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Introduction

The Passion of the Monk“ ‘Follow your passion’ isdangerous advice.”

Thomas had this realization inone of the last places you mightexpect. He was walking a trailthrough the oak forest that outlinesthe southern bowl of TremperMountain. The trail was one ofmany that cross through the 230-acre property of the Zen MountainMonastery, which has called thiscorner of the Catskill Mountains its

home since the early 1980s. Thomaswas halfway through a two-yearstay at the monastery, where he wasa practicing lay monk. His arrival,one year earlier, had been thefulfillment of a dream-job fantasythat he had nurtured for years. Hehad followed his passion for allthings Zen into this secludedCatskills retreat and had expectedhappiness in return. As he stood inthe oak forest that afternoon,however, he began to cry, hisfantasy crumbling around him.

“I was always asking, ‘What’sthe meaning of life?’ ” Thomas told

me when I first met him, at a coffeeshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts.By then, several years had passedsince Thomas’s realization in theCatskills, but the path that led himto that point remained clear and hewas eager to talk about it, as if therecounting would help exorcise thedemons of his complicated past.

After earning a pair of bachelor’sdegrees in philosophy and theology,then a master’s degree incomparative religion, Thomasdecided that Zen Buddhist practicewas the key to a meaningful life.“There was such a big crossover

between the philosophy I wasstudying and Buddhism that Ithought, ‘Let me just go practiceBuddhism directly to answer thesebig questions,’ ” he told me.

After graduation, however,Thomas needed money, so he tookon a variety of jobs. He spent ayear, for example, teaching Englishin Gumi, an industrial town incentral South Korea. To many, lifein East Asia might sound romantic,but this exoticism soon wore off forThomas. “Every Friday night, afterwork, the men would gather atthese street carts, which had tents

extending out from them,” Thomastold me. “They gathered to drinksoju [a distilled rice liquor] late intothe night. During winter therewould be steam coming from thesetents, from all the men drinking.What I remember most, however, isthat the next morning the streetswould be covered in dry vomit.”

Thomas’s search also inspiredhim to travel across China and intoTibet, and to spend time in SouthAfrica, among other journeys,before ending up in Londonworking a rather dull job in dataentry. Throughout this period,

Thomas nurtured his convictionthat Buddhism held the key to hishappiness. Over time, thisdaydream evolved into the idea ofhim living as a monk. “I had builtup such an incredible fantasy aboutZen practice and living in a Zenmonastery,” he explained to me. “Itcame to represent my dream cometrue.” All other work paled incomparison to this fantasy. He wasdedicated to following his passion.

It was while in London thatThomas first learned about the ZenMountain Monastery, and he wasimmediately attracted to its

seriousness. “These people werepracticing really intense and sincereZen,” he recalls. His passioninsisted that the Zen MountainMonastery was where he belonged.

It took nine months for Thomasto complete the application process.When he finally arrived at Kennedyairport, having been approved tocome live and practice at themonastery, he boarded a bus to takehim into the Catskill countryside.The ride took three hours. Afterleaving the city sprawl, the busproceeded through a series ofquaint towns, with the scenery

getting “progressively morebeautiful.” In a scene of almostcontrived symbolism, the buseventually reached the foot ofTremper Mountain, where itstopped and let Thomas out at acrossroads. He walked from the busstop down the road leading to themonastery entrance, which wasguarded by a pair of wrought-irongates, left open for new arrivals.

Once on the grounds, Thomasapproached the main building, afour-story converted churchconstructed from local bluestoneand timbered with local oak. “It is

as if the mountain offered itself as adwelling place for spiritualpractice” is how the monks of themonastery describe it in theirofficial literature. Pushing past theoaken double doors, Thomas wasgreeted by a monk who had beentasked with welcoming newcomers.Struggling to describe the emotionsof this experience, Thomas finallymanaged to explain it to me asfollows: “It was like being reallyhungry, and you know that you’regoing to get this amazing meal—that is what this represented forme.”

Thomas’s new life as a monkstarted well enough. He lived in asmall cabin, set back in the woodsfrom the main building. Early in hisvisit he asked a senior monk, whohad been living in a similar cabinfor over fifteen years, if he ever gottired of walking the trail connectingthe residences to the main building.“I’m only just starting to learn it,”the monk replied mindfully.

The days at the Zen MountainMonastery started as early as 4:30A.M., depending on the time ofyear. Remaining in silence, themonks would greet the morning

with forty to eighty minutes ofmeditation on mats arranged with“geometric precision” in the mainhall. The view outside the Gothicwindows at the front of the hall wasspectacular, but the mats kept themeditators too low to see out. Apair of hall monitors sat at the backof the room, occasionally pacingamong the mats. Thomas explained:“If you found yourself fallingasleep, you could request that theyhit you with a stick they kept forthis purpose.”

After breakfast, eaten in the samegreat hall, everyone was assigned

jobs. Thomas spent time cleaningtoilets and shoveling ditches as partof his housecleaning duties, but hewas also assigned, somewhatanachronistically, to handle thegraphic design for the monastery’sprint journal. A typical daycontinued with more meditation,interviews with senior practitioners,and often long, inscrutable Dharmalectures. The monks were given abreak each evening before dinner.Thomas often took advantage ofthis respite to light the woodstovein his cabin, preparing for the coldCatskill nights.

Thomas’s problems began withthe koans. A koan, in the Zentradition, is a word puzzle, oftenpresented as a story or a question.They’re meant to defy logicalanswers and therefore force you toaccess a more intuitiveunderstanding of reality. Inexplaining the concept to me,Thomas gave the followingexample, which he had encounteredearly in his practice: “Show me animmovable tree in a heavy wind.”

“I don’t even know what ananswer to that would look like,” Iprotested.

“In an interview,” he explained,“you have to answer right away, nothinking. If you pause like that, theykick you out of the room; theinterview is over.”

“Okay, I would have beenkicked out.”

“Here’s the answer I gave to passthe koan,” he said. “I stood, like atree, and waved my hands slightlyas if in a wind. Right? The pointwas that this is a concept you reallycouldn’t capture in words.”

One of the first major hurdles ayoung practitioner faces in seriousZen practice is the Mu koan:

Passing this koan is the first of the“eight gates” of Zen Buddhism.Until you reach this milestone,you’re not yet considered a seriousstudent of the practice. Thomasseemed reluctant to explain thiskoan to me. I had encountered thisbefore in my research on Zen:Because these puzzles defyrationality, any attempt to describethem to a non-practitioner can betrivializing. Because of this I didn’tpress Thomas for details. Instead, IGoogled it. Here’s one translation Ifound:

A pilgrim of the way asked theGrand Master Zhaozhou,“Does a dog have Buddhanature or not?” Zhaozhousaid, “Mu.”

In Chinese, mu translatesroughly to “no.” According to theinterpretations I found, Zhaozhou isnot answering the pilgrim’squestion, but is instead pushing itback to the questioner. Thomasstruggled to pass this koan,focusing on it intensely for months.“I worked and worked on thatkoan,” he told me. “I went to bed

with it; I let it inhabit my wholebody.”

Then he cracked it.“One day I was walking in the

forest, and a moment passed. I hadbeen looking at these leaves, and ‘I’had disappeared. We all experiencethings like this but don’t attach anyimportance to them. But when I hadthis experience, I was prepared forit, and it clicked. I realized, ‘This isthe whole koan.’ ” Thomas hadachieved a glimpse of the unity ofnature that forms the core of theBuddhist understanding of theworld. It was this unity that

provided the answer to the koan.Excited, at his next interview with asenior monk Thomas made agesture—“a simple gesture,something you might do ineveryday life”—that made it clearthat he had an intuitiveunderstanding of the koan’sanswer. He had made it through thefirst gate: He was officially a seriousstudent of Zen.

It was not long after passing theMu koan that Thomas had hisrealization about passion. He waswalking in the same woods wherehe had cracked the koan. Armed

with the insight provided bypassing the Mu, he had begun tounderstand the once obtuse lecturesgiven most days by the seniormonks. “As I walked that trail, Irealized that these lectures were alltalking about the same thing as theMu koan,” said Thomas. In otherwords, this was it. This was whatlife as a Zen monk offered:increasingly sophisticated musingson this one, core insight.

He had reached the zenith of hispassion—he could now properlycall himself a Zen practitioner—andyet, he was not experiencing the

undiluted peace and happiness thathad populated his daydreams.

“The reality was, nothing hadchanged. I was exactly the sameperson, with the same worries andanxieties. It was late on a Sundayafternoon when I came to thisrealization, and I just startedcrying.”

Thomas had followed hispassion to the Zen MountainMonastery, believing, as many do,that the key to happiness isidentifying your true calling andthen chasing after it with all thecourage you can muster. But as

Thomas experienced that lateSunday afternoon in the oak forest,this belief is frighteningly naïve.Fulfilling his dream to become afull-time Zen practitioner did notmagically make his life wonderful.

As Thomas discovered, the pathto happiness—at least as it concernswhat you do for a living—is morecomplicated than simply answeringthe classic question “What should Ido with my life?”

A Quest BeginsBy the summer of 2010, I hadbecome obsessed with answering asimple question: Why do somepeople end up loving what they do,while so many others fail at thisgoal? It was this obsession that ledme to people like Thomas, whosestories helped cement an insight Ihad long suspected to be true:When it comes to creating workyou love, following your passion isnot particularly useful advice.

The explanation for what startedme down this path goes somethinglike this: During the summer of

2010, when this preoccupation firstpicked up steam, I was apostdoctoral associate at MIT,where I had earned my PhD incomputer science the year before. Iwas on track to become a professor,which, at a graduate program likeMIT’s, is considered to be the onlyrespectable path. If done right, aprofessorship is a job for life. Inother words, in 2010 I was planningwhat might well be my first and lastjob hunt. If there was ever a time tofigure out what generates a passionfor one’s livelihood, this was it.

Tugging more insistently at my

attention during this period was thevery real possibility that I wouldn’tend up with a professorship at all.Not long after meeting Thomas, Ihad set up a meeting with myadvisor to discuss my academic jobsearch. “How bad of a school areyou willing to go to?” was hisopening question. The academic jobmarket is always brutal, but in 2010,with an economy still in recession,it was especially tough.

To complicate matters, myresearch specialty hadn’t proven tobe all that popular in recent years.The last two students to graduate

from the group where I wrote mydissertation both ended up withprofessorships in Asia, while thelast two postdocs to pass throughthe group ended up in Lugano,Switzerland, and Winnipeg,Canada, respectively. “I have to say,I found the whole process to bepretty hard, stressful, anddepressing,” one of these formerstudents told me. Given that mywife and I wanted to stay in theUnited States, and preferably on theEast Coast, a choice that drasticallynarrowed our options, I had to facethe very real possibility that my

academic job search would be abust, forcing me to essentially startfrom scratch in figuring out what todo with my life.

This was the backdrop againstwhich I launched what I eventuallybegan to refer to as “my quest.” Myquestion was clear: How do peopleend up loving what they do? And Ineeded an answer.

This book documents what Idiscovered in my search.

Here’s what you can expect in thepages ahead:

As mentioned, I didn’t get far inmy quest before I realized, asThomas did before me, that theconventional wisdom on careersuccess—follow your passion—isseriously flawed. It not only fails todescribe how most people actuallyend up with compelling careers, butfor many people it can actuallymake things worse: leading tochronic job shifting and unrelentingangst when, as it did for Thomas,one’s reality inevitably falls short ofthe dream.

With this as a starting point, Ibegin with Rule #1, in which I tear

down the supremacy of this passionhypothesis. But I don’t stop there.My quest pushed me beyondidentifying what doesn’t work,insisting that I also answer thefollowing: If “follow yourpassion” is bad advice, whatshould I do instead? My search forthis answer, described in Rules#2–4, brought me to unexpectedplaces. To better understand theimportance of autonomy, forexample, I ended up spending a dayat an organic farm owned by ayoung Ivy League graduate. Tobetter nuance my understanding of

skill, I spent time with professionalmusicians—examples of a dyingcraftsman culture that I thought hadsomething important to say abouthow we approach work. I alsodived into the world of venturecapitalists, screenwriters, rock-starcomputer programmers, and ofcourse, hotshot professors, to namejust a few more examples amongmany—all in an effort to pick apartwhat matters and what doesn’twhen building a compelling career.I was surprised by how manysources of insight became visibleonce I burned off the obscuring fog

generated by a mono-focusedinsistence on following yourpassion.

The narratives in this book arebound by a common thread: theimportance of ability. The thingsthat make a great job great, Idiscovered, are rare and valuable. Ifyou want them in your workinglife, you need something rare andvaluable to offer in return. In otherwords, you need to be good atsomething before you can expect agood job.

Of course, mastery by itself isnot enough to guarantee happiness:

The many examples of well-respected but miserableworkaholics support this claim.Accordingly, this main thread of myargument moves beyond the mereacquisition of useful skills and intothe subtle art of investing the careercapital this generates into the righttypes of traits in your working life.

This argument flips conventionalwisdom. It relegates passion to thesidelines, claiming that this feelingis an epiphenomenon of a workinglife well lived. Don’t follow yourpassion; rather, let it follow you inyour quest to become, in the words

of my favorite Steve Martin quote,“so good that they can’t ignoreyou.”

To many, this concept is aradical shift, and as with anydisruptive idea, it needs to make asplashy entrance. This is why Iwrote this book in a manifestostyle. I divided the content into four“rules,” each given a deliberatelyprovocative title. I also tried tomake the book short and punchy: Iwant to introduce a new way oflooking at the world, but I don’twant to belabor the insights withexcessive examples and

discussions. This book does offerconcrete advice, but you won’t findten-step systems or self-assessmentquizzes in these pages. This topic istoo subtle to be reduced to theformulaic.

By the end of this book, you’llhave learned how my own storyends up and the specific ways I’mapplying the insights in my ownworking life. We’ll also return toThomas, who after his dispiritingrealization at the monastery wasable to return to his first principles,move his focus away from findingthe right work and toward working

right, and eventually build, for thefirst time in his life, a love for whathe does. This is the happiness thatyou, too, should demand.

It’s my hope that the insights thatfollow will free you from simplisticcatchphrases like “follow yourpassion” and “do what you love”—the type of catchphrases that havehelped spawn the career confusionthat afflicts so many today—andinstead, provide you with a realisticpath toward a meaningful andengaging working life.

RULE #1

Don’t Follow Your Passion

Chapter One

The “Passion” of Steve Jobs

In which I question the validity ofthe passion hypothesis, which saysthat the key to occupationalhappiness is to match your job to apre-existing passion.

The Passion HypothesisIn June 2005, Steve Jobs took thepodium at Stanford Stadium to givethe commencement speech toStanford’s graduating class.Wearing jeans and sandals underhis formal robe, Jobs addressed acrowd of 23,000 with a shortspeech that drew lessons from hislife. About a third of the way intothe address, Jobs offered thefollowing advice:

You’ve got to find what youlove…. [T]he only way to dogreat work is to love what you

do. If you haven’t found ityet, keep looking, and don’tsettle.

When he finished, he received astanding ovation.

Though Jobs’s address containedseveral different lessons, hisemphasis on doing what you lovewas the clear standout. In theofficial press release describing theevent, for example, Stanford’s newsservice reported that Jobs “urgedgraduates to pursue their dreams.”

Soon after, an unofficial videoof the address was posted on

YouTube, where it went viral,gathering over 3.5 million views.When Stanford posted an officialvideo, it gathered an additional 3million views. The comments onthese clips homed in on theimportance of loving your work,with viewers summarizing theirreactions in similar ways:

“The most valuable lesson is tofind your purpose, follow yourpassions…. Life is too short to bedoing what you think you have todo.”

“Follow your passions—life isfor the living.”

“Passion is the engine to livingyour life.”

“[It’s] passion for your work thatcounts.”

“ ‘Don’t Settle.’ Amen.”In other words, many of the

millions of people who viewed thisspeech were excited to see SteveJobs—a guru of iconoclasticthinking—put his stamp ofapproval on an immenselyappealing piece of popular careeradvice, which I call the passionhypothesis:

The Passion Hypothesis

The key to occupationalhappiness is to first figure outwhat you’re passionate aboutand then find a job thatmatches this passion.

This hypothesis is one ofmodern American society’s mostwell-worn themes. Those of uslucky enough to have some choicein what we do with our lives arebombarded with this message,starting at an early age. We are toldto lionize those with the courage tofollow their passion, and pity theconformist drones who cling to the

safe path.If you doubt the ubiquity of this

message, spend a few minutesbrowsing the career-advice shelf thenext time you visit a bookstore.Once you look past the technicalmanuals on résumé writing and job-interview etiquette, it’s hard to finda book that doesn’t promote thepassion hypothesis. These bookshave titles like Career Match:Connecting Who You Are withWhat You’ll Love to Do, and DoWhat You Are: Discover the PerfectCareer for You Through theSecrets of Personality Type, and

they promise that you’re just a fewpersonality tests away from findingyour dream job. Recently, a new,more aggressive strain of thepassion hypothesis has beenspreading—a strain that despairsthat traditional “cubicle jobs,” bytheir very nature, are bad, and thatpassion requires that you strike outon your own. This is where youfind titles like Escape from CubicleNation, which, as one reviewdescribed it, “teaches the tricksbehind finding what makes youpurr.”

These books, as well as the

thousands of full-time bloggers,professional counselors, and self-proclaimed gurus who orbit thesesame core issues of workplacehappiness, all peddle the samelesson: to be happy, you mustfollow your passion. As oneprominent career counselor toldme, “do what you love, and themoney will follow” has become thede facto motto of the career-advicefield.

There is, however, a problemlurking here: When you look pastthe feel-good slogans and go deeperinto the details of how passionate

people like Steve Jobs really gotstarted, or ask scientists about whatactually predicts workplacehappiness, the issue becomes muchmore complicated. You begin tofind threads of nuance that, oncepulled, unravel the tight certainty ofthe passion hypothesis, eventuallyleading to an unsettling recognition:“Follow your passion” might justbe terrible advice.

It was around the time I wastransitioning from graduate schoolthat I started to pull on thesethreads, eventually leading to mycomplete rejection of the passion

hypothesis and kicking off myquest to find out what really mattersfor creating work you love. Rule #1is dedicated to laying out myargument against passion, as thisinsight—that “follow your passion”is bad advice—provides thefoundation for everything thatfollows. Perhaps the best place tostart is where we began, with thereal story of Steve Jobs and thefounding of Apple Computer.

Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not WhatHe Said

If you had met a young Steve Jobsin the years leading up to hisfounding of Apple Computer, youwouldn’t have pegged him assomeone who was passionate aboutstarting a technology company.Jobs had attended Reed College, aprestigious liberal arts enclave inOregon, where he grew his hairlong and took to walking barefoot.Unlike other technology visionariesof his era, Jobs wasn’t particularlyinterested in either business orelectronics as a student. He instead

studied Western history and dance,and dabbled in Eastern mysticism.

Jobs dropped out of college afterhis first year, but remained oncampus for a while, sleeping onfloors and scrounging free meals atthe local Hare Krishna temple. Hisnon-conformity made him acampus celebrity—a “freak” in theterminology of the times. As JeffreyS. Young notes in his exhaustivelyresearched 1988 biography, SteveJobs: The Journey Is the Reward,Jobs eventually grew tired of beinga pauper and, during the early1970s, returned home to California,

where he moved back in with hisparents and talked himself into anight-shift job at Atari. (Thecompany had caught his attentionwith an ad in the San Jose MercuryNews that read, “Have fun and makemoney.”) During this period, Jobssplit his time between Atari and theAll-One Farm, a country communelocated north of San Francisco. Atone point, he left his job at Atari forseveral months to make amendicants’ spiritual journeythrough India, and on returninghome he began to train seriously atthe nearby Los Altos Zen Center.

In 1974, after Jobs’s return fromIndia, a local engineer andentrepreneur named Alex Kamradtstarted a computer time-sharingcompany dubbed Call-in Computer.Kamradt approached SteveWozniak to design a terminal devicehe could sell to clients to use foraccessing his central computer.Unlike Jobs, Wozniak was a trueelectronics whiz who was obsessedwith technology and had studied itformally at college. On the flip side,however, Wozniak couldn’tstomach business, so he allowedJobs, a longtime friend, to handle

the details of the arrangement. Allwas going well until the fall of1975, when Jobs left for the seasonto spend time at the All-Onecommune. Unfortunately, he failedto tell Kamradt he was leaving.When he returned, he had beenreplaced.

I tell this story because these arehardly the actions of someonepassionate about technology andentrepreneurship, yet this was lessthan a year before Jobs startedApple Computer. In other words, inthe months leading up to the start ofhis visionary company, Steve Jobs

was something of a conflictedyoung man, seeking spiritualenlightenment and dabbling inelectronics only when it promisedto earn him quick cash.

It was with this mindset that laterthat same year, Jobs stumbled intohis big break. He noticed that thelocal “wireheads” were excited bythe introduction of model-kitcomputers that enthusiasts couldassemble at home. (He wasn’t alonein noticing the potential of thisexcitement. When an ambitiousyoung Harvard student saw the firstkit computer grace the cover of

Popular Electronics magazine, heformed a company to develop aversion of the BASIC programminglanguage for the new machine,eventually dropping out of schoolto grow the business. He called thenew firm Microsoft.)

Jobs pitched Wozniak the idea ofdesigning one of these kit computercircuit boards so they could sellthem to local hobbyists. The initialplan was to make the boards for$25 apiece and sell them for $50.Jobs wanted to sell one hundred,total, which, after removing thecosts of printing the boards, and a

$1,500 fee for the initial boarddesign, would leave them with anice $1,000 profit. Neither Wozniaknor Jobs left their regular jobs: Thiswas strictly a low-risk venturemeant for their free time.

From this point, however, thestory quickly veers into legend.Steve arrived barefoot at the ByteShop, Paul Terrell’s pioneeringMountain View computer store, andoffered Terrell the circuit boardsfor sale. Terrell didn’t want to sellplain boards, but said he would buyfully assembled computers. Hewould pay $500 for each, and

wanted fifty as soon as they couldbe delivered. Jobs jumped at theopportunity to make an even largeramount of money and beganscrounging together start-up capital.It was in this unexpected windfallthat Apple Computer was born. AsYoung emphasizes, “Their planswere circumspect and small-time.They weren’t dreaming of takingover the world.”

The Messy Lessons of JobsI shared the details of Steve Jobs’sstory, because when it comes tofinding fulfilling work, the detailsmatter. If a young Steve Jobs hadtaken his own advice and decidedto only pursue work he loved, wewould probably find him today asone of the Los Altos Zen Center’smost popular teachers. But hedidn’t follow this simple advice.Apple Computer was decidedly notborn out of passion, but insteadwas the result of a lucky break—a“small-time” scheme thatunexpectedly took off.

I don’t doubt that Jobseventually grew passionate abouthis work: If you’ve watched one ofhis famous keynote addresses,you’ve seen a man who obviouslyloved what he did. But so what? Allthat tells us is that it’s good to enjoywhat you do. This advice, thoughtrue, borders on the tautological anddoesn’t help us with the pressingquestion that we actually careabout: How do we find work thatwe’ll eventually love? Like Jobs,should we resist settling into onerigid career and instead try lots ofsmall schemes, waiting for one to

take off? Does it matter whatgeneral field we explore? How dowe know when to stick with aproject or when to move on? Inother words, Jobs’s story generatesmore questions than it answers.Perhaps the only thing it does makeclear is that, at least for Jobs,“follow your passion” was notparticularly useful advice.

Chapter Two

Passion Is Rare

In which I argue that the more youseek examples of the passionhypothesis, the more you recognizeits rarity.

The Roadtrip Nation RevelationIt turns out that Jobs’s complicatedpath to fulfilling work is commonamong interesting people withinteresting careers. In 2001, a groupof four friends, all recentlygraduated from college, set out on across-country road trip to interviewpeople who “[lived] lives centeredaround what was meaningful tothem.” The friends sought advicefor shaping their own careers intosomething fulfilling. They filmed adocumentary about their trip, whichwas then expanded into a series onPBS. They eventually launched a

nonprofit called Roadtrip Nation,with the goal of helping otheryoung people replicate theirjourney. What makes RoadtripNation relevant is that it maintainsan extensive video library of theinterviews conducted for theproject1. There’s perhaps no bettersingle resource for diving into thereality of how people end up withcompelling careers.

When you spend time with thisarchive, which is available for freeonline, you soon notice that themessy nature of Steve Jobs’s path ismore the rule than the exception. In

an interview with the public radiohost Ira Glass, for example, a groupof three undergraduates press himfor wisdom on how to “figure outwhat you want” and “know whatyou’ll be good at.”

“In the movies there’s this ideathat you should just go for yourdream,” Glass tells them. “But Idon’t believe that. Things happen instages.”

Glass emphasizes that it takestime to get good at anything,recounting the many years it tookhim to master radio to the pointwhere he had interesting options.

“The key thing is to force yourselfthrough the work, force the skills tocome; that’s the hardest phase,” hesays.

Noticing the stricken faces of hisinterviewers, who were perhapshoping to hear something moreuplifting than work is hard, so suckit up, Glass continues: “I feel likeyour problem is that you’re tryingto judge all things in the abstractbefore you do them. That’s yourtragic mistake.”2

Other interviews in the archivepromote this same idea that it’s hardto predict in advance what you’ll

eventually grow to love. Theastrobiologist Andrew Steele, forexample, exclaims, “No, I had noidea what I was going to do. Iobject to systems that say youshould decide now what you’regoing to do.” One of the studentsasks Steele if he had started his PhDprogram “hoping you’d one daychange the world.”

“No,” Steele responds, “I justwanted options.”3

Al Merrick, the founder ofChannel Island Surfboards, tells asimilar tale of stumbling intopassion over time. “People are in a

rush to start their lives, and it’ssad,” he tells his interviewers. “Ididn’t go out with the idea ofmaking a big empire,” he explains.“I set goals for myself at being thebest I could be at what[ever] Idid.”4

In another clip, William Morris,a renowned glass blower based inStanwood, Washington, brings agroup of students to his workshopset in a converted barn surroundedby lush, Pacific Northwest forest. “Ihave a ton of different interests, andI don’t have focus,” one of thestudents complains. Morris looks at

her: “You’ll never be sure. Youdon’t want to be sure.”5

These interviews emphasize animportant point: Compellingcareers often have complexorigins that reject the simple ideathat all you have to do is followyour passion.

This observation may come as asurprise for those of us who havelong basked in the glow of thepassion hypothesis. It wouldn’t,however, surprise the manyscientists who have studiedquestions of workplace satisfactionusing rigorous peer-reviewed

research. They’ve been discoveringsimilar conclusions for decades, butto date, not many people in thecareer-advice field have paid themserious attention. It’s to theseoverlooked research efforts that Iturn your attention next.

The Science of PassionWhy do some people enjoy theirwork while so many other peopledon’t? Here’s the CliffsNotessummary of the social scienceresearch in this area: There aremany complex reasons forworkplace satisfaction, but thereductive notion of matching yourjob to a pre-existing passion is notamong them.

To give you a better sense of therealities uncovered by this research,here are three of the moreinteresting conclusions I’veencountered:

Conclusion #1: Career PassionsAre Rare

In 2002, a research team led by theCanadian psychologist Robert J.Vallerand administered an extensivequestionnaire to a group of 539Canadian university students6. Thequestionnaire’s prompts weredesigned to answer two importantquestions: Do these students havepassions? And if so, what are they?

At the core of the passionhypothesis is the assumption thatwe all have pre-existing passionswaiting to be discovered. Thisexperiment puts that assumption to

the test. Here’s what it found: 84percent of the students surveyedwere identified as having a passion.This sounds like good news forsupporters of the passionhypothesis—that is, until you divedeeper into the details of thesepursuits. Here are the top fiveidentified passions: dance, hockey(these were Canadian students,mind you), skiing, reading, andswimming. Though dear to thehearts of the students, thesepassions don’t have much to offerwhen it comes to choosing a job. Infact, less than 4 percent of the total

identified passions had any relationto work or education, with theremaining 96 percent describinghobby-style interests such as sportsand art.

Take a moment to absorb thisresult, as it deals a strong blow tothe passion hypothesis. How can wefollow our passions if we don’thave any relevant passions tofollow? At least for these Canadiancollege students, the vast majoritywill need a different strategy forchoosing their career.

Conclusion #2: Passion TakesTime

Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor oforganizational behavior at YaleUniversity, has made a careerstudying how people think abouttheir work. Her breakthroughpaper, published in the Journal ofResearch in Personality while shewas still a graduate student,explores the distinction between ajob, a career, and a calling7. A job,in Wrzesniewski’s formulation, is away to pay the bills, a career is apath toward increasingly betterwork, and a calling is work that’s

an important part of your life and avital part of your identity.

Wrzesniewski surveyedemployees from a variety ofoccupations, from doctors tocomputer programmers to clericalworkers, and found that mostpeople strongly identify their workwith one of these three categories.A possible explanation for thesedifferent classifications is that someoccupations are better than others.The passion hypothesis, forexample, predicts that occupationsthat match common passions, suchas being a doctor or a teacher,

should have a high proportion ofpeople who experience the work asa true calling, while less flashyoccupations—the type that no onedaydreams about—should havealmost no one experiencing thework as a calling. To test thisexplanation, Wrzesniewski lookedat a group of employees who allhad the same position and nearlyidentical work responsibilities:college administrative assistants.She found, to her admitted surprise,that these employees were roughlyevenly split between seeing theirposition as a job, a career, or a

calling. In other words, it seemsthat the type of work alone does notnecessarily predict how muchpeople enjoy it.

Supporters of the passionhypothesis, however, might replythat a position like a collegeadministrative assistant will attract awide variety of employees. Somemight arrive at the position becausethey have a passion for highereducation and will therefore lovethe work, while others mightstumble into the job for otherreasons, perhaps because it’s stableand has good benefits, and

therefore will have a less exaltedexperience.

But Wrzesniewski wasn’t done.She surveyed the assistants to figureout why they saw their work sodifferently, and discovered that thestrongest predictor of an assistantseeing her work as a calling was thenumber of years spent on the job.In other words, the moreexperience an assistant had, themore likely she was to love herwork.

This result deals another blow tothe passion hypothesis. InWrzesniewski’s research, the

happiest, most passionateemployees are not those whofollowed their passion into aposition, but instead those whohave been around long enough tobecome good at what they do. Onreflection, this makes sense. If youhave many years’ experience, thenyou’ve had time to get better atwhat you do and develop a feelingof efficacy. It also gives you time todevelop strong relationships withyour coworkers and to see manyexamples of your work benefitingothers. What’s important here,however, is that this explanation,

though reasonable, contradicts thepassion hypothesis, which insteademphasizes the immediatehappiness that comes frommatching your job to a true passion.

Conclusion #3: Passion Is a SideEffect of Mastery

Not long into his popular TED talk,titled “On the Surprising Science ofMotivation,” author Daniel Pink,discussing his book Drive, tells theaudience that he spent the lastcouple of years studying the scienceof human motivation. “I’m tellingyou, it’s not even close,” he says.“If you look at the science, there isa mismatch between what scienceknows and what business does.”When Pink talks about “whatscience knows,” he’s referring, forthe most part, to a forty-year-old

theoretical framework known asSelf-Determination Theory (SDT),which is arguably the bestunderstanding science currently hasfor why some pursuits get ourengines running while others leaveus cold.8

SDT tells us that motivation, inthe workplace or elsewhere,requires that you fulfill three basicpsychological needs—factorsdescribed as the “nutriments”required to feel intrinsicallymotivated for your work:

Autonomy: the feeling that you

have control over your day,and that your actions areimportantCompetence: the feeling thatyou are good at what you doRelatedness: the feeling ofconnection to other people

The last need is the leastsurprising: If you feel close topeople at work, you’re going toenjoy work more. It’s the first twoneeds that prove more interesting.It’s clear, for example, thatautonomy and competence arerelated. In most jobs, as you

become better at what you do, notonly do you get the sense ofaccomplishment that comes frombeing good, but you’re typicallyalso rewarded with more controlover your responsibilities. Theseresults help explain AmyWrzesniewski’s findings: Perhapsone reason that more experiencedassistants enjoyed their work wasbecause it takes time to build thecompetence and autonomy thatgenerates this enjoyment.

Of equal interest is what this listof basic psychological needs doesnot include. Notice, scientists did

not find “matching work to pre-existing passions” as beingimportant for motivation. The traitsthey did find, by contrast, are moregeneral and are agnostic to thespecific type of work in question.Competence and autonomy, forexample, are achievable by mostpeople in a wide variety of jobs—assuming they’re willing to put inthe hard work required for mastery.This message is not as inspiring as“follow your passion and you’llimmediately be happy,” but itcertainly has a ring of truth. Inother words, working right trumps

finding the right work.

Chapter Three

Passion Is Dangerous

In which I argue that subscribingto the passion hypothesis can makeyou less happy.

The Birth of the Passion HypothesisIt’s difficult to pinpoint the exactmoment when our society beganemphasizing the importance offollowing your passion, but a goodapproximation is the 1970publication of What Color Is YourParachute? The author, RichardBolles, was working at the time forthe Episcopal Church advisingcampus ministers, many of whomwere in danger of losing their jobs.He published the first edition ofParachute as a straightforwardcollection of tips for those facingcareer change. The original print

run was one hundred copies.The premise of Bolles’s guide

sounds self-evident to the modernear: “[Figure] out what you like todo… and then find a place thatneeds people like you.” But in 1970,this was a radical notion. “[At thetime,] the idea of doing a lot ofpen-and-paper exercises in order totake control of your own career wasregarded as a dilettante’s exercise,”Bolles recalls1. The optimism ofthis message, however, caught on:You can control what you do withyour life, so why not pursue whatyou love? There are now more than

six million copies of Bolles’s bookin print.

The decades since thepublication of Bolles’s book can beunderstood as a period ofincreasing dedication to the passionhypothesis. You can visualize thisshift by using Google’s NgramViewer2. This tool allows you tosearch Google’s vast corpus ofdigitized books to see how oftenselected phrases turn up inpublished writing over time. If youenter “follow your passion,” yousee a spike in usage right at 1970(the year when Bolles’s book was

published), followed by a relativelysteady high usage until 1990, atwhich point the graph curve swingsupward. By 2000, the phrase“follow your passion” was showingup in print three times more oftenthan in the seventies and eighties.

Parachute, in other words,helped introduce the baby boomgeneration to this passion-centrictake on career, a lesson they havenow passed down to their children,the echo boom generation, whichhas since raised the bar on passionobsession. This young generationhas “high expectations for work,”

explains psychologist JeffreyArnett, an expert on the mindset ofthe modern postgrad. “They expectwork to be not just a job but anadventure[,]… a venue for self-development and self-expression[,]… and something that provides asatisfying fit with their assessmentof their talents.”3

Even if you accept my argumentthat the passion hypothesis isflawed, it’s at this point that youmight respond, “Who cares!” If thepassion hypothesis can encourageeven a small number of people toleave a bad job or to experiment

with their career, you might argue,then it has provided a service. Thefact that this occupational fairy talehas spread so far should not causeconcern.

