Make Your Passion

The gist is simple:
Working right trumps finding the right
work.
I have had a fishy feeling about the swaths
of unhappy people running around yelling
about following your passion and money
and infinite happiness will find you. At a
certain point I began to believe them and I
also began to trumpet the same bull shit to
people desperate for exhilarating advice on
how to live the good life. Even as I saw
friends lose their passions when they
attempted to cash them in I didn’t for a
moment stop and question the advice that
has become more and more universal
since the days of What Color is Your
Parachute? I felt something was off and,
even in my quest to see things as honestly
as possible, I was blind to it.
In every work of genius we recognize our
own rejected thoughts: they come back to
us with a certain alienated majesty. –
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Thank you, Cal, for showing me what I’ve
been unable to see for years.
The only sustained passions I have ever
had are ones that I developed. I was drawn
to day trading because it resembled a
computer game and when I got good I
could make a bunch of money – it became
a passion. I had a job in internet marketing
and the harder I tried to become a master
the more I liked it until one day I looked at
my computer screen and realized I had
become passionate about it. I used to play
semi-professional paintball with Will and
found myself, after six months or so of
training hard, to be truly passionate about
the sport. I began writing years ago
because I had some ideas I needed to tell
more people than I could talk to – now you
and I get to share in this particular
passion. If I skip a day of writing I don’t
feel full when I go to bed at night. I am
passionate about Eastern ideas and the
present moment – but I developed this
passion after a severe depression drove me
to read everything I could find on the
subject. I love movies but it isn’t until I
began directing short films that I really
developed a passion for creating them. I
love thinking about difficult things. I love
solving problems.
While these passions developed there were
a million other things that I thought I was
passionate about. I day dreamed about
them then started them and then stopped
caring. Over and over. I’ve done this s0
many times it’s embarrassing. We all have.
We wait for the instant spark of passion.
The excitement and romance that will drive
our lives forward into the fairytale sunset.
Will and me having a blast and a half
on a paintball field.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You has forced
me to look at the things that I’ve really
loved in life and the things I had a puppy-
love crush on and see the difference. The
answer is liberating: the only things I’ve
truly loved in my life are the things that
I’ve put the most effort into (that I didn’t
resent). These aren’t necessarily the things
I loved right away and so let myself put
time into.
When we put our earnest effort into
something we’re respecting it and what we
respect we love.
Newport’s message may sound negative at
first but once understood it’s inspiring.
There are swaths of coaches and advice-
yellers telling people the only reason they
are in a 9-5 job that they don’t like is their
lack of courage. Because, essentially,
they’re being pussies. A lot of this advice
comes from people trying to get paid for no
other reason than being excited about that
message. Finally someone has come along
and told them to shut the fuck up.
There is a chance, a good chance, that
you’re in your job right now because you
should be, not because you’re a pussy. If
you’re unhappy in your work you may need
to start working differently instead of just
leaving everything behind. Of course there
are a lot of people who should leave their
jobs. There are a ton of people who hate
their work. I wonder, though, how many
people hate their work because they
fantasize about traveling the world with
their laptop and writing about it.
I am not defending bad jobs. This site’s
very mission is to demonstrate that anyone
can survive outside of a standard job. What
I am saying is that the way we work
deserves a lot more attention.
I am not saying you shouldn’t do
something you’re passionate about. You
need to! What I am saying – and what
Newport is saying – is that pre-existing
passions do not often lead to long-time life
satisfaction. When we work patiently
and diligently we fall in love – we develop
passion. This idea can be seen in the great
book Flow as well – the people who are
most satisfied in life are often the ones
who have mastered their craft.
Do not feel scared if you don’t have some
great passion tugging at you. Our society
has lied about the importance of pre-
existing passion and made us all doubt any
job that isn’t in line with some mystical
force that we may not see.
If you have passion in life and you can see
a career path that lets you tap into it then,
by all means, attack! But don’t tell others
they need your life.
StartupBros at the first ever
StartupBus — we aren’t having much
fun in this picture… but IT WAS
AWESOME
If you don’t feel a clear passion in your life
then work to become as good as you can
be in the thing you’re doing. And don’t
listen to anybody yelling at you for not
conforming to their ‘non-conformist’ ideals.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You is broken
down into four sections:
1. The myth of pre-existing passion
2. The importance of skill
3. The importance of control
4. The importance of mission
The rest of this blog article will summarize
these sections. After you’re done reading
this blog you need to go to Amazon and
buy this book – even if what is here
doesn’t resonate with you. Cal provides an
inspiring alternative to the helpless reliance
on an unfelt passion many experience.
Remember, this book is not about killing
passion – it’s about creating a passion
that is true and sustainable throughout
your life!
Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion
You need to get the book to read the
referenced story below, but not to
understand the point:
I tell this story because these are hardly the
actions of someone passionate about
technology and entrepreneurship, yet this
was less than a year before Jobs started
Apple Computer. In other words, in the
months leading up to the start of his
visionary company, Steve Jobs was
something of a conflicted young man,
seeking spiritual enlightenment and
dabbling in electronics only when it
promised to earn him quick cash.
Newport goes on to show the rarity of true
pre-existing passion:
“In the movies there’s this idea that you
should just go for your dream,” Glass tells
them. “But 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 yoruself 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.
It turns out that oftentimes passion is a
side-effect of mastery. Think in your life
about anything that you’ve excelled at – I
bet you enjoyed it.
The worship of passion can be dangerous
when it drives people to constantly
question they’re current position.
The more we focused on loving what we
do, the less we ended up loving it.
