Rule 2: The Importance of Skill

Summary

Rule #1 took on the conventional wisdom about how people end up loving what they do. It argued that the Passion Hypothesis, which says that the key to loving your work is to match a job to a pre-existing passion, is bad advice. There’s little evidence that most people have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered, and believing that there’s a magical right job lurking out there can often lead to chronic unhappiness and confusion when the reality of the working world fails to match this dream.

Logical Transition: If “follow your passion” is bad advice, what should you do instead?

Cal contended that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable. If you want these traits in your own life, you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. I called these rare and valuable skills Career Capital, and noted that the foundation of constructing work you love is acquiring a large store of this capital.

With this in mind, we turned our attention to this process of Capital Acquisition. Cal argued that it’s important to adopt the Craftsman Mindset, where you focus relentlessly on what value you are offering the world. This stands in stark contrast to the much more common Passion Mindset, which has you focus only on what value the world is offering you.

Logical Transition: Even with the craftsman mindset, however, becoming “so good they can’t ignore you” is not trivial.

To help these efforts Cal introduced the well-studied concept of Deliberate Practice, an approach to work where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance. Musicians, athletes, and chess players know all about deliberate practice. Knowledge workers, however, do not. This is great news for knowledge workers: if you can introduce this strategy into your working life you can vault past your peers in your acquisition of career capital.

Rule 3: The Importance of Control

Summary

Rules #1 and #2 laid the foundation for Cal’s new thinking on how people end up loving what they do. Rule #1 dismissed the Passion Hypothesis, which says that you have to first figure out your true calling and then find a job to match. Rule #2 replaced this idea with Career Capital Theory, which argues that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable, and if you want these in your working life, you must first build up rare and valuable skills to offer in return. I call these skills Career Capital, and in rule #2 I dived into the details of how to acquire it.

Logical Transition: The obvious next question is how to invest this capital once you have it.

Rule #3 explored one answer to this question by arguing that gaining Control over what you do and how you do it is incredibly important. This trait shows up so often in the lives of people who love what they do that I’ve taken to calling it the Dream-Job Elixir.

Investing your capital in control, however, turns out to be tricky. There are two traps that commonly snare people in their pursuit of this trait. The First Control Trap notes that it’s dangerous to try to prematurely gain more control without enough capital to back it up. The Second Control Trap notes that once you have the capital to back up a bid for more control, you’re still not out of the woods. This capital makes you valuable enough to your employer that they will likely now fight to keep you on a more traditional path. They realize that gaining more control is good for you but not for their bottom line.

Logical Transition: The control traps put you in a difficult situation. Let’s say you have an idea for pursuing more control in your career and you’re encountering resistance. How can you tell if this resistance is useful (e.g. it’s helping you avoid the first control trap) or something to ignore (e.g. it’s the result of the second control trap)?

The help to navigate this control conundrum is called The Law of Financial Viability, where money is used as a neutral indicator of value, a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you are ready to go after. If people are ready to pay you, then pursuing an option with more control is amazing.

Rule 4: The Importance of Mission

Summary

Logical Transition: The core idea of this book is simple: To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers. Mission is yet another of those traits.

In the first chapter of this rule, Cal reinforced the idea that this trait, like all desirable career traits, really does require career capital — you can’t skip straight into a great mission without first building mastery in your field. Drawing from the terminology of Steven Johnson, Cal argued that the best ideas for missions are found in the Adjacent Possible — the region just beyond the current cutting edge.

To encounter these ideas, therefore, you must first get to that cutting edge, which in turn requires expertise. To try to devise a mission when you’re new to a field and lacking any career capital is a venture bound for failure.

Logical Transition: Once you identify a general mission, however, you’re still left with the task of launching specific projects that make it succeed.

An effective strategy for accomplishing this task is to try small steps that generate concrete feedback — Little Bets — and then use this feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next. This systematic exploration can help you uncover an exceptional way forward that you might have never otherwise noticed.

The little-bets strategy, Cal discovered as his 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 Remark-ability. 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.

In sum, mission is one of the most important traits you can acquire with your career capital. But adding this trait to your working life is not simple. Once you have the capital to identify a good mission, you must still work to make it succeed. By using little bets and the law of remark-ability, you greatly increase your chances of finding ways to transform your mission from a compelling idea into a compelling career.

My Chapter Highlights From The Book

Below are the highlights that I jotted down when I read the physical book. These are snippets that I find useful, but I find the rule summaries above to be even more comprehensive. I also find the glossary section toward the end of the book a good reminder of the key concepts, which is a good companion to this section.

Chapter 1: The “Passion” of Steve Jobs

The passion hypothesis: The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion. Clearly, this is a hypothesis that Cal Newport does not believe to be true.

Chapter 2: Passion is Rare

“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.” — Ira Glass

Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion. Working right trumps finding the right work. The passion hypothesis trivializes this challenge.

Self-determination theory says that motivation, in the workplace or elsewhere, requires that you fill three basic psychological needs:

  • Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important
  • Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do
  • Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

These are the traits that Daniel Pink described in his book Drive, which I read about 10 years ago and found to be very good. Cal recites SDT and again built his book based on these traits. Essentially, he argues that these are rare and valuable traits that define a good career, and we should try to use our rare and valuable skills to acquire these traits for our work in order to live a good life.

Chapter 3: Passion is Dangerous

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.

Chapter 4: The Clarity of Craftsman

The passion mindset: focuses on what the world can offer you. The deep questions driving the passion mindset — “who am I?”, “what do I truly love?” are essentially impossible to confirm. These questions rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses, and are almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused.

The craftsman mindset: focuses on what you can offer the world. It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is “just right”, and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good.

Chapter 5: The Power of Career Capital

“The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come, that’s the hardest phase” — Ira Glass

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.

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

Chapter 7: Becoming a Craftsman

If you just show up and work hard, you will soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. To successfully adopt the craftsman mindset, therefore, we have to approach our jobs with deliberate practice.

The Five habits of a craftsman

  • Step 1: Decide what capital market you’re in (“winner-take-all” or “auction”)
  • Step 2: Identify your capital type
  • Step 3: Define good
  • Step 4: Stretch and Destroy
  • Step 5: Be Patient

Chapter 8: The Dream-Job Elixir

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment. Control is one of the rare and valuable traits one can acquire for their jobs.

Chapter 9: The First Control Trap

The first control trap: Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

Chapter 10: 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.

Chapter 11: Avoiding the Control Trap

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.

Chapter 13: Missions Require Capital

We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape

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. Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of small thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a “big” action.

Chapter 14: Actions Require Little Bets

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback. For Chris Rock, such a bet might include telling a joke to an audience and seeing if they laugh. These bets allow you to tentatively explore the specific avenues surrounding your general mission, looking for those with the highest likelihood of leading to outstanding results.

Chapter 15: Missions Require Marketing

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