I disagree. The more I studiedthe issue, the more I noticed that thepassion hypothesis convincespeople that somewhere there’s amagic “right” job waiting for them,and that if they find it, they’llimmediately recognize that this isthe work they were meant to do.The problem, of course, is whenthey fail to find this certainty, badthings follow, such as chronic job-

hopping and crippling self-doubt.We can see this effect in the

statistics. As I just established, thelast several decades are marked byan increasing commitment toBolles’s contagious idea. And yet,for all of this increased focus onfollowing our passion and holdingout for work we love, we aren’tgetting any happier. The 2010Conference Board survey of U.S.job satisfaction found that only 45percent of Americans describethemselves as satisfied with theirjobs. This number has been steadilydecreasing from the mark of 61

percent recorded in 1987, the firstyear of the survey. As Lynn Franco,the director of the Board’sConsumer Research Center notes,this is not just about a bad businesscycle: “Through both economicboom and bust during the past twodecades, our job satisfactionnumbers have shown a consistentdownward trend.” Among youngpeople, the group perhaps mostconcerned with the role of work intheir lives, 64 percent now say thatthey’re actively unhappy in theirjobs. This is the highest level ofdissatisfaction ever measured for

any age group over the full two-decade history of the survey4. Inother words, our generation-spanning experiment with passion-centric career planning can bedeemed a failure: The more wefocused on loving what we do, theless we ended up loving it.

These statistics, of course, arenot clear-cut, as other factors play arole in declining workplacehappiness. To develop a morevisceral understanding of thisunease, we can turn to anecdotalsources. Consider AlexandraRobbins and Abby Wilner’s 2001

ode to youth disaffection,Quarterlife Crisis: The UniqueChallenges of Life in YourTwenties. This book chronicles thepersonal testimony of dozens ofunhappy twentysomethings whofeel adrift in the world of work.Take, for example, the tale of Scott,a twenty-seven-year-old fromWashington, D.C.

“My professional situation nowcouldn’t be more perfect,” Scottreports. “I chose to pursue thecareer I knew in my heart I waspassionate about: politics…. I lovemy office, my friends… even my

boss.” The glamorous promises ofthe passion hypothesis, however,led Scott to question whether hisperfect job was perfect enough.“It’s not fulfilling,” he worrieswhen reflecting on the fact that hisjob, like all jobs, includes difficultresponsibilities. He has sincerestarted his search for his life’swork. “I’ve committed myself toexploring other options that interestme,” Scott says. “But I’m having ahard time actually thinking of acareer that sounds appealing.”

“I graduated college wantingnothing more than the ultimate job

for me,” says Jill, another youngperson profiled in QuarterlifeCrisis. Not surprisingly, everythingJill tried failed to meet this highmark.

“I’m so lost about what I want todo,” despairs twenty-five-year-oldElaine, “that I don’t even realizewhat I’m sacrificing.”5

And so on. These stories, whichare increasingly common at all ages,from college students to the middle-aged, all point toward the sameconclusion: The passionhypothesis is not just wrong, it’salso dangerous. Telling someone

to “follow their passion” is not justan act of innocent optimism, butpotentially the foundation for acareer riddled with confusion andangst.

Beyond PassionBefore continuing, I shouldemphasize an obvious point: Forsome people, following theirpassion works. The RoadtripNation archives, for example,include an interview with RollingStone film critic Peter Travers, whoclaims that even as a child he usedto bring notebooks into movietheaters to record his thoughts6.The power of passion is even morecommon when you look to thecareers of gifted individuals, suchas professional athletes. You’d behard-pressed, for example, to find a

professional baseball player whodoesn’t claim that he has beenpassionate about the sport as farback as he can remember.

Some people I’ve talked to aboutmy ideas have used examples ofthis type to dismiss my conclusionsabout passion. “Here’s a case wheresomeone successfully followedtheir passion,” they say, “therefore‘follow your passion’ must be goodadvice.” This is faulty logic.Observing a few instances of astrategy working does not make ituniversally effective. It is necessaryinstead to study a large number of

examples and ask what worked inthe vast majority of the cases. Andwhen you study a large group ofpeople who are passionate aboutwhat they do, as I did inresearching this book, you find thatmost—not all—will tell a storymore complex than simplyidentifying a pre-existing passionand then pursuing it. Examples suchas Peter Travers and professionalathletes, therefore, are exceptions.If anything, their rarenessunderscores my claim that for mostpeople, “follow your passion” isbad advice.

This conclusion inspires animportant follow-up question:Without the passion hypothesis toguide us, what should we doinstead? This is the question I takeup in the three rules that follow.These rules chronicle my quest tofigure out how people really endup loving what they do. Theyrepresent a shift away from the toneof lawyerly argument used here andinto something more personal:evidence of my attempts to capturethe complexity and ambiguity of myencounters with the reality ofworkplace happiness. With the

thorny underbrush of the passionhypothesis cleared, we can onlynow bring light to a more realisticstrain of career advice that has solong been strangled in the shadows.This is a process that begins in thenext rule with my arrival at anunlikely source of insight: a groupof bluegrass musicians practicingtheir craft in the suburbs of Boston.

RULE #2

Be So Good They Can’t IgnoreYou

(Or, the Importance of Skill)

Chapter Four

The Clarity of the Craftsman

In which I introduce two differentapproaches to thinking aboutwork: the craftsman mindset, afocus on what value you’reproducing in your job, and thepassion mindset, a focus on whatvalue your job offers you. Mostpeople adopt the passion mindset,but in this chapter I argue that thecraftsman mindset is thefoundation for creating work youlove.

Upstairs at the Bluegrass Frat HouseWhen I first rounded the corneronto Mapleton Street, the house, acareworn Victorian, blended in withits tidy suburban neighbors. It wasonly as I got closer that I noticedthe eccentricities. The paint waspeeling. There was a pair of leatherrecliners outside on the porch.Empty Bud Light bottles littered theground.

Jordan Tice, a professional guitarplayer of the New Acoustic style,stood by the front door smoking acigarette. He waved me over. As Ifollowed him inside, I noticed that a

small foyer set off the entry hadbeen converted into a bedroom.“The banjo player who sleeps therehas a PhD from MIT,” Jordan said.“You’d like him.”

Jordan is one of many musicianswho come and go from the rental,squeezing themselves into anyspace that meets the technicaldefinition of habitable. “Welcometo the bluegrass frat house,” hesaid, by way of explanation as weheaded up to the second floorwhere he lives. Jordan’s room ismonastic. Smaller than any dormroom I had at college, it’s just big

enough for a twin bed and a simplepressboard desk. A Fender tubeamp sits in one corner and a rollingluggage bag in the other. Most ofhis guitars, I assume, are keptdownstairs in the common practicespace, as I only saw one in theroom, a beat-up Martin. We had toborrow a chair from another roomso that we could both sit.

Jordan is twenty-four. In theworld of traditional work this isyoung, but when you consider thathe signed his first record deal whilestill in high school, it’s clear that inthe world of acoustic music

Jordan’s no rookie. He’s alsopainfully modest. One review of histhird album, Long Story, began,“Music has always had its share ofprodigies, from Mozart up to thecurrent day.”1 This is exactly thetype of praise that Jordan wouldhate for me to write about. When Iasked him why Gary Ferguson, awell-known bluegrass artist, choseJordan at the age of sixteen to tourwith him, he could only stammer,before lapsing into silence.

“It’s a big deal,” I pushed. “Hechose you to be his guitar player.He had his choice of lots of guitar

players, and he chose a sixteen-year-old.”

“I don’t derive any arrogancefrom that specific thing,” he finallyanswered.

Here’s what does excite Jordan:his music. When I asked him,“What are you working on today?”his eyes lit up as he grabbed anopen composition book from hisdesk. On it were five lines ofmusic, lightly penciled in—mainlydense runs of quarter notesspanning up and down the octave,punctuated with the occasionalhandwritten explanation. “I’m kinda

working on a new tune,” heexplained. “It’s going to be reallyfast.”

Jordan picked up his Martin toplay me the new song. It had thedriving beat of bluegrass, but themelody, which was inspired by aDebussy composition, happilydisregards the genre. When Jordanplayed, he stared just beyond thefretboard and breathed in sharp,sporadic gasps. At one point hemissed a note, which upset him. Hebacked up and started again,insisting on playing until hefinished the full phrase without

mistake.I told him I was impressed by

the speed of the licks. “No, this isslow,” he replied. He then showedme the pace he’s working toward:It’s at least twice as fast. “I can’tquite make the lead trail yet,” heapologized after it slipped awayfrom him. “I guess I could do it,but I can’t get the notes to pop outyet like I want it.” He showed mehow the successive notes in the leadtend to span many strings,complicating fast picking. “It’sreally wide.”

At my request, Jordan laid out

his practice regimen for this song.He starts by playing slow enoughthat he can get the effects hedesires: He wants the key notes ofthe melody to ring while he fills thespace in between with runs up anddown the fretboard. Then he addsspeed—just enough that he can’tquite make things work. He repeatsthis again and again. “It’s a physicaland mental exercise,” he explained.“You’re trying to keep track ofdifferent melodies and things. In apiano, everything is laid out clearlyin front of you; ten fingers nevergetting in the way of one another.

On the guitar, you have to budgetyour fingers.”

He called his work on this songhis “technical focus” of themoment. In a typical day, if he’s notpreparing for a show, he’ll practicewith this same intensity, alwaysplaying just a little faster than he’scomfortable, for two or three hoursstraight. I asked him how long itwill take to finally master the newskill. “Probably like a month,” heguessed. Then he played throughthe lick one more time.

The Craftsman MindsetLet me be clear about something: Ireally don’t care if Jordan Ticeloves what he does. I also don’tcare why he decided to become amusician or whether he sees guitarplaying as his “passion.” Musicians’career paths are idiosyncratic, oftenrelying on unusual circumstancesand lucky breaks early in life. (Thefact that Jordan’s parents are bothbluegrass musicians, for example,obviously played a big role in hisearly dedication to guitar.) Becauseof this, I’ve never found the originstories of performers’ careers to be

all that relevant to the rest of us.Here’s what does interest me aboutJordan: how he approaches hiswork on a daily basis. Lurking here,I discovered, is an insight of greatvalue to my quest for work I love.

The path that led me to Jordanand the insight he represents beganwith a 2007 episode of the CharlieRose show. Rose was interviewingthe actor and comedian SteveMartin about his memoir BornStanding Up2. They talked aboutthe realities of Martin’s rise. “I readautobiographies in general,” Martinsaid. “[And I often get frustrated]…

and say, ‘You left out that one parthere, how did you get that auditionfor that one thing where suddenlyyou’re working at the Copa? Howdid that happen?’ ” Martin wrote hisbook to answer the “how” question,at least with respect to his ownsuccess in stand-up. It was in thisexplanation of “how” that Martinintroduced a simple idea thatfloored me when I first heard it.The quote comes in the last fiveminutes of the interview, whenRose asks Martin his advice foraspiring performers.

“Nobody ever takes note of [my

advice], because it’s not the answerthey wanted to hear,” Martin said.“What they want to hear is ‘Here’show you get an agent, here’s howyou write a script,’… but I alwayssay, ‘Be so good they can’t ignoreyou.’ ”

In response to Rose’s trademarkambiguous grunt, Martin defendedhis advice: “If somebody’sthinking, ‘How can I be reallygood?’ people are going to come toyou.”

This is exactly the philosophythat catapulted Martin into stardom.He was only twenty years old when

he decided to innovate his act intosomething too good to be ignored.“Comedy at the time was all setupand punch line… the clichédnightclub comedian, rat-a-tat-tat,”Martin explained to Rose.3 Hethought it could be something moresophisticated. Here’s how Martinexplained his evolution in an articlehe published around the time of hisCharlie Rose interview: “What ifthere were no punch lines? What ifthere were no indicators? What if Icreated tension and never releasedit? What if I headed for a climax,but all I delivered was an

anticlimax?”4 In one famous bit,Martin tells the audience that it’stime for his famous nose-on-the-microphone routine. He then leansin and puts his nose on themicrophone for several seconds,steps back, takes a long bow, andwith gravitas thanks the crowd.“The laugh came not then,” heexplains, “but only after theyrealized I had already moved on tothe next bit.”

It took Martin, by his ownestimation, ten years for his new actto cohere, but when it did, hebecame a monster success. It’s clear

in his telling that there was no realshortcut to his eventual fame.“[Eventually] you are soexperienced [that] there’s aconfidence that comes out,” Martinexplained. “I think it’s somethingthe audience smells.”

Be so good they can’t ignoreyou. When I first heard this advice,I was watching the Martin interviewonline. It was the winter of 2008and I was approaching my finalyear as a graduate student. At thetime, I had recently started a blogcalled Study Hacks, which wasinspired by the pair of student-

advice guides I had published, andfocused mainly on tips forundergraduates. Soon after hearingMartin’s axiom, however, I dashedoff a blog post that introduced hisidea to my readers.5 “Sure, it’sscary,” I concluded. “But, evenmore, I find it liberating.”

As my graduate student careerhad been winding down, I hadbecome obsessed with my researchstrategy—an obsession that wasmanifested in the chronic workingand reworking of the description ofmy work on my website. This was afrustrating process: I felt like I was

stretching to convince the worldthat my work was interesting, yetno one cared. Martin’s axiom gaveme a reprieve from this self-promotion. “Stop focusing on theselittle details,” it told me. “Focusinstead on becoming better.”Inspired, I turned my attention frommy website to a habit that continuesto this day: I track the hours spenteach month dedicated to thinkinghard about research problems (inthe month in which I first wrote thischapter, for example, I dedicatedforty-two hours to these core tasks).

This hour-tracking strategy

helped turn my attention backabove all else to the quality of whatI produce. At the same time,however, it also felt incremental, asif I hadn’t yet grasped the fullimplications of Martin’s radicalidea. When I later launched myquest to uncover how people endup loving their work, it didn’t takelong for me to return to Martin’sadvice. Intuitively I grasped that itplayed an important role inconstructing a remarkable career.This is what led me to Jordan Tice:If I really wanted to understand thisaxiom, I figured, I needed to

understand the people who livetheir lives by it.

Listening to Tice talk about hisroutine, I was struck by his Martin-esque focus on what he produces.As you’ll recall, he’s happy tospend hours every day, week afterweek, in a barely furnishedmonastic room, exhausting himselfin pursuit of a new flat-pickingtechnique, all because he thinks itwill add something important to thetune he’s writing. This dedication tooutput, I realized, also explains hispainful modesty. To Jordan,arrogance doesn’t make sense.

“Here’s what I respect: creatingsomething meaningful and thenpresenting it to the world,” heexplained.

Inspired by meeting Jordan, I gotin touch with Mark Casstevens togain a cynical veteran’s perspectiveon the performer’s mindset. Mark isa studio musician from Nashvillewho has certainly earned his stripes:He’s played on ninety-nine numberone hit singles on the Billboardcharts. When I told Mark aboutJordan, he agreed that an obsessivefocus on the quality of what youproduce is the rule in professional

music. “It trumps your appearance,your equipment, your personality,and your connections,” heexplained. “Studio musicians havethis adage: ‘The tape doesn’t lie.’Immediately after the recordingcomes the playback; your ability hasno hiding place.”

I liked that phrase—the tapedoesn’t lie—as it sums up nicelywhat motivates performers such asJordan, Mark, and Steve Martin. Ifyou’re not focusing on becoming sogood they can’t ignore you, you’regoing to be left behind. This claritywas refreshing.

To simplify things goingforward, I’ll call this output-centricapproach to work the craftsmanmindset. My goal in Rule #2 is toconvince you of an idea thatbecame clearer to me the more timeI spent studying performers such asTice: Irrespective of what type ofwork you do, the craftsman mindsetis crucial for building a career youlove. Before we get ahead ofourselves, however, I want to take amoment to contrast this mindsetwith the way most of us are used tothinking about our livelihood.

The Passion Mindset“[People] thrive by focusing on thequestion of who they really are—and connecting that to work thatthey truly love.”6 Po Bronson wrotethis in a 2002 manifesto publishedin Fast Company. This shouldsound familiar, as it’s exactly thetype of advice you would give ifyou subscribed to the passionhypothesis, which I debunked inRule #1. With this in mind, let’s callthe approach to work endorsed byBronson the passion mindset.Whereas the craftsman mindset

focuses on what you can offer theworld, the passion mindset focusesinstead on what the world can offeryou. This mindset is how mostpeople approach their workinglives.

There are two reasons why Idislike the passion mindset (that is,two reasons beyond the fact that, asI argued in Rule #1, it’s based on afalse premise). First, when youfocus only on what your workoffers you, it makes youhyperaware of what you don’t likeabout it, leading to chronicunhappiness. This is especially true

for entry-level positions, which, bydefinition, are not going to be filledwith challenging projects andautonomy—these come later. Whenyou enter the working world withthe passion mindset, the annoyingtasks you’re assigned or thefrustrations of corporatebureaucracy can become too muchto handle.

Second, and more serious, thedeep questions driving the passionmindset—“Who am I?” and “Whatdo I truly love?”—are essentiallyimpossible to confirm. “Is this whoI really am?” and “Do I love this?”

rarely reduce to clear yes-or-noresponses. In other words, thepassion mindset is almostguaranteed to keep you perpetuallyunhappy and confused, whichprobably explains why Bronsonadmits, not long into his career-seeker epic What Should I Do WithMy Life? that “the one feelingeveryone in this book hasexperienced is of missing out onlife.”7

Adopting the Craftsman MindsetTo summarize, I’ve presented twodifferent ways people think abouttheir working life. The first is thecraftsman mindset, which focuseson what you can offer the world.The second is the passion mindset,which instead focuses on what theworld can offer you. The craftsmanmindset offers clarity, while thepassion mindset offers a swamp ofambiguous and unanswerablequestions. As I concluded aftermeeting Jordan Tice, there’ssomething liberating about thecraftsman mindset: It asks you to

leave behind self-centered concernsabout whether your job is “justright,” and instead put your headdown and plug away at gettingreally damn good. No one owesyou a great career, it argues; youneed to earn it—and the processwon’t be easy.

With this in mind, it’s onlynatural to envy the clarity ofperformers like Jordan Tice. Buthere’s the core argument of Rule#2: You shouldn’t just envy thecraftsman mindset, you shouldemulate it. In other words, I amsuggesting that you put aside the

question of whether your job isyour true passion, and instead turnyour focus toward becoming sogood they can’t ignore you. That is,regardless of what you do for aliving, approach your work like atrue performer.

This shift in mindset proved anexciting development in my ownquest. But as I discovered, it comesmore easily for some than forothers. When I began exploring thecraftsman mindset on my blog,some of my readers became uneasy.I noticed them starting to home inon a common counterargument,

which I should address before wecontinue. Here’s how one readerput it:

Tice is willing to grind outlong hours with littlerecognition, but that’sbecause it’s in service tosomething he’s obviouslypassionate about and hasbeen for a long time. He’sfound that one job that’sright for him.

I’ve heard this reaction enoughtimes to give it a name: “the

argument from pre-existingpassion.” At its core is the idea thatthe craftsman mindset is only viablefor those who already feelpassionate about their work, andtherefore it cannot be presented asan alternative to the passionmindset.

I don’t buy it.First, let’s dispense with the

notion that performers like JordanTice or Steve Martin are perfectlysecure in their knowledge thatthey’ve found their true calling. Ifyou spend any time withprofessional entertainers, especially

those who are just starting out, oneof the first things you notice is theirinsecurity concerning theirlivelihood. Jordan had a name forthe worries about what his friendsare doing with their lives andwhether his accomplishmentscompare favorably: “the cloud ofexternal distractions.”

Fighting this cloud is an ongoingbattle. Along these lines, SteveMartin was so unsure during hisdecade-long dedication toimproving his routine that heregularly suffered crippling anxietyattacks. The source of these

performers’ craftsman mindset isnot some unquestionable innerpassion, but instead somethingmore pragmatic: It’s what works inthe entertainment business. AsMark Casstevens put it, “the tapedoesn’t lie”: If you’re a guitarplayer or a comedian, what youproduce is basically all that matters.If you spend too much timefocusing on whether or not you’vefound your true calling, thequestion will be rendered mootwhen you find yourself out ofwork.

Second, and more fundamental,

I don’t really care why performersadopt the craftsman mindset. As Imentioned earlier, their world isidiosyncratic, and most of whatmakes them tick doesn’t generalize.The reason I focused on Jordan’sstory is that I wanted you to seewhat the craftsman mindset lookedlike in action. In other words,forget why Jordan adopted thismindset and notice instead how hedeploys it. In the next chapter, I willargue that regardless of how youfeel about your job right now,adopting the craftsman mindsetwill be the foundation on which

you’ll build a compelling career.This is why I reject the “argumentfrom pre-existing passion,” becauseit gets things backward. In reality,as I’ll demonstrate, you adopt thecraftsman mindset first and then thepassion follows.

Chapter Five

The Power of Career Capital

In which I justify the importance ofthe craftsman mindset by arguingthat the traits that make a greatjob great are rare and valuable,and therefore, if you want a greatjob, you need to build up rare andvaluable skills—which I call careercapital—to offer in return.

The Economics of Great JobsIn the last chapter I offered a boldproposition: If you want to lovewhat you do, abandon the passionmindset (“what can the world offerme?”) and instead adopt thecraftsman mindset (“what can Ioffer the world?”).

My argument for this strategystarts with a simple question: Whatmakes a great job great? Inexploring this question, it helps toget specific. In Rule #1, I providedseveral examples of people whohad great jobs and love (or loved)what they do—so we can draw

from there. Among others, Iintroduced Apple founder SteveJobs, radio host Ira Glass, andmaster surfboard shaper AlMerrick. Using this trio as ourrunning example, I can now askwhat it is specifically about thesethree careers that makes them socompelling? Here are the answersthat I came up with:

TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREATWORK

Creativity: Ira Glass, forexample, is pushing theboundaries of radio, and

winning armfuls of awards inthe process.Impact: From the Apple II tothe iPhone, Steve Jobs haschanged the way we live ourlives in the digital age.Control: No one tells AlMerrick when to wake up orwhat to wear. He’s not expectedin an office from nine to five.Instead, his Channel IslandSurfboards factory is located ablock from the Santa Barbarabeach, where Merrick stillregularly spends time surfing. (Jake Burton Carpenter, founder

of Burton Snowboards, forexample, recalls hownegotiations for the mergerbetween the two companieshappened while he and Merrickwaited for waves in a surflineup.)

This list isn’t comprehensive, butif consider your own dream-jobfantasies, you’ll likely notice somecombination of these traits. We cannow advance to the question thatreally matters: How do you getthese traits in your own workinglife? One of the first things I

noticed when I began to study thisquestion is that these factors arerare. Most jobs don’t offer theiremployees great creativity, impact,or control over what they do andhow they do it. If you’re a recentcollege graduate in an entry-leveljob, for example, you’re muchmore likely to hear “go change thewater cooler” than you are “gochange the world.”

By definition, we also know thatthese traits are valuable—as they’rethe key to making a job great. Butnow we’re moving into well-trodterritory. Basic economic theory

tells us that if you want somethingthat’s both rare and valuable, youneed something rare and valuable tooffer in return—this is Supply andDemand 101. It follows that if youwant a great job, you needsomething of great value to offer inreturn. If this is true, of course, weshould see it in the stories of ourtrio of examples—and we do. Nowthat we know what to look for, thistransactional interpretation ofcompelling careers becomessuddenly apparent.

Consider Steve Jobs. When Jobswalked into Paul Terrell’s Byte

Shop he was holding somethingthat was literally rare and valuable:the circuit board for the Apple I,one of the more advanced personalcomputers in the fledgling market atthe time. The money from selling ahundred units of that originaldesign gave Jobs more control inhis career, but in classic economicterms, to get even more valuabletraits in his working life, he neededto increase the value of what he hadto offer. It’s at this point that Jobs’sascent begins to accelerate. He takeson $250,000 in funding from MarkMarkkula and works with Steve

Wozniak to produce a newcomputer design that isunambiguously too good to beignored. There were other engineersin the Bay Area’s HomebrewComputer Club culture who couldmatch Jobs’s and Wozniak’stechnical skill, but Jobs had theinsight to take on investment and tofocus this technical energy towardproducing a complete product. Theresult was the Apple II, a machinethat leaped ahead of thecompetition: It had color graphics;the monitor and keyboard wereintegrated inside the case; the

architecture was open, allowingrapid expansion of memory andperipherals (such as the floppydisk, which the Apple II was thefirst to introduce into mainstreamuse). This was the product that putthe company on the map and thatpushed Jobs from a small-timeentrepreneur into the head of avisionary company. He producedsomething of great value and inreturn his career got an injection ofcreativity, impact, and control.

The radio host Ira Glass wasgiven the opportunity to create hisgenre-defining radio show This

American Life only after he hadproven himself as one of publicradio’s best editors and hosts. Glassstarted as an intern and then movedon to become a tape cutter for AllThings Considered. There are manyyoung people who start down thesame path as Glass: landing aninternship at a local NPR stationand then moving up to a low-levelproduction position. But Glassbegan to break away from the packwhen he turned his focus onmaking his skills more rare andmore valuable. The crispness of hissegment editing eventually gained

him the opportunity to host a fewof his own segments on air. Andeven though Glass has a voice thatmocks everything sacred aboutwhat a radio personality shouldsound like, he began to win awardsfor his segments. It’s possible that alatent natural talent for editing maybe playing a role here, but recallfrom Rule #1 that Glass emphasizesthe importance of the hard workrequired to develop skill. “All of uswho do creative work… you getinto this thing, and there’s like a‘gap.’ What you’re making isn’t sogood, okay?… It’s trying to be

good but… it’s just not that great,”he explained in an interview abouthis career.1 “The key thing is toforce yourself through the work,force the skills to come; that’s thehardest phase,” he elaborated in hisRoadtrip Nation session. In otherwords, this is not the story of aprodigy who walked into a radiostation after college and walked outwith a show. The more you readabout Glass, the more youencounter a young man who wasdriven to develop his skills untilthey were too valuable to beignored.

This strategy worked. After thesuccess of his short segments forAll Things Considered, Glass wastapped to cohost a string ofdifferent local shows produced outof Chicago’s WBEZ station, furtherincreasing the value of his skills. In1995, when the station manager atWBEZ decided to put together afree-form show with any eyetoward national syndication—ashow called This American Life—Glass was at the top of his list. Hiscareer today is rich with creativity,impact, and control, but when youread his story, the economic

undertones are unmistakable. Glassexchanged a collection of hard-won, rare, and valuable skills forhis fantastic job.

With Al Merrick, notsurprisingly, we get the same styleof story. The rare and valuable skillthat launched Merrick’s career as aprofessional surfboard shaper iscrystal clear: His boards woncompetitions. What’s important tonote is that this was not always thecase. Merrick picked up the trade offiberglass shaping from his yearsspent as a boatbuilder, and he knewabout surfing from his own on-

again, off-again relationship withthe sport, but it took an abundanceof hard work to get his board-crafting skills to the place wherethey were valuable. “[Starting out,]a lot of time you’re afraid thatyou’re going to be a failure, thatthis guy you’re making a board foris a world champion and his boards[won’t be] working right,” herecalled in his Roadtrip Nationsession. “It just makes me workharder and try harder to accomplishwhat I’m trying to accomplish witha surfboard.” Having an office ablock from the beach, with the

freedom to take off to surf on amoment’s notice, sounds great, butit’s not the type of job that is justbeing handed out. To get it, Merrickrealized he needed a rare andvaluable skill to offer in exchange.Once he had surf pros like KellySlater riding his boards—andwinning—he became free to dictatethe terms of his working life.

Here, then, are the main strandsof my argument:

THE CAREER CAPITALTHEORY OF GREAT WORK

The traits that define great

work are rare and valuable.Supply and demand says that ifyou want these traits you needrare and valuable skills to offerin return. Think of these rareand valuable skills you canoffer as your career capital.The craftsman mindset, with itsrelentless focus on becoming“so good they can’t ignoreyou,” is a strategy well suitedfor acquiring career capital.This is why it trumps thepassion mindset if your goal isto create work you love.

Jobs, Glass, and Merrick alladopted the craftsman mindset.(Some even use these exact wordsin describing themselves. “I was acraftsman,” said Merrick, in aninterview on his early days as aboard shaper.2) Career capitaltheory tells us that this is nocoincidence. The traits that definegreat work require that you havesomething rare and valuable tooffer in return—skills I call careercapital. The craftsman mindset,with its relentless focus on whatyou produce, is exactly the mindsetyou would adopt if your goal was

to acquire as much career capital aspossible. Ultimately, this is why Ipromote the craftsman mindset overthe passion mindset. This is notsome philosophical debate on theexistence of passion or the value ofhard work—I’m being intenselypragmatic: You need to get good inorder to get good things in yourworking life, and the craftsmanmindset is focused on achievingexactly this goal.

But there is, I must admit, adarker corollary to this argument.The passion mindset is not justineffective for creating work you

love; in many cases it can activelywork against this goal, sometimeswith devastating consequences.

From Courage to Food StampsA pair of articles, published withintwo days of each other in the NewYork Times in the summer of 2009,emphasize the contrast between thepassion mindset and the craftsmanmindset. The first article concernedLisa Feuer3. At the age of thirty-eight, Feuer quit her career inadvertising and marketing. Chafingunder the constraints of corporatelife, she started to question whetherthis was her calling. “I’d watchedmy husband go into business forhimself, and I felt like I could do it,too,” she said. So she decided to

give entrepreneurship a try.As reported by the Times, Feuer

enrolled in a two-hundred-houryoga instruction course, tapping ahome equity loan to pay the $4,000tuition. Certification in hand, shestarted Karma Kids Yoga, a yogapractice focused on young childrenand pregnant women. “I love what Ido,” she told the reporter whenjustifying the difficulties of startinga freelance business.

The passion mindset supportsFeuer’s decision. To thoseenthralled by the myth of a truecalling, there’s nothing more heroic

than trading comfort for passion.Consider, for example, the authorPamela Slim, a believer in thepassion mindset who wrote thepopular book Escape from CubicleNation.4 Slim describes on herwebsite the following sampledialogue, which she claims she hasoften:

Me: So are you ready tomove forward with yourplan?

Them: I know what I have todo, but I don’t know if Ican do it! Who am I to

pretend to be a successful(artist) (coach) (consultant)(masseuse)? What ifeveryone looks at mywebsite and laughshysterically that I wouldeven consider selling myservices? Why wouldanyone ever want toconnect with me?

Me: Time for a little work onyour backbone.5

Motivated by these encounters,Slim launched a phone-seminarproduct called Rebuild Your

Backbone. Its goal is to convincemore people to be like Lisa Feuerby finding the courage to followtheir dreams. The coursedescription says Slim will answerquestions like “Why do we getstuck living other people’s modelsof success?” and “How do we getthe courage to do big things in theworld?” It costs forty-seven dollars.

Rebuild Your Backbone is anexample of the courage culture, agrowing community of authors andonline commentators pushing thefollowing idea: The biggest obstaclebetween you and work you love is

a lack of courage—the couragerequired to step away from “otherpeople’s definition of success” andto follow your dream. It’s an ideathat makes perfect sense whenpresented against the backdrop ofthe passion mindset: If there’s someperfect job waiting for us out there,every day we’re not following thispassion is a wasted day. Whenviewed from this perspective,Feuer’s move appears courageousand long overdue; she could be aguest lecturer in Pamela Slim’steleseminar. But this idea crumbleswhen viewed from the perspective

of career capital theory—aperspective that makes Karma KidsYoga suddenly seem like a poorgamble.

The downside of the passionmindset is that it strips away merit.For passion proponents like Slim,launching a freelance career thatgives you control, creativity, andimpact is easy—it’s just the act ofgetting started that trips us up.Career capital theory disagrees. Ittells us that great work doesn’t justrequire great courage, but also skillsof great (and real) value. WhenFeuer left her advertising career to

start a yoga studio, not only did shediscard the career capital acquiredover many years in the marketingindustry, but she transitioned intoan unrelated field where she hadalmost no capital. Given yoga’spopularity, a one-month trainingprogram places Feuer pretty nearthe bottom of the skill hierarchy ofyoga practitioners, making her along way from being so good shecan’t be ignored. According tocareer capital theory, she thereforehas very little leverage in her yoga-working life. It’s unlikely,therefore, that things will go well

for Feuer—which, unfortunately, isexactly what ended up happening.

As the recession hit in 2008,Feuer’s business struggled. One ofthe gyms where she taught closed.Then two classes she offered at alocal public high school weredropped, and with the tighteningeconomy, demands for privatelessons diminished. In 2009, whenshe was profiled for the Times, shewas on track to make only $15,000for the year. Toward the conclusionof the profile, Feuer sends thereporter a text message: “I’m at thefood stamp office now, waiting.”

It’s signed: “Sent from my iPhone.”Two days after Lisa Feuer’s

profile was published, the Timesintroduced its readers to anothermarketing executive, Joe Duffy.6Like Feuer, Duffy worked inadvertising and eventually began tochafe at the constraints of corporatelife. “I was tired of the agencybusiness,” he recalls. “I [wanted] tosimplify my life and focus on thecreative side again.” Given thatDuffy’s original training was as anartist—he had entered theadvertising industry as a technicalillustrator only after he had a hard

time making a living with hispaintings—supporters of thepassion mindset might encouragesomeone in Duffy’s situation toleave advertising behind and returnto his passion for the creative arts.

Duffy, it turns out, is from thecraftsman school of thought.Instead of fleeing the constraints ofhis current job, he began acquiringthe career capital he’d need to buyhimself out of them. His specialtybecame international logos andbrand icons. As his ability grew, sodid his options. Eventually, he washired away by the Minneapolis-

based Fallon McElligott agency,which allowed him to run his ownsubsidiary within the largerorganization, calling it DuffyDesigns. In other words, his capitalhad bought him more autonomy.

After twenty years at FallonMcElligott, working on logos formajor companies such as Sony andCoca-Cola, Duffy once againinvested his capital to gain moreautonomy, this time by starting hisown fifteen-person shop: Duffy &Partners. This entrepreneurial movecontrasts sharply with Feuer’s.Duffy started his own company

with enough career capital toimmediately thrive—he was one ofthe world’s best logo men and hada waiting list of clients. Feuerstarted her company with only twohundred hours of training and anabundance of courage.

It’s fair to guess that by the timeDuffy recently retired, he lovedwhat he did. His work gave himheaps of control and respect and,depending on your view of theimportance of advertising, also hada great impact on the world. To me,however, the most vivid contrast toFeuer’s story was Duffy’s purchase

of Duffy Trails, a hundred-acreretreat on the banks of Wisconsin’sTotagatic River. Duffy is an avidcross-country skier, and the fivemiles of wooded trails, skiable fromNovember through March, madethe retreat irresistible. As reportedby the New York Times, theproperty can comfortably house atleast twenty guests, spread overthree different residentialoutbuildings, but on the hottestsummer nights, it’s the screenedgazebo by the retreat’s sixteen-acre,bass-stocked lake that attracts themost visitors.