We like to hold onto the stories of people
who knew exactly what they wanted their
whole lives and held onto that passion even
though we know it’s so rare. We look
around and see a vast majority of people
who didn’t have one single passion
identified their entire lives. Just because
that’s right for somebody doesn’t mean it’s
right for you. When you stop worrying about
what your passion is then it’s much more
likely to surface.
Rule #2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
(Or, the Importance of Skill)
Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses
on what you can offer the world, the
passion mindset focuses instead on what
the world can offer you.
There are two reasons he dislikes the
passion mindset:
First, when you gocus only on what your
work offers you, it makes you hyperaware
of what you don’t like about it, leading to
chronic unhappiness…
Second, and more serious, the deep
questions driving the passion mindset –
“Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?” –
are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is
this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?”
rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses.
He also does a great job at calling out
those people fostering a “courage culture”
which is…
a growing community of authors and online
commentators pushing the following idea:
The biggest obstacle between you and work
you love is a lack of courage – the courage
required to step away from “other people’s
definition of success” and to follow your
dream. It’s an idea that makes perfect
sense when presented against the backdrop
of the passion mindset: If there’s some
perfect job waiting for us out there, every
day we’re not following this passion is a
wasted day.
Newport later talks about the importance of
courage in different areas of managing your
career, specifically when others tell you to
take a promotion with less control when
you need to fight to maintain autonomy.
The courage culture he’s railing against
here is the one that just yells at anybody
unhappy that they’re being a pussy and
need to drop everything to chase a passion
that’s not there (if it was it would have
already pulled them where they need to
be).
There are Three Disqualifiers for Applying
the Craftsman Mindset:
1. The job presents few opportunities to
distinguish yourself by developing
relevant skills that are rare and
valuable.
2. The job focuses on something you
think is useless or even actively bad for
the world.
3. The job forces you to work with people
you really dislike.
To become great requires more than just
hours of practice, it requires hours of
deliberate practice which is
…focuse[d] on difficult activities, carefully
chosen to stretch your abilities where they
most need stretching and that provide
immediate feedback.
There are Five Habits of a Craftsman:
1. Decide What Capital Market You’re In.
Winner-take-all versus auction. A
winner-take-all market is one where
you have one skill that you must
master. He uses the example of writing
– the only thing that matters is your
ability to write. “An auction market, by
contrast, is less structured: There are
many different types of career capital,
and each person might generate a
unique collection. The clean-tech space
is an auction market. Mike Jackson’s
capital, for example, included expertise
in renewable energy markets and
entrepreneurship, but there are a
variety of other types of relevant skills
that also could have led to a job in this
field.”
2. Identify Your Capital Type. This is an
automatic answer if you are in a
winner-take-all market like writing –
your capital is your writing! However, if
you are in an auction market then you
need to decide where to focus your
energies. “A useful heuristic in this
situation is to seek open gates –
opportunities to build capital that are
already open to you.”
3. Define “Good”. Without a clear goal
(or, definition of what “good” means)
then it is nearly impossible to sustain
deliberate practice. You may need to
define your skill by “good enough to
get this job with this company” or
“good enough to be noticed by this
person” or something similar. Define
how good your skill must get to
progress.
4. Stretch and Destroy. It’s difficult to
maintain deliberate practice because
it’s “often the opposite of enjoyable.”
This, however, is the key to becoming
great. It comes naturally for athletes
because it’s so in their face but is easy
to shirk for knowledge workers. Later in
the book he recommends measuring
the time you spend in deliberate
practice each month.
5. Be Patient. It’s hard and takes a while.
Be deliberate, be diligent, and trust that
you’re hard work will be worth
something.
Rule #3: Turn Down a Promotion (Or, the
Importance of Control)
…if your goal is to love what you do, your
first step is to acquire career capital. Your
next step is to invest this capital in the
traits that define great work. Control is one
of the morst important targets you can
choose for this investment.
He then describes how so many people that
try to grab control of their career without
any capital end up losing. Without career
capital, control is often unsustainable.
When you get enough career capital to take
control you will also be hitting the point
where your boss never wants you to leave.
They and those around you will pressure
you into staying or moving into a situation
that may have less control but more pay.
He quotes Derek Sivers to describe The
Law of Financial Viability, “I have this
principle about money that overrides my
other life rules… Do what people are willing
to pay for. ”
Newport uses this to decide whether or not
to “follow an appealing pursuit that will
introduce more control into your work life…”
Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big (Or, the
Importance of Mission)
A good career mission is similar to a
scientific breakthrough – it’s an innovation
waiting to be discovered int he 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.
This switches the order most of us like to
attack the idea of a mission. We feel we
must first have a mission to energize our
work. Newport’s finding liberates us from
this perceived need and shows us that
most of the time people find their missions
when they have already become skilled in
their 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.
Newport quotes Peter Sims :
“Rather than believing they [Steve Jobs,
Chris Rock, Frank Gehry] 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, and from small
but significant wins” [emphasis mine
[Newport’s!]]. This rapid and frequent
feedback, Sims argues, “allows them to find
unexpected avenues and arrive at
extraordinary outcomes.”
He goes on about little bets later on:
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.
If career capital makes it possible to
identify a compelling mission, then it’s a
strategy of a little bets that gives you a
good shot of succeeding in this mission.
In his section “Missions Require Marketing”
he introduces 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.
______________________
TL/DR:
Well, there are some good things Cal
Newport wrote. Most business books aren’t
worth anything more than a summary can
provide – this one is, though, so get it!
Working right trumps finding the right
work.