved with gardening in middle school, when he came up with a variety of ideas for making money. The most lucrative was picking blueberries and selling them by the side of the road. He wasn’t particularly passionate about gardening, but it made money, so he branched out to selling produce from his parents’ garden.
In high school, Ryan rented land from a farmer, bought a tractor, and started selling at farmer’s markets. Then, he studied at the agriculture college at Cornell University. When Ryan decided it was time to buy land and start farming full time, he had almost ten years’ worth of career capital in the form of gardening experience, entrepreneurship, and a college diploma in horticulture.
Ryan needed a loan to buy the land, so he had to go through a formal version of the law of payment by submitting a viable business plan to the Massachusetts Farm Services Agency. The agency only approves people they think will be able to pay back the loan, so when Ryan was approved, he knew that someone thought he was going to make money.
His farm was very successful—so many people wanted to buy produce from him that he had to turn people away.
As the author was wrapping up graduate school, he received two professorship offers. One was with Georgetown University, which had only recently developed a computer science graduate program. The other was from a well-known university with a well-established program.
Georgetown University offered far more autonomy—since the program was just starting out, the author would have a chance to influence its development. He would also have more freedom to choose an up-and-coming specialty. (At established universities, it’s safer to choose popular specialties so that there are people who can endorse your knowledge—if no one can validate you, you’re in perpetual danger of losing your job.)
If the author went to the well-known university, he’d be falling into the second autonomy pitfall—giving up autonomy for status. He assessed if choosing Georgetown was falling into the first pitfall by considering the law of payment. He was confident that he had the career capital to cash in for autonomy because Georgetown was going to pay him a good salary and offer support for his research. He accepted the job.
When seeking more autonomy, use the law of payment to avoid pitfalls.
What’s one opportunity you currently have to increase your autonomy? (For example, you might quit your job and work freelance instead.)
Would you encounter resistance from anyone if you chose to pursue this opportunity? From whom? Why do you think they would offer resistance?
Consider the law of payment. Do you think anyone would pay you if you took the opportunity? What evidence do you have to support your answer?
Reflect on the resistance you suspect you’ll encounter and whether you’ll pass or fail the law of payment. How will these factors influence your decision to make (or not make) a bid for autonomy?
In Rule #3, we looked at how to cash in your scarce and prized skills for autonomy. Now, we’ll look at how to cash them in for a mission, which, like autonomy, is one of the traits of a lovable job.
A mission is a useful, potentially world-changing goal that focuses your career. People who think their careers make a difference are happier and can better weather the difficulties of work. For example, for many people, putting in overtime is worth it if they’re saving lives.
In this chapter, we’ll look at how to find your general mission and then how to transform that mission into reality by pursuing specific projects.
Missions come from a space called the “adjacent possible”: the space just beyond the cutting edge of human knowledge.
The idea of the adjacent possible originally comes from biology, in which it refers to the potential for simple chemical structures to combine and form more complex structures. Before the simple structures combine, the complex structures don’t exist yet. Because the simple structures are the building blocks of the more complex ones, it’s perfectly possible they’ll eventually form.
Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, adopted this term to describe inventions. New inventions nearly always come from the adjacent possible space because most discoveries build incrementally upon the current understanding. As each discovery advances the cutting edge further, a new adjacent possible space opens up, and that becomes filled, and so on.
For example, when oxygen was discovered in the 1770s, the cutting edge consisted of two relevant factors:
Anyone who was up to speed on the cutting edge could see the next step—use these two factors to isolate oxygen. Both Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele isolated oxygen, independently, within two years of each other.
Like scientific discoveries, career missions come from the adjacent possible because they often need to be innovative in order to change the world. This is why missions are so hard to find—it takes a lot of work to get to the cutting edge at which they’re even visible. However, this difficulty is actually in your favor. It narrows the competition for mission-fulfilling jobs.
Coming up with an idea for a mission is the only the first step to cashing in your career capital—next, you need to figure out how to transform that idea into a reality.
There’s a three-step process to developing a mission. Each step of the process forms one level of a pyramid:
The bottom level is research in your field, which will help you develop career capital and approach the adjacent possible. To create a strong base for your pyramid, read papers, talk to experts in the field, attend lectures, and brainstorm.
(Shortform example: If you’re a novelist, you might attend writing conferences, participate in workshops, and dedicate an hour a week to analyzing bestselling novels.)
The middle level is inspired by Peter Sims’s Little Bets. Little Bets details the stories of innovative individuals and companies, and comes to the conclusion that these people and organizations never had a master plan—they had multiple small plans, or little bets. Each little bet provided feedback about what to do next. If the little bet didn’t pay off, they’d try a new direction. If it did pay off, they’d continue on. This allowed them to try out several options and see which one was most likely to succeed.
To help you figure out the best projects to pursue to achieve your mission, undertake small experiments that will give you feedback about whether you’re headed in the right direction.
Each little bet should have the following characteristics:
For example, Kirk French, an archaeologist at Penn State, didn’t know exactly how he was going to achieve his mission of using media to popularize archaeology. His first little bet was to digitize a 1961 documentary about the Teotihuacan Valley in Mexico, which was a notable example of historical ecology. This took him only a few months and went well, and his next little bet was to create an updated version of the documentary.