Duffy purchased this property atthe age of forty-five: in otherwords, not long after the age atwhich Feuer left advertising topursue her yoga business. It’s thisparallel that gives this pair of storiestheir Frostian undertones. “Tworoads diverged in a yellow wood,”and one traveler chose the path tomastery while the other was calledtoward passion’s glow. The formerended up celebrated in the industry,in control of his own livelihood,and weekending with his family ina forested retreat. The latter endedup on food stamps.

This comparison is notnecessarily fair. We don’t know thatFeuer could have replicated Duffy’ssuccess if she had stayed inmarketing and advertising and hadfocused her restless energy onbecoming excellent. But as ametaphor, the story works nicely.The image of Feuer, waiting in linefor food stamps, while Duffy, at asimilar age, returns from asuccessful overseas trip to spend arelaxing weekend skiing at DuffyTrails, is striking. It captures wellboth the risk and the illogic ofstarting from scratch as contrasted

with the leverage gained by insteadacquiring more career capital. BothFeuer and Duffy had the sameissues with their work; these issuesemerged at around the same time;and they both had the same desireto love what they do. But they hadtwo different approaches to tacklingthese issues. In the end, it wasDuffy’s commitment tocraftsmanship that was the obviouswinner.

When Craftsmanship FailsNot long before I started writingthis chapter, I received an e-mailfrom John, a recent collegegraduate and longtime reader of myblog. He was concerned about hisnew job as a tax consultant. Thoughhe found the work to be“sometimes interesting,” the hourswere long and the tasks werefiercely prescribed, making itdifficult to stand out. “Aside fromnot liking the lifestyle,” Johncomplained, “I’m concerned thatmy work doesn’t serve a largerpurpose, and, in fact, that it actively

hurts the most vulnerable.”This chapter has argued in favor

of the craftsman mindset andagainst its passion-centricalternative. Part of what makes thecraftsman mindset thrilling is itsagnosticism toward the type ofwork you do. The traits that definegreat work are bought with careercapital, the theory argues; they don’tcome from matching your work toyour innate passion. Because ofthis, you don’t have to sweatwhether you’ve found your calling—most any work can become thefoundation for a compelling career.

John had heard this argument andwrote me because he was having ahard time applying it to his life as atax consultant. He didn’t like hiswork and he wanted to know if,like a good craftsman, he shouldjust suck it up and continue tofocus on getting good. This is animportant question, and here’s whatI told John:

“It sounds like you should leaveyour job.” On reflection, it becameclear to me that certain jobs arebetter suited for applying careercapital theory than others. To aidJohn, I ended up devising a list of

three traits that disqualify a job asproviding a good foundation forbuilding work you love:

THREE DISQUALIFIERS FORAPPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN

MINDSET1. The job presents few

opportunities to distinguishyourself by developing relevantskills that are rare and valuable.

2. The job focuses on somethingyou think is useless or perhapseven actively bad for the world.

3. The job forces you to workwith people you really dislike.7

A job with any combination ofthese disqualifying traits can thwartyour attempts to build and investcareer capital. If it satisfies the firsttrait, skill growth isn’t possible. If itsatisfies the second two traits, theneven though you could build upreserves of career capital, you’llhave a hard time sticking aroundlong enough to accomplish thisgoal. John’s job satisfied the firsttwo traits, so he needed to leave.

To give another example: As acomputer scientist at MIT, which Iwas while writing this book, I gotquite a few e-mails from Wall Street

headhunters. They were hiring forjobs that provide plenty of room todevelop skills and they’re not afraidto compensate you well for yourtime. “There is a small handful offirms on Wall Street that pay betterthan everyone else, about three orfour of them,” said one headhunterwho wrote me recently. “Thiscompany is one of them.” (I waslater told by friends that the startingsalary for these firms was in thetwo to three hundred thousanddollar range.) But to me, these firmssatisfy the second condition listedabove. This realization allowed me

to confidently delete these offers asthey arrived.

The big-picture point worthnoting here, however, is that thesedisqualifying traits still havenothing to do with whether a job isthe right fit for some innate passion.They remain much more general.Working right, therefore, stilltrumps finding the right work.

Now that I’ve made my pitch forthe craftsman mindset, andmoderated it with the exceptionslisted above, it’s time to see it inaction.

Chapter Six

The Career Capitalists

In which I demonstrate the powerof career capital in action with twoprofiles of people who leveragedthe craftsman mindset to constructcareers they love.

Two Career CapitalistsAlex Berger is thirty-one: He’s asuccessful television writer and heloves his work. Mike Jackson istwenty-nine: He’s a cleantechventure capitalist and he also loveshis work. This chapter is dedicatedto telling their stories, as they bothhighlight the somewhat messyreality of using the craftsmanmindset to generate fantasticlivelihoods. Alex and Mike bothfocused on getting good—notfinding their passion—and thenused the career capital thisgenerated to acquire the traits that

made their careers compelling.

The Closed-Off World ofTelevision Kabillionaires

Let’s assume for the moment thatyou want to be hired as a televisionwriter on a network series. Yourfirst step is to get past someone likeJamie.

Jamie, who is in his late twenties,was recently involved in the writer-staffing process for a networkshow. He agreed to provide me aglimpse into his world so long as Ikept him and his show anonymous.Here’s what I learned: TV writing isnot an easy gig to land. Accordingto Jamie, the process unfolds as

follows. First, the producers put outa call to talent agencies to send oversample scripts from their writers.For his particular show, Jamiereceived around a hundredpackages, each containing a samplescript, which Jamie read, reviewed,and graded. Only around the besttwenty or so from this pile will bepassed on to the producers foradditional consideration. Keep inmind that the producers havealready hired their favored veteranwriters, so there are precious fewspots left to be filled from this opencall.

To provide a sense of thecompetitiveness of this process,Jamie sent me a copy of his scriptevaluations. Out of the hundred orso writers who submitted scripts, allbut fourteen sent a script that hadalready been produced and aired ontelevision. Of the fourteen who hadnot yet broken into the industry, thehighest score any received fromJamie was a 6.5 out of 10. Most ofthis group, however, fared muchworse. “It was flat, without anyinteresting storytelling, engagingact-outs, or smart dialogue,” hewrote about one such script (score:

4 out of 10). “I only read about aquarter of this script but it’s clearlypretty subpar,” he said aboutanother.

In other words, getting on theinside in the world of televisionwriting is daunting. But at the sametime, I can understand why somany thousands aspire to this goal:It’s a fantastic job. For one thing,there’s the money. As a new writer,your salary starts modest. TheWriter’s Guild of Americaguarantees that you make at least$2,500 a week, which, given astandard twenty-six week season, is

decent for half a year of work.Depending on the success of theseries, you’ll then progress after ayear or two to become a storyeditor, where, as a longtime TVwriter explained in a Salon.comarticle on the topic, “you’re stillmaking shit” (though, as anotherwriter admitted, “shit” at this pointqualifies as over $10,000 anepisode).1 Things start to getinteresting when you make it to thenext level: producer. Once there,“you’re in the money.” Top writerscan pull in seven-figure paychecks.In the Salon.com article referenced

above, the term “kabillionaire” wasused by multiple people to describethe salaries of producers on long-running shows.

Of course, you can also makelots of money in other jobs. A fastriser at Goldman Sachs can hit theseven-figure mark (includingbonuses) by his or her midthirties,and a partner at a prestigious lawfirm can get somewhere similar afew years later. But the differencebetween Wall Street and Hollywoodin the style of work is staggering.Imagine: no e-mail, no late-nightcontract negotiations, no need to

master intricate bond markets orlegal precedents. As a writer yourwhole focus is on one thing: tellinggood stories. The work can beintense, as you’re often underdeadline to deliver the next script,but it only lasts half a year, and it’simmensely creative, and you canwear shorts, and the catered food,as was emphasized to me severaltimes, is fantastic. (“Writers arecrazy about their food,” one sourceexplained.) To recast the job in theterms I introduced in the lastchapter, television writing isattractive because it has the three

traits that make people love theirwork: impact, creativity, andcontrol.

By the time I met him, AlexBerger had managed to break intothis elite world. He had recentlysold a pilot to USA Network. Tosell a pilot is to sell an idea: You sitdown in a room with three or fourexecutives from the network andspend five minutes pitching yourvision. At a cable network likeUSA, these executives will heararound fifteen to twenty suchpitches a week. They then retreat toa staff meeting and choose three or

four to actually buy. Alex’s ideawas one of the four they boughtthat week.

Alex has a few more hurdles toleap before his show makes it onthe air at USA, but selling a pilot,by itself, is seen as impressive inthe industry—a mark that youknow what you’re doing. As if toemphasize this impressiveness, oneof the executives at USA, who likedAlex’s work, helped staff him on analready running show, the hit spydrama Covert Affairs, so that he’dhave something to do while waitingfor the pilot decisions to be made.

Not that Alex needed the boost tohis reputation: He had alreadywritten and aired episodes for threedifferent shows leading up to thispoint. His latest gig was on the stop-motion comedy Glenn Martin,DDS, which he had cocreated withMichael Eisner and had run for twoseasons. In other words, there’s nodoubt that Alex is an establishedwriter in an industry that allows fewthrough its gates.

The question is, how did he doit?

How Alex Berger Broke intoHollywood

What makes television a hardindustry to crack is the fact that it’sa winner-take-all market. There’sonly one type of career capital here,the quality of your writing, andthere are thousands of hopefulstrying to gain enough of this capitalto impress a very small group ofbuyers.

In this respect, however, Alexhad an advantage. At DartmouthCollege he had been a debater, anda damn good one at that: In 2002his two-man team arrived at the

National Debate Tournament withthe country’s highest rank; Alexthen went on to win the BestSpeaker prize at the tournament. Indebate, as in television writing,there’s no mystery about whatseparates good from bad: Thescoring system is specific andknown. To become the country’sbest debater, therefore, Alex had tomaster the art of continualimprovement. Hearing the story ofhow he then went on to succeed inHollywood convinced me that itwas exactly this skill that fueled hisfast rise.

When Alex made the decision tomove to Hollywood, his logic, intypical debater fashion, was airtight:“I figured I could always apply tolaw school,” he recalled thinking,“but realistically this would be myonly chance to try out writing.”Alex admits that when he firstmoved west he wasn’t even surewhat his goals were: “I had anumber of things I wanted to do,but didn’t know what they meant. Ithought I wanted to be a networkexecutive, for example, but had noidea what that involved. I thought Imight be a TV writer, but didn’t

know what that meant either.” Thiswas not a classic case of the youngman building the courage to followhis unmistakable passion.

When Alex first arrived in LA,he took a job as website editor forthe National Lampoon. Once there,he discovered that the Lampoonwas also interested in televisionproduction. Drawing from theadage “write what you know,” Alexpitched them Master Debaters, ashow that required comedians todebate humorous topics in front ofa panel of judges. He was given amodest amount of money to film a

pilot, which he did, in a Border’sbookstore in Westwood. Butmaking television shows is a toughgame, and the National Lampoon’stentative effort didn’t go anywhere.

What I like about Alex’s story iswhat he does next: He quit his jobat the National Lampoon and tooka position as an assistant to adevelopment executive at NBC. It’shere that I see Alex’s debaterinstincts stir back to life. TheNational Lampoon was too far tothe periphery of the industry toteach him what it takes to succeed.By accepting an assistant position

he threw himself into the center ofthe action, where he could find outhow things actually work.

It didn’t take long for Alex todiscover what allows some writersto succeed in catching the attentionof a network while so many othersfail: They write good scripts—atask that’s more difficult than manyimagine. Spurred by this insight,Alex turned his attention to writing.Lots of writing. During the eightmonths he spent as an assistant hededicated his nights to working ona trio of different writing projects.First, before Alex left the National

Lampoon, they had optioned hisMaster Debaters idea to VH1—while an assistant Alex was stillpolishing the script for the VH1version of the pilot. (In the end,like most pilots, nothing ever cameof the VH1 option.) At the sametime, he was working on a pilot foran unrelated show along with aproducer he had met at theLampoon. And on his own, he waswriting a screenplay about his lifegrowing up in Washington, D.C. “Imight finish writing at two or threeA.M., then have to leave at eight thenext morning to get back to my job

at NBC on time,” Alex recalls. Itwas a busy period.

After eight months as anassistant, Alex heard about a jobopening for a script assistant onCommander in Chief, a West Wingcopycat helmed by Geena Davis. Hejumped at the chance to observeprofessional TV writers up close,even though it was still a low-levelposition. On the side, he also addedto his portfolio a spec script-in-progress for the HBO series CurbYour Enthusiasm, aggressivelyseeking feedback on his earlydrafts. “I thought I needed more

samples to get work,” he recalls.While working as a script

assistant for Commander in Chief,Alex started to pitch episode ideasto the room: One of the privilegesof being a script assistant is that youcan always get a (quick)consideration of your pitch. Notlong before the show was canceled,he finally caught the attention of theroom with an episode idea aboutlost missiles from a plane crash inPakistan and the political fallout ofa gay commitment ceremony.Working with Cynthia Cohen, oneof the staff writers on the show, he

produced a draft of the episode.“For those with free TiVo space,

I recommend giving the ‘thumbsup’ to a groundbreaking episode ofCommander in Chief, this Thursdayat ten,” Alex wrote in an e-mail tofriends around this time. “Whygroundbreaking, you ask? Because,within the first ten minutes, for thefirst time in the history of networktelevision, the words ‘Alex’ and‘Berger’ will appear—in succession,mind you—just underneath thewords ‘written by.’ ”

With his first produced televisionscript now in hand, things began to

move quickly for Alex. AfterCommander in Chief was canceled,he took another low-level job, thistime working with the producerJonathan Lisco in the run-up for hisnew show, K-Ville, a post-KatrinaNew Orleans drama beingdeveloped for Fox. Given hiswriting credit, however, and acollection of increasingly polishedspec scripts, this job became aninformal tryout for Alex: He wasgiven the chance to impress Lisco—which he did. When a spot openedon the writing staff for K-Ville, itwas given to Alex: his first official

position as a staff writer. He wenton to write and air two episodesbefore the show was canceled.

After K-Ville, a mutual friend setup a meeting between Alex andMichael Eisner, who, fresh fromleaving Disney, was looking tocreate a television comedy as hisfirst project as an independentproducer. Alex got the meetingbecause he was a former staffwriter for a network show, but itwas his Curb Your Enthusiasmscript that convinced Eisner to askhim to write a pilot for his newidea. Eisner liked the pilot draft,

and Alex went on to help himcocreate the show, Glenn Martin,DDS, which aired for two seasonsas a flagship program forNickelodeon’s “Nick at Night”block.

It was as Glenn Martin waswinding down that Alex sold hispilot to USA and was staffed onone of their hit shows, CovertAffairs—the setting where I firstintroduced him to you.

Alex’s CapitalTo understand Alex Berger’svarious breaks, you need tounderstand the career capital thatenabled them. For example, it wascertainly a big deal for MichaelEisner to ask Alex to help himcreate a show, but think about whatthis break required: At the time,Alex had been a staff writer for anetwork show and had a quality-comedy spec script—polished overmany rounds of aggressivefeedback—in his portfolio. That’san important collection of capital.

If you rewind the clock more

and ask how Alex got a staff spoton K-Ville, you once again discovera capital transaction: He had alreadywritten and aired an episode ofanother network drama,Commander in Chief. Anotherimportant collection of capital.

Rewind the clock further and askhow Alex, as a lowly scriptassistant, got a script aired onCommander in Chief, and youencounter the writing skill he haddeveloped over the previous yearsspent obsessively honing his craft—a period where he was oftenworking on three or four scripts at a

time, always seeking feedback forhow he could make them better.The Alex Berger who first arrivedin LA, fresh out of college, did nothave this writing-skill capital. Bythe time he was working forCommander in Chief, however, hewas ready for his first majortransaction.

In this telling, the story of Alex’sfast rise is not one of passiontriumphing over setbacks: It’s muchless dramatic. Alex, the formerdebate champion, coolly assessedwhat career capital was valuable inthis market. He then set out with the

intensity once reserved for debateprep to acquire this capital as fast aspossible. What this story lacks inpizazz, it makes up in repeatability:There’s nothing mysterious abouthow Alex Berger broke intoHollywood—he simply understoodthe value, and difficulty, ofbecoming good.

The Most Desirable Job in SiliconValley

Mike Jackson is a director at theWestly Group, a cleantech venturecapital firm on Silicon Valley’sfamous Sand Hill Road. To say thatMike has a desirable job is anunderstatement. “I have a friendwho recently had dinner with thedean in charge of a top-tier businessschool,” he told me. “And at thisdinner, the dean said that everyonein their graduating class right nowwants to be a cleantech VC.” Mikehas experienced this firsthand: Hereceives dozens of e-mails from

business school students asking himabout his path. He used to try toanswer them, but now, due to timeconstraints, he mostly ignores them.“Everyone wants my job,” heexplained.

The fact that people covet hisposition isn’t surprising. Cleanenergy is hot. It’s a way to help theworld while at the same time, asMike admitted, “you make a lot ofmoney.” In his position, Mike hastraveled the world, met senators,and spent time with the mayors ofboth Sacramento and Los Angeles.During one of our conversations,

he mentioned that David Plouffe,Barack Obama’s campaignmanager, had been “hanging aroundthe office.”

What interests me about Mike isthat, like Alex Berger, he didn’tarrive at his outstanding job byfollowing a clear passion. Insteadhe carefully and persistentlygathered career capital, confidentthat valuable skills would translateinto valuable opportunities. UnlikeAlex, however, Mike startedgathering capital before he knewwhat he wanted to do with it. Infact, he had never given a

moment’s thought to cleantechventure capital until a couple weeksbefore his first interview.

How Mike Jackson Became aVenture Capitalist

Mike majored in biology and earthsystems at Stanford. After earninghis bachelor’s degree, Mike electedto stay for a fifth year to earn amaster’s. The professor whosupervised his master’s was tryingto decide whether or not to launch amajor research project studying thenatural-gas sector in India, so hearranged Mike’s thesis to act as anexploration of the project’sviability. In the fall of 2005, afterMike finished his graduate degree,his supervisor decided he liked

what he saw and launched themajor research project. Notsurprisingly, he asked Mike to helphim lead it—at this point, Mike hadjust spent a year getting up to speedon its details.

Mike, who is competitive bynature, tackled the project withintensity, driven by the belief thatthe better he did now, the better hisoptions would be later. “During thistime, I traveled to India ten timesand to China four to five times, inaddition to quite a bit of travel inEurope,” he recalls. “I met with theheads of major utilities, and I

learned how the global energymarket really works.” When theproject concluded in the fall of2007, Mike and his professor held amajor international conference torelease and discuss the results.Academics and governmentofficials from around the worldattended.

With the project complete, Mikehad to decide what to do next. Ofthe many valuable skills he pickedup from the project, one inparticular was a “deepunderstanding” of how theinternational carbon market works.

As part of this expertise, he learnedthat the United States had anobscure exchange, known as therenewable energy credits market.“Almost no one understood thesethings; it was a really fracturedmarket with huge informationasymmetry,” he recalls. Being oneof the few people who actuallyknew how this market worked,Mike decided to start a business. Hecalled it Village Green. The ideawas simple: You give money toMike, he does complicatedtransactions that only he and a fewother energy regulation wonks

really understand, and then heoffers you certification that you’vepurchased enough carbon offsetsfor your business to be deemedcarbon neutral.

Mike ran this business for twoyears along with a friend fromStanford and a rotating series ofother partners. They wereheadquartered in a rental house notfar from where he lived in SanFrancisco. The company neverstruggled to pay its expenses, but italso never became a thrivingconcern. So when the economywent sour in 2009, Mike and his

partner decided to shutter it insteadof hunkering down and trying toride out the recession.

“We decided to get real jobs,” ishow Mike describes what happenednext. Here’s how the processunfolded: A stand-up comedianfriend of Mike’s had a girlfriendwho was interviewing at a venturecapital firm. She decided not to takethe job, but recommended that theytalk to Mike. “She thought I wouldbe a good fit for venture capital,given my experience with mycompany,” he said. Mike knew thathe was not a good match for this

technology-focused fund. “I haveno idea how to find the nextFacebook,” he told me, “but I couldtell you if a solar energy firm wasprobably going to make money.”He figured, however, that since hehad never been through a real jobinterview before, the experiencewould provide good practice.

“The interview was pretty low-key, because we both realized earlyon I wasn’t going to get this job,but we hit it off on a personal level”he recalls. At some point in thediscussion, the venture capitalisthad an idea. “You know, you

would be a good match for thiscleantech fund that’s starting up,”he said. “Why don’t I introduce youto my friend over there?”

In the summer of 2009, Mikestarted a trial period as an intern atthe Westly Group. In October theygave him a full-time position as ananalyst, and soon after, he waspromoted to associate. Two yearslater he became a director. “Whenpeople ask me how I got my job,”he now jokes, “I tell them to makefriends with a comedian.”

Mike’s CapitalMike Jackson leveraged thecraftsman mindset to do whateverhe did really well, thus ensuringthat he came away from eachexperience with as much careercapital as possible. He never hadelaborate plans for his career.Instead, after each workingexperience, he would stick his headup to see who was interested in hisnewly expanded store of capital,and then jump at whateveropportunity seemed mostpromising.

One could argue that luck also

played an important role in Mike’sstory. He was, for example, lucky tofind a personal connection to aventure capitalist and then to hit itoff when they met in person. Butthese types of small breaks arecommon. What mattered most inMike’s story is that once hestumbled through the door, hiscareer capital went to work gettinghim a fantastic job offer.

If you spend time around Mike,you quickly realize how serious heis about doing what he does well.It’s true that he now loves his work,but he’s still quick to turn the

conversation back to how heapproaches it. As you’ll learn moreabout in the next chapter, Mikeliterally tracks every hour of hisday, down to quarter-hourincrements, on a spreadsheet. Hewants to ensure that his attention isfocused on the activities that matter.“It’s so easy to just come in andspend your whole day on e-mail,”he warned. On the samplespreadsheet he sent me, he allotshimself only ninety minutes per dayfor e-mail. The day before we lastspoke he had only spent forty-five.This is a man who is serious about

doing what he does really well.In the end, Mike’s focus on

capabilities over callings obviouslypaid off. He has a fantastic job, butit was one that required a fantasticstore of career capital to be offeredin exchange.

Chapter Seven

Becoming a Craftsman

In which I introduce deliberatepractice, the key strategy foracquiring career capital, and showhow to integrate it into your ownworking life.

Why Is Jordan Tice a Better GuitarPlayer than Me?

Jordan Tice and I both startedplaying guitar at the age of twelve.After receiving my first guitar, Iformed a band and several monthslater performed my first“concert”—a reduced-speedinterpretation of Nirvana’s “AllApologies,” played to politeapplause at the Tollgate GrammarSchool sixth-grade talent show.After this I got serious: I tooklessons throughout junior highschool and high school. I playedevery day—sometimes rocking

blues solos to Hendrix recordingsfor hours at a time. My band, whichhad the questionable name ofRocking Chair, played around adozen shows a year: festivals,parties, competitions—anywhere,really, that people would allow usto set up our equipment. We onceplayed a gig in a graveyard facing aparking lot. Our drummer’s momvideotaped it. When she pans thecamera from our setup in front ofthe graves to the lot, you realize thatthe “crowd” consists of no morethan a dozen people on foldingchairs. She still finds it funny to

play this tape.By the time I graduated high

school I could play from arepertoire of hundreds of songs,ranging from Green Day to PinkFloyd. In other words, I hadreached the level of expertise youwould expect from someone whohad played an instrument seriouslyfor the last six years. But this iswhat I find fascinating: Comparedto Jordan Tice’s ability at this sameage, I was mediocre.

Jordan picked up guitar at thesame point in his life as I did. Butby the time he graduated high

school, he had been touring themid-Atlantic with a group ofprofessional bluegrass musiciansand had signed his first record deal.When I was in high school, theacoustic group Nickel Creek wasthought of, admiringly, by mygrade’s music snobs as DaveMatthews for cool people. WhenJordan was in high school, heregularly played gigs with their bassplayer, Mark Schatz. The questionhanging over this comparison iswhy, even though we had bothplayed seriously for the sameamount of time, did I end up an

average high school strummerwhile Jordan became a star?

It didn’t take long into my visitwith Jordan to understand theanswer to this question. Thedifference in our abilities by the ageof eighteen had less to do with thenumber of hours we practiced—though he probably racked up moretotal practice hours than I did, weweren’t all that far apart—and moreto do with what we did with thosehours. One of my most vividmemories of Rocking Chair, forexample, was my discomfortplaying anything I didn’t know real

well. There’s a mental strain thataccompanies feeling your waythough a tune that’s not ingrained inmuscle memory, and I hated thatfeeling. I learned songs reluctantly,then clung to them fiercely oncethey had become easy for me. Iused to get upset when our rhythmguitar player would suggest we tryout something new during bandpractice. He was happy glancing at achord chart and then jumping in. Iwasn’t. Even at that young age Irealized that my discomfort withmental discomfort was a liability inthe performance world.

Compare this to Jordan’s earliestexperiences with the guitar. His firstteacher was a friend from hisparents’ church. As Jordanremembers, their lessons focusedon picking out the leads fromAllman Brothers records. “So hewould write out the lead and thenyou would go memorize them?” Iasked. “No, we would just figurethem out by ear,” Jordan replied.To the high school version ofmyself, the idea of learningcomplicated lead parts by ear wouldhave been way past my threshold ofmental strain and patience. But

Jordan came to enjoy this labor. Inour interview, a decade beyond hishigh school years, Jordan at onepoint grabbed his old Martin andknocked off the solo from“Jessica,” which he somehow stillremembered. “Great melody,” hesaid.

Not only did Jordan’s earlypractice require him to constantlystretch himself beyond what wascomfortable, but it was alsoaccompanied by instant feedback.The teacher was always there,Jordan explained, “to jump in andshow me if I junked up a

harmony.”Watching Jordan’s current

practice regime, these traits—strainand feedback—remain central. Toget up to speed on the wide pickingstyle he needs for his new tune, hekeeps adjusting the speed of hispracticing to a point just past wherehe’s comfortable. When he hits awrong note, he immediately stopsand starts over, providing instantfeedback for himself. Whilepracticing, the strain on his face andthe gasping nature of his breathscan be uncomfortable even towatch—I can’t imagine what it feels

like to actually do. But Jordan ishappy to practice like this for hoursat a time.

This, then, explains why Jordanleft me in the dust. I played. But hepracticed. The Nashville studiomusician Mark Casstevensseconded this dedication toconstantly stretching your abilities.When I talked to him, for example,he was in the process of slowlygetting up to speed on a“complicated new tune in B-flatwith a great deal of barre chordsand nasty counterpoint.” Evensomeone with Casstevens’s level of

(literally) award-winningexperience (the Academy ofCountry Music recently named himSpecialty Instrumentalist of theYear) can’t avoid the need to “goout to the woodshed in order topractice.”

“I develop muscle memory thehard way, by repetition,” he said,echoing Jordan’s long, skill-stretching practice sessions. “Theharder I work, the more relaxed Ican play, and the better it sounds.”

These observations, of course,are about more than just guitarplaying. The central idea of this

chapter is that the difference instrategy that separates averageguitar players like me from starslike Tice and Casstevens is notconfined to music. This focus onstretching your ability and receivingimmediate feedback provides thecore of a more universal principle—one that I increasingly came tobelieve provides the key tosuccessfully acquiring career capitalin almost any field.

How to Become a Grand MasterIf you want to understand thescience of how people get good atsomething, chess is an excellentplace to start. For one thing, itprovides a clear definition ofability: your ranking. Thoughdifferent chess ranking systemshave been proposed with varyingpopularity, the current standard isthe Elo system used by the WorldChess Federation. This system givesplayers a score starting at zero thatincreases as they get better. Itscalculation is complicated, but at ahigh level of approximation it

reflects one’s performance atofficial tournaments. If you dobetter than expected, it goes up, andif you do worse, it goes down. Asolid novice player who plays theoccasional weekend competitionwill have a score in the triple digits.Bobby Fischer peaked at 2785. In1990, Garry Kasparov became thefirst player to ever reach 2800. Thehighest score ever obtained was2851, also by Kasparov.

The other reason chess provesuseful for studying performance isthe fact that it’s really hard. To beatGarry Kasparov in 1997, for

example, IBM’s Deep Bluesupercomputer had to analyze 200million moves per second, and toplay a competitive opening, it drewfrom a database of over 700,000grand-master games. Given chess’sdifficulty, we can expect that thestrategies required to get good willbe more pronounced and thereforeeasier to identify.

These traits explain whyscientists have been studying chessplayers since as early as the 1920s,when a trio of Germanpsychologists set out to determine ifgrand masters had freakish

memories.1 (Interestingly, it turnsout they don’t: Though grandmasters are fantastically efficient atstoring chess positions in theirminds, their general recall ability isquite average.) One study thatproves especially relevant to ourinterests is more recent. In 2005, aresearch team led by Neil Charness,a psychologist from Florida StateUniversity, published the results ofa decades-long investigation of thepractice habits of chess players.2Throughout the nineties, Charness’steam had been placing ads innewspapers and posting flyers at

chess tournaments, looking forranked players to participate in theirproject. They ended up surveyingover four hundred players, fromaround the world, in an effort tounderstand why some were betterthan others. Each player was givena form to fill out that requested adetailed history of the player’schess instruction. The respondentswere asked, in essence, to re-createa time line of their development aschess players: At what age did theystart? What type of training did theyreceive at each year? How manytournaments did they play? Were

they coached? How much? And soon.

Previous studies had shown ittakes around ten years, atminimum, to become a grandmaster. (As the psychologist K.Anders Ericsson likes to point out,even prodigies like Bobby Fishermanaged to fit in ten years ofplaying before they achievedinternational recognition: He juststarted this accumulation earlierthan most.) This is the “ten-yearrule,” sometimes called the “10,000-hour rule,” which has beenbouncing around scientific circles

since the 1970s, but waspopularized more recently byMalcolm Gladwell’s bestselling2008 book, Outliers.3 Here’s howhe summarized it:

The 10,000-Hour RuleThe idea that excellence atperforming a complex taskrequires a critical minimumlevel of practice surfacesagain and again in studies ofexpertise. In fact, researchershave settled on what theybelieve is the magic numberfor true expertise: ten

thousand hours [emphasismine].

In Outliers, Gladwell pointed tothis rule as evidence that greataccomplishment is not about naturaltalent, but instead about being in theright place at the right time toaccumulate such a massive amountof practice. Bill Gates? He happenedto attend one of the first highschools in the country to install acomputer and allow their studentsunsupervised access—making himone of the first in his generation tobuild up thousands of hours of

practice on this technology. Mozart?His dad was a fanatic aboutpracticing. By the time Mozart wasbeing toured around Europe as aprodigy, he had squeezed in morethan twice the number of practicehours that similarly aged musiciancontemporaries had acquired.

What interests me aboutCharness’s study, however, is that itmoves beyond the 10,000-hour ruleby asking not just how long peopleworked, but also what type of workthey did. In more detail, theystudied players who had all spentroughly the same amount of time—

around 10,000 hours—playingchess. Some of these players hadbecome grand masters while othersremained at an intermediate level.Both groups had practiced the sameamount of time, so the difference intheir ability must depend on howthey used these hours. It was thesedifferences that Charness sought.

In the 1990s, this was a relevantquestion. There was debate in thechess world at the time surroundingthe best strategies for improving.One camp thought tournament playwas crucial, as it provides practicewith tight time limits and working

through distractions. The othercamp, however, emphasized seriousstudy—pouring over books andusing teachers to help identify andthen eliminate weaknesses. Whensurveyed, the participants inCharness’s study thoughttournament play was probably theright answer. The participants, as itturns out, were wrong. Hours spentin serious study of the game wasnot just the most important factor inpredicting chess skill, it dominatedthe other factors. The researchersdiscovered that the players whobecame grand masters spent five

times more hours dedicated toserious study than those whoplateaued at an intermediate level.The grand masters, on average,dedicated around 5,000 hours outof their 10,000 to serious study. Theintermediate players, by contrast,dedicated only around 1,000 to thisactivity.

On closer examination, theimportance of serious studybecomes more obvious. In seriousstudy, Charness concluded,“materials can be deliberatelychosen or adapted such that theproblems to be solved are at a level

that is appropriately challenging.”This contrasts with tournamentplay, where you are likely to drawan opponent who is eitherdemonstrably better ordemonstrably worse than yourself:both situations where “skillimprovement is likely to beminimized.” Furthermore, inserious study, feedback isimmediate: be it from looking upthe answer to a chess problem in abook or, as is more typically thecase for serious players, receivingimmediate feedback from an expertcoach. The Norwegian chess

phenom Magnus Carlsen, forexample, paid Garry Kasparov over$700,000 a year to add polish to hisotherwise intuitive playing style.

Notice how well chess fits withour earlier discussion of guitarpractice. The “serious study”employed by top chess playerssounds similar to Jordan Tice’sapproach to music: They’re bothfocused on difficult activities,carefully chosen to stretch yourabilities where they most needstretching and that provideimmediate feedback. At the sametime, notice how chess-tournament

play sounds a lot like my approachto guitar: It’s enjoyable andexciting, but it’s not necessarilymaking you better. I spent manyhours playing songs I knew,including dozens and dozens ofhours spent on stage. Like theintermediate players in the Charnessstudy, I was letting this satisfyingwork pile up ineffectively whileJordan, during these same ages, waspainstakingly squirreling away theserious study that would make himexceptional.

In the early 1990s, AndersEricsson, a colleague of Neil

Charness at Florida StateUniversity, coined the term“deliberate practice” to describe thisstyle of serious study, defining itformally as an “activity designed,typically by a teacher, for the solepurpose of effectively improvingspecific aspects of an individual’sperformance.”4 As hundreds offollow-up studies have sinceshown, deliberate practice providesthe key to excellence in a diversearray of fields, among which arechess, medicine, auditing, computerprogramming, bridge, physics,sports, typing, juggling, dance, and

music.5 If you want to understandthe source of professional athletes’talent, for example, look to theirpractice schedules—almost withoutexception they have beensystematically stretching theirathletic abilities, with the guidanceof expert coaches, since they werechildren. If you instead turned thetables on Malcolm Gladwell, andasked him about his writing ability,he too would point you towarddeliberate practice. In Outliers henotes that he spent ten years honinghis craft in the Washington Postnewsroom before he moved to the

New Yorker and began writing hisbreakout book, The Tipping Point.

