#21 - So Good They Can't Ignore You
Our youngest child, Agnes, has recently started piano lessons. And every week, the same story happens again and again: when she gets a new piece that challenges and stretches her ability, first she "hates" it. Yet, she likes playing the piano so much that she perseveres with the new piece until she plays it well enough. Then, every time magic happens: "hate" turns into "love" and the piece becomes her new "favorite".
This little story is a metaphor for the topic that grabbed my attention recently: To do something well we have to like it. And to like something, we often first need to do it well. How do we find a solution to this "chicken-and-egg" problem? And more generically, how do we find the work we love when it's so complicated?
In this edition of the newsletter, I have assembled a few valuable resources that can help us in this honorable quest. Feel free to browse and grab what suits you best.
If you have less than 1 minute: The Best Career Advice No One Wants to Hear
If you have 5 minutes: How to Do What You Love
If you have 2.5 hours: Born Standing Up
If you have 3.5 hours: So Good They Can't Ignore You
If you have 5 more minutes: The Best Example of Life and Career of Artistry and Impact
Last but not least, my new article: Your 'Dream Job Checklist' - Why You Need One And How to Build It
If you have less than 1 minute: The Career Advice No One Wants to Hear
Be so good they can't ignore you.
If you have 5 minutes: How to Do What You Love
If I could recommend you just one article on finding the work you love, it would be this article by Paul Graham. Please read it. It's seminal. It's captures the essence of the "finding the work you love" problem and shows the way forward.
Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting an axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions. It's hard to find the work you love. So don't underestimate the task…
Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and then just glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the exception. More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side.
Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path?.. Is there a some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.
Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate… "Always produce " is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to this constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, towards things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof…
There are two routes to doing the work you love:
The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don’t. The organic route happens naturally to anyone who does good work. A young architect has to take whatever the work he can get. But if he does well, he'll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain…
The two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money to work on things you do. This route requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention. The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over obstacles. The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of work…
Which route should you take? That depends on how sure you are of what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your lifetime) for what you want to do.
If you have 2.5 hours: "Born Standing Up", by Steve Martin
Some say that it takes ten years to become an overnight success. Steve Martin starts his autobiography as follows:
I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.
This is a book you can finish in one evening. It's a fascinating story of how deliberate focus on mastery becomes a path to success, with fame not being a primary goal. And as we can add artistry to every endeavour, that's why this book is not only for those who want to be artists or comedians, but for anyone who wants to become really good at something.
I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps.
…It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing. I would move my act without pausing for the laugh, as though everything were an aside… Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe I didn't care if they laughed at all, and this act was going on with or without them.
If you have 3.5 hours: "So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love", by Cal Newport
'Follow your passion' is a dangerous advice.
Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is to follow your passion.
Career passions are rare. How can we follow our passions if we don't have any relevant passions to follow?
Passion takes time. There is an important distinction between a job, a career, and a calling: a job is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that's an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.
Passion is a side effect of mastery.
Without the passion hypothesis to guide us, what should we do instead?
You need rare and valuable skills - your career capital. The foundation of constructing the work you love is acquiring a large store of this capital.
Be so good they can't ignore you (the importance of skill). Adopt the craftsman mindset: 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.
Gaining control over what you do and how you do it is incredibly important, it's the dream-job elixir. You invest your career capital in control is tricky because of two traps: (1) it's dangerous to try to gain more control without enough capital to back it up and (2) once you have the capital to back up a bid for more control, this capital makes you valuable enough to your employer that they'll likely fight to keep you on a more traditional path. The way to determine whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit is the law of financial viability: unless people are willing to pay you, it's not an idea you're ready to go after.
To truly love you work & career, you also require a sense of mission. The best ideas for missions are in the adjacent possible - the region just beyond the cutting edge. Getting to that cutting edge requires expertise. And it needs little best - specific projects that make it succeed. You also need to follow the law of remarkability: the project must literally compel people to remark about it. And it must be launched in a venue conductive to such remarking.
If you have 5 more minutes: The best Example of Life & Career of Artistry and Impact - Ruth Bader Ginsburg
This Quartz Obsession piece has everything you need to remind you of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's larger-than-life personality, her impact and the legacy she has left behind.
Other justices write well. All of them are smart. But Ginsburg is downright artistic. She seemed to see no boundary between form and function, style and substance, law and life.
And bonus if you've read up to here: my very own article offering actionable advice on formulating your idea of a dream job.
New Article: Your 'Dream Job Checklist': Why You Need One and How to Build It
You might never get a 'dream job', yet if you are clear about what you want, you increase your chances of having the work you love. Learn why you need a ‘dream job checklist’ and how to build it.
Stay healthy, do what you love and love what you do,
Arina
Illustration source: Davide Bonazzi