"Follow your passion" is dangerous advice.
The traits that can make your life interesting, I learned, have very little to do with intensive soul-searching. Princeton Web Solutions [Cal's high school web company], in other works, inoculated me against the idea that occupational happiness requires a calling.
The world is filled with opportunities like Princeton Web Solutions waiting to be exploited to make your life more interest. Any job/challenge is interesting for a sufficiently short period of time. This isn't a downside.
Seek opportunities to master rare skills that would yield big rewards.
[Rule 1] saved me from needless fretting about which of these paths forward [professor vs something else] was my true calling. If tackled correctly, I was absolutely confident that either could yield a career I love.
Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple that all your have to do is follow your passion. Inspecting this one can arrive at 3 conclusions:
Career capital: rare and valuable skills
You must conduct yourself as a craftsman where you focus relentlessly on what value you're offering the world.
The most effective means of obtaining these rare and valuable skills is through deliberate practice---a method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond where you're currently comfortable.
If you're not careful to keep pushing forward, your improvement can taper off to what the performance scientist Anders Ericsson called an "acceptable level" where you then remain stuck.
Instead emulate Richard Feynman, and his compulsion to tear down important papers and mathematical concepts until he could understand the concepts from the bottom up.
5 habits of becoming a craftsman:
- Understand your career capital market. Whether you're in a winner-take-all market, where 1 type of career capital dominates and people compete for it, or auction market, where you can generate a unique collection of multiple kinds of capital.
- Identify your capital type. In my case of an auction market, a useful heuristic is to consider open gates---opportunities to build capital that are already open to you.
- Define "good". Deliberate practice requires good goals.
- Stretch and destroy. Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. If you're not uncomfortable you're probably stuck at an "acceptable level". The other part is embracing honest feedback---even if it destroys what you thought was good. It's how you learn to retrain your focus in order to continue making progress.
- Be patient. You must be dilligent and willing to reject shiny new pursuits that will derail your efforts before you acquire the career capital you need.
Cal decided focused his attention on a bottoms-up understanding of his own fields most difficult results would be a good first step toward revitalizing his career capital stores. Mastering this notoriously hard paper would prove a perfect introduction to his new regime of self-enforced deliberate practice.
This type of skill development is hard. To combat the resistance you need to employ several strategies
- Time structure where you force yourself to work on the problem for a minimum amount of time. See Deep Work for all his strategies.
- Information structure where you capture the results of your hard focus in a useful form to support subsequent efforts. Make conceptual maps. Walk through each step filling in the gaps. Write detailed summaries.
Cal adopted several specific routines to enforce these time and information structure strategies:
- Developing a research bible, where once a week he would summarize a paper that he thought would be relevant to his research
- Keeping a running hour tally of deliberate practice time, with a row for each month on which he keeps a tally of the total hours spent that month in a state of deliberate practice.
- Maintaining a results notebook where he pushes himself to collect and succinctly summarize the results of time spent brainstorming new research directions.
Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice.
You have to get good before you can expect good work.
Control over what you do and how you do it is such a powerful force for building remarkable careers that it could be called the "dream-job elixir". You should use your career capital to negotiate more control in your professional life.
There are 2 traps that often trip people up in their search for control:
- Having too little career capital, where you don't have the skills to offer in exchange for income, influence, etc... on your own terms.
- Ater accumulated sufficient career capital, succumbing to resistance from others in your life when you choose to exercise your capital because having more control over your life and career usually benefits only you.
When pushing your career forward, it's nearly impossible to discern whether the resistance you'll inevitably experience is because you have insufficient career capital (trap 1) or have enough to exert control people don't want you to (trap 2)
To avoid this ambiguity, respect what Cal calls the law of financial viability:. Use money as a "neutral indicator of value"---a way of determining whether you have enough career capital to succeed at this point.
When deciding on whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people will are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.
You need to find a career mission, the purpose around which you organize your professional life. It's what leads people to become famous for what they do and ushers in the remarkable opportunities that come along with such fame.
The more you try to force it, I learn, the less likely you are to succeed.
Sabert thought small by focusing patiently for years on a small niche (the genetics of diseases in Africa), but then acting big once she acquired enough career capital to identify a mission (using computational genetics to understand and fight ancient diseases). Then, consider how Alan Lightman, MIT physics professor turned writer, has used mission to create and offbeat and compelling career. Building a career around the mission to expore the human side of science has led him to fascinating places. And the success he has achieved along the way has afforded him the control to get away with things a less famous academic never would be able to.
True missions, it turns out, require 2 things:
- You need career capital to understand what is meaningful, which requires patience.
- You need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible of your field, requiring brainstorming and exposure to new ideas.
Transform your approach to work into one that will lead to a successful mission, involving this multi-level pyramid:
Top level: the tentative research mission, a sort of rough guideline for the type of work you are interested in doing. Come up with a concrete mission statement, such as "To apply distributed algorithm theory to interesting new places with the goal of producing interesting new results". In order to identify this mission description, he had to acquire career capital in his field. After you've acquired enough exposure to topics, the real challenge is finding the compelling projects to exploit this potential. This is the goal of the other 2 levels of the pyramid are designed to pursue.
TRENT NOTE: Note the level of generality (or ambiguity depending on your point of view) in Cal's mission statement.
Bottom level: background research, where every week you dedicate some time to exposing yourself to something new in your field. I can read a paper, attend a talk or schedule a meeting. To ensure I really understand the idea, I require myself to add a summary, in my own words, to my growing research bible. I also try to carve out one walk each day for free-form thinking about the ideas turned up by this background research. Thoroughly explore the adjacent possible of things you can understand and do with your continually-increasing set of skills and knowledge.
Middle level: exploratory projects, where you spend most of your time and produce most of the value of your career capital. Make the leap from a tentative mission idea to compelling accomplishments using small projects that Cal calls "little bets". A little bet has the following characteristics:
- It's a project small enough to be completed in less than a month.
- It forces you to create new value (e.g. master a new skill and roduce new results that didn't exist before).
- It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback.
Use little bets to explore the most promising ideas turned up by the process described by the bottom level of the pyramid. When a little bet finishes, use the concrete feedback it generates to guide your research efforts going forward. The success or failure of mid-level projects provides a feedback loop for evolving your top-level mission statement.
Approach the task of finding good bets with the mindset of a marketer. Candidates should be both remarkable in the literal sense of compelling people to remark about them, and presented in a venue that supports these remarks, where there's infrastructure for noticing and spreading ideas. Blogging, with Twitter and Facebook shares, is an excellent venue and all other venues should be considered against whether they can beat that.
Try to keep only 2 to 3 bets active at a time so that they can receive intense attention. Also use deadlines. Finally, track the hours spent on these bets in the hours tally. Without accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to urgent but less important matters.
Working right trumps finding the right work.
- Missions require capital
- Missions require little bets
- Missions require marketing
404 on Deep Work Link? https://gist.github.com/matttrent/bookx_deep_work.mdown