“When experts exhibit theirsuperior performance in publictheir behavior looks so effortlessand natural that we are tempted toattribute it to special talents,”Ericsson notes. “However, whenscientists began measuring theexperts’ supposedly superiorpowers… no general superioritywas found.”6 In other words,outside a handful of extremeexamples—such as the height ofprofessional basketball players andthe girth of football linemen—

scientists have failed to find muchevidence of natural abilitiesexplaining experts’ successes. It is alifetime accumulation of deliberatepractice that again and again endsup explaining excellence.

Here’s what struck me asimportant about deliberate practice:It’s not obvious. Outside of fieldssuch as chess, music, andprofessional athletics, which haveclear competitive structures andtraining regimes, few participate inanything that even remotelyapproximates this style of skilldevelopment. As Ericsson explains,

“Most individuals who start asactive professionals… change theirbehavior and increase theirperformance for a limited time untilthey reach an acceptable level.Beyond this point, however, furtherimprovements appear to beunpredictable and the number ofyears of work… is a poor predictorof attained performance.” Putanother way, if you just show upand work hard, you’ll soon hit aperformance plateau beyondwhich you fail to get any better.This is what happened to me withmy guitar playing, to the chess

players who stuck to tournamentplay, and to most knowledgeworkers who simply put in thehours: We all hit plateaus.

When I first encountered thework of Ericsson and Charness, thisinsight startled me. It told me that inmost types of work—that is, workthat doesn’t have a clear trainingphilosophy—most people are stuck.This generates an excitingimplication. Let’s assume you’re aknowledge worker, which is a fieldwithout a clear training philosophy.If you can figure out how tointegrate deliberate practice into

your own life, you have thepossibility of blowing past yourpeers in your value, as you’ll likelybe alone in your dedication tosystematically getting better. That is,deliberate practice might providethe key to quickly becoming sogood they can’t ignore you.

To successfully adopt thecraftsman mindset, therefore, wehave to approach our jobs in thesame way that Jordanapproaches his guitar playing orGarry Kasparov his chesstraining—with a dedication todeliberate practice. How to

accomplish this feat is the goal ofthe remainder of this chapter. Iwant to start, in the next section, byarguing that I’m not the first to havethis insight. When we return to thestories of Alex Berger and MikeJackson, we find that deliberatepractice was at the core of theirquest for work they love.

Alex Berger Craves Criticism andMike Jackson Doesn’t Check E-

mailConsider Alex Berger’s two-yearrise from assistant to cocreator of anational television series. He toldme that getting your writing to“network quality” can take from acouple of years at the minimum toas many as twenty-five. The reasonhe was on the fast track, heexplained, was his debate-champ-style obsession with improving. “Ihave a never-ending thirst to getbetter,” he said. “It’s like a sport,you have to practice and you have

to study.” Alex admitted that eventhough he’s now an establishedwriter, he still reads screenwritingbooks, looking for places where hiscraft could stand improving. “It’s aconstant learning process,” he said.

The other thing I noticed aboutAlex is that this learning is not donein isolation: “You need to beconstantly soliciting feedback fromcolleagues and professionals,” hetold me. During his rise, Alexconsistently chose projects wherehe’d be forced to show his work toothers. While still working as anassistant at NBC, for example, he

was writing two pilots: one for VH1and another with a producer he metat the National Lampoon. In bothcases, people were waiting to seehis scripts—there was no avoidinghaving them be read and dissected.His Curb Your Enthusiasm spec, toname another example, whichhelped him land his job withMichael Eisner, underwent a lot ofscrutiny from Alex’s colleagues, athis request. “When I look backnow, I’m humiliated that I evershowed it to anyone,” Alex recalled.But it was necessary if he was goingto get better. “I hope I can look

back ten years later and say thesame about what I’m writing now.”

In Alex, we see exactly the traitsthat Anders Ericsson defined ascrucial for deliberate practice. Hestretched his abilities by taking onprojects that were beyond hiscurrent comfort zone; and not justone at a time, but often up to threeor four writing commissionsconcurrently, all the while holdingdown a day job! He thenobsessively sought feedback, oneverything—even if, looking backnow, he’s humiliated at the qualityof scripts he was sending out. This

is textbook deliberate practice: Andit worked. It allowed Alex toacquire career capital in a winner-take-all market that’s notoriouslyreluctant to hand it out.

We see a similar commitment todeliberate practice in MikeJackson’s story. In each stage of hispath to becoming a venturecapitalist he threw himself into aproject beyond his currentcapabilities and then hustled tomake it a success. He took on anambitious master’s thesis that hethen translated into leading an evenmore ambitious international

research project. He went from theproject into the harsh world ofstart-ups, where, without outsideinvestment, his ability to pay hisrent was dependent on him figuringthings out quickly.

Furthermore, at all stages of thispath, Mike was not only stretchinghimself, he was also receivingdirect feedback. The work he wasleading for the internationalresearch project was being preparedfor peer review—the epitome ofruthless response. When runninghis start-up, this feedback took theform of how much money came

through the door. If he ran thecompany poorly, there would be noescaping this fact: His critiquewould arrive in the form ofbankruptcy.

In his current position as aventure capitalist, Mike maintainshis dedication to stretching hisability, guided by feedback. Hisnew tool of choice is a spreadsheet,which he uses to track how hespends every hour of every day. “Atthe beginning of each week I figureout how much time I want to spendon different activities,” heexplained. “I then track it so I can

see how close I came to mytargets.” On the sample spreadsheethe sent me, he divides his activitiesinto two categories: hard to change(i.e., weekly commitments he can’tavoid) and highly changeable (i.e.,self-directed activities that hecontrols). Here’s the amount of timehe dedicates to each:

Mike Jackson’s Work-HourAllocation

Hard-to-Change Commitments

Activity

HoursAllocated

for the

WeekE-mail 7.5Lunch/Breaks/Other 4Planning/Organization 1.5PartnerMeeting/Administrative 4

Weekly Fund-raisingMeeting 1

Highly ChangeableCommitments

HoursAllocated

Activity for theWeek

Improving Fund-raisingMaterials 3

Fund-raising Process 12Due Diligence Research 3Deal Flow Sourcing 3Meetings/Calls withPotential Investors 1

Work with PortfolioCompanies 2

Networking/ProfessionalDevelopment 3

Mike’s goal with his spreadsheet

is to become more “intentional”about how his workday unfolds.“The easiest thing to do is to showup to work in the morning and justrespond to e-mail the whole day,”he explained. “But that is not themost strategic way to spend yourtime.” Mike now freely admits thathe doesn’t “do much e-mail.” Evenafter we had been working for awhile on the interviews for thisbook, my scheduling e-mails toMike only sporadically generated areply. I eventually figured out that itworked better to call him while hewas commuting to his Palo Alto

office. On reflection, of course, thismakes perfect sense from Mike’sperspective. Spending hours everyday sorting through non-critical e-mail from authors such as myself orfrom business students fishing fortips, among other trivialities, wouldimpede his ability to raise moneyand find good companies—ultimately the job he’s judged on.Does he annoy some peoplebecause of this lack of availability?Probably. But take my example ofeventually being forced to call himduring his commute: The importantstuff still finds its way to him, but

on his schedule.When you look at Mike’s

spreadsheet, you also notice that herestricts the hours dedicated torequired tasks that don’t ultimatelymake him better at what he does(eighteen hours). The majority ofhis week is instead focused on whatmatters: raising money, vettinginvestments, and helping his fund’scompanies (twenty-seven hours).Without this careful tracking, thisratio would be much different.

This is a great example ofdeliberate practice at work. “I wantto spend time on what’s important,

instead of what’s immediate,” Mikeexplained. At the end of every weekhe prints his numbers to see howwell he achieved this goal, and thenuses this feedback to guide himselfin the week ahead. The fact thathe’s been promoted three times inless than three years underscoresthe effectiveness of this deliberateapproach.

The Five Habits of a CraftsmanThe stories of Alex Berger andMike Jackson provide a niceexample of deliberate practice in aknowledge-work setting. It can stillbe difficult, however, to figure outhow to apply this strategy in yourown working life. Motivated by thisreality, I drew from the researchliterature on deliberate practice, aswell as from the stories ofcraftsman like Alex and Mike, toconstruct a series of steps forsuccessfully applying this strategy.In this section, I’ll detail these steps.There is no magic formula, but

deliberate practice is a highlytechnical process, so I’m hopingthat this specificity will help you getstarted.

Step 1: Decide What CapitalMarket You’re In

For the sake of clarity, I willintroduce some new terminology.When you are acquiring careercapital in a field, you can imaginethat you are acquiring this capital ina specific type of career capitalmarket. There are two types ofthese markets: winner-take-all andauction. In a winner-take-allmarket, there is only one type ofcareer capital available, and lots ofdifferent people competing for it.Television writing is a winner-take-all market because all that matters is

your ability to write good scripts.That is, the only capital type is yourscript-writing capability.

An auction market, by contrast,is less structured: There are manydifferent types of career capital, andeach person might generate aunique collection. The cleantechspace is an auction market. MikeJackson’s capital, for example,included expertise in renewableenergy markets andentrepreneurship, but there are avariety of other types of relevantskills that also could have led to ajob in this field.

With this in mind, the first taskin building a deliberate practicestrategy is to figure out what type ofcareer capital market you arecompeting in. Answering thisquestion might seem obvious, butit’s surprisingly easy to get itwrong. In fact, this is how Iinterpret the beginning of Alex’sstory. When he arrived in LosAngeles, he treated theentertainment industry as an auctionmarket. By taking a job as a Webeditor at the National Lampoon, hebegan to build up a stable ofcollege-aged humor writers. He also

filmed a pilot for a low-budgetshow for the organization. Theseactions make sense in an auctionmarket where it’s important to buildup a diverse collection of capital.But the entertainment industry isnot an auction market; it’s insteadwinner-take-all. If you want acareer in television writing, as Alexdiscovered, only one thing matters:the quality of your scripts. It tookhim a year to realize his mistake,but once he did, he left theLampoon to become an assistant toa TV executive so he could betterunderstand the single type of capital

of any value to his field. It was onlyat this point that he began to gaintraction in his career.

Mistaking a winner-take-all foran auction market is common. I seeit often in an area relevant to myown life: blogging. Here’s a typicale-mail from among the many Ireceive from people asking foradvice on growing their own blogaudience:

“I’ve finished my first monthof posting and am at aboutthree thousand views. Thebounce rate, however, is

incredibly high, particularlythrough Digg and Redditsubmissions, where it can getclose to 90 percent. I’mwondering what next stepsyou think I should take tobring down the bouncerate?”

This new blogger was viewingblogging as an auction market. Inhis conception, there are manydifferent types of capital relevant toyour blog—from its format, to itspost frequency, to its search-engineoptimization, to how easy it is to

find it on social networks (thisparticular blogger invested serioustime in submitting every post to asmany social networking sites aspossible). He viewed the worldthrough statistics and hoped thatwith the right combination ofcapital he could get them where heneeded them to be to make money.The problem, however, is thatblogging in the advice space—where his site existed—is not anauction market, it’s winner-take-all.The only capital that matters iswhether or not your posts compelthe reader.

Some top blogs in this spacehave notoriously clunky designs,but they all accomplish the samebaseline goal: They inspire theirreaders. When you correctlyunderstand the market whereblogging exists, you stop calculatingyour bounce rate and start focusinginstead on saying something peoplereally care about—which is whereyour energy should be if you wantto succeed.

Mike Jackson, by contrast,correctly identified that he was inan auction market. He wasn’t sureexactly what he wanted to do, but

he knew it would involve theenvironment, so he set out to gainany capital relevant to this broadtopic.

Step 2: Identify Your Capital TypeOnce you’ve identified yourmarket, you must then identify thespecific type of capital to pursue. Ifyou’re in a winner-take-all market,this is trivial: By definition, there’sonly one type of capital thatmatters. For an auction market,however, you have flexibility. Auseful heuristic in this situation is toseek open gates—opportunities tobuild capital that are already opento you. For example, MikeJackson’s next step after his degreewas to work with a Stanfordprofessor on his environmental-

policy research. This decisionhelped Mike acquire a key type ofcareer capital—a nuancedunderstanding of internationalenergy markets. At the same time,however, keep in mind that this wasalso an opportunity that was opento Mike because he was already aStanford student earning a degree inthe field. This made it relativelyeasy for him to jump into this newrole. For someone outside ofStanford, by contrast, being put incharge of such an important projectwould have been a much less likelyproposition.

The advantage of open gates isthat they get you farther faster, interms of career capital acquisition,than starting from scratch. It helpsto think about skill acquisition likea freight train: Getting it startedrequires a huge application ofeffort, but changing its track onceit’s moving is easy. In other words,it’s hard to start from scratch in anew field. If, for example, Mikehad decided to leave Stanford to gowork for a private sustainabilitynon-profit, he would have beenstarting at the ground floor with noparticular leg up. By instead

leveraging his Stanford education togain a position with a Stanfordprofessor, he was acquiringvaluable capital much sooner.

Step 3: Define “Good”It’s at this point, once you’veidentified exactly what skill tobuild, that you can, for guidance,begin to draw from the research ondeliberate practice. The first thingthis literature tells us is that youneed clear goals. If you don’t knowwhere you’re trying to get to, thenit’s hard to take effective action.Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortunemagazine who wrote a book ondeliberate practice,7 put it this wayin an article that appeared inFotune: “[Deliberate practice]

requires good goals.”8

When you ask a musician likeJordan Tice, for example, there’slittle ambiguity about what getting“good” means to him at thatmoment. There’s always some new,more complicated technique tomaster. For Alex Berger, thedefinition of “good” was also clear:his scripts being taken seriously. Togive a concrete example, one of theprojects he was working on whilestill an assistant was thedevelopment of a spec script tosubmit to talent agencies. For him,at this early stage of his career

capital acquisition, “good” meanthaving a script good enough to landhim an agent. There was noambiguity about what it meant tosucceed at this goal.

Step 4: Stretch and DestroyReturning to Geoff Colvin, in thearticle cited above he gives thefollowing warning about deliberatepractice:

Doing things we know how todo well is enjoyable, andthat’s exactly the opposite ofwhat deliberate practicedemands…. Deliberatepractice is above all an effortof focus and concentration.That is what makes it“deliberate,” as distinct fromthe mindless playing of scales

or hitting of tennis balls thatmost people engage in.

If you show up and do whatyou’re told, you will, as AndersEricsson explained earlier in thischapter, reach an “acceptable level”of ability before plateauing. Thegood news about deliberate practiceis that it will push you past thisplateau and into a realm where youhave little competition. The badnews is that the reason so fewpeople accomplish this feat isexactly because of the trait Colvinwarned us about: Deliberate

practice is often the opposite ofenjoyable.

I like the term “stretch” fordescribing what deliberate practicefeels like, as it matches my ownexperience with the activity. WhenI’m learning a new mathematicaltechnique—a classic case ofdeliberate practice—theuncomfortable sensation in myhead is best approximated as aphysical strain, as if my neurons arephysically re-forming into newconfigurations. As anymathematician will admit, thisstretching feels much different than

applying a technique you’ve alreadymastered, which can be quiteenjoyable. But this stretching, asany mathematician will also admit,is the precondition to getting better.

This is what you shouldexperience in your own pursuit of“good.” If you’re notuncomfortable, then you’reprobably stuck at an “acceptablelevel.”

Pushing past what’s comfortable,however, is only one part of thedeliberate-practice story; the otherpart is embracing honest feedback—even if it destroys what you

thought was good. As Colvinexplains in his Fortune article,“You may think that your rehearsalof a job interview was flawless, butyour opinion isn’t what counts.”It’s so tempting to just assume whatyou’ve done is good enough andcheck it off your to-do list, but it’sin honest, sometimes harshfeedback that you learn where toretrain your focus in order tocontinue to make progress.

Alex Berger, for example, wentto elaborate lengths to keep aconstant stream of feedbackcoming. Recall that during his first

year of seriously pursuing careercapital in television writing, he wasworking on two pilots: one for VH1and another with a producer he metat the National Lampoon. In bothcases, he was working withprofessionals who wouldn’t hesitateto let him know what was workingand what was not in his writing.Though he now describes himselfas being somewhat “humiliated” bythe quality of writing he was puttingout for feedback at this stage, healso recognizes that the continuousand harsh feedback he receivedaccelerated the growth of his ability.

Step 5: Be PatientIn his 2007 interview with CharlieRose, here’s how Steve Martinexplained his strategy for learningthe banjo: “[I thought], if I staywith it, then one day I will havebeen playing for forty years, andanyone who sticks with somethingfor forty years will be pretty good atit.”

To me, this is a phenomenaldisplay of patience. Learningclawhammer banjo is hard, andbecause of this, Martin was willingto look forty years into the futurefor the payoff—a recognition of the

frustrating months of hard workand mediocre playing ahead. In hismemoir, Martin expounds on thisidea when he discusses theimportance of “diligence” for hissuccess in the entertainmentbusiness. What’s interesting is thatMartin redefines the word so thatit’s less about paying attention toyour main pursuit, and more aboutyour willingness to ignore otherpursuits that pop up along the wayto distract you. The final step forapplying deliberate practice to yourworking life is to adopt this style ofdiligence.

The logic works as follows:Acquiring capital can take time. ForAlex, it took about two years ofserious deliberate practice beforehis first television script wasproduced. Mike Jackson was a halfdecade out of college beforecashing in his capital to land adream job.

This is why Martin’s diligence isso important: Without this patientwillingness to reject shiny newpursuits, you’ll derail your effortsbefore you acquire the capital youneed. I think the image of Martinreturning to his banjo, day after

day, for forty years, is poignant. Itcaptures well the feel of how careercapital is actually acquired: Youstretch yourself, day after day,month after month, before finallylooking up and realizing, “Hey, I’vebecome pretty good, and people arestarting to notice.”

Summary of Rule #2Rule #1 took on the conventional

wisdom about how people end uploving what they do. It argued thatthe passion hypothesis, which saysthat the key to loving your work isto match a job to a pre-existingpassion, is bad advice. There’s littleevidence that most people have pre-existing passions waiting to bediscovered, and believing thatthere’s a magical right job lurkingout there can often lead to chronicunhappiness and confusion whenthe reality of the working worldfails to match this dream.

Rule #2 was the first to tackle thenatural follow-up question: If“follow your passion” is badadvice, what should you doinstead? It contended that the traitsthat define great work are rare andvaluable. If you want these traits inyour own life, you need rare andvaluable skills to offer in return. Icalled these rare and valuable skillscareer capital, and noted that thefoundation of constructing workyou love is acquiring a large storeof this capital.

With this in mind, we turned ourattention to this process of capital

acquisition. I argued that it’simportant to adopt the craftsmanmindset, where you focusrelentlessly on what value you’reoffering the world. This stands instark contrast to the much morecommon passion mindset, whichhas you focus only on what valuethe world is offering you.

Even with the craftsman mindset,however, becoming “so good theycan’t ignore you” is not trivial. Tohelp these efforts I introduced thewell-studied concept of deliberatepractice, an approach to workwhere you deliberately stretch your

abilities beyond where you’recomfortable and then receiveruthless feedback on yourperformance. Musicians, athletes,and chess players know all aboutdeliberate practice. Knowledgeworkers, however, do not. This isgreat news for knowledge workers:If you can introduce this strategyinto your working life you can vaultpast your peers in your acquisitionof career capital.

RULE #3

Turn Down a Promotion

(Or, the Importance of Control)

Chapter Eight

The Dream-Job Elixir

In which I argue that control overwhat you do, and how you do it, isone of the most powerful traits youcan acquire when creating workyou love.

The Mysterious Red Fire AppealWhen Ryan Voiland graduatedcollege in 2000 with an Ivy Leaguediploma in hand, he didn’t followhis classmates into the big-citybanks or managementconsultancies. Instead he didsomething unexpected: He boughtfarmland. Ryan’s acreage is inGranby, Massachusetts, a smalltown of six thousand in the centerof the state, not far south fromAmherst. The land quality inGranby is mixed—it’s too far eastfrom the Connecticut River toguarantee access to the river

valley’s best soil—but Ryan stillmanaged to coax a variety of fruitsand vegetables out of his plot. Hecalled the fledgling concern RedFire Farm.

When I arrived in May 2011 tospend a day at Red Fire, Ryan, whois now working with his wife,Sarah, had seventy acres of organicproduce under cultivation. The bulkof Red Fire’s revenue comes fromtheir Community SupportedAgriculture (CSA) program, inwhich subscribers pay for a shareof the farm’s output at thebeginning of the growing season

and then pick up their produceevery week at distribution standsthroughout the state. In 2011, theprogram had around 1,300 CSAsubscribers and had started to turnpeople away—there was moredemand than they could meet.

In other words, Red Fire Farm isa success, but this is not what drewme to Granby. I arranged to spend aday with Ryan and Sarah for amore personal reason: I wanted tofigure out why their lifestyle was soappealing.

To clarify, I’m not the only oneentranced by Red Fire. This is a

farm with fans. When Ryan andSarah arrange special eventsthroughout the year—a dinner tocelebrate the summer strawberryharvest, for example, or their fallpumpkin festival—they quickly sellout. During my last visit Ioverheard a middle-aged womantell her friend, “I just love Ryan andSarah”—and I’m pretty sure they’dnever actually met. The idea ofRyan and Sarah, and what theirlifestyle represents, was enough todraw her to Granby.

This appeal, of course, goesbeyond just Red Fire. The dream of

leaving the rat race to start a farm,or otherwise live in harmony withthe land, is the perennial fantasy ofthe cubicle-bound. In recent years,the New York Times, for example,has made great sport of telling thestory of ex-bankers who head off toVermont to start farms (stories thatusually end with the bankerslinking home, mud-stained hat inhand). Something about workingoutdoors, sun on your back, nocomputer screen in sight, isundeniably appealing. But why?

This question motivated my visitto Red Fire. I was unlikely to move

out to the country, but if I couldisolate the underlying traits thatattracted me to this lifestyle, Ireasoned, I could perhaps thenintegrate some of these traits intomy own life in the city. In otherwords, figuring out this appealbecame a key goal in my quest tounderstand how people end uploving what they do. So I wroteRyan and Sarah and asked if Icould spend a day following themaround. Once they agreed, I packedup my notebook, dusted off mywork boots, and drove due west outof Boston: I was on a mission to

crack the Red Fire Code.

Cracking the Red Fire CodeNot long into my visit, I joinedRyan and Sarah for lunch at theirfarmhouse. Their kitchen was smallbut well-used, packed withcookbooks and hand-labeled herbjars. They served bean sandwiches,open face on local nine-grain breadand topped with thick-cut cheddar.As we ate, I asked Ryan how heended up becoming a full-timefarmer. I figured that if I wanted tounderstand what made his lifeappealing today, I needed to firstunderstand how he got here.

As you encountered in Rule #1

and #2 of this book, by this point inmy quest I had developed anunconventional theory on howpeople end up loving what they do.I argued in Rule #1 that “followyour passion” is bad advice, as thevast majority of people don’t havepre-existing passions waiting to bediscovered and matched to a job. InRule #2, I then countered thatpeople with compelling careersinstead start by getting good atsomething rare and valuable—building what I called “careercapital”—and then cashing in thiscapital for the traits that make great

work great. In this understanding,finding the right work pales inimportance to working right. AsRyan told me his story over lunch, Iwas gratified to realize that his lifeprovides a terrific case study ofthese ideas in action.

To start, I’ll emphasize that Ryandid not follow his passion intofarming. Instead, like many peoplewho end up loving what they do, hestumbled into his profession, andthen found that his passion for thework increased along with hisexpertise. Ryan grew up in Granby,but is not from a farming family.

“Growing up, I had little exposureto professional growing,” heexplained. In middle school, Ryanwas drawn to a universal interest:making extra spending cash. Thisentrepreneurial streak led him to aseries of schemes, from taking on apaper route to collecting cans forthe local recycling center. Hisbusiness breakthrough, however,came when he started collectingwild blueberries and selling themby the carton. “I put up an umbrellanext to the road,” he told me, “andstarted my first farm stand.” This,he discovered, was a good way to

make a buck.Ryan advanced from wild-

picked berries to selling extraproduce from his parents’ backyardgarden. Looking to increaserevenue, he then talked his parentsinto letting him take over theirgarden. “My dad was more thanhappy with that arrangement,” herecalls. It was here that Ryandecided to get serious about careercapital acquisition. “I readeverything about growing that Icould get my hands on… zillions ofdifferent things,” he told me. Soonhe expanded his parents’ garden to

cover most of the backyard,bringing in compost by thetruckload to increase yield.

By the time Ryan was in highschool he was renting ten acresfrom a local farmer and hiring part-time help during the summerharvest. He took a loan from theMassachusetts Farm ServicesAgency to finance the purchase ofan old tractor and expanded hisbusiness beyond his farm stand toalso sell at a farmers market and toa small number of wholesaleclients. After graduating highschool, Ryan headed off to

Cornell’s agriculture college tofurther hone his skills with a degreein fruit and vegetable horticulture—returning home on the weekends inorder to keep his rented fieldshealthy.

Here’s what struck me aboutRyan’s story: He didn’t just decideone day that he was passionateabout produce and thencourageously head off into thecountryside to start farming.Instead, by the time he made theplunge into full-time farming in2001, when he bought his first land,he had been painstakingly acquiring

relevant career capital for close to adecade. This might be less sexythan the daydream of quitting yourday job one day and then wakingup to the rooster’s crow the next,but it matches what I consistentlyfound when researching theprevious two rules: You have to getgood before you can expect goodwork.

As lunch concluded, I hadlearned the Red Fire history, but Iwas still unclear on what exactlymade its presence so appealing. Aswe left the kitchen to tour the farm,however, an insight began to

develop. I noticed that as Ryanexplained his crops, much of hisearly wariness fell away. Ryan isshy. When he talks in front ofcrowds, he tends to rush hissentences to completion, as ifapologetic for interrupting. Butonce he got going on his farmingstrategies, explaining the differencebetween Merrimack sandy loam andPaxton silt loam, for example, orhis new weeding strategy for thecarrot beds, his shyness gave wayto the enthusiasm of a craftsmanwho knows what he’s doing andhas been given the privilege to put

this knowledge to work.I noticed a similar enthusiasm in

Sarah when she discussed herefforts to manage the farm’s CSAprogram and public image. WhenSarah joined Ryan in Granby in2007, she was already an advocatefor both organic farming andcommunity-supported agriculture.She had studied environmentalpolicy at Vassar, where she’dstumbled on the college’sPoughkeepsie Farm Project CSA.Inspired, she started her own small-scale CSA program aftergraduating, in nearby Stafford

Springs, Connecticut. Coming toRed Fire gave Sarah theopportunity to promote thesebeliefs on a larger scale—achallenge she clearly relishes.

This, I came to realize, is what’sso appealing about the Red Firelifestyle: control. Ryan and Sarahinvested their (extensive) careercapital into gaining control overwhat they do and how they do it.Their working lives aren’t easy—ifI learned anything from my visit toRed Fire, it’s that farming is acomplicated and stressful pursuit—but their lives are their own to

direct, and they’re good at this. Inother words, the Red Fire appeal isnot about working outside in thesun—to farmers, I learned, theweather is something to battle, notto enjoy. And it’s not about gettingaway from the computer screen—Ryan spends all winter using Excelspreadsheets to plan his crop beds,while Sarah spends a healthy chunkof each day managing the farmoperations on the office computer.It is, instead, autonomy that attractsthe Granby groupies: Ryan andSarah live a meaningful life on theirown terms.

As I’ll argue next, control isn’tjust the source of Ryan and Sarah’sappeal, but it turns out to be one ofthe most universally important traitsthat you can acquire with yourcareer capital—something sopowerful and so essential to thequest for work you love that I’vetaken to calling it the dream-jobelixir.

The Power of ControlRyan and Sarah have heaps ofcontrol in their working lives, andthis is what makes the Red Firelifestyle so appealing. The appeal ofcontrol, however, is not limited tofarmers. Decades of scientificresearch have identified this trait asone of the most important you canpursue in the quest for a happier,more successful, and moremeaningful life. Dan Pink’s 2009bestselling book Drive, forexample, reviews the dizzying arrayof different ways that control hasbeen found to improve people’s

lives.1 As Pink summarizes theliterature, more control leads tobetter grades, better sportsperformance, better productivity,and more happiness.

In one such study, mentioned inPink’s book, researchers at Cornellfollowed over three hundred smallbusinesses, half of which focusedon giving control to their employeesand half of which did not. Thecontrol-centric businesses grew atfour times the rate of theircounterparts. In another study,which I found during my ownresearch, giving autonomy to

middle school teachers in astruggling school district not onlyincreased the rate at which theteachers were promoted, but also,to the surprise of the researchers,reversed the downwardperformance trend of theirstudents.2

If you want to observe the powerof control up close in theworkplace, look toward companiesembracing a radical new philosophycalled Results-Only WorkEnvironment (or, ROWE, forshort). In a ROWE company, allthat matters is your results. When

you show up to work and whenyou leave, when you take vacations,and how often you check e-mail areall irrelevant. They leave it to theemployee to figure out whateverworks best for getting the importantthings done. “No results, no job:It’s that simple,” as ROWEsupporters like to say.

If you read the business case forROWE, available online, you findexample after example ofemployees liberated by control.3 AtBest Buy’s corporate headquarters,for example, the teams thatimplemented ROWE saw the rate at

which people left plummet by up to90 percent. “I love the ROWEenvironment…. It makes me feellike I’m in control of my destiny,”said one Best Buy employee.

At the Gap’s headquarters,employees in a ROWE pilot studyfound their happiness andperformance improved. “I’ve neverseen my employees happier,” saidone manager. At a non-profitorganization in Redlands, California—the first non-profit to embraceROWE—80 percent of theemployees reported feeling moreengaged while over 90 percent

thought it made their life better:which is about as close to universalagreement as is possible in a worksetting. And these are just a fewexamples among many.

The more time you spendreading the research literature, themore it becomes clear: Givingpeople more control over whatthey do and how they do itincreases their happiness,engagement, and sense offulfillment. It’s no wonder, then,that when you flip through yourmental Rolodex of dream jobs,control is often at the core of their

appeal. Throughout Rule #3, forexample, you’ll meet people in avariety of different fields whowielded control to create a workinglife they love. Among them is afreelance computer programmerwho skips work to enjoy sunnydays, a medical resident who took atwo-year leave from his eliteresidency program to start acompany, and a famousentrepreneur who gave away hismillions and sold his possessions toembrace an unencumbered, globe-trotting existence. These examplesall have great lives, and as you’ll

learn, they all used control to createthem.

To summarize, if your goal is tolove what you do, your first step isto acquire career capital. Your nextstep is to invest this capital in thetraits that define great work.Control is one of the mostimportant targets you can choosefor this investment. Acquiringcontrol, however, can becomplicated. This is why I’vededicated the remainder of Rule #3to this goal. In the chapters ahead,you’ll follow me on my quest tofind out more about this fickle trait.

Chapter Nine

The First Control Trap

In which I introduce the firstcontrol trap, which warns that it’sdangerous to pursue more controlin your working life before youhave career capital to offer inexchange.

Jane’s Adventurous VisionJane understands the importance ofcontrol. She was a talented studentwho earned top-one-percent scoreson her standardized tests andattended a competitive university,but she was also unhappy withfollowing a traditional path fromcollege and into a steady, well-paying job. Her vision for her lifewas more exotic. As an amateurathlete who once rode a bike acrossthe country for charity andcompeted in an Ironman triathlon,she envisioned a more adventurousfuture. A copy of the life plan she

sent me includes the goal ofcircumnavigating the world’soceans and traveling without motorpower across every continent:“Australia (by unicycle?)…Antarctica (by dog sled?).” The listalso includes more eccentric goals,such as surviving in the wilderness“with no tools or equipment” forone month, and learning how tobecome a fire breather.

To finance this adventurous life,her plan calls, vaguely, for her to“build a set of low-maintenancewebsites that recurrently earnenough to support the pursuits on

this list.” Her goal was to get thisrevenue up to $3,000 a month,which she calculated to be enoughto handle her basic expenses.Eventually, she planned to leveragethese experiences to “develop anon-profit to develop my vision ofhealth, human potential, and a lifewell-lived.”

At first glance, Jane mightremind you of Ryan and Sarahfrom Red Fire Farm. Sherecognized that gaining control overher life trumps simply gaining moreincome or prestige. Like Ryantrading in his diploma for farmland,

this realization gave her the courageto step off a safe career path andinstead pursue a more compellingexistence. But unlike Ryan andSarah, Jane’s plans faltered. Soonafter we met, she revealed that herembrace of control had led her toan extreme decision: dropping outof college. It didn’t take her long torealize that just because you’recommitted to a certain lifestyledoesn’t mean you’ll find peoplewho are committed to supportingyou.

“The current problem is financialindependence,” she told me. “After

quitting college, I started variousbusinesses, and launched freelanceand blog projects, but lostmotivation to continue beforesubstantial results came.” One ofthese experiments, a blog that shehoped to become the foundation ofher empire of recurrent revenuegeneration, featured only threeposts in nine months.

Jane had discovered a hard truthof the real world: It’s really hard toconvince people to give youmoney. “I agree that it would beideal to continue to develop myvision,” she admitted. “However, I

also need money in order to eat.”Without even a college degree toher name, finding this money wasproving difficult. A commitment todogsledding across Antarctica, itturns out, doesn’t read well on arésumé.

Control Requires CapitalControl is seductive. As Idiscovered at Red Fire Farm, thistrait defines the type of dream jobsthat keeps cubicle dwellers up atnight. It was this appeal thatconvinced Jane to leave hercomfortable life as a student andpursue adventure. In doing so,however, she fell into a trap thatthreatens many in their quest forcontrol:

The First Control TrapControl that’s acquired

without career capital is notsustainable.

In Rule #2, I introduced the ideathat career capital is the foundationfor creating work you love. Youmust first generate this capital bybecoming good at something rareand valuable, I argued, then investit in the traits that help make greatwork great. In the last chapter, Iargued that control is one of themost valuable traits you can investin. Jane recognized the second partof this argument: Control ispowerful. But she unfortunately

skipped the first part—you needsomething valuable to offer inreturn for this powerful trait. Inother words, she tried to obtaincontrol without any capital to offerin return, and ended up with a mereshadow of real autonomy. Ryan ofRed Fire Farm, by contrast, avoidedthis trap by building up a decade’sworth of relevant career capitalbefore taking the dive into full-timefarming.

This trap might sound familiar,as we saw an example of it earlierin Rule #2, where I told the story ofLisa Feuer. As you’ll recall, Feuer

gave up her career in marketing andadvertising to start a yoga business,even though her only training inyoga was a monthlong certificationcourse. Like Jane, she went aftermore control without the capital toback it up. Also like Jane, this pathsoon veered in a difficult direction:Within a year, Feuer was on foodstamps.

The more I studied examples ofcontrol, the more I encounteredpeople who had made these samemistakes. Jane’s story, for example,is just one of many from thegrowing lifestyle-design

community. This movement arguesthat you don’t have to live life byother people’s rules. It encouragesits followers to design their ownpath through life—preferably onethat’s exciting and enjoyable to live.It’s easy to find examples of thisphilosophy in action, because manyof its disciples blog about theirexploits.