Then, one day, a man called the archaeology department, claiming that he’d found a Knights Templar treasure. Everyone in the department wrote him off as a waste of time, but Kirk decided to undertake another little bet and talk to the man, because talking to the public about archaeology fit nicely with his mission. Kirk filmed their meeting and decided he’d meet with and film everyone who called the department about a discovery. Kirk didn’t know where the project would go but decided he could at least show the videos to his archaeology students.
This turned out to be the little bet that led Kirk to a job he loved. The Discovery Channel wanted to put together a show about archaeology, and when a production company called Penn State, Kirk sent them his videos, which they loved. Kirk became the host of a show called American Treasures.
The top level is a statement that describes an approximate mission. The statement can be frequently edited as you acquire career capital from the bottom level and get feedback from your little bets in the middle level.
(Shortform example: “Use dance to teach youth how to express themselves in a healthy way.”)
Once you’ve found your mission and started to develop it by pursuing projects, adopt a marketing mindset in order to share it with the world. The more people interact with your mission, the greater your world-changing ability is.
The marketing mindset comes from Giles Bowkett, who was in turn inspired by a combination of ideas in two books, Purple Cow by Seth Godin and My Job Went to India by Chad Fowler.
Purple Cow is a book about marketing that explains that if you want someone to notice something—in your case, your mission—it needs to be remarkable. For example, people see brown cows all the time, but not purple ones, so because of its novelty, a purple cow will be inherently more interesting. If your mission is remarkable, people will talk about it, spreading it widely and increasing your reach. (Shortform note: Read our summary of Purple Cow here.)
My Job Went to India specifically offers career tips for software developers, but one of the tips is more widely applicable—market your remarkable project (or mission) on a platform that’s highly visible and respected. The more visible you can make your mission, the more people will encounter it, again increasing your reach.
For example, after deciding on a mission to combine technology with art, Giles Bowkett built Archaeopteryx, an AI program that composes its own dance music. Few programmers knew how to compose music, and few musicians knew programming, so the project was remarkable—Giles was probably the only person in the world who could have built it.
The next step was to share this one-of-a-kind program. Giles went to speak at conferences and publicly released the program’s code to the open-source community, which is a community of people who share and work on each other’s projects for free. Many programmers and employers keep an eye on open-source platforms because they’re a good place to discover new talent, so plenty of people found out about Archaeopteryx.
Sarah had just started studying cognitive science when she began searching for her mission. She hadn’t acquired enough career capital to reach the cutting edge yet, so there was no way she could see into the adjacent possible at this point. Instead of taking the time to amass capital, she had a crisis—she was torn between theoretical work and applied work, and felt like she had too many conflicting interests. She struggled to settle on a mission.
Unlike Sarah, Pardis Sabeti didn’t start looking for her mission until she reached the cutting edge, and she made multiple little bets to get there.
When Pardis was in high school, she loved math. Then, she encountered an excellent biology teacher and ultimately decided to study biology at MIT. She thought she wanted to be a doctor but went on to earn her Ph.D. in genetics at Oxford University. While there, she decided to study infectious diseases in Africa. She worked in a lab that used genetic analytics to track ancestry, and then switched to studying the genetics of malaria. Finally, she did decide to do her MD. All of this study built up Pardis’s career capital and brought her to the cutting edge.
By the time Pardis was working at the Broad Institute, a research center, she had developed her knowledge of genetics enough to see into the adjacent possible. She saw a way to use genetics to try to cure ancient diseases such as malaria and decided to make this her mission. She’d recently written a popular paper and had job offers coming in, and she took a professorship at Harvard, using her career capital to buy herself a job that allowed her to work towards her mission.
After accepting a job at Georgetown, the author started looking for a mission. He’d just finished a Ph.D. and was at the cutting edge, so it was an appropriate time. He’d spent a lot of time working with distributed algorithms and could see the potential to use them in multiple fields, so he decided to make their application his mission. As for how he would actually pursue this mission, he consulted the mission development system.
To fill out the bottom of his pyramid, he read papers, talked to experts, went to lectures, and then summarized his findings. He also went for walks to give himself time to brainstorm.
To fill out the middle, he ran two or three little bets at a time. If they went well, he continued the project. If not, he tried something else.
At the top of his pyramid, he placed the tentative mission: to use distributed algorithm theory in new settings to create results.
At the time of the book’s writing, the author hadn’t yet started his job at Georgetown so couldn’t offer more about how his mission was developing, but he’s confident he’ll like what he does and that he’ll like it even more as he does it for longer.
The mission-development strategy uses a pyramid exercise to explore possible missions.
The bottom level of your pyramid is researching your field to identify possible areas of innovation. How could you research? (For example, what lectures could you attend or experts could you talk to?)
The middle level of your pyramid is to create little bets—small experiments that provide feedback about possible directions for future projects. What little bets could you undertake? (Remember that little bets should take less than 30 days and encourage you to learn or create something new.)
The top level of your pyramid is a tentative mission statement. What’s yours?