At a high level, of course, there’snothing wrong with thisphilosophy. The author TimothyFerriss, who coined the term“lifestyle design,” is a fantasticexample of the good things this

approach to life can generate(Ferriss has more than enoughcareer capital to back up hisadventurous existence). But if youspend time browsing the blogs oflesser-known lifestyle designers,you’ll begin to notice the same redflags again and again: Adistressingly large fraction of thesecontrarians, like Jane, skipped overthe part where they build a stablemeans to support theirunconventional lifestyle. Theyassume that generating the courageto pursue control is what matters,while everything else is just a detail

that is easily worked out.One such blogger I found, to

give another example from amongmany, quit his job at the age oftwenty-five, explaining, “I was fedup with living a ‘normal’conventional life, working 9–5 forthe man [and] having no time andlittle money to pursue my truepassions… so I’ve embarked on acrusade to show you and the rest ofthe world how an average Joe…can build a business from scratch tosupport a life devoted to living ‘TheDream.’ ” The “business” hereferenced, as is the case with many

lifestyle designers, was his blogabout being a lifestyle designer. Inother words, his only product washis enthusiasm about not having a“normal” life. It doesn’t take aneconomist to point out there’s notmuch real value lurking there. Or,put into our terminology,enthusiasm alone is not rare andvaluable and is therefore not worthmuch in terms of career capital.This lifestyle designer was investingin a valuable trait but didn’t havethe means to pay for it.

Not surprisingly, things soonturned bleak on this fellow’s blog.

After three months of postingseveral times a week about how tofund an unconventional lifethrough blogging—even though hewasn’t making any money himselffrom his own site—somefrustration crept into his writing. Inone post, he says, with evidentexasperation, “What I noticed is that[readers] come and go. I’ve put inthe hard yards, writing quality postsand finding awesome people… butalas many of [you] just come andgo. This is as annoying as trying tofill up a bucket with water that hasa bunch of holes in it.” He then

goes on to detail his ten-point planfor building a more stable audience.The plan includes steps such as “#2.Bring the ENERGY” and “#4.Shower Your Readers withAppreciation,” but the list stillexcludes the most important step ofall: giving readers content they’rewilling to pay for. A few weekslater, the posts on the blog stopped.By the time I found it, there hadn’tbeen a single new post in over fourmonths.

This story provides another clearexample of the first control trap: Ifyou embrace control without

capital, you’re likely to end up likeJane, Lisa, or our poor frustratedlifestyle designer—enjoying all theautonomy you can handle butunable to afford your next meal.This first trap, however, turns outto be only half of the story of whycontrol can be a tricky trait toacquire. As I’ll detail in the nextchapter, even after you have thecapital required to acquire realcontrol, things remain difficult, asit’s exactly at this point that peoplebegin to recognize your value andstart pushing back to keep youentrenched in a less autonomous

path.

Chapter Ten

The Second Control Trap

In which I introduce the secondcontrol trap, which warns thatonce you have enough careercapital to acquire more control inyour working life, you have becomevaluable enough to your employerthat they will fight your efforts togain more autonomy.

Why Lulu Keeps Turning DownPromotions

Lulu Young is a software developerand she loves what she does. Shelives in Roslindale, a close-insuburb of Boston, in a beautifullyrenovated duplex. When I met herthere on a rainy spring day in 2011to talk about work and control, sheneeded little prompting beforediving into one of the more detailedautobiographies I had so farencountered in my quest. I can tellyou, for example, that she scored a5 on her AP chemistry test in highschool and that landing her first job

involved a chance encounter withan old employer at a Bertucci’s inWellesley Hills. Here’s what I wrotein my notes not long into theinterview: “This is someone whohas put a lot of thought into hercareer.”

This thoughtfulness evidentlypaid off, as Lulu turned out to beone of the more confident andcontented subjects I haveencountered in my interviews. Atthe core of this contentment iscontrol. Throughout her career,Lulu repeatedly fought to gain morefreedom in her working life,

sometimes to the shock or dismayof her employers or friends.“People tell me that I don’t dothings the way other people do,”Lulu said. “But I tell them, ‘I’m notother people.’ ”

She succeeded in these fights, asyou’ll learn, because she was waryof the first control trap, which wasdescribed in the previous chapter.That is, she was careful to ensureshe always had enough careercapital to back her up before shemade a bid for more control. This isa major reason that I want to tell herstory: She provides a great example

of control done right.Lulu’s first job after graduating

Wellesley College with amathematics degree was at thebottom rung of the software-development career ladder: She wasworking in Quality Assurance(QA), a fancy term for softwaretester.

“So your job would be, forexample, to put text in bold andthen make sure it worked?” I askedher, as she explained this first job.“Whoa, whoa, let’s not exaggeratethe amount of responsibility theygave me!” she joked in response.

This was not a great job. In fact,this was not even a decent job. It’shere that Lulu could have easilyfallen into the first control trap:Finding yourself stuck in a boringjob is exactly the point wherebreaking away to pave your ownnon-conformist path becomestempting. Instead, she decided toacquire the career capital requiredto get somewhere better.

Things played out as follows:Lulu began hacking the UNIXoperating system that ran thecompany’s software. She eventuallytaught herself to build scripts that

automated the testing, thus savingthe company time and money. Herinnovations attracted notice, andafter a few short years she waspromoted to senior QA engineer.

By this point, Lulu had built up alegitimate store of career capital, soshe decided to see what it could buyher. To regain some autonomyfrom a succession ofmicromanaging bosses who hadbeen tormenting her, she demandeda thirty-hour-a-week schedule soshe could pursue a part-time degreein philosophy from Tufts. “I wouldhave asked for less time, but thirty

was the minimum for which youcould still receive full benefits,” sheexplained. If Lulu had tried thisduring her first year ofemployment, her bosses wouldhave laughed and probably offeredher instead a “zero-hour-a-weekschedule,” but by the time she hadbecome a senior engineer and wasleading their testing automationefforts, they really couldn’t say no.

After she earned her degree,Lulu quit the company and broughther QA automation skills to anearby start-up that had just beenacquired by a major firm. “I had

this spacious office with threecomputer screens,” she recalls.“Every week the office managerwould come by to take our candyorder. You would tell her whatcandy you wanted, and it wouldshow up on your desk…. I had alot of fun.”

After several years, the parentcompany of the start-up decided toshut down the Boston-area office,so Lulu, who had just bought ahouse, decided it was time forsomething different. When shereentered the job market, shegenerated several offers, including

one to manage the QA group for alarge company. This would havebeen a big promotion for Lulu:more money, more power, andmore prestige; the next step on aladder to becoming a hot-shotexecutive VP.

Lulu turned it down. Instead, shetook an offer to work with a seven-person start-up, founded by an oldcollege friend’s boyfriend, that hadjumped at the chance to acquiresomeone with such proven skills. “Ididn’t really understand what theydid, and I’m not sure they had it allfigured out yet either,” she told me.

But this is exactly what made itappealing to Lulu: tacklingsomething brand-new, where therewasn’t a detailed plan in placealready, seemed interesting—apursuit where she would have a lotof say over what she did and howshe did it.

By the time this company wasacquired in 2001, Lulu was the headsoftware developer. Given thiscareer capital, when she began tochafe at the new owner’sregulations—a dress code, forexample, plus insisting that allemployees work between the hours

of nine and five—she was able todemand (and receive) three months’leave. “There will be no way foryou to contact me during thisperiod,” she told her new bosses.The leave, it turned out, was also anexcuse to train her staff to workwithout her. Soon after her leaveended, Lulu left and, in a bid foreven more control, became afreelance software developer. Atthis point her skills were sovaluable that finding clients was noproblem. More importantly,working as a contractor also gaveher extreme flexibility in how she

did her work. She would travel forthree or four weeks at a time whenshe felt like getting away. “If theweather was nice on a Friday,” shetold me, “I would just take the dayoff to go flying” (she obtained herpilot’s license around this time).When she started work and whenshe ended her days were up to her.“A lot of those days I would take aniece or nephew and have fun. Iwent to the children’s museum andzoo probably more than anybodyelse in the city,” she recalls. “Theycouldn’t stop me from doing thesethings, as I was just a contractor.”

I interviewed Lulu early on aweekday afternoon, and the timingdidn’t seem to matter at all. “Holdon, let me make sure Skype isturned off so no one can botherme,” she told me soon after Iarrived. Taking an afternoon off ona whim to do an interview is not thetype of decision she could havegotten away with if she hadfollowed a traditional career path tobecome a stock-owning, Porsche-driving, ulcer-suffering VP. Butthen again, stock-owning, Porsche-driving, ulcer-suffering VPsprobably enjoy their lives quite a bit

less than Lulu.

Control Generates ResistanceLulu’s story, as I mentioned earlier,is an example of control done right.Like Ryan and Sarah of Red FireFarms, her career is compellingbecause she has infused it withcontrol over what she does andhow she does it. Also like Ryan andSarah, she succeeds in this effortwhere others have failed—forexample, Jane from the last chapter—by always making sure she hasthe career capital needed to obtainthis autonomy.

Lurking in this story, however, isa hidden danger. Though Lulu’s

career was satisfyingly self-directed,the path to acquiring this freedomgenerated conflict. Almost everytime she invested her career capitalto obtain the most control, she alsoencountered resistance. When sheleveraged her value to obtain athirty-hour schedule at her first job,for example, her employer couldn’tsay no (she was saving them toomuch money), but they didn’t likeit. It took nerve on Lulu’s part topush through that demand.Similarly, when she turned down amajor promotion to take an ill-defined position at a seven-person

start-up, people in her life didn’tunderstand.

“You had just bought a house,” Ireminded her. “To turn down a bigimportant job to go work with anunknown little company, that’s abig deal.”

“People thought I was nuts,” sheagreed. Leaving this start-up after itwas acquired was similarly difficult.Lulu was hesitant to get into details,but the subtext was that her valuewas so high at this company that itsnew owners tried every tactic theycould to keep her on board. Andfinally, her transition to freelance

work came with its own difficulties.Her first client really wanted to hireher full-time to work on the project,but she refused. “They really didn’twant a contractor,” she recalls, “butthey didn’t have anyone else whocould do this type of work, so theyeventually had no choice but toagree.”

The more I met people whosuccessfully deployed control intheir career, the more I heardsimilar tales of resistance from theiremployers, friends, and families.Another example is someone I’llcall Lewis, who is a resident in a

well-known combined plasticsurgery program, which is arguablythe most competitive medicalresidency. Three years into hisresidency, he was starting to chafeunder hospital bureaucracy. When Imet him for coffee, he gave me avivid example of the frustrations oflife as a modern doctor.

“I once received this patient inthe ER who had his chest cut openbecause he had been stabbed in theheart,” he told me. “I’m on thegurney, massaging his heart withmy hands as he’s brought into theoperating room. We get to the

room, and obviously this guy needsa blood transfusion because he hasa hole in his heart.

“ ‘Where’s the blood?’ I ask.“ ‘We can’t give it to you,’ the

tech replied. ‘You skippedregistration when you came in’—remember, I literally had this guy’sheart in my hand when we camethrough the door—and I wasthinking, ‘You got to be freakingkidding me.’ ”

That patient died in the OR. Heprobably would still have died evenif he had been given a bloodtransfusion, but the point is that this

was exactly the type of autonomy-demolishing experience that waseating away at Lewis. He cravedmore control in his life, so he didsomething unexpected: He took twoyears off from his residencyprogram to start a company thatbuilds online medical educationtools.

When you ask Lewis why hewanted to start a company, hepaints a compelling picture. “Onething a lot of people struggle within my field is that they have a lot ofideas, but don’t know how to getthem turned into reality.” In his

vision, he would become a doctor,but also be the cofounder of thiscompany that would continue torun without requiring his day-to-day supervision. As he came upwith ideas around medicaleducation, an interest of his, hecould then hand them over to theteam at the company to be turnedinto reality.

“Let’s say I have this idea for agame that could help premedstudents learn some sort of newconcept,” he told me when I askedfor an example. “I could turn to myteam at the company and say, ‘Go

make this happen.’ ” To Lewis,there’s a great sense of satisfactionin “creating something that actuallyworks,” and this company wouldprovide him that opportunity.

As with Lulu, however, onceLewis had enough medical expertiseto successfully raise the funding tobegin this company, he had becomevaluable enough to his employerthat they didn’t want to let him go.He was the first person in the ten-year history of his combined plasticsurgery program to request time offin the middle of his residency.“They were asking me, ‘Why would

you do this!?’ ” he recalls. It wasnot an easy transition to make.When I met Lewis, however, histwo-year break was almost up.During this time, his company hadprogressed from an idea into a well-funded organization with a popularflagship product (a tool that helpsmed students prepare for theirboard exams) and a full-time staffthat will keep things rolling as hereturns to finish his residency.Lewis was clearly happy about hisdecision to push for somethingdifferent—but it hadn’t been easy.

This is the irony of control.

When no one cares what you dowith your working life, youprobably don’t have enough careercapital to do anything interesting.But once you do have this capital,as Lulu and Lewis discovered,you’ve become valuable enoughthat your employer will resist yourefforts. This is what I came to thinkof as the second control trap:

The Second Control TrapThe point at which you haveacquired enough careercapital to get meaningfulcontrol over your working life

is exactly the point whenyou’ve become valuableenough to your currentemployer that they will try toprevent you from making thechange.

On reflection, this second trapmakes sense. Acquiring morecontrol in your working life issomething that benefits you butlikely has no direct benefit to youremployer. Downshifting to a thirty-hour-per-week schedule, forexample, provided Lulu freedomfrom a working environment that

had felt increasingly stifling. Butfrom the point of view of heremployer, it was simply lostproductivity. In other words, inmost jobs you should expect youremployer to resist your movetoward more control; they haveevery incentive to try to convinceyou to reinvest your career capitalback into your career at theircompany, obtaining more moneyand prestige instead of morecontrol, and this can be a hardargument to resist.

Courage RevisitedBack in Rule #2, I was dismissiveof the “courage culture.” This wasmy term for the growing number ofauthors and online commentatorswho promote the idea that the onlything standing between you and adream job is building the courage tostep off the expected path. I arguedthat it was this courage culture thatled Lisa Feuer to quit her corporatejob to chase an ill-fated yogaventure. This culture also plays abig role in egging on the lesssuccessful members of the lifestyle-design community.

In light of the second controltrap, I need to moderate myprevious disdain. Courage is notirrelevant to creating work youlove. Lulu and Lewis, as we nowunderstand, required quite a bit ofcourage to ignore the resistancegenerated by this trap. The key, itseems, is to know when the time isright to become courageous in yourcareer decisions. Get this timingright, and a fantastic working lifeawaits you, but get it wrong bytripping the first control trap in apremature bid for autonomy, anddisaster lurks. The fault of the

courage culture, therefore, is not itsunderlying message that courage isgood, but its severe underestimationof the complexity involved indeploying this boldness in a usefulway.

Imagine, for example, that youcome up with an idea for injectingmore control into your career. As Iargued earlier, this is an idea worthpaying attention to because controlis so powerful in transforming yourworking life that I call it the dream-job elixir. Also imagine, however,that as you toy with this idea,people in your life start offering

resistance. What’s the right thing todo? The two control traps make thisa hard question to answer.

It’s possible that you don’t haveenough career capital to back upthis bid for more control. That is,you’re about to fall into the firstcontrol trap. In this case, youshould heed the resistance andshelve the idea. At the same time,however, it’s possible that you haveplenty of career capital, and thisresistance is being generated exactlybecause you’re so valuable. That is,you’ve fallen into the secondcontrol trap. In this case, you

should ignore the resistance andpursue the idea. This, of course, isthe problem with control: Bothscenarios feel the same, but theright response is different in each.

By this point in my quest, I’veencountered enough stories ofcontrol going both right and wrongto know that this conundrum isserious—perhaps one of the singlemost difficult obstacles facing us inour quest for work we love. Thecheery slogans of the courageculture are obviously too crude toguide us through this trickyterritory. We need a more nuanced

heuristic, something that couldmake clear exactly what brand ofcontrol trap you’re facing. As you’lllearn next, I ended up discoveringthis solution in the habits of aniconoclastic entrepreneur, someonewho has elevated living his life byhis own rules to an art form.

Chapter Eleven

Avoiding the Control Traps

In which I explain the law offinancial viability, which says youshould only pursue a bid for morecontrol if you have evidence thatit’s something that people arewilling to pay you for.

Derek Sivers Is a Control FreakNot long into his 2010 TED talk oncreativity and leadership, DerekSivers plays a video clip of a crowdat an outdoor concert. A young manwithout a shirt starts dancing byhimself. The audience membersseated nearby look on curiously.

“A leader needs the guts to standalone and look ridiculous,” Dereksays. Soon, however, a secondyoung man joins the first and startsdancing.

“Now comes the first followerwith a crucial role… the firstfollower transforms the lone nut

into a leader.” As the videocontinues, a few more dancers jointhe group. Then several more.Around the two-minute mark, thedancers have grown into a crowd.

“And ladies and gentlemen,that’s how a movement is made.”1

The TED audience gives Derek astanding ovation. He bows, thendoes a little dance himself on stage.

No one can accuse Derek Siversof being a conformist. During hiscareer, he has repeatedly played therole of the first dancer. He startswith a risky move, designed tomaximize his control over what he

does and how he does it. By doingso, he’s at risk of looking like the“lone nut” dancing alone.Throughout Derek’s career,however, there always ended upbeing a second dancer whovalidated his decision, and theneventually a crowd arrived,defining the move as successful.

His first risky move occurred in1992 when he quit a good job atWarner Bros. to pursue music full-time. He played guitar and touredwith the Japanese musician andproducer Ryuichi Sakamoto, and byall accounts was pretty good at it.

His next big move was in 1997,when he started CD Baby, acompany that helped independentartists sell their CDs online. In anage before iTunes, this companyfilled a crucial need for independentmusicians, and the company grew.In 2008, he sold it to Disc Makersfor $22 million.

At this point in his career,conventional wisdom dictated thatDerek should move to a large houseoutside of San Francisco andbecome an angel investor. ButDerek was never interested inconventional wisdom. Instead, he

put all of the proceeds from the saleinto a charitable trust to supportmusic education, living off thesmallest possible amount of interestallowed by law. He then sold hispossessions and began traveling theworld in search of an interestingplace to live. When I spoke withhim, he was in Singapore. “I lovethat the country has so little gravity,it doesn’t try to hold you here, it’sinstead a base from which you cango explore,” he said. When I askedhim why he’s living overseas, hereplied, “I follow a rule with my lifethat if something is scary, do it. I’ve

lived everywhere in America, andfor me, a big scary thing was livingoutside the country.”

After taking time off to read,learn Mandarin, and travel theworld, Derek has recently turnedhis sights on a new company:MuckWork. This service allowsmusicians to outsource boring tasksso they can spend more time on thecreative things that matter. Hestarted the company because hethought the idea sounded fun.

Here’s what interests me aboutDerek: He loves control. His wholecareer has been about making big

moves, often in the face ofresistance, to gain more controlover what he does and how he doesit. And not only does he lovecontrol, but he’s fantasticallysuccessful at achieving it. This iswhy I got him on the phone fromSingapore: I wanted to find out howhe achieved this feat. In moredetail, I asked what criteria he usesto decide which projects to pursueand which to abandon—in essence,I wanted his map for navigating thecontrol traps described in the lasttwo chapters.

Fortunately for us, he had a

simple but surprisingly effectiveanswer to my question….

The Law of Financial ViabilityWhen I explained what I was after,Derek got it right away.

“You mean, the type of mentalalgorithm that prevents the lawyer,who has had this successful careerfor twenty years, from suddenlysaying, ‘You know, I lovemassages, I’m going to become amasseuse’?” he asked.

“That’s it,” I replied.Derek thought for a moment.“I have this principle about

money that overrides my other liferules,” he said. “Do what peopleare willing to pay for.”

Derek made it clear that this isdifferent from pursuing money forthe sake of having money.Remember, this is someone whogave away $22 million and sold hispossessions after his company wasacquired. Instead, as he explained:“Money is a neutral indicator ofvalue. By aiming to make money,you’re aiming to be valuable.”

He also emphasized that hobbiesare clearly exempt from this rule.“If I want to learn to scuba dive, forexample, because I think it’s fun,and people won’t pay me to do that,I don’t care, I’m going to do it

anyway,” he said. But when itcomes to decisions affecting yourcore career, money remains aneffective judge of value. “If you’restruggling to raise money for anidea, or are thinking that you willsupport your idea with unrelatedwork, then you need to rethink theidea.”

At first encounter, Derek’scareer, which orbits around creativepursuits, might seem divorced frommatters as prosaic and crass asmoney. But when he renarrated hispath from the perspective of thismental algorithm, it suddenly made

more sense.His first big move, for example,

was to become a professionalmusician in 1992. As Derekexplained to me, he started bypursuing music at night and on theweekend. “I didn’t quit my day jobuntil I was making more moneywith my music.”

His second big move was to startCD Baby. Again, he didn’t turn hisattention full-time to this pursuituntil after he had built up aprofitable client base. “People askme how I funded my business,” hesaid. “I tell them first I sold one

CD, which gave me enough moneyto sell two.” It grew from there.

In hindsight, Derek’s bids forcontrol remain big and non-conformist, but given his mentalalgorithm on only doing whatpeople are paying for, they nowalso seem much less risky. Thisidea is powerful enough that Ishould give it its own official-sounding title:

The Law of FinancialViability

When deciding whether tofollow an appealing pursuit

that will introduce morecontrol into your work life,seek evidence of whetherpeople are willing to pay forit. If you find this evidence,continue. If not, move on.

When I began reflecting on thislaw, I saw that it applied again andagain to examples of peoplesuccessfully acquiring more controlin their careers. To understand this,notice that the definition of “willingto pay” varies. In some cases, itliterally means customers payingyou money for a product or a

service. But it can also mean gettingapproved for a loan, receiving anoutside investment, or, morecommonly, convincing an employerto either hire you or keep writingyou paychecks. Once you adopt thisflexible definition of “pay for it,”this law starts popping up all over.

Consider, for example, RyanVoiland from Red Fire Farm. Manywell-educated city dwellers, fed upwith urban chaos, buy somefarmland and try to make a livingworking with their hands. Most fail.What makes Ryan different is thathe made sure people were willing to

pay him to farm before he tried it.In more detail, because he wasn’t arich ex-banker, buying his firstproperty required a loan from theMassachusetts Farm ServicesAgency—and the FSA does notgive away its money easily. Youhave to submit a detailed businessplan that convinces them that you’llactually make money with yourfarm. With ten years of experienceon his side, Ryan was able to makethis argument.

Lulu provides another goodexample of this law in action. Here,the definition of “willing to pay”

concerned her paycheck. Shejudged her moves toward moreautonomy by whether or notsomeone would hire her or keeppaying her while she made them.Her first big move, for example,was to drop to a thirty-hour-per-week schedule. She knew she hadenough capital to support thischange because her employer saidyes. In later jobs, when shenegotiated a three-month leave orinsisted on working freelance withan open schedule, these were alsobids for more control that werevalidated by the fact that her

employers accepted them. If shehad had less career capital theywould have had no problem tellingher good-bye.

On the flip side, when you lookat stories of people who wereunsuccessful in adding morecontrol to their careers, you oftenfind that this law has been ignored.Remember Jane from earlier inRule #3: She dropped out of collegewith the vague idea that some sortof online business would support alifestyle of adventure. If she hadmet Derek Sivers, she would havedelayed this move until she had real

evidence that she could makemoney online. In this case, the lawwould have served its purpose well,as a simple experiment would havelikely revealed that passive-incomewebsites are more myth than reality,and thus prevented her rashabandonment of her education.This doesn’t mean that Jane wouldhave had to resign herself to a lifeof boring work. On the contrary,the law could have provided herstructure to keep exploringvariations on her adventurous lifevision until she could find one topursue that would actually yield

results.

Summary of Rule #3Rules #1 and #2 laid the

foundation for my new thinking onhow people end up loving whatthey do. Rule #1 dismissed thepassion hypothesis, which saysthat you have to first figure outyour true calling and then find a jobto match. Rule #2 replaced this ideawith career capital theory, whichargues that the traits that definegreat work are rare and valuable,and if you want these in yourworking life, you must first buildup rare and valuable skills to offerin return. I call these skills “career

capital,” and in Rule #2 I dived intothe details of how to acquire it.

The obvious next question ishow to invest this capital once youhave it. Rule #3 explored oneanswer to this question by arguingthat gaining control over what youdo and how you do it is incrediblyimportant. This trait shows up sooften in the lives of people wholove what they do that I’ve taken tocalling it the dream-job elixir.

Investing your capital in control,however, turns out to be tricky.There are two traps that commonlysnare people in their pursuit of this

trait. The first control trap notesthat it’s dangerous to try to gainmore control without enoughcapital to back it up.

The second control trap notesthat once you have the capital toback up a bid for more control,you’re still not out of the woods.This capital makes you valuableenough to your employer that theywill likely now fight to keep you ona more traditional path. They realizethat gaining more control is goodfor you but not for their bottomline.

The control traps put you in a

difficult situation. Let’s say youhave an idea for pursuing morecontrol in your career and you’reencountering resistance. How canyou tell if this resistance is useful(for example, it’s helping you avoidthe first control trap) or somethingto ignore (for example, it’s theresult of the second control trap)?

To help navigate this controlconundrum, I turned to DerekSivers. Derek is a successfulentrepreneur who has lived a lifededicated to control. I asked himhis advice for sifting throughpotential control-boosting pursuits

and he responded with a simplerule: “Do what people are willing topay for.” This isn’t about makingmoney (Derek, for example, ismore or less indifferent to money,having given away to charity themillions he made from selling hisfirst company). Instead, it’s aboutusing money as a “neutral indicatorof value”—a way of determiningwhether or not you have enoughcareer capital to succeed with apursuit. I called this the law offinancial viability, and concludedthat it’s a critical tool for navigatingyour own acquisition of control.

This holds whether you arepondering an entrepreneurialventure or a new role within anestablished company. Unless peopleare willing to pay you, it’s not anidea you’re ready to go after.

RULE #4

Think Small, Act Big

(Or, the Importance of Mission)

Chapter Twelve

The Meaningful Life of PardisSabeti

In which I argue that a unifyingmission to your working life can bea source of great satisfaction.

The Happy ProfessorHarvard’s state-of-the-art NorthwestScience Building is found at 52Oxford Street in Cambridge,Massachusetts, a ten-minute walkfrom the tourists packing theuniversity’s famed central yard. It’spart of a complex of hulking brick-and-glass laboratories that form thenew heart of Harvard’s fabledresearch engine. Inside, theNorthwest looks like a Hollywoodvision of a science lab. Thehallways defining the perimeter ofeach floor are polished concreteand lit dimly in the style of

television crime procedurals.Inside the hallways, in the center

of the building, are the wetlabs,with graduate students manipulatingpipettes visible through windowedsteel doors. On the other side of thehallway are the professors’ offices,defined by floor-to-ceiling glasspartitions. It was one of theseoffices in particular that drew me tothe Northwest on a sunny Juneafternoon—the office of PardisSabeti, a thirty-five-year-oldprofessor of evolutionary biologywho had mastered one of the moreelusive but powerful strategies in

the quest for work you love.One of the first things you’ll

notice if you spend time aroundPardis is that she enjoys her life.Biology, like any high-stakesacademic field, is demanding.Because of this it has a reputationfor turning young professors intocurmudgeons who adopt amasochistic brand of workaholism,in which relaxation becomes a signof failure and the accomplishmentsof peers become tragedies. This canbe a bleak existence. Pardis, for herpart, has avoided this fate.

Not five minutes into my visit,

for example, a young grad student,one of ten people Pardis employs inher eponymous Sabeti Lab, pokeshis head into the office.

“We’re heading down tovolleyball practice,” he says,referencing the lab’s team, whichevidently takes itself seriously. Shepromises to join them as soon asour interview ends.

Volleyball is not Pardis’s onlyhobby. In a corner of her office shekeeps an acoustic guitar that servesas more than decoration: Pardisplays in a band called ThousandDays, which is well known in

Boston music circles. In 2008, PBSfeatured the band in a Nova specialcalled Researchers Who Rock.

Pardis’s energy for theseactivities is a side effect of herenthusiasm for her work. The bulkof her research focuses on Africa,with studies ongoing in Senegal,Sierra Leone, and most of all,Nigeria. To Pardis, this work isabout more than just theaccumulation of publications andgrant money. At one point in ourconversation, for example, she pullsout her laptop: “You have to seethis video of me and my girls,” she

says, loading up a YouTube clip ofPardis, guitar in hand, leading agroup of four African women in asong. The video was shot outdoorsin Nigeria. Palm trees provide thebackdrop. The women, I learn,work in a clinic supported by theSabeti Lab. “These women dealwith people who die in devastatingways every day,” she says to no onein particular while the video plays.On screen, everyone is smilingwhile Pardis leads them, with mixedsuccess, through the verses. “I lovegoing there,” she adds. “Nigeria ismy African home.”

It’s clear that Pardis has avoidedthe grinding cynicism that traps somany young academics, and hasinstead built an engaging life (“It’snot always easy,” she once said inan interview, “but I truly love whatI do”1). But how did she pull offthis feat? As I spent time withPardis, I recognized that herhappiness comes from the factthat she built her career on aclear and compelling mission—something that not only givesmeaning to her work but providesthe energy needed to embrace lifebeyond the lab. In the

overachieving style typical ofHarvard, Pardis’s mission is by nomeans subtle: Her goal, put simply,is to rid the world of its mostancient and deadly diseases.

Pardis’s MissionAs a graduate student, Pardisstumbled into the emerging field ofcomputational genetics—the use ofcomputers to help understand DNAsequences. She developed analgorithm that sifts throughdatabases of human geneticinformation looking for traces of anelusive target: ongoing humanevolution. To the general public,the idea that humans are stillevolving can be surprising, butamong evolutionary biologists it’staken for granted. (One of theclassic examples of recent human

evolution is lactose tolerance—theability to digest milk into adulthood—a trait that didn’t start spreadingthrough the human population untilwe domesticated milk-producinganimals.)

Pardis’s algorithm uses statisticaltechniques to hunt down patterns ofgene migration that match what youwould expect from selectivepressure—for example, a mutationthat popped up recently in humandevelopment but has since spreadquickly among a population. Thealgorithm, in other words, searchesblindly, turning up “candidate”

genes that look like they’re theresult of natural selection, butleaving it up to the researcher tofigure out why natural selectiondeemed the gene useful.

Pardis uses the algorithm tosearch for recently evolved genesthat provide disease resistance. Herlogic is that if she can find thesegenes and understand how theywork, biomedical researchers mightbe able to mimic their benefit in atreatment. It makes sense, ofcourse, that disease-resistance geneswould be among the candidatesturned up by Pardis’s algorithm, as

they provide a classic example ofnatural selection in action. If adeadly virus has been killing offhumans in a population for a longtime, biologists would say that thispopulation is under “selectivepressure.” If a lucky few membersof the group then happen to evolvea resistance to the disease, thispressure ensures that the new genewill spread quickly (people with thenew gene die less frequently thanthose without it). This rapid spreadof a new gene is exactly the type ofsignature Pardis’s algorithm hasbeen tuned to detect.

Pardis’s first big discovery was agene that provides resistance toLhassa fever, one of the oldest andmost deadly diseases of the Africancontinent, responsible for tens ofthousands of deaths each year.(“People don’t just die with thisdisease,” she emphasized, “they dieextreme deaths.”) She has sinceadded malaria and the bubonicplague to the list of “ancientscourges” that she’s tackling withher computational strategy.

Pardis’s career is driven by aclear mission: to use newtechnology to fight old diseases.

This research is clearly important—an observation emphasized by thefact that she’s received seven-figuregrants for her work from both theBill and Melinda Gates Foundationand the NIH. Later in this book,we’ll dive into the details of howshe found this focus, but what’simportant to note now is that hermission provides her a sense ofpurpose and energy, traits that havehelped her avoid becoming acynical academic and insteadembrace her work with enthusiasm.Her mission is the foundation onwhich she builds love for what she

does, and therefore it’s a careerstrategy we need to betterunderstand.

The Power of MissionTo have a mission is to have aunifying focus for your career. It’smore general than a specific job andcan span multiple positions. Itprovides an answer to the question,What should I do with my life?Missions are powerful because theyfocus your energy toward a usefulgoal, and this in turn maximizesyour impact on your world—acrucial factor in loving what youdo. People who feel like theircareers truly matter are moresatisfied with their working lives,and they’re also more resistant to

the strain of hard work. Staying uplate to save your corporate litigationclient a few extra million dollarscan be draining, but staying up lateto help cure an ancient disease canleave you more energized thanwhen you started—perhaps evenproviding the extra enthusiasmneeded to start a lab volleyball teamor tour with a rock band.

I was drawn to Pardis Sabetibecause her career is driven by amission and she’s reaped happinessin return. After meeting her, I wentsearching for other people wholeveraged this trait to create work

they love. This search led me to ayoung archaeologist whose missionto popularize his field led to hisown television series on theDiscovery Channel, and to a boredprogrammer who systematicallystudied marketing to devise amission that injected excitementback into his working life. In allthree cases, I tried to decode exactlyhow these individuals found andthen successfully deployed theirmissions. In short, I wanted ananswer to an important question:How do you make mission a realityin your working life?

The answers I found arecomplicated. To better understandthis complexity, let’s put the topicback into the broader context of thebook. In the preceding rules, I haveargued that “follow your passion” isbad advice, as most people aren’tborn with pre-existing passionswaiting to be discovered. If yourgoal is to love what you do, youmust first build up “career capital”by mastering rare and valuableskills, and then cash in this capitalfor the traits that define great work.As I’ll explain, mission is one ofthese desirable traits, and like any

such desirable trait, it too requiresthat you first build career capital—amission launched without thisexpertise is likely doomed to sputterand die.

But capital alone is not enough tomake a mission a reality. Plenty ofpeople are good at what they do buthaven’t reoriented their career in acompelling direction. Accordingly,I will go on to explore a pair ofadvanced tactics that also play animportant role in making the leapfrom a good idea for a mission toactually making that mission areality. In the chapters ahead, you’ll

learn the value of systematicallyexperimenting with different proto-missions to seek out a directionworth pursuing. You’ll also learnthe necessity of deploying amarketing mindset in the search foryour focus. In other words,missions are a powerful trait tointroduce into your working life,but they’re also fickle, requiringcareful coaxing to make them areality.

This subtlety probably explainswhy so many people lack anorganizing focus to their careers,even though such focus is widely

admired: Missions are hard. By thispoint in my quest, however, I hadbecome comfortable with “hard,”and I hope that if you’ve made itthis far in the book, you havegained this comfort as well.Hardness scares off thedaydreamers and the timid, leavingmore opportunity for those like uswho are willing to take the time tocarefully work out the best pathforward and then confidently takeaction.

Chapter Thirteen

Missions Require Capital

In which I argue that a missionchosen before you have relevantcareer capital is not likely to besustainable.

Mission FailureWhen Sarah wrote me, she wasstuck. She had recently quit her jobas a newspaper editor to attendgraduate school to study cognitivescience. Sarah had considered gradschool right out of college, but atthe time, she worried that she didn’thave the right skills. With age,however, came more confidence,and after she signed up for and thenaced an artificial-intelligence coursethat would have “scared a youngerversion of myself,” Sarah decidedto take the plunge and become afull-time doctoral candidate.

Then the trouble started. Notlong into her new student careerSarah became paralyzed by herwork’s lack of an organizingmission. “I feel I have too manyinterests,” she told me. “I can’tdecide if I want to do theoreticalwork or something more applied,or which would be more useful.Even more threatening, I believe allthe other researchers to begeniuses…. What would you do ifyou were in my shoes?”

Sarah’s story reminded me ofJane, whom I introduced in Rule#3. As you might recall, Jane

dropped out of college to “[start] anon-profit to develop my vision ofhealth, human potential, and a lifewell-lived.” This mission,unfortunately, ran into a harshfinancial reality when Jane failed toraise money to support her vaguevision. When I met her, she wassoliciting advice about finding anormal job, a task that was provingdifficult because she lacked adegree.

Both Sarah and Jane recognizedthe power of mission, but struggledto deploy the trait in their ownworking lives. Sarah desperately

wanted a Pardis Sabeti style of life-transforming research focus, yet herfailure to immediately identify sucha focus led her to rethink graduateschool. Jane, on the other hand,slapped together something vague(a non-profit that would “developmy vision of… a life well-lived”)and then hoped the details wouldwork themselves out once she gotstarted. Jane fared no better thanSarah: The details, it turned out, didnot work themselves out, leavingJane penniless and still without acollege degree.

I tell these stories because they

emphasize an important point:Missions are tricky. As Sarah andJane learned, just because youreally want to organize your workaround a mission doesn’t mean thatyou can easily make it happen.After my visit to Harvard, I realizedthat if I was going to deploy thistrait in my own career, I needed tobetter understand this trickiness.That is, I needed to figure out whatPardis did differently than Sarahand Jane. The answer I eventuallyfound came from an unexpectedplace: the attempts to explain apuzzling phenomenon.

The Baffling Popularity ofRandomized Linear Network

CodingAs I write this chapter, I’mattending a computer scienceconference in San Jose, California.Earlier today, something interestinghappened. I attended a session inwhich four different professorsfrom four different universitiespresented their latest research.Surprisingly, all four presentationstackled the same narrow problem—information dissemination innetworks—using the same narrowtechnique—randomized linear

network coding. It was as if myresearch community woke up onemorning and collectively andspontaneously decided to tackle thesame esoteric problem.

This example of joint discoverysurprised me, but it would not havesurprised the science writer StevenJohnson. In his engaging 2010book, Where Good Ideas ComeFrom, Johnson explains that such“multiples” are frequent in thehistory of science.1 Consider thediscovery of sunspots in 1611: AsJohnson notes, four scientists, fromfour different countries, all

identified the phenomenon duringthat same year. The first electricalbattery? Invented twice in the mid-eighteenth century. Oxygen?Isolated independently in 1772 and1774. In one study cited byJohnson, researchers fromColumbia University found just shyof 150 different examples ofprominent scientific breakthroughsmade by multiple researchers atnear the same time.

These examples of simultaneousdiscovery, though interesting, mightseem tangential to our interest incareer mission. I ask, however, that

you stick with me, as theexplanation for this phenomenon isthe first link in a chain of logic thathelped me decode what Pardis diddifferently than Sarah and Jane.

Big ideas, Johnson explained, arealmost always discovered in the“adjacent possible,” a termborrowed from the complex-systembiologist Stuart Kauffman, whoused it to describe the spontaneousformation of complex chemicalstructures from simpler structures.Given a soup of chemicalcomponents sloshing and mixingtogether, noted Kauffman, lots of

new chemicals will form. Not everynew chemical, however, is equallylikely. The new chemicals you’llfind are those that can be made bycombining the structures already inthe soup. That is, the new chemicalsare in the space of the adjacentpossible defined by the currentstructures.

When Johnson adopted the term,he shifted it from complexchemicals to cultural and scientificinnovations. “We take the ideaswe’ve inherited or that we’vestumbled across, and we jiggerthem together into some new

shape,” he explained. The next bigideas in any field are found rightbeyond the current cutting edge, inthe adjacent space that contains thepossible new combinations ofexisting ideas. The reason importantdiscoveries often happen multipletimes, therefore, is that they onlybecome possible once they enter theadjacent possible, at which pointanyone surveying this space—thatis, those who are the current cuttingedge—will notice the sameinnovations waiting to happen.

The isolation of oxygen as acomponent of air, to name one of

Johnson’s examples of a multiplediscovery, wasn’t possible until twothings happened: First, scientistsbegan to think about air as asubstance containing elements, notjust a void; and second, sensitivescales, a key tool in the neededexperiments, became available.Once these two developmentsoccurred, the isolation of oxygenbecame a big fat target in the newlydefined adjacent possible—visibleto anyone who happened to belooking in that direction. Twoscientists—Carl Wilhelm Scheeleand Joseph Priestley—were looking

in this direction, and therefore bothwent on to conduct the necessaryexperiments independently but atnearly the same time.

The adjacent possible alsoexplains my earlier example of fourresearchers tackling the sameobscure problem with the sameobscure technique at the conferenceI attended. The specific techniqueapplied in this case—a techniquecalled randomized linear networkcoding—came to the attention ofthe computer scientists I work withonly over the last two years, asresearchers who study a related

topic began to apply it successfullyto thorny problems. The scientistswho ended up presenting papers onthis technique at my conference hadall noticed its potential around thesame time. Put in Johnson’s terms,this technique redefined the cuttingedge in my corner of the academicworld, and therefore it alsoredefined the adjacent possible, andin this new configuration theinformation dissemination problem,like the discovery of oxygen manycenturies earlier, suddenly loomedas a big target waiting to be tackled.

We like to think of innovation as

striking us in a stunning eurekamoment, where you all at oncechange the way people see theworld, leaping far ahead of ourcurrent understanding. I’m arguingthat in reality, innovation is moresystematic. We grind away toexpand the cutting edge, opening upnew problems in the adjacentpossible to tackle and thereforeexpand the cutting edge some more,opening up more new problems,and so on. “The truth,” Johnsonexplains, “is that technological (andscientific) advances rarely break outof the adjacent possible.”

As I mentioned, understandingthe adjacent possible and its role ininnovation is the first link in a chainof argument that explains how toidentify a good career mission. Inthe next section, I’ll forge thesecond link, which connects theworld of scientific breakthroughs tothe world of work.

The Capital-Driven MissionScientific breakthroughs, as we justlearned, require that you first get tothe cutting edge of your field. Onlythen can you see the adjacentpossible beyond, the space whereinnovative ideas are almost alwaysdiscovered. Here’s the leap I madeas I pondered Pardis Sabeti aroundthe same time I was ponderingJohnson’s theory of innovation: Agood career mission is similar to ascientific breakthrough—it’s aninnovation waiting to bediscovered in the adjacentpossible of your field. If you want

to identify a mission for yourworking life, therefore, you mustfirst get to the cutting edge—theonly place where these missionsbecome visible.

This insight explains Sarah’sstruggles: She was trying to find amission before she got to the cuttingedge (she was still in her first twoyears as a graduate student whenshe began to panic about her lack offocus). From her vantage point as anew graduate student, she wasmuch too far from the cutting edgeto have any hope of surveying theadjacent possible, and if she can’t

see the adjacent possible, she’s notlikely to identify a compelling newdirection for her work. Accordingto Johnson’s theory, Sarah wouldhave been better served by firstmastering a promising niche—atask that may take years—and onlythen turning her attention to seekinga mission.

This distance from the adjacentpossible also tripped up Jane. Shewanted to start a transformativenon-profit that changed the waypeople live their lives. A successfulnon-profit, however, needs aspecific philosophy with strong

evidence for its effectiveness. Janedidn’t have such a philosophy. Tofind one, she would have needed anice view of the adjacent possiblein her corner of the non-profitsector, and this would haverequired that she first get to thecutting edge of efforts to betterpeople’s lives—a process that, aswith Sarah, requires patience andperhaps years of work. Jane wastrying to identify a mission beforeshe got to the cutting edge and shepredictably didn’t come up withanything that could turn people’sheads.

In hindsight, these observationsare obvious. If life-transformingmissions could be found with just alittle navel-gazing and an optimisticattitude, changing the world wouldbe commonplace. But it’s notcommonplace; it’s instead quiterare. This rareness, we nowunderstand, is because thesebreakthroughs require that you firstget to the cutting edge, and this ishard—the type of hardness thatmost of us try to avoid in ourworking lives.

The alert reader will notice thatthis talk of “getting to the cutting

edge” echoes the idea of careercapital, which was introduced backin Rule #2. As you’ll recall, careercapital is my term for rare andvaluable skills. It is, I argued, yourmain bargaining chip in creatingwork you love: Most people wholove their work got where they areby first building up career capitaland then cashing it in for the typesof traits that define great work.Getting to the cutting edge of a fieldcan be understood in these terms:This process builds up rare andvaluable skills and therefore buildsup your store of career capital.

Similarly, identifying a compellingmission once you get to the cuttingedge can be seen as investing yourcareer capital to acquire a desirabletrait in your career. In other words,mission is yet another example ofcareer capital theory in action. Ifyou want a mission, you need tofirst acquire capital. If you skip thisstep, you might end up like Sarahand Jane: with lots of enthusiasmbut very little to show for it.

Not surprisingly, when we returnto the story of Pardis Sabeti, wefind that her path to a missionprovides a nice example of this

career capital perspective translatedinto practice.

Pardis’s Patience“I think you do need passion to behappy,” Pardis Sabeti told me. Atfirst this sounds like she’ssupporting the passion hypothesisthat I debunked in Rule #1. Butthen she elaborated: “It’s just thatwe don’t know what that passion is.If you ask someone, they’ll tell youwhat they think they’re passionateabout, but they probably have itwrong.” In other words, shebelieves that having passion foryour work is vital, but she alsobelieves that it’s a fool’s errand totry to figure out in advance what

work will lead to this passion.When you hear Pardis’s story,

the origin of this philosophybecomes clear. “In high school, Iwas obsessed with math,” she toldme. Then she had a biology teacherwhom she loved, which made herthink that biology might be for her.When she arrived at MIT, she wasforced to choose between math andbio. “It turns out that the MIT biodepartment has an unbelievableemphasis on teaching,” sheexplained. “So I majored in bio.”With a bio major came a new plan:She decided she was destined to

become a doctor. “I perceivedmyself as someone who caredabout people. I wanted to practicemedicine.”

Pardis did very well at MIT, wona Rhodes Scholarship, and used itto go earn her PhD at Oxford. Shefocused on biological anthropology,a typically archaic Oxfordian namefor a field most would simply callgenetics.

It was at Oxford that Pardisdecided that Africa and infectiousdiseases were also a potentiallyinteresting topic to study. If you’rekeeping count, this was the third

field that at some point in herstudent career attracted her—thefull list now contains math,medicine, and infectious disease.This is why she’s wary of thestrategy of trying to identify yourone true calling in advance—in herexperience, lots of different thingscan, at different times, seemcompelling.

Given her new interest in Africa,Pardis joined a research groupusing genetic analysis to helpAfrican-Americans trace theirgenealogy back to regions ofAfrica. After a year or so, Pardis

decided to switch labs, and shemoved into another, suggested by afriend. This lab was tackling thegenetics of malaria.

After Oxford, Pardis returned toHarvard Medical School to earn herMD—amazingly, even as she wasfinishing up a PhD in genetics, shewasn’t ready yet to abandon herearlier premonition that she wassomehow meant to be a doctor. Theresult was that she became a youngmed student finishing a PhD thesisduring her spare time. “If you wantto write a thing about having aquality enjoyable life, don’t ask me

about my time at Harvard,” shewarned. “Harvard was a toughtime.”

Pardis finished her dissertationand became a postdoctoral fellow,continuing to juggle this work withthe end of her MD program, takingthe subway back and forth betweenHarvard and MIT, where she wasnow working at the Broad Institutewith the famed geneticist EricLander. It was during this periodthat her ideas about using statisticalanalysis to find evidence of recenthuman evolution begin to yieldresults, culminating in the 2002

publication of a major paper inNature with the innocuous title:“Detecting recent positive selectionin the human genome fromhaplotype structure.”2

According to Google Scholar,the work has been cited over 720times since its publication. “Peoplestarted treating me differently afterthat paper,” Pardis says. “That’swhen the faculty offers startedcoming in.” Though she finishedher MD somewhere in this period, itwas not until this point that hermission finally became clear:Becoming a clinical doctor didn’t

make sense; she was going to builda research career focused on heruse of computational genetics tocombat ancient diseases. Pardistook a professorship at Harvard,finally ready to commit to a singlefocus in her working life.

What struck me about Pardis’sstory is how remarkably late it wasin her training before she identifiedthe mission that now defines hercareer. This lateness is bestrepresented by her decision to stillattend—and finish!—medicalschool even though she wasworking on PhD research that was

starting to attract notice. These arenot the actions of someone who iscertain of her destiny from day one.This certainty didn’t come untillater, around the time of her Naturepublication, when Pardis had finallydeveloped her computationalgenetics ideas to the point wheretheir usefulness and novelty wereobvious.

To use my terminology, this longperiod of training, starting with herundergraduate biology classes andcontinuing through her PhD andthen postdoctoral work at the BroadInstitute, was when she was

building up her stores of careercapital. When she took aprofessorship at Harvard, she wasfinally ready to cash in this capitalto obtain the mission-driven careershe enjoys today.

Rule #4 is entitled “Think Small,Act Big.” It’s in this understandingof career capital and its role inmission that we get our explanationfor this title. Advancing to thecutting edge in a field is an act of“small” thinking, requiring you tofocus on a narrow collection ofsubjects for a potentially long time.Once you get to the cutting edge,

however, and discover a mission inthe adjacent possible, you must goafter it with zeal: a “big” action.

Pardis Sabeti thought small byfocusing patiently for years on anarrow niche (the genetics ofdiseases in Africa), but then actingbig once she acquired enoughcapital to identify a mission (usingcomputational genetics to helpunderstand and fight ancientdiseases). Sarah and Jane, bycontrast, reversed this order. Theystarted by thinking big, looking fora world-changing mission, butwithout capital they could only

match this big thinking with small,ineffectual acts. The art of mission,we can conclude, asks us tosuppress the most grandiose of ourwork instincts and instead adopt thepatience—the style of patienceobserved with Pardis Sabeti—required to get this ordering correct.

Chapter Fourteen

Missions Require Little Bets

In which I argue that greatmissions are transformed intogreat successes as the result ofusing small and achievableprojects—little bets—to explore theconcrete possibilities surroundinga compelling idea.

Leaping the Gap Between Idea andPractice

My time with Pardis Sabeticonvinced me that career capital isnecessary to identify a goodmission. But even as thisunderstanding solidified, a naggingthought kept spoiling myintellectual satisfaction: Why don’t Ihave a personal mission-drivencareer?

When I met Pardis, I had a PhDin computer science from MIT andclose to two dozen peer-reviewedpublications to my name. I’d giventalks on my work all over the

world, from Rio to Bologna toZurich. In other words, I hadaccumulated career capital, and thiscapital allowed me to identify manypotential missions relevant to myskills. I even had a written recordof these brainstorms, as I alwayskeep an idea notebook with me. OnMarch 13, 2011, for example, Irecorded the possibility of focusingmy career on a new style ofdistributed algorithm theory thatwas just emerging—the study ofalgorithms in communicationgraphs with unrestrained topologychanges. I could, I noted, immerse

myself in its development much inthe same way the early proponentsof chaos theory did in their fieldback in the early 1980s.

But this brings me back to mynagging question. I had notebooksfilled with potential missions, yet Ihad resisted devoting myself to anyone in particular. And I’m not alonein this reluctance to act. Manypeople have lots of career capital,and can therefore identify a varietyof different potential missions fortheir work, but few actually buildtheir career around such missions.It seems, therefore, that there’s

more to this career tactic thansimply getting to the cutting edge.Once you have the capital requiredto identify a mission, you must stillfigure out how to put the missioninto practice. If you don’t have atrusted strategy for making this leapfrom idea to execution, then like meand so many others, you’ll probablyavoid the leap altogether.

This chapter is the first of twothat investigate people who havesuccessfully made this leap. Mygoal for these investigations is tofind specific strategies that take youfrom big idea to big results—the

type of strategies that can transformthe missions in my notebooks frombeing merely ideas to becoming thefoundation of an attention-catchingcareer. We’ll start with the story ofa brash young archaeologist from asmall town in Southeast Texas:someone who discovered asystematic strategy for deploying abold mission in a field famous forits conformity.

American TreasuresI first encountered Kirk Frenchwhile watching the DiscoveryChannel. During a commercialbreak, I saw an ad for thenetwork’s newest show. It wascalled American Treasures. Thespot showed a pair of youngarchaeologists, dressed in jeans andbattered work shirts, driving aroundthe American backcountry in an oldFord F-150, helping peopledetermine the historical significanceof their family heirlooms. Thehosts, who were revealed to bearchaeologists Kirk French and

Jason De León, seemed loud andenergetic and enjoying the hell outof what they were doing. It was likeAntiques Roadshow, but withconsiderably more drinking andcursing. I set my DVR to record thepremiere.

Early in this first episode, Kirkand Jason find themselves in theEast Texas flatlands, at a run-down,dirt-road homestead. They are thereto investigate the authenticity of asuit of clothes that supposedlybelonged to Clyde Barrow ofBonnie and Clyde fame.

It takes the archaeologists all of

thirty seconds to disprove thisclaim: Not a lot of suits from thatperiod feature a “Made in China”tag. But this doesn’t dampen theirenthusiasm.

“You’re from a moonshinefamily,” notes French.

“Yep,” drawls Leslie, the suit’sowner.

“Let’s try some moonshine.”Soon a glass pitcher is produced.

As Leslie pours the hootch intoMason jars, he offers a warning:“Don’t ask about the proof. Youwouldn’t drink it if you knew.” AsKirk and Jason sit on a pair of logs,

drinking the moonshine andswapping stories, surrounded byEast Texas nothingness, they seemto be having a great time.

I was hooked. To understand theappeal of American Treasures, youmust understand its competition. Atthe time, cable TV was overrunwith “cash for junk”–style shows,such as the History Channel’s PawnStars, which follows the staff of aLas Vegas pawnshop as they try tobargain cash-strapped people out ofvaluable possessions; and theDiscovery Channel’s AuctionKings, which follows the

adventures of an Atlanta-basedauction house whose websitedeploys significantly moreexclamation points than, say,Sotheby’s might approve of. Theseshows, of course, are not to beconfused with Discovery’sAmerican Pickers, which alsofollows a team that buys people’spossessions, but now features thekey twist that the bargain hunterstravel in a van instead of workingout of a storefront. And none ofthese should be confused witheither Discovery’s Auction Huntersor the History Channel’s Storage

Wars, both of which take a hard-hitting look at buying abandonedstorage units at auction—a topic toonuanced, it seems, to be fullyplumbed by only a single series.

These programs never interestedme. But something about AmericanTreasures caught my attention. Ithink once I looked past the name—which Kirk later admitted to mehe both hated and fought against—Iwas struck by the fact that the hostshad a purpose beyond just wantingto be on television. For one thing,they aren’t full-time TVpersonalities, but are instead

academic archaeologists. (TheDiscovery Channel had to buy out asemester of their teachingobligations so they could film thefirst season.) In addition, there’s noexchanging of cash in this show (amainstay of all other entries in thisgenre). Putting monetary value onartifacts is antithetical to the missionof archaeology, and Kirk and Jasonrefused to do so in their show. Thehosts instead seem driven by theidea that they’re educating thepublic about the reality of modernarchaeology. This is their mission,and as indicated by the smiles on

their faces as they sipped East Texasmoonshine in the premiere episodeof their show, it’s a mission that’s ahell of a lot of fun to pursue.

Not long after meeting PardisSabeti, around the time I startedquestioning why I didn’t have amission-driven career, Kirk andJason popped back to mind. Irealized that they provided a perfectcase study of what it’s like to leap alarge gap between idea and practice.The mission of popularizingarchaeology to a mass audience,and having a fun time doing so,sounds good on paper, but to

actually devote your career to thismission, especially when you’re justout of graduate school and trying tomake a name for yourself in atraditional academic field, is aterrifying prospect. I called up Kirkto find out what strategy he used tomake this leap with confidence.

The Armchair ArchaeologistNo one who knows him woulddescribe Kirk French as boring.“After Bush won the election in2004,” he told me, “I sort of lost it.I sold everything and moved to thewoods.” The “woods” consisted ofsixteen acres of old farmland, and itwas a twenty-minute drive from thePenn State campus, where Kirk wasa graduate student at the time.

While living in his “hermit”mode, he decided to build awooden stage in an apple tree grovenot far from his cabin and organizea music festival, which he called,

naturally, Kirk Fest. Jason De León,a fellow grad student at Penn State,had a band named Wilcox Hotel atthe time, which played at thefestival. He admired Kirk’sentrepreneurial streak and asked ifhe wanted to manage Wilcox Hotel.Kirk thought it sounded like fun.They ended up taking time off fromtheir graduate studies to buy aminibus and “drive across thecountry and back” on tour. Theyalso recorded two CDs during thisperiod. I tell these stories becausethey emphasize that Kirk issomeone who is not afraid to try

something bold if it holds out thepromise of making his life moreinteresting.

During this period as a graduatestudent, Kirk, who specialized inMayan water management, wasinterviewed for a History Channeldocumentary on the Maya calledLost Worlds. As someone alwaysseeking creative outlets for hisenergy, this experience helped Kirkcement a potential mission for hiscareer: to popularize modernarchaeology to a mass audience. Hisfirst efforts to explore this directionbegan after he graduated with his

PhD and became a postdoc, andthey centered on a classic 1961documentary called Land andWater: An Ecological Study of theTeotihuacan Valley of Mexico,filmed by the late Penn Statearchaeologist William Sanders. Thisfilm documents how the rise ofMexico City has transformed theecology and lifestyle in theTeotihuacan Valley. For those, likeKirk, who study historical ecology,it’s an influential film.

In the fall of 2009, Kirk got hishands on the original 16 mm reels,including outtakes that never made

the original cut, as well as Sanders’snotes. He launched two projectssurrounding this find. The first wasto digitize the original film footageand release a DVD of the originaldocumentary—a project hecompleted in the spring of 2010.The second project was moreambitious. He decided to film a newversion of the documentary—anupdate that would show the furtherchanges that have happenedbetween the 1960s and the presentin the valley. Kirk raised seedmoney from Penn State’santhropology department and the

Maya Exploration Center, puttogether a team, and in the winter of2010 headed down to Mexico Cityto begin filming sample footage.The goal was to pull togetherenough compelling shots to“convince funding agencies of theimportance of [the project].”

Kirk’s breakthrough for hismission, however, began inDecember 2009. George Milner, aprofessor in the office next to Kirk,called him in to join a group ofarchaeologists who were allstanding around Milner’s phone.“You’ve got to listen to this

message,” he said while dialing into his voice mail. The recordingwas of a man who lived just northof Pittsburgh. He sounded articulateand thoughtful—at least, until hegot to the reason he was calling thePenn State archaeology department.“I’ve got what I think is the treasureof the Knights Templar in mybackyard,” he explained.

The gathered academics all had agood laugh. But then Kirkinterjected: “I’m going to call himback.” His more experiencedcolleagues tried to talk him out of it.“He will never leave you alone,”

they told him. “He will call youback every week and keep askingyou questions.”

As Kirk explained to me, in anacademic field like archaeology,you get a lot of these types of calls—“people who think they found adinosaur footprint, or whatever”—and there’s just not time, with thepressure of research and teaching,to keep up with them. But Kirk sawan opportunity here that wouldsupport his mission. “This type ofpublic outreach is exactly what wearchaeologists should be doing,” herealized.

He decided he was going tofollow up on the random calls thatcame in to the department. Heplanned to go meet the people, heartheir stories, and help explain howthe principles of archaeology canlead them to figure out whether ornot a medieval organization ofknights was actually traipsingaround the hills of Pittsburgh. Notonly would he meet them but hewould also film the encounters,with the eventual goal of producinga documentary on the mostinteresting case. He called theproject The Armchair

Archaeologist. He envisioned thisside project taking five or ten years—something to work on alongsidehis filming in the TeotihuacanValley. “I figured, at the very least,I could show it to the students inmy intro archaeology classes,” hesaid.

On a Sunday morning, not longafter hearing the call about theKnights Templar treasure, Kirkgathered a cameraman andsoundman, and headed out toPittsburgh to investigate the claim.“He was the coolest guy,” Kirkrecalls. “He had crazy ideas, but he

was fun to talk to. We hung out allday, and had some beers, andchatted.” The “treasure,” it turnsout, was just some old deer bonesand railroad spikes found in agravel pit, but the experience wasinvigorating for Kirk. It also turnedout to be more consequential thanhe could ever have guessed.

Around this time, the DiscoveryChannel decided it wanted a realityshow that had something to do witharchaeology. As is common in theTV business, instead of developingthe idea themselves, the channelinstead spread word of their general

interest, and left it to independentproduction companies to pulltogether specific show concepts.Three months after Kirk filmed hisPittsburgh footage, one of theseproduction companies contacted thehead of the archaeology departmentat Penn State, who forwarded themessage to the whole staff. “Sure Ihad only three months ofexperience on my job as a lecturerat the time,” Kirk recalled, “but Iwas really interested in media, so Ithought, ‘Why not me?’ ” Kirkfollowed up with the productioncompany. “I have your show idea,”

he told them, not long into theirinitial conversation. He sent themhis Armchair Archaeologistfootage.

The production company lovedthe idea and they loved Kirk. Theyrefilmed his visit to the Templars’treasure site and sent the tape to theDiscovery Channel and the HistoryChannel. The latter agreed tofinance a pilot, but the former said,“Screw a pilot, let’s film eightepisodes.” When they asked Kirkabout a cohost, he had only onename to offer, his good friendJason De León, who had also

recently graduated Penn State andhad just started as an assistantprofessor at Michigan. They botharranged for the Discovery Channelto buy out their teaching obligationsfor the following fall, and then hitthe road to film the first season ofwhat would become AmericanTreasures.1

Leveraging Little BetsKirk’s mission was to popularizearchaeology, and he wanted to doso in a way that generated anexciting life. Hosting AmericanTreasures made this mission areality. The question at hand is howhe made this leap from a generalidea into specific action.

Here’s what I noticed: Kirk’spath to American Treasures wasincremental. He didn’t decide out ofnowhere that he wanted to host atelevision show and then workbackward to make that dream areality. Instead, he worked forward

from his original mission—topopularize archaeology—with aseries of small, almost tentativesteps. When he stumbled on the oldfilm reels for Land and Water, forexample, he decided to digitizethem and produce a DVD. Afterthis small step he took the slightlylarger step of raising money toshoot exploratory footage for a newversion of the documentary. WhenGeorge Milner played him thatfateful answering machine tape,Kirk took another modest step bylaunching The ArmchairArchaeologist project with no real

vision of how it would proveuseful, other than perhaps as fodderfor his intro archaeology courses.This final little step, however,turned out to be a winner, leadingdirectly to his own television show.

As I was struggling to makesense of Kirk’s story, I stumbledacross a new business book thathad been making waves. It wastitled Little Bets, and it was writtenby a former venture capitalistnamed Peter Sims.2 When Simsstudied a variety of successfulinnovators, from Steve Jobs toChris Rock to Frank Gehry, as well

as innovative companies, such asAmazon and Pixar, he found astrategy common to all. “Ratherthan believing they have to startwith a big idea or plan out a wholeproject in advance,” he writes, “theymake a methodical series of littlebets about what might be a gooddirection, learning criticalinformation from lots of littlefailures and from small butsignificant wins” [emphasis mine].This rapid and frequent feedback,Sims argues, “allows them to findunexpected avenues and arrive atextraordinary outcomes.”

To illustrate this idea, Simsdetails the example of Chris Rockpreparing a comedy set for one ofhis acclaimed HBO specials. Rock,it turns out, will make somewherebetween forty to fifty unannouncedvisits to a small New Jersey–areacomedy club to help him figure outwhich material works and whichdoesn’t. As Sims notes, he showsup on stage with a yellow legal pad,working through different jokes,taking notes on the crowd’sreaction. Most of the material fallsflat. It’s not uncommon for Rock tolook up and say, “This needs to be

fleshed out more,” while the crowdlaughs at the awkwardness ofRock’s flops. But these littlefailures, combined with the littlevictories of the jokes that connect,provide the key informationrequired for Rock to put together anextraordinary set.

This style of little bets, I realized,is what Kirk deployed to feel outhis mission of popularizingarchaeology. He tried releasing aDVD, filming a documentary, andputting together a film series for hisstudents. The latter ended up themost promising, but Kirk couldn’t

have known this in advance. Theimportant thing about little bets isthat they’re bite-sized. You try one.It takes a few months at most. Iteither succeeds or fails, but eitherway you get important feedback toguide your next steps. Thisapproach stands in contrast to theidea of choosing a bold plan andmaking one big bet on its success.If Kirk had done this—for example,deciding in advance to dedicateyears to popularizing the Land andWater documentary—he would nothave had nearly as much successwith his mission.

When I looked back to PardisSabeti’s story, I noticed the little-bets strategy at play here as well. Asyou’ll recall, she decided early inher graduate student career topursue the general mission oftackling infectious disease in Africa.But at this stage, she didn’t knowhow to make this missionsuccessful, so she launched smallexperiments. She started in aresearch lab working on the geneticheritage of African-Americans. Thisdidn’t seem quite right, so shemoved to a group that worked onmalaria—but again, she didn’t see a

clear path to making her mission asuccess. Returning to Harvard, shebegan work as a postdoctoralfellow at the Broad Institute. It washere that she began to gain tractionfor her computational approach toseeking out markers of naturalselection in the human genome. Itwas this last bet—out of a longstring of such bets—that proved tobe a big winner, at which point shededicated her career to its pursuit. Itwas tentativeness, not boldness, thattransformed Pardis’s generalmission into a specific success.

A Brief Mission IntermissionLet’s take a moment to pull togetherwhat we’ve learned so far aboutmission. In the last chapter, I usedPardis Sabeti’s story to emphasizethat you need career capital beforeyou can identify a realistic missionfor your career. Just because youhave a good idea for a mission,however, doesn’t mean that you’llsucceed in its pursuit. With this inmind, in this chapter we studied thelife of Kirk French to betterunderstand how you make the leapfrom identifying a realistic missionto succeeding in making it a reality.

Here we discovered theimportance of little bets. Tomaximize your chances of success,you should deploy small, concreteexperiments that return concretefeedback. For Chris Rock, such abet might include telling a joke toan audience and seeing if theylaugh, whereas for Kirk, it mightmean producing sample footage fora documentary and seeing if itattracts funding. These bets allowyou to tentatively explore thespecific avenues surrounding yourgeneral mission, looking for thosewith 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 little bets thatgives you a good shot ofsucceeding in this mission. Todeploy this career tactic, you needboth pieces. As you’ll learn in thenext chapter, however, the story ofmission is not yet complete. As Icontinued my study of this topic, Idiscovered a third and final strategyfor helping to integrate this trait intoyour quest for work you love.

Chapter Fifteen

Missions Require Marketing

In which I argue that greatmissions are transformed intogreat successes as the result offinding projects that satisfy the lawof remarkability, which requiresthat an idea inspires people toremark about it, and is launched ina venue where such remarking ismade easy.

The Remarkable Life of GilesBowkett

Giles Bowkett loves what he doesfor a living. In fact, my firstencounter with Giles was an e-mailhe sent me with the subject line:“My remarkable life.”

Giles, however, didn’t alwayslove his career. There were pointswhen he was broke andunemployed, and other points whenhe suffered through jobs that boredhim into a stupor. The turning pointcame in 2008 when Giles became arock star in the community ofcomputer programmers who

specialize in a language calledRuby. “It seems as if every Rubyprogrammer on the planet knowsmy name,” he told me, reflecting onhis newfound celebrity. “I literallymet people from Argentina andNorway who not only knew who Iwas but were absolutely shockedthat I didn’t expect them to knowwho I was.”

I’ll dive into the details of howGiles became a star soon, but what Iwant to emphasize now is that thisfame allowed him to take control ofhis career and to transform it intosomething he loves. “I had a lot of

interest from companies in SanFrancisco and Silicon Valley,” hetold me, reflecting on the periodthat began in 2008. He decided totake a job with ENTP, one of thecountry’s top Ruby programmingfirms. They doubled his salary andput him to work on interestingprojects. In 2009, Giles was bit byan entrepreneurial bug. He leftENTP and built up a blog and acollection of mini–Web applicationsthat soon brought in enough moneyto support him. “I had an audiencewho wanted to know what Ithought about a whole ton of

different things,” he told me. “Inmany cases they were happy to paymoney just to ask me questions.”

Eventually, he decided that hehad had his fill with the sololifestyle (“working from home iskind of lame when you don’t haveroommates, a girlfriend, or even adog”), so he pursued a longstandinginterest in filmmaking by going towork for hitRECord: a companystarted by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt that provides a Web-basedplatform for collaborative mediaprojects. It’s not that the money wasgreat (“the Hollywood

understanding of whatprogrammers get paid is wildlyinaccurate”), but just that it soundedlike a lot of fun—one of Giles’smost important criteria for hisworking life. “It was a pretty greatexperience,” he told me. “I got tohang out with one of the stars ofInception and the next Batman,drinking beers at his house, thatkind of thing.” Not long after I metGiles, after he had successfullyscratched his Hollywood itch, heonce again moved on. A publisherhad asked him to write a book, andhe had agreed—and why not? It

seemed like an interesting thing todo.

The speed with which Gilesbounces from opportunity toopportunity might seemdisorienting, but this lifestyle is aperfect match for his hyperkineticpersonality. One of Giles’s favoritepresentation techniques, forexample, is to begin talking fasterand faster, accompanying hisspeech with a rapid series of slides,each featuring a single keyword thatflashes on the screen at the exactmoment that he utters the term—theoratorical equivalent of a caffeine

rush. In other words, he used hiscapital to build a career custom-fitto his personality, which is why henow loves his working life.

The reason I’m telling Giles’sstory here in Rule #4 is that at thecore of his rise to fame was hismission. In more detail, Gilescommitted himself to the mission ofbringing together the worlds of artand Ruby programming. He madegood on this commitment when hereleased Archaeopteryx, an open-source artificial intelligenceprogram that writes and plays itsown dance music. Watching

Archaeopteryx in action can beeerie: An innocuous commandtyped into the Mac command linestarts an aggressive and complicatedtechno breakbeat; a single value ischanged in the Bayesian probabilitymatrices underlying the AI engine;and all of a sudden the beattransforms into something entirelydifferent. It’s as if musical creativityitself has been reduced to a series ofequations and some lines of tersecode. This feat made Giles a star.

But the question that interests memost about Giles is how he madethe leap from a general mission—to

bring together art and Rubyprogramming—to a specific, fame-inducing project: Archaeopteryx. Inthe last chapter, I highlighted theimportance of using little bets tofeel out a good way forward fromgeneral mission to specific project.Giles, however, adds another layerof nuance to this goal. Heapproached the task of findinggood projects for his mission withthe mindset of a marketer,systematically studying books onthe subject to help identify whysome ideas catch on while othersfall flat. His marketing-centric

approach is useful for anyonelooking to wield mission as part oftheir quest for work they love.

Purple Cows and Open-SourceRock Stars

Giles’s career story starts when heleft Santa Fe College after his firstyear. He tried writing screenplays,“but they weren’t good,” and hetried writing music, “which I wasbetter at, but which didn’t pay.” Healso temped. Artistic in nature,Giles was drawn to the graphicdesigners in the companies wherehe worked and they introduced himto quirky new markup language thatwas poised to change the world ofdesign—a language called HTML.Giles built his first Web page in

1994, and in 1996 he moved to SanFrancisco, bringing with him bookson Java and Perl, programminglanguages that provided thefoundation of the early Web. Hemade $30,000 in 1994. In 1996 thisjumped to $100,000: The dot-comboom was picking up speed andGiles was in the right place with theright skills at the right time.

At first, things went well forGiles in San Francisco. He enjoyeddesigning websites and in his freetime he became involved in thelocal DJ scene. But careers havetheir own sort of momentum, and

he soon found himselfprogramming for an investmentbank. “I was bored out of mymind,” he recalls, “so I decided todo something bold: I was going toapply to a really interesting start-up.” The day after he submitted hisapplication the start-up went under.The first dot-com crash had begun.“Pretty soon I was the only one ofmy friends who had a job at all,” herecalled. “I talked to a recruiterabout finding something I likedbetter, and he said I should bethrilled to have a job.”

Giles being Giles, however, he

ignored the recruiter, quit his job,and moved back to Santa Fe. Helived in a rented camper on hisparents’ land, helping them build asolar-powered house while takingcourses at the local communitycollege. He studied painting, voice,piano, and perhaps mostimportantly, studio engineering, theclass that introduced him toaleatoric music: composition usingalgorithms. It’s here, among thedesert landscapes and arts courses,that Giles made a key decision. Acareer untamed, he realized, canbring you into dangerous territory,

such as being bored while writingcomputer code for an investmentbank. He needed a mission toactively guide his career or hewould end up trapped again andagain. He decided that a goodmission for him would somehowcombine the artistic and technicalsides of his life, but he didn’t knowhow to make this general idea into amoney-making reality, so he wentsearching for answers. He foundwhat he was looking for in anunlikely pair of books.

“You’re either remarkable orinvisible,” says Seth Godin in his2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.1 As heelaborated in a Fast Companymanifesto he published on thesubject: “The world is full of boringstuff—brown cows—which is whyso few people pay attention…. Apurple cow… now that would standout. Remarkable marketing is theart of building things worthnoticing.”2 When Giles readGodin’s book, he had an epiphany:For his mission to build asustainable career, it had to producepurple cows, the type of remarkable

projects that compel people tospread the word.

But this left him with a secondquestion: In the world of computerprogramming, where does onelaunch remarkable projects? Hefound his second answer in a 2005career guide with a quirky title: MyJob Went to India: 52 Ways toSave Your Job.3 The book waswritten by Chad Fowler, a well-known Ruby programmer who alsodabbles in career advice forsoftware developers. Featuredamong Fowler’s fifty-two strategiesis the idea that the job seeker

should leverage the open-sourcesoftware movement. Thismovement brings togethercomputer programmers whovolunteer their time to buildsoftware that’s freely available andmodifiable. Fowler argued that thiscommunity is well respected andhighly visible. If you want to makea name for yourself in softwaredevelopment—the type of namethat can help you secureemployment—focus your attentionon making quality contributions toopen-source projects. This is wherethe people who matter look for

talent.“At this point I basically just put

two and two together,” Giles toldme. “The synthesis of Purple Cowand My Job Went to India is thatthe best way to market yourself as aprogrammer is to create remarkableopen-source software. So I did.”

Following Godin’s advice, Gilescame up with the idea forArchaeopteryx, his AI-driven musiccreator. “I don’t think there wasanybody else with my combinedbackground,” he said. “Plenty ofRuby programmers love dancemusic, but I don’t think any of

them has sacrificed the sameridiculous number of hours totweaking breakbeats and synthpatches over and over again,releasing white-label records thatnever made a dime, and studyingmusic theory.” In other words,Giles’s ability to produce a Rubyprogram that produced real musicwas unique: If he could pull it off,it would be a purple cow.

Drawing from Fowler’s advice,Giles then decided that the open-source community was the perfectplace to introduce this purple cowto the world. In addition to

releasing the Archaeopteryx code asopen source, he took to the road tospread the word. “I basically tookChad Fowler’s advice way too farand went to speak at almost everyuser group and conference that Icould—at least fifteen in 2008,”Giles recalled. This hybridGodin/Fowler strategy worked. “Igot offers from all over the place,”Giles recalled. “I got to work withstars in my industry, I gotapproached to write a book onArchaeopteryx, I could charge a lotmore money than I used to.” It was,in other words, a strategy that made

his mission into a success.

The Law of RemarkabilityReflecting on Giles’s story, I keptcoming back to the same adjective:“remarkable.” What Gilesdiscovered, I decided, is that a goodmission-driven project must beremarkable in two different ways.First, it should be remarkable in theliteral sense of compelling people toremark about it. To understand thistrait, let’s first look at somethingthat lacks it. Before releasingArchaeopteryx, Giles had workedon another open-source project. Hecollected popular command-linetools for Ruby and combined them

into one package with consistentdocumentation. If you asked aRuby programmer about thisproject, he would tell you that thisis solid, quality, useful work. Butit’s not the type of achievement thatwould compel this same Rubyprogrammer to write his friends andtell them, “You have to see this!”

In the words of Seth Godin, thisearly project was a “brown cow.”By contrast, teaching your computerto write its own complex music is apurple cow; it inspires people totake notice and spread the word.

What’s nice about this first

notion of remarkability is that it canbe applied to any field. Take bookwriting: If I published a book ofsolid advice for helping recentgraduates transition to the jobmarket, you might find this a usefulcontribution, but probably wouldn’tfind yourself whipping out youriPhone and Tweeting its praises. Onthe other hand, if I publish a bookthat says “follow your passion” isbad advice, (hopefully) this wouldcompel you to spread the word.That is, the book you’re holdingwas conceived from the very earlystages with the hope of being seen

as “remarkable.”There’s also, however, a second

type of remarkability at play. Gilesdidn’t just find a project thatcompels remarks, but he alsospread the word about the project ina venue that supports theseremarks. In his case, this venue wasthe open-source softwarecommunity. As he learned fromChad Fowler, there’s an establishedinfrastructure in this community fornoticing and spreading the wordabout interesting projects. Withoutthis conduciveness to chatter, apurple cow, though striking, may

never be seen. To be moreconcrete, if Giles had insteadreleased Archaeopteryx as a closed-source piece of commercialsoftware, perhaps trying to sell itfrom a slick website or at musicconventions, it probably wouldn’thave caught fire as it did.

Once again, this notion ofremarkability applies beyond justGiles’s world of Rubyprogramming. If we return to myexample of writing career-advicebooks, I realized early on in myprocess that blogging was aremarkable venue for introducing

my ideas. Blogs are visible and theinfrastructure is in place for goodideas to quickly spread, through,for example, linking, Tweets, andFacebook. Because of thisconduciveness to remarking, by thetime I pitched this book topublishers, I not only had a largeaudience who appreciated my viewson passion and skill, but the memehad spread: Newspapers and majorwebsites around the world hadbegun to quote my thoughts on thetopic, while the articles had beencited online and Tweeted thousandsof times. If I had instead decided to

confine my ideas to paid speakinggigs, for example, my mission tochange the way we think aboutcareers would have likely stagnated—the venue would not have beensufficiently remarkable.

To help organize our thinking,I’ll summarize these ideas in asuccinct law:

The Law of RemarkabilityFor a mission-driven projectto succeed, it should beremarkable in two differentways. First, it must compelpeople who encounter it to

remark about it to others.Second, it must be launchedin a venue that supports suchremarking.

Once I had articulated this law, Ibegan to notice it at play in theexamples I had previously found ofmission leading to a compellingcareer. To help cement thismarketing-centric approach tomission, it’s worth taking a momentto return to these examples andhighlight the law in action.

The Law in ActionPardis Sabeti’s general mission wasto use genetics to help fightinfectious disease in Africa. This isa fine mission, but by itself it doesnot guarantee the type of fulfillinglife Pardis leads. In fact, lots ofresearchers share this mission, andare doing good, basic science—such as sequencing the genes ofviruses—but don’t have particularlycompelling careers. Pardis, bycontrast, pursued this mission bylaunching an arresting project:using powerful computers to seekout examples of humans evolving

resistance to ancient diseases. If youwant evidence of the remarkabilityof this approach, look no fartherthan the catchy headlines of themany articles that have been pennedon the Sabeti Lab—articles withtitles such as “5 Questions for theWoman Who Tracks Our DNAFootprints” (Discover, April 2010),“Picking Up Evolution’s Beat”(Science, April 2008), and “Are WeStill Evolving?” (BBC Horizon,March 2011). This is a project thatcompels people to spread the word.It is a purple cow.

By seeking a remarkable project,

Pardis satisfied the first part of thelaw of remarkability. The secondpart requires that she launch herproject in a venue that supportsremarking. For Pardis, as with allscientists, this is the easy part. Peer-reviewed publication is a systembuilt around the idea of allowinggood ideas to spread. The better theidea, the better the journal it getspublished in. The better the journalan article is published in, the morepeople who read it. And the morepeople who read it, the more it getscited, discussed at conferences, andin general affects the field. If you’re

a scientist with a remarkable idea,there’s little doubt about how bestto spread it: publish! This is exactlywhat Pardis did with the Naturearticle that jump-started herreputation.

With Kirk French, we also seethe law of remarkability in action.His general mission was topopularize modern archaeology.There are lots of non-remarkableways to pursue this mission. Forexample, he could have worked onmaking the archaeology curriculumat Penn State more appealing toundergraduates, or published

articles on the field in general-interest science magazines. Butthese projects would not havegenerated the type of attention-grabbing success that can transformyour career into somethingcompelling. Instead, Kirk decidedto head straight into people’s homesand use archaeological techniquesto help them uncover thesignificance (if any) of familytreasures. This approach isremarkable—an observationreinforced by the number ofspeaking invitations Kirk nowreceives, including a recent

opportunity to address the largestconference in his field aboutlessons learned as a popularizer.When he gave the address, thecrowd overflowed the auditorium(an impressive feat for someonewho had just earned his doctorate).

In this example, Kirk had aremarkable project to support hismission—now all he needed was avenue conducive to remarking. Hefound this remarkable venue withtelevision. We’re a society trainedto watch what’s on and then discusswhat caught our attention the nextday.

Summary of Rule #4The core idea of this book is

simple: To construct work youlove, you must first build careercapital by mastering rare andvaluable skills, and then cash in thiscapital for the type of traits thatdefine compelling careers. Missionis one of those traits.

In the first chapter of this rule, Ireinforced the idea that this trait,like all desirable career traits, reallydoes require career capital—youcan’t skip straight into a greatmission without first buildingmastery in your field. Drawing

from the terminology of StevenJohnson, I argued that the bestideas for missions are found in theadjacent possible—the region justbeyond the current cutting edge.

To encounter these ideas,therefore, you must first get to thatcutting edge, which in turn requiresexpertise. To try to devise a missionwhen you’re new to a field andlacking any career capital is aventure bound for failure.

Once you identify a generalmission, however, you’re still leftwith the task of launching specificprojects that make it succeed. An

effective strategy for accomplishingthis task is to try small steps thatgenerate concrete feedback—littlebets—and then use this feedback,be it good or bad, to help figure outwhat to try next. This systematicexploration can help you uncoveran exceptional way forward thatyou might have never otherwisenoticed.

The little-bets strategy, Idiscovered as my research intomission continued, is not the onlyway to make a mission a success. Italso helps to adopt the mindset of amarketer. This led to the strategy

that I dubbed the law ofremarkability.

This law says that for a project totransform a mission into a success,it should be remarkable in twoways. First, it must literally compelpeople to remark about it. Second,it must be launched in a venueconducive to such remarking.

In sum, mission is one of themost important traits you canacquire with your career capital. Butadding this trait to your workinglife is not simple. Once you havethe capital to identify a goodmission, you must still work to

make it succeed. By using little betsand the law of remarkability, yougreatly increase your chances offinding ways to transform yourmission from a compelling idea intoa compelling career.

Conclusion

My Story ResumesIn the introduction to this book Idescribed the circumstances thatlaunched me on the quest you justfinished reading about. My time asa graduate student and postdoc waswinding down, and I was about toenter the academic-job market.Succeeding as a professor, I knew,was not an easy task. If you’re notin control of your career, it canchew you up and spit you out. Tomake matters worse, I was entering

the market in a bad economy, sothere was a chance I might not finda suitable academic position at all,which would force me to start fromscratch in my career thinking. Thisuncertainty made the followingquestion suddenly seem pressing:How do people end up loving whatthey do?

In the fall of 2010 I sent out myapplications for academic jobs. Byearly December I had applied totwenty positions. A curious quirkof the academic-job search processis that your colleagues expect it tobe demanding, so they keep tasks

off your desk. And though theprocess is in fact demanding, thesedemands come in bursts, leavinglong stretches of downtime inbetween. Without much work to fillthese stretches, you can findyourself uncomfortably idle. So itwas that as November gave way toDecember, and I finishedsubmitting my twenty applications,I had, for the first time since mycollege summer vacations, notmuch to do.

With free time on my hands, Icould finally begin to tackle myquest in earnest. It was at this point

that I began to seek out people’scareer stories, both successes andfailures, to see what I could learn. Itwas in November, for example, thatI first met Thomas, whose taleopened this book. The stories Iencountered that fall cemented anidea that I had long suspected to betrue: “Follow your passion” is badadvice. But this validation onlybrought forward the more difficulttask of figuring out what career-happiness strategies do work.

My search for this answer wasput on hold in January andFebruary as my job search process

picked up steam. I began to preparemy job talk and sift through theinterview offers that started totrickle in. In early March I went onan interview trip that included astop at Georgetown University.Everything about Georgetown feltright. Fortunately, I had anotheroffer at the time with a tightdeadline. I told my contacts atGeorgetown that I enjoyed my visitand was interested in the positionbut that I had a fast-approachingdeadline. Later that night I receivedthe key e-mail from the head oftheir search committee. It was terse,

just three sentences:

We will have an offer for youon Thursday. We just need toknow where to contact you tocommunicate it in theafternoon. Will your cellphone be the best way toreach you?

I turned down a pair ofinterviews that had been scheduledfor later in the spring and acceptedthe Georgetown offer. My careerdie had been cast: I was going to bea professor. It was the second week

of March when I formally tookmyself off the market. My start datewould be in August. This left a gapof four months to finalize myanswers to my pressing careerquestions: I now had a job, but Ineeded to figure out how totransform it into one I loved.During that spring and subsequentsummer, I hit the road, conductingthe interviews that formed the coreof Rules #2–4.

As I’m writing this conclusion,I’m now two weeks away from myfirst semester as a professor. I havebeen working hard over the past

several months to not only finishthe quest I described in this book,but also to write up my experiencesin the form in which you justencountered them. (I signed thedeal for this book only two weeksafter accepting my Georgetownoffer.) This conclusion is the lastpiece of this book to be written, andthe timing couldn’t be better. I’ll behanding in this manuscript meredays before turning my attention tomy new life as a professor—allowing me to start this newchapter of my career withconfidence in what I should do to

push it somewhere remarkable.My quest, of course, uncovered

several surprising ideas. If yourgoal is to love what you do, Idiscovered, “follow you passion”can be bad advice. It’s moreimportant to become good atsomething rare and valuable, andthen invest the career capital thisgenerates into the type of traits thatmake a job great. The traits ofcontrol and mission are two goodplaces to start. My goal for this finalpart of the book is to describe howI am applying these ideas in myown working life. That is, I want to

take you inside my thought processand highlight the specific ways inwhich the insights of Rules #1–4are playing a role in this early stageof my new career. Obviously theseapplications are tentative—I havenot yet been a professor longenough to see how they will all playout—but it’s this tentativeness, Ithink, that makes them morerelevant. They provide a real-worldexample of the type of concreteactions you can take right now tostart applying the lessons of thisbook in your own working life.Your decisions will differ from

mine, but I hope that you’llencounter in this conclusion a bettersense of what it means to re-form acareer to match this new way ofthinking about creating work youlove.

How I Applied Rule #1Rule #1 argued that “follow yourpassion” is bad advice, as the vastmajority of people don’t have pre-existing passions waiting to bediscovered and matched to a career.The real path to work you love, itnoted, is often more complicated.This insight was not one that Iencountered for the first timeduring my quest, but was insteadsomething I had long suspected tobe true. Although the chapter onRule #1 describes my recent effortsto find real evidence for thisintuition, the seeds for this thought

had been planted long before.The story of my passion aversion

starts in high school, when myfriend Michael Simmons and Istarted a Web design company. Wecalled it Princeton Web Solutions.The origin of our company wasmodest. It was the late 1990s—thefirst dot-com boom—and the mediawas obsessed with stories ofteenage CEOs earning millions.Michael and I thought this soundedlike fun—certainly a better way tomake money than our standardsummer jobs. We tried to think up acreative new idea for a high-tech

company—something along thelines of a new Amazon.com—butwe were stumped and ended updefaulting to an idea that we hadearlier vowed we wouldn’t pursue:designing websites. To be clear, wewere by no means following ourtrue calling. We were bored,available, and ambitious—adangerous combination—andstarting a company sounded aspromising as anything else wecould imagine.

Princeton Web Solutions wasn’ta meteoric success, but this waspartly by design, as we didn’t really

want to invest the time required togrow a serious company. Duringour senior year of high school weworked with six or seven clients,including a local architecture firm, alocal technical college, and an ill-conceived—but oddly well-funded—Web portal targeting the elderly.Most of these contracts paidbetween $5,000 and $10,000, ahealthy chunk of which we passedon to a team of Indiansubcontractors, who did most of theactual programming work. WhenMichael and I left for college—heto NYU and I to Dartmouth—I

decided I was done with websitedesign and moved on to morepressing interests, such as girls.

For many in my generation, therejection of “follow your passion”as career advice is heretical. I neverfelt this same attraction to the cultof passion, and for this I give creditto my experience with PrincetonWeb Solutions. As I mentioned,starting this company had nothingto do with me following a passion.Once Michael and I figured outhow to keep the business humming,however, this skill turned out to berare and valuable (especially for

people our age). This career capitalcould then be cashed in for avariety of different excitingexperiences. We got to wear suitsand make pitches to boardrooms.We made enough money to neverhave to worry about not being ableto afford the types of thingsteenagers buy. Our teachers wereimpressed by the company andallowed us to unofficially ditchclasses for meetings. Magazineswrote about us, photographerscame to take our pictures fornewspapers, and the wholeexperience certainly played a large

role in our being admitted to elitecolleges.

The traits that can make your lifeinteresting, I learned, had very littleto do with intensive soul-searching.Princeton Web Solutions, in otherwords, had inoculated me againstthe idea that occupational happinessrequires a calling.

Because of these earlyexperiences, I looked on withcuriosity, once I arrived at college,when my classmates began to wringtheir hands about the question ofwhat they wanted to do with theirlives. For them, something as basic

as choosing a major becameweighted with cosmic significance.I thought this was nonsense. To me,the world was filled withopportunities like Princeton WebSolutions waiting to be exploited tomake your life more interesting—opportunities that had nothing to dowith identifying predestineddispositions.

Driven by this insight, while myclassmates contemplated their truecalling, I went seekingopportunities to master rare skillsthat would yield big rewards. Istarted by hacking my study skills

to become as efficient as possible.This took one semester ofsystematic experiments andsubsequently earned me threeconsecutive years of a 4.0 gradepoint average, a period duringwhich I never pulled an all-nighterand rarely studied past dinner. Ithen cashed in this asset bypublishing a student-advice guide.These experiences helped me buildan exciting student life—I was, Iimagine, the only student onDartmouth’s campus taking regularcalls from his literary agent—butneither came from the pursuit of a

pre-existing passion. Indeed, themotivation to write my first bookwas an idle dare leveled by anentrepreneur I admired whom I metone night for drinks: “Don’t justtalk about it,” he scolded me when Ioffhandedly mentioned the bookidea. “If you think it would be cool,go do it.” This seemed as good areason as any for me to proceed.

When it later came time for meto decide what to do after college, Ihad two offers in hand, one fromMicrosoft and the other from MIT.This is the type of decision thatwould paralyze my classmates. I,

however, didn’t see any reason toworry. Both paths, I was sure,would yield numerousopportunities that could beleveraged into a remarkable life. Iended up choosing MIT—amongother reasons, in order to staycloser to my girlfriend.

The point I’m trying to make inthis section is that the core insightof Rule #1 came to me before myquest started, and in fact wassomething I internalized as early ashigh school. When I came to thefall of 2011, therefore, and wasfacing the period of uncertainty

when I wasn’t sure if I wouldbecome a professor or end updoing something completelydifferent, this Rule #1 mindsetsaved me from needless frettingabout which of these paths forwardwas my true calling. If tackledcorrectly, I was absolutelyconfident that either could yield acareer I love. Figuring out how toachieve this goal, however, was lesscertain, and it was this question thatled me to the insights described inRules #2–4.

How I Applied Rule #2Rule #1 argued that “follow yourpassion” is bad advice. Thisprovided the motivation for myquest to figure out what does matterin creating work you love. Rule #2described the first insight Iencountered once my quest wasunder way. The things that makegreat work great, it argued, are rareand valuable. If you want them inyour career, you need rare andvaluable skills to offer in return. Inother words, if you’re not putting inthe effort to become, as SteveMartin put it, “so good they can’t

ignore you,” you’re not likely toend up loving your work—regardless of whether or not youbelieve it’s your true calling.

I introduced the term careercapital to describe these rare andvaluable skills, and noted that thetricky part is figuring out how toacquire this capital. By definition, ifit’s rare and valuable, it’s not easyto get. This insight brought me intothe world of performance science,where I encountered the concept ofdeliberate practice—a method forbuilding skills by ruthlesslystretching yourself beyond where

you’re comfortable. As Idiscovered, musicians, athletes, andchess players, among others, knowall about deliberate practice, butknowledge workers do not. Mostknowledge workers avoid theuncomfortable strain of deliberatepractice like the plague, a realityemphasized by the typical cubicledweller’s obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is thisbehavior if not an escape fromwork that’s more mentallydemanding?

As I researched these ideas, Ibecame increasingly worried about

the current state of my academiccareer. I feared that my rate ofacquiring career capital wastapering off. To understand thisworry, you should understand thatgraduate school, and thepostdoctoral years that often follow,provide an uneven growthexperience. Early in this processyou’re constantly pushed intointellectual discomfort. A graduate-level mathematics problem set—something I have plenty ofexperience with—is about as purean exercise in deliberate practice asyou’re likely to find. You’re given a

problem that you have no idea howto solve, but you have to solve it oryou’ll get a bad grade, so you divein and try as hard as you can,repeatedly failing as differentavenues lead you to dead ends. Themental strain of mustering everylast available neuron toward solvinga problem, driven by the fear ofearning zero points on theassignment, is a nice encapsulationof exactly what the deliberate-practice literature says is necessaryto improve. This is why, early intheir careers, graduate studentsexperience great leaps in their

abilities.1But at a research-oriented

program like the one offered byMIT’s computer sciencedepartment, your course workwinds down after the first twoyears. Soon after, your researchefforts are expected to releasethemselves from your advisor’sorbit and follow a self-directedtrajectory. It’s here that if you’renot careful to keep pushingforward, your improvement cantaper off to what the performancescientist Anders Ericsson called an“acceptable level,” where you then

remain stuck. The research drivingRule #2 taught me that theseplateaus are dangerous because theycut off your supply of career capitaland therefore cripple your ability tokeep actively shaping your workinglife. As my quest continued,therefore, it became clear that Ineeded to introduce some practicalstrategies into my own working lifethat would force me to once againmake deliberate practice a regularcompanion in my daily routine.

According to popular legend,

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist,scored only a slightly above-average IQ of 125 when he wastested in high school. In hismemoirs, however, we find hints ofhow he rose from modestintelligence to genius, when he talksabout his compulsion to tear downimportant papers and mathematicalconcepts until he could understandthe concepts from the bottom up.It’s possible, in other words, thathis amazing intellect was less abouta gift from God and more about adedication to deliberate practice.

Motivated by my research andexamples such as Feynman, Idecided that focusing my attentionon a bottom-up understanding ofmy own field’s most difficultresults would be a good first steptoward revitalizing my career capitalstores.

To initiate these efforts, I chose apaper that was well cited in myresearch niche, but that was alsoconsidered obtuse and hard tofollow. The paper focused on onlya single result—the analysis of analgorithm that offers the best-known solution to a well-known

problem. Many people have citedthis result, but few have understoodthe details that support it. I decidedthat mastering this notorious paperwould prove a perfect introductionto my new regime of self-enforceddeliberate practice.

Here was my first lesson: Thistype of skill development is hard.When I got to the first tricky gap inthe paper’s main proof argument, Ifaced immediate internal resistance.It was as if my mind realized theeffort I was about to ask it toexpend, and in response itunleashed a wave of neuronal

protest, distant at first, but then as Ipersisted increasingly tremendous,crashing over my concentrationwith mounting intensity.

To combat this resistance, Ideployed two types of structure.The first type was time structure: “Iam going to work on this for onehour,” I would tell myself. “I don’tcare if I faint from the effort, ormake no progress, for the next hourthis is my whole world.” But ofcourse I wouldn’t faint andeventually I would make progress.It took, on average, ten minutes forthe waves of resistance to die

down. Those ten minutes werealways difficult, but knowing thatmy efforts had a time limit helpedensure that the difficulty wasmanageable.

The second type of structure Ideployed was information structure—a way of capturing the results ofmy hard focus in a useful form. Istarted by building a proof map thatcaptured the dependencies betweenthe different pieces of the proof.This was hard, but not too hard,and it got me warmed up in myefforts to understand the result. Ithen advanced from the maps to

short self-administered quizzes thatforced me to memorize the keydefinitions the proof used. Again,this was a relatively easy task, but itstill took concentration, and theresult was an understanding thatwas crucial for parsing the detailedmath that came next.

After these first two steps,emboldened by my initial successesin deploying hard focus, I movedon to the big guns: proofsummaries. This is where I forcedmyself to take each lemma andwalk through each step of its proofs—filling in missing steps. I would

conclude by writing a detailedsummary in my own words. Thiswas staggeringly demanding, butthe fact that I had already spent timeon easier tasks in the paper built upenough momentum to help push meforward.

I returned to this paper regularlyover a period of two weeks. When Iwas done, I had probablyexperienced fifteen hours total ofdeliberate practice–style strain, butdue to its intensity it felt like muchmore. Fortunately, this effort led toimmediate benefits. Among otherthings, it allowed me to understand

whole swaths of related work thathad previously been mysterious.The researchers who wrote thispaper had enjoyed a near monopolyon solving this style of problem—now I could join them. Leveragingthis new understanding, I went onto prove a new result, which Ipublished at a top conference in myfield. This is now a new researchdirection open for me to explore asI see fit. Perhaps even moreindicative of this strategy’s value isthat I actually ended up finding apair of mistakes in the paper. WhenI told the authors, it turned out I

was only the second person tonotice them, and they hadn’t yetpublished a correction. To helpcalibrate the magnitude of thisomission, bear in mind thataccording to Google Scholar thepaper had already been cited closeto sixty times.

More important than these smallsuccesses, however, was the newmindset this test case introduced.Strain, I now accepted, was good.Instead of seeing this discomfort asa sensation to avoid, I began tounderstand it the same way that abody builder understands muscle

burn: a sign that you’re doingsomething right. Inspired by thisinsight, I accompanied a promise todo more large-scale paperdeconstructions of this type with atrio of smaller habits designed toinject even more deliberate practiceinto my daily routine. I describethese new routines below:

My Research Bible RoutineAt some point during my quest, Istarted what I came to call myresearch bible, which is, in reality,a document I keep on mycomputer. Here’s the routine: Oncea week I require myself tosummarize in my “bible” a paper Ithink might be relevant to myresearch. This summary mustinclude a description of the result,how it compares to previous work,and the main strategies used toobtain it. These summaries are lessinvolved than the step-by-stepdeconstruction I did on my original

test-case paper—which is whatallows me to do them on a weeklybasis—but they still induce thestrain of deliberate practice.

My Hour-Tally RoutineAnother deliberate-practice routinewas the introduction of my hourtally—a sheet of paper I mountedbehind my desk at MIT, and planon remounting at Georgetown. Thesheet has a row for each month onwhich I keep a tally of the totalnumber of hours I’ve spent thatmonth in a state of deliberatepractice. I started the tally sheet onMarch 15, 2011, and in the last twoweeks of that month I experienced12 hours of strain. In April, the firstfull month of this record keeping, Igot the tally up to 42 hours. In May,

I backslid to 26.5 hours and in Junethis fell to 23 hours. (In fairness,these last two months were a periodduring which I was up to my ears inthe logistics of switching from myposition at MIT to my position atGeorgetown.) By having these hourcounts stare me in the face everyday I’m motivated to find new waysto fit more deliberate practice intomy schedule. Without this routine,my total amount of time spentstretching my abilities wouldundoubtedly be much lower.

My Theory-Notebook RoutineMy third strategy was the purchaseof the most expensive notebook Icould find at the MIT bookstore: anarchival-quality lab notebook thatcost me forty-five dollars. Thisnotebook boasts a nice thickcardboard cover, mounted ondouble-wire spirals, that falls openflat. The pages are acid-free, thick,and gridded. I use this notebookwhen brainstorming new theoryresults. At the end of each of thesebrainstorming sessions I requiremyself to formally record theresults, by hand, on a dated page.

The expense of the notebook helpssignal the importance of what I’msupposed to write inside it, and this,in turn, forces me into the strainrequired to collect and organize mythinking. The result: moredeliberate practice.

The insights of Rule #2fundamentally changed the way Iapproach my work. If I had todescribe my previous way ofthinking, I would probably use thephrase “productivity-centric.”Getting things done was my

priority. When you adopt aproductivity mindset, however,deliberate practice-inducing tasksare often sidestepped, as theambiguous path toward theircompletion, when combined withthe discomfort of the mental strainthey require, makes them anunpopular choice in schedulingdecisions. It’s much easier toredesign your graduate-student Webpage than it is to grapple with amind-melting proof. The result forme was that my career capitalstores, initially built up during theforced strain of my early years as a

graduate student, were dwindling astime went on. Researching Rule #2,however, changed this state ofaffairs by making me much more“craft-centric.” Getting better andbetter at what I did became whatmattered most, and getting betterrequired the strain of deliberatepractice. This is a different way ofthinking about work, but once youembrace it, the changes to yourcareer trajectory can be profound.

How I Applied Rule #3In the early spring of 2011, myacademic-job hunt took aninteresting turn. At the time, I had averbal offer from GeorgetownUniversity, but nothing in writing,and as my postdoctoral advisor toldme, “If it’s not in writing, it doesn’tcount.” While waiting for theofficial offer, I received aninterview invitation from a well-known state university with a well-funded research program. Decidinghow to navigate this careerconundrum was vastly simplifiedby my quest, which was under way

at the same time. In particular, itwas my investigation of the valueof control, as detailed in Rule #3,that provided me guidance.

Rule #3 argued that control overwhat you do and how you do it issuch a powerful force for buildingremarkable careers that it couldrightly be called a “dream-jobelixir.” When you study the type ofcareers that make others remark,“That’s the type of job I want,” thistrait almost always plays a centralrole. Once you understand thisvalue of control, it changes the wayyou evaluate opportunities, leading

you to consider a position’spotential autonomy as being asimportant as its offered salary or theinstitution’s reputation. This wasthe mindset I took into my own jobsearch, and it helped me reenvisionmy choice between acceptingGeorgetown’s offer or delaying it togo interview at the unnamed stateuniversity.

There were two important pointsI noticed when I started evaluatingmy options through the lens ofcontrol. First, Georgetown was juststarting up its computer sciencePhD program as part of a more

general campus-wide investment inthe sciences. Throughout my job-hunt process, my PhD advisor atMIT had been telling me about herexperiences, early in her owncareer, working in Georgia Tech’scomputer science departmentduring the period when it, too, wasfirst transitioning toward aresearch-centric program. “In agrowing program, you’ll alwayshave a say,” she told me.

By contrast, at a well-establishedinstitution, your position in thehierarchy as a new assistantprofessor is clear: at the bottom. At

these universities, you often have towait until you’re a full professor,years and years into your career,before you can start affecting theprogram’s direction. Until this pointyou follow along with what getspassed down from on high.

The second thing I noticed wasthat Georgetown’s tenure processwas going to differ somewhat fromthe pattern of standard well-established programs. At a largeresearch institution, tenure happensas follows: Higher-ups in theadministration send out letters toother people in your general field

and ask whether you’re the topperson in your particular specialty.If you’re not, they’ll fire you andtry to hire whoever is. Some placesgo so far as to essentially tell theirnew hires not to expect tenure.(Academic-job markets are sotough, and with so much moreavailable talent than open positions,they can get away with this.)

If your specialty is new—asmine is—and they can’t thereforefind experts with an opinion on iteither way, you’re going to have areal hard time keeping yourposition, as there’s no one out there

to validate your stature. Because ofthis, the system rewards conformityfor junior faculty: That is, the safestroute to tenure is to take a robustresearch topic that already has lotsof interest and then outwork yourpeers. If you want to innovate, waituntil later in your career. In hisfamed “Last Lecture,” the lateCarnegie Mellon computer scienceprofessor Randy Pausch capturedthis reality well when he quipped,“Junior faculty members used tocome up to me and say, ‘Wow, yougot tenure early; what’s yoursecret?’ I said, ‘It’s pretty simple,

call me any Friday night in myoffice at ten o’clock and I’ll tellyou.’ ”

Georgetown, by contrast, made itclear that they weren’t interested inthis explicit comparison-basedapproach to tenure. At this stage inits growth, the computer sciencedepartment was more focused ondeveloping star researchers thantrying to hire them away. In otherwords, if I published good resultsin good venues, I could stay.Without pressure to choose a safe,pre-existing area to dominate, Iwould therefore have much more

flexibility in how my researchprogram unfolded.

Viewed from the perspective ofthe control I would enjoy over mycareer, Georgetown was clearlymore attractive than the well-established state university. Beforefinalizing my decision, however, Itook some time to reflect on theother insights of Rule #3—insightsthat nuanced its otherwiseenthusiastic endorsement ofautonomy. During my quest, forexample, I discovered two traps thattypically trip people up in theirsearch for control. The first trap

was having too little career capital.If you go after more control in yourworking life without a rare andvaluable skill to offer in return,you’re likely pursuing a mirage.

This was the trap tripped, forexample, by the many fans oflifestyle design, who left theirtraditional jobs to try to make aliving on passive income-generatingwebsites. Many of these contrariansquickly discovered that the income-generating piece of that plan doesn’twork well if you don’t havesomething valuable to offer inexchange for people’s money. This

trap might not seem relevant to myjob hunt, as the academic-searchprocess usually demands largestores of career capital—in the formof peer-reviewed publications andstrong recommendation letters—before a candidate has a possibilityof earning an offer. But there aredepartments lurking out there thatwill attract second-tier candidates(i.e., those without much careercapital) with the allure of theautonomous academic life, butthen, once they arrive on campus,saddle them with an overwhelmingamount of teaching and service

responsibilities. In other words,even in this rarefied world, onemust still be wary of controlmirages.

The second trap describes whathappens when you do have enoughcapital to successfully make a shifttoward more control. It’s at thispoint that you’re most likely toencounter resistance from others inyour life, as more control usuallybenefits only you. Fortunately forme, my closest advisors at MITencouraged me to pursue theflexibility offered by a fast-growingprogram like Georgetown’s. But

there were certainly those fartherout in my professional orbit whowere more resistant to this decision.To them, pounding a well-trod pathat a well-established university wasthe safest route to the desiredoutcome of tenure and a goodresearch reputation. The personalbenefits of having more controlover my work were not on theirprofessional radar, so any decisionoutside the safe decision wasdeemed alarming.

While researching Rule #3, Icame across a useful tool fornavigating between these two traps.

I called it the law of financialviability, and described it asfollows: “When deciding whether tofollow an appealing pursuit that willintroduce more control into yourwork life, ask yourself whetherpeople are willing to pay you for it.If so, continue. If not, move on.”

Ultimately, this was the law thathelped me finalize my own careerdecision. Georgetown offered muchgreater potential for control overwhat I did and how I did it. Thisseemed clear. Furthermore, theywere willing to pay me well for thismove toward autonomy, both

financially and in terms of supportfor my research initiatives.According to the law of financialviability, I could therefore beconfident that in going toGeorgetown I would be avoidingboth control traps: I had enoughcareer capital to exchange for thepotential flexibility and couldconfidently ignore the status quo–themed voices of resistance. So Iturned down the interview requestfrom the state university and heldout for Georgetown.

How I Applied Rule #4As explained in Rule #4, a careermission is an organizing purpose toyour working life. It’s what leadspeople to become famous for whatthey do and ushers in theremarkable opportunities that comealong with such fame. It’s also anidea that has long fascinated me.

Academia is a profession wellsuited for mission. If you identifyprofessors with particularlycompelling careers, and then askwhat they did differently than theirpeers, the answer almost alwaysinvolves them organizing their

work around a catchy mission.Consider, for example, AlanLightman, an MIT physicsprofessor turned writer. Lightmanstarted as a traditional physicist butwas writing on the side—bothfiction and nonfiction that grappledwith the human side of science.He’s perhaps best known for hisbestselling, award-winning novel,Einstein’s Dreams,2 though he’swritten many other books, and hisessays have appeared in basicallyevery important American literarypublication.

Lightman’s career is based on his

mission to explore the human sideof science, and this led him tofascinating places. He left behindthe grueling MIT physics tenuretrack to become the first professorin the Institute’s history to be dual-appointed in both science andhumanities. He helped developMIT’s communications requirementand then went on to found itsgraduate science-writing program.By the time I met Lightman, he hadshifted to an adjunct-professorposition, providing him even morefreedom in his schedule, and hadcrafted for himself an impressively

unburdened life of the mind. Henow teaches writing courses that hedesigned and that focus on issueshe thinks are important. He hasfreed himself from the need to beconstantly seeking grant money orpublications. He spends hissummers with his family on anisland in Maine—a location with nophone, TV, or Internet—presumably thinking big thoughtswhile basking in the sublimity ofhis surroundings. Most impressiveto me, Lightman’s contact page onhis official MIT website gives thefollowing disclaimer: “I don’t use e-

mail”—a move toward simplicitythat a less famous academic wouldnever get away with.

This is just one example amongmany of professors who leveragedmission to create an offbeat andcompelling career. Some of theseprofessors, such as Pardis Sabetiand Kirk French, I ended uptracking down and interviewingwhen researching this book, whichis why you’ll find the details oftheir stories in Rule #4. Others,such as Alan Lightman, or ErezLieberman, who earned fame by theage of thirty-one through his

combination of mathematics andcultural studies, or Esther Duflo,who won a MacArthur “GeniusGrant” for her work evaluating ant-poverty programs, didn’t make thecut for the book, but still weighheavily on my thinking about howto best shape my own career.

It wasn’t until I got started inearnest in my Rule #4 research,however, and met mission mavenssuch as Pardis, Kirk, and GilesBowkett, that I understood just howtricky it is to make this trait a realityin your working life. The more youtry to force it, I learned, the less

likely you are to succeed. Truemissions, it turns out, require twothings. First you need career capital,which requires patience. Second,you need to be ceaselessly scanningyour always-changing view of theadjacent possible in your field,looking for the next big idea. Thisrequires a dedication tobrainstorming and exposure to newideas. Combined, these twocommitments describe a lifestyle,not a series of steps thatautomatically spit out a missionwhen completed. As I entered thesummer of 2011, I leveraged this

new understanding to try totransform my approach to workinto one that would lead to asuccessful mission. These effortsgenerated a series of routines that Icombined into a mission-development system. This system isbest understood as a three-levelpyramid. I’ll explain each of theselevels below.

Top Level: The Tentative ResearchMission

My system is guided, at the toplevel of the pyramid, by a tentativeresearch mission—a sort of roughguideline for the type of work I’minterested in doing. Right now, mymission reads, “To apply distributedalgorithm theory to interesting newplaces with the goal of producinginteresting new results.” In order toidentify this mission description, Ihad first to acquire career capital inmy field. I’ve published and readenough distributed algorithm resultsto know that there’s great potential

in moving this body of theory tonew settings. The real challenge, ofcourse, is finding the compellingprojects that exploit this potential.This is the goal the other two levelsof the pyramid are designed topursue.

Bottom Level: BackgroundResearch

We now dive from the top level ofthe pyramid to the bottom level,where we find my dedication tobackground research. Here’s myrule: Every week, I expose myselfto something new about my field. Ican read a paper, attend a talk, orschedule a meeting. To ensure that Ireally understand the new idea, Irequire myself to add a summary, inmy own words, to my growing“research bible” (which Iintroduced earlier in this conclusionwhen discussing how I applied

Rule #2). I also try to carve out onewalk each day for free-formthinking about the ideas turned upby this background research (Icommute to work on foot and havea dog to exercise, so I have manysuch walks to choose from in myschedule). The choice of whatmaterial to expose myself to isguided by my mission description atthe top of the pyramid.

This background-researchprocess, which combines exposureto potentially relevant material withfree-form re-combination of ideas,comes straight out of Steven

Johnson’s book, Where Good IdeasCome From, which I introduced inRule #4 when talking about hisnotion of the adjacent possible.According to Johnson, access tonew ideas and to the “liquidnetworks” that facilitate theirmixing and matching often providesthe catalyst for breakthrough newideas.

Middle Level: Exploratory ProjectsWe arrive now at the middle levelof the pyramid, which isresponsible for most of the work Iproduce as a professor. Asexplained in Rule #4, an effectivestrategy for making the leap from atentative mission idea to compellingaccomplishments is to use smallprojects that I called “little bets”(borrowing the phrase from PeterSims’s 2010 book of the same title).As you might recall, a little bet, inthe setting of mission exploration,has the following characteristics:

It’s a project small enough tobe completed in less than amonth.It forces you to create newvalue (e.g., master a new skilland produce new results thatdidn’t exist before).It produces a concrete resultthat you can use to gatherconcrete feedback.

I use little bets to explore themost promising ideas turned up bythe processes described by thebottom level of my pyramid. I try tokeep only two or three bets active at

a time so that they can receiveintense attention. I also usedeadlines, which I highlight inyellow in my planning documents,to help keep the urgency of theircompletion high. Finally, I alsotrack my hours spent on these betsin the hour tally I described back inthe section of this conclusiondedicated to my application of Rule#2. I found that without theseaccountability tools, I tended toprocrastinate on this work, turningmy attention to more urgent but lessimportant matters.

When a little bet finishes, I use

the concrete feedback it generates toguide my research efforts goingforward. This feedback tells me, forexample, whether a given projectshould be aborted and, if not, whatdirection is most promising toexplore next. The effort ofcompleting these bets also has theadded side benefit of inducingdeliberate practice—yet anothertactic in my ever-growing playbookdedicated to making me better andbetter at what I do.

Ultimately, the success or failureof the projects pursued in thismiddle level helps me evolve the

research mission maintained by thetop level. In other words, thesystem as a whole is a closedfeedback loop—constantly evolvingtoward a clearer and bettersupported vision for my work.

Final Thoughts: Working RightTrumps Finding the Right Work

This book opened with the story ofThomas, who believed that the keyto happiness is to follow yourpassion. True to this conviction, hefollowed his passion for Zenpractice to a remote monastery inthe Catskill Mountains. Once there,he applied himself to the study ofZen, immersing himself inmeditation and pondering endlessDharma lectures.

But Thomas didn’t find thehappiness he expected. He realizedinstead that although his

surroundings had changed, he was“exactly the same person” as beforehe arrived at the monastery. Thethought patterns that had previouslyconvinced him, job after job, thathe hadn’t yet found his true callinghad not disappeared. When we leftThomas back in this book’sintroduction, the weight of thisrealization had reduced him to tears.He sat in the quiet oak forestsurrounding the monastery, crying.

Almost ten years later, I metThomas at a coffee shop not farfrom my building at MIT. He wasworking in Germany at the time and

was visiting Boston for aconference. Thomas is tall and slimwith close-cropped hair. He wearsthe thin-framed square glasses thatseem to be mandatory issue amongEuropean knowledge workers. Aswe sat and sipped coffee, Thomasfilled me in on his life after his Zencrisis.

Here’s what I learned: Afterleaving the monastery, Thomasreturned to the banking job he hadleft two years earlier when hemoved to the Catskills to pursue hispassion. This time, however, heapproached his working life with a

new awareness. His experience atthe monastery had freed him fromthe escapist thoughts of fantasy jobsthat had once dominated his mind.He was able instead to focus on thetasks he was given and onaccomplishing them well. He wasfree from the constant, drainingcomparisons he used to makebetween his current work and somemagical future occupation waitingto be discovered.

This new focus, and the output itproduced, was appreciated bymanagement. Nine months into hisjob he was promoted. Then he was

promoted again. And then again!Within two years he had movedfrom a lowly data-entry position tobeing put in charge of a computersystem that managed over $6 billionof investment assets. By the time Imet him, he had been put in chargeof a system that manages five timesthat amount. His work ischallenging, but Thomas enjoys thechallenge. It also provides him witha sense of respect, impact, andautonomy—exactly the kind of rareand valuable traits, as you mightrecall, that I argued back in Rule #2are needed for creating work you

love. Thomas acquired these traitsnot by matching his work to hispassion, but instead by doing hiswork well and then strategicallycashing in the capital it generated.

Managing computer systemsmight not generate the daily blissthat defined Thomas’s olddaydreams, but as he nowrecognized, nothing would. Afulfilling working life is a moresubtle experience than his oldfantasies had allowed. As wechatted, Thomas agreed that a goodway of describing histransformation is that he came to

realize a simple truth: Workingright trumps finding the rightwork. He didn’t need to have aperfect job to find occupationalhappiness—he needed instead abetter approach to the work alreadyavailable to him.

I think it’s fitting to end onThomas’s story, as it sums up themessage at the core of this book:Working right trumps finding theright work—it’s a simple idea, butit’s also incredibly subversive, as itoverturns decades of folk careeradvice all focused on the mysticalvalue of passion. It wrenches us

away from our daydreams of anovernight transformation intoinstant job bliss and providesinstead a more sober way towardfulfillment. This is why I left thisconclusion to Thomas’s saga untilthe end of the book. I wanted thechance to first explore with you,through the four rules that camebefore, the nuances of “workingright,” providing example afterexample of how this approach canlead to increased enjoyment of yourown working life. Now that you’rearmed with these insights, it’s myhope that the end to Thomas’s story

is no longer so surprising.

I love what I do for a living. I’malso confident that as I continue mycommitment to the ideas discoveredin my quest, this love will onlydeepen. Thomas feels the same wayabout his work. So do most of thepeople I profiled in the book.

I want you to share in thisconfidence. To accomplish thisgoal, let the rules I uncovered guideyou. Don’t obsess over discoveringyour true calling. Instead, masterrare and valuable skills. Once you

build up the career capital that theseskills generate, invest it wisely. Useit to acquire control over what youdo and how you do it, and toidentify and act on a life-changingmission. This philosophy is lesssexy than the fantasy of droppingeverything to go live among themonks in the mountains, but it’salso a philosophy that has beenshown time and again to actuallywork.

So next time you start toquestion whether you’re missingout on some dream job waiting foryou to muster the courage to pursue

it, conjure up a pair of images.First, recall passion-obsessedThomas, heartbroken and sobbingon the forest floor. Then replacethis with the image of the smiling,confident, value-focused man whoten years later joined me for coffee—the version of Thomas wholooked at me at one point in ourconversation and remarked, withoutirony, “Life is good.”

Career Profile Summaries

A quick summary of the maincareer profiles from the book,presented in the order in whichthey appear.

JOE DUFFY(introduced in Rule #2)

Current job:

Before recently retiring, Joe ranDuffy & Partners, his own fifteen-person branding and design shop.

Why he loves what he does:

He worked on handpickedinternational projects and wasgreatly respected (and rewarded)for his work. Between engagementshe spent much of his time at DuffyTrails, a hundred-acre retreat heowns, tucked away on the banks ofWisconsin’s Totagatic River.

How he applied the rulesdescribed in this book to get thisjob:

When Joe was starting out in hisadvertising career, like many at his

young age, he chafed at theconstraints of working for a largecompany. He had originally plannedon being an artist and wasentertaining the thought of quittinghis job and returning to that“dream.” Instead, Joe deployedcareer capital theory. He realizedthat the traits that define great workare rare and valuable and thattherefore they require rare andvaluable skills to be offered inreturn. He found a specialty withinhis field—brand communicationthrough logos—and hunkereddown to dominate the skill. He was

hired away by a larger agency,which gave him more money andmore freedom. As he continued tobuild career capital, they appeasedhim by allowing him to run anindependent agency within thelarger agency—providing Joe evenmore control. Eventually, he left torun his own shop on his own terms,using the monetary rewards of hisexpertise to buy Duffy Trails. Giventhat before he retired he controlledwhen he worked and what heworked on, he was able to get themost out of both his work and hisrelaxation.

ALEX BERGER(introduced in Rule #2)

Current job:

Alex is a successful televisionwriter.

Why he loves what he does:

When you’re good enough to find asteady stream of work, televisionwriting is a fantastic gig. It pays youloads of money to do highlycreative projects that are seen bymillions. In addition, it also gives

you months off every year.

How he applied the rulesdescribed in this book to get thisjob:

When Alex first arrived inHollywood, Ivy League diploma inhand, he thought he could breakinto the industry by launching andcarefully managing a variety ofdifferent entertainment-relatedprojects. It turned out that no onecared about his big ideas. It didn’ttake long for Alex to pare hisattention down to a more specific

pursuit: television writing. Herealized that all that mattered in thisfield was a single type of careercapital: the ability to write qualityscripts.

Using the practice techniqueshoned as a college debatechampion, he began tosystematically improve hisscriptwriting capability, sometimesworking on as many as four or fivewriting projects at a time, whileconstantly exposing himself toruthless feedback. This strategypaid off as his scriptwritingimproved quickly, eventually

earning him his first producedscripts, which in turn earned himhis first staff writing jobs, whichled to him cocreating a show withMichael Eisner. This is a classicexample of career capital theory inaction. To get a job he loved, Alexneeded to first become so good thathe couldn’t be ignored.

MIKE JACKSON(introduced in Rule #2)

Current job:

Mike is a director at the WestlyGroup, a cleantech venture capitalfirm on Silicon Valley’s famousSand Hill Road.

Why he loves what he does:

Clean-energy venture capital is ahot field. It offers a way to help theworld while at the same time, asMike admitted, “You make a lot ofmoney.”

How he applied the rulesdescribed in this book to get thisjob:

Mike didn’t start with a clear visionof what he wanted to do with hislife. He did understand, however,the basics of career capital theory:The more rare and valuable skillsyou have to offer, the moreinteresting opportunities willbecome available. With this inmind, Mike formed his early careeraround the goal of dominating onevaluable pursuit after another,trusting that the large stores ofcareer capital this would generatewould lead him somewhere worthgoing. He started by choosing anambitious master’s thesis project

that ended up making him an experton international carbon markets. Hethen leveraged this expertise to runa green-energy start-up that soldcarbon offsets contracts toAmerican companies.

This combination of expertknowledge on green-energymarkets and entrepreneurshipexperience made him a perfectmatch for the Westly Group, theclean-energy venture capital firmwhere he now works. Throughoutthis process, Mike’s focus was onhow to get better, not on figuringout his true calling. The result was

an enviable job.

RYAN VOILAND(introduced in Rule #3)

Current job:

Ryan, along with his wife, Sarah,runs Red Fire Farm, a thrivingorganic farm in Granby,Massachusetts.

Why he loves what he does:

Ryan has been training inhorticulture since he was a teenager.

To now own land that he cancultivate on his own terms is deeplyfulfilling to him.

How he applied the rulesdescribed in this book to get thisjob:

Many people harbor a rosy imageof farm life. They imagine it wouldbe nice to spend time outdoors innice weather and be free from thedistractions of the modern office.Spend time with Ryan at Red Fire,however, and this myth is quicklydispelled. Farming, it turns out, is

hard work. The weather is notsomething you enjoy, as if onvacation, but instead a force poisedto play havoc with your crops. Andfar from being free from moderndistractions, a farmer is abusinessman, with all the e-mail,Excel spreadsheets, andQuickBooks software that comealong with that role. The reasonRyan loves what he does, it turnsout, is not that he gets to be outsideor be free from e-mail, but insteadthat he has control—over bothwhat he does and how he does it.

This trait, as described in Rule

#3, is crucial for creating work youlove. What’s important aboutRyan’s story is that he didn’t justdecide one day that farming wouldprovide nice control and then gobuy some land. Instead, herecognized that control, like anyvaluable career trait, requires careercapital to acquire. With this inmind, he built up his farming skillsfor over a decade before setting outon his own. It started withcultivating his parents’ garden andselling produce by the road. Fromthere, he slowly built up his abilitiesby taking on larger cultivation

projects. By the time he left forCornell to study horticulture, hewas renting land from a localfarmer. It wasn’t until after heearned his degree that he appliedfor a loan for his first parcel ofland. Given his expertise, it’s notsurprising that his new farmthrived. He’s a perfect example ofboth the value of control and thepatient capital acquisition requiredbefore you can gain this trait inyour working life.

LULU YOUNG

(introduced in Rule #3)

Current job:

Lulu is a freelance softwaredeveloper.

Why she loves what she does:

Lulu enjoys challenging softwareprojects, but she also enjoys havingcontrol over her life, includingwhen she works, what she workson, and under what terms. As afreelance developer with skills thatare in high demand, she has beenable to maintain that control,

allowing her to mix her work with avariety of different leisurelypursuits, from monthlong trips toAsia, to pilot’s training, to weekdayafternoons spent with her nephew.

How she applied the rulesdescribed in this book to get thisjob:

Lulu, like Ryan, is a good exampleof the value of control. Also likeRyan, she’s a good example ofleveraging career capital in pursuitof this trait. Lulu didn’t decide outof the blue to be a freelance

developer; instead she built up herskills and reputation over manyyears in the industry. She now hasmore than enough career capital toset her own terms for her work.When you study her story,however, you learn that this shifttoward increased autonomy didn’thappen all at once. Instead, Luludeveloped a steady stream of bidsfor increased freedom as she gotincreasingly good at what she did.

It started with her first job as asoftware tester—the bottom of thedeveloper heap. Lulu figured outhow to automate much of the

testing process. The capital thisgenerated allowed her to thenbargain for a thirty-hour workweekso she could take philosophyclasses on the side. As she got evenbetter at what she did, she investedher growing capital stores inobtaining positions at a series ofstart-ups, where she was givenmore and more control over herwork. It was after one of thesestart-ups was acquired by a largecompany, which promptly addednew constraints, that Lulutransitioned to a freelance role. Atthis point, however, her career

capital stores were more thansufficient to support this final bidfor even more control.

DEREK SIVERS(introduced in Rule #3)

Current job:

Derek is an entrepreneur, writer,and thinker.

Why he loves what he does:

Derek has had enough successes inhis career that he can now live

where he wants and work onprojects he finds interesting whenhe decides he’s in the mood towork. He’s in complete control overhis life and is taking full advantageof this autonomy.

How he applied the rulesdescribed in this book to get thisjob:

Derek is another example of controlbeing a defining trait of a greatcareer. What made him mostrelevant to our discussion in Rule#3, however, is the rule he deploys

when deciding whether or not topursue a bid for more autonomy. Icalled this rule “the law of financialviability,” and it says that youshould only pursue a project ifpeople are willing to pay you for it.If they aren’t, you probably don’thave sufficient capital to exchangefor the control you desire.

This is the law that helped guideDerek to his current levels ofsuccess. He first applied it whendeciding to quit his job at WarnerBros. to become a full-timemusician. He delayed this decisionuntil the money he was making

from music was equal to what hemade in his day job—if he couldn’tget to this modest level of incomewith part-time playing, he reasoned,then he was unlikely to enjoyenough success pursuing this careerfull-time. He next applied the lawwhen starting CD Baby, thecompany he eventually sold formillions. He didn’t drop everythingto pursue his entrepreneurialambition. Instead, he started small.When the company made a littlemoney, he used this money toexpand it so it could make a littlemore. When it started to make a lot

of money, only then did he decideto make it into his full-time job.

The courage culture pushes us tomake drastic bids for increasedcontrol over our working lives.Derek’s example provides a nicereality check. Seeking freedom isgood, but it’s easy to fail in thispursuit. The law of financialviability provides a good guide pastthese pitfalls.

PARDIS SABETI(introduced in Rule #4)

Current job:

Pardis is a professor ofevolutionary biology at HarvardUniversity.

Why she loves what she does:

Pardis’s academic career is builtaround a mission that she findsboth exciting and important: to usecomputational genetics to help ridthe world of ancient diseases.

How she applied the rulesdescribed in this book to get thisjob:

Pardis is a good example of thevalue of organizing your workinglife around a compelling mission.Many professors are overwhelmedby their jobs and eventuallydescend into a state of bittercynicism. Pardis avoided this fateby dedicating her work towardsomething she finds important andexciting. Of equal importance ishow she found her mission. Manypeople incorrectly believe thatcoming up with a mission is theeasy part (it’s something that justhappens in a moment ofinspiration) and that what’s hard is

mustering the courage to pursue it.Rule #4 argued the opposite. It saidthat real missions—those that youcan build a career around—requirethat you build up extensive amountsof expertise before they can beidentified.

Once they are identified,however, pursuing them is often ano-brainer. This is exactly what wefind in the story of Pardis. It tookyears of skill acquisition beforePardis was able to identify themission that now defines her career.After college she went on to earnher PhD in genetics. Not quite sure

what she wanted to do with her life,she also went to medical school. Itwasn’t until after finishing medicalschool and spending time as apostdoctoral fellow that she finallyhad enough expertise in her field tosift out this exciting newopportunity. Overall, Pardis’s mostimportant commitment was topatience. She didn’t try to force adirection for her working life, butinstead built up her career capitaland kept her eyes open for theinteresting directions she knew thisprocess would uncover.

KIRK FRENCH(introduced in Rule #4)

Current job:

Kirk teaches archaeology at PennState University and is the cohost ofa television show on the DiscoveryChannel that lets him travel thecountry helping people figure outthe historical importance of theirkeepsakes and heirlooms.

Why he loves what he does:

As a teacher, Kirk has long been

interested in spreading the wordabout modern archaeology. Eversince being interviewed for adocumentary on the Mayan culture(Kirk’s specialty), he has also beeninterested in media as a vehicle forpopularizing archaeology. Landinga television show has been afantastic realization of theseinterests.

How he applied the rulesdescribed in this book to get thisjob:

Kirk organized his archaeological

career around the mission ofpopularizing his field. This missionhas helped him turn an academiccareer that could become dry oroverwhelming into a source ofadventure and fulfillment. As withPardis, this mission first requiredcareer capital—in Kirk’s case, thiscame in the form of his PhD. Hisstory, however, also highlights thefirst of two strategies presented inRule #4 for helping career missions,once they’re identified, succeed.

The idea to host a televisionshow did not come to Kirk out ofthe blue. Instead, he explored his

general mission idea—to popularizearchaeology—by means of a seriesof “little bets.” Many of these, suchas his attempts to raise finances fora documentary, failed, but thesefailures were important, as theyhelped Kirk shift his attention awayfrom non-productive directions. Inthe end, it was one of these bets thatled him directly to his televisionshow. He decided to film a visit to alocal man who claimed to havefound the Knights Templars’treasure buried in his suburbanPittsburgh property.

Not long afterward, a producer

wrote Kirk’s department chairlooking for ideas for anarchaeology-related televisionshow. Kirk saw the e-mail and sentthe producer his Knights Templartape. The producer loved it, and notlong after, a show concept wasborn with Kirk as the host. Buildingthe expertise to identify a qualitycareer mission is the first steptoward leveraging this trait. AsKirk’s story demonstrated,deploying a series of little bets tofeel out the best way forward withthis mission is a good second step.

GILES BOWKETT(introduced in Rule #4)

Current job:

Giles is a well-known Rubysoftware programmer. His renownhas allowed him to shift betweenmany jobs, following his interest ofthe moment. He’s worked for thecountry’s top Ruby shop, supportedhimself entirely off of blog income,helped a Hollywood movie starlaunch a Web-based entertainmentventure, and, most recently, startedwriting a book.

Why he loves what he does:

Because Giles has a hyperkineticpersonality, his ability to jump fromone interesting job to another,moving on once somethingbecomes boring, is a perfect matchfor his rapidly shifting attention.Spend any time around Giles andyou’ll realize how miserable hewould be if forced by economicnecessity into a long-term,traditional, forty-hour-a-week job.

How he applied the rulesdescribed in this book to get this

job:

Giles is another example of missionbeing used as the foundation for agreat career. In this case, themission is combining the worlds ofthe arts and Ruby programming.Giles made this mission a successwhen he released Archaeopteryx, anopen-source software program thatwrites and performs its own music.This software gave Giles the famewithin his community that hassupported his kinetic careertrajectory ever since.

Like Pardis and Kirk, Giles

needed career capital before hecould identify his mission. Heseriously studied and performedmusic and spent many yearsdeveloping his programming skillsbefore he was at a sufficient levelof expertise to recognize thepotential in combining theseworlds. His story, however, alsocaptures the second of the twostrategies presented in Rule #4 forhelping missions, once identified, tosucceed. This second strategy,which I called “the law ofremarkability,” says that a goodmission-driven project should be

remarkable in two ways: First, itshould compel people to remarkabout it, and second, it should bedeployed in a venue conducive toremarking. These were the rulesthat led Giles to his idea forArchaeopteryx. He recognized that ademo of a piece of computer codegenerating sophisticated musicwould be something that wouldcatch people’s attention. He hadalso realized that the open-sourcesoftware community was wellstructured to spread the word aboutinteresting projects, making it aperfect venue for the software’s

release. Combined, these two traitsmade the project, and thereforeGiles’s career mission, a success.

Acknowledgments

The decision to write this book canbe traced back to a series of postson the passion hypothesis that I firstpublished on my blog, StudyHacks. The reaction from myreaders was immediate andvoluminous. Their feedback helpedshape and focus my thinking onthis topic and convinced me thatthis was a discussion worth sharingwith a wider audience. As such, Ithank them for spurring me intostarting this project.

It was at this point that mypublishing team entered the picture.My longtime agent and mentor,Laurie Abkemeier, worked hermagic and helped me transform mydiverse thoughts into a cohesivebook proposal. The book ended upwith Rick Wolff at GrandCentral/Business Plus, and Icouldn’t be happier about this turnof events. Rick is the type of editorauthors hope for. He understoodmy idea at a gut level, and hisenthusiasm for it never waned. Hehelped me find the right voice forexpressing these provocative

arguments in a way that peoplewould accept. The book isindisputably better due to hisefforts.

Finally, my wife, Julie, wasindispensable in the writingprocess. She not only read drafts ofmy work in progress but alsolistened through endless iterationsof my thinking, always offeringhonest and clear feedback. She wasjoined in these efforts by my friendBen Casnocha, who conceived,sold, and wrote a career-advicebook concurrently with my own,allowing us to share numerous

useful conversations at all stages ofthe process.

About the Author

CAL NEWPORT is an AssistantProfessor of Computer Science atGeorgetown University. Hepreviously earned his PhD fromMIT and his bachelor’s fromDartmouth College.

Newport is the author of threebooks of unconventional advice forstudents: How to Be a High SchoolSuperstar, How to Become aStraight-A Student, and How toWin at College. He runs thepopular blog, Study Hacks, which

decodes patterns of success forboth students and graduates.

He lives with his wife inWashington, D.C. Visit him atwww.calnewport.com.

Recognized as one of the world’smost prestigious business imprints,Business Plus specializes inpublishing books that are on thecutting edge. Like you, to besuccessful we always strive to beahead of the curve.

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management works, state-of-the-artpersonal financial advice,noteworthy narrative accounts, thelatest in sales and marketing advice,individualized career guidance, andautobiographies of the key businessleaders of our time.

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Glossary

A summary of the important terms,theories, and laws introduced inthe book, presented in the order oftheir appearance.

the passion hypothesis (introducedin Rule #1): This hypothesisclaims that the key tooccupational happiness is to firstfigure out what you’re passionateabout and then find a job thatmatches this passion. The basictenet behind this book is that the

passion hypothesis, althoughwidely believed, is both wrongand potentially dangerous.

“Be so good they can’t ignoreyou.” (introduced in Rule #2): A quote from comedian SteveMartin that captures what isneeded to build a working lifeyou love. It is excerpted from thefollowing longer quote, whichMartin gave in a 2007 interviewwith Charlie Rose when askedwhat his advice was for aspiringentertainers: “Nobody ever takesnote of [my advice], because it’snot the answer they wanted to

hear. What they want to hear is‘Here’s how you get an agent,here’s how you write a script,’…but I always say, ‘Be so goodthey can’t ignore you.’ ”

the craftsman mindset(introduced in Rule #2): Anapproach to your working life inwhich you focus on the value ofwhat you are offering to theworld.

the passion mindset (introduced inRule #2): An approach to yourworking life in which you focuson the value your job is offeringyou. This mindset stands in

contrast to the craftsmanmindset. The passion mindsetultimately leads to chronicdissatisfaction and daydreamingabout the better jobs you imagineexisting out there waiting to bediscovered.

career capital (introduced in Rule#2): A description of the skillsyou have that are rare andvaluable to the working world.This is the key currency forcreating work you love.

the career capital theory of greatwork (introduced in Rule #2): This theory provides the

foundation for all of the ideasthat follow it in this book. Itclaims that the key to work youlove is not to follow yourpassion, but instead to get goodat something rare and valuable,and then cash in the “careercapital” this generates to acquirethe traits that define great jobs.This requires that you approachwork with a craftsman mindset(focusing on your value to theworld) and not a passionmindset (focusing on what valuethe world is offering you). Hereis the formal three-part definition

of the theory as presented inRule #2:

The traits that define greatwork are rare and valuable.Supply and demand says that ifyou want these traits, you needrare and valuable skills to offerin return. Think of these rareand valuable skills you canoffer as your career capital.The craftsman mindset, with itsrelentless focus on being “sogood they can’t ignore you,” isa strategy well suited foracquiring career capital. This is

why it trumps the passionmindset if your goal is to havework you love.

the 10,000-hour rule (introducedin Rule #2): A rule, well-knownto performance scientists,describing the amount of practicetime required to master a skill.Malcolm Gladwell, whopopularized the concept in his2008 book Outliers, described itas follows: “The idea thatexcellence at performing acomplex task requires a criticalminimum level of practice

surfaces again and again instudies of expertise. In fact,researchers have settled on whatthey believe is the magic numberfor true expertise: ten thousandhours.”

deliberate practice (introduced inRule #2): The style of difficultpractice required to continue toimprove at a task. Florida StateUniversity professor AndersEricsson, who coined the term inthe early 1990s, describes itformally as an “activity designed,typically by a teacher, for thesole purpose of effectively

improving specific aspects of anindividual’s performance.”Deliberate practice requires youto stretch past where you arecomfortable and then receiveruthless feedback on yourperformance. In the context ofcareer construction, mostknowledge workers avoid thisstyle of skill developmentbecause, quite frankly, it’suncomfortable. To build up largestores of career capital, however,which is necessary for creatingwork you love, you must makethis style of practice a regular

part of your work routine.career capital markets

(introduced in Rule #2): Whenacquiring career capital in a field,you can envision that you’reacquiring this capital in a specifictype of career capital market.There are two types of thesemarkets: winner-take-all andauction.

In a winner-take-all market,there is only one type of careercapital available and lots ofdifferent people competing for it.An auction market, by contrast,is less structured: There are

many different types of careercapital, and each person mightgenerate their own uniquecollection of this capital.Different markets requiredifferent career capitalacquisition strategies. In awinner-take-all market, forexample, you need to first “crackthe code” on how people masterthe one skill that matters. In anauction market, by contrast, youmight simply emphasize rarenessin the skill combinations that youcreate.

control (introduced in Rule #3):

Control is having a say in whatyou do and how you do it. Thisis one of the most importanttraits to acquire with your careercapital when creating work youlove.

the first control trap (introducedin Rule #3): A warning to heedwhen trying to introduce morecontrol into your working life. Itrepresents the principle thatcontrol that’s acquired withoutcareer capital is not sustainable.

the second control trap(introduced in Rule #3): Another warning to heed when

trying to introduce more controlinto your working life. Itrepresents the principle thatwhen you acquire enough careercapital to acquire meaningfulcontrol over your working life,that’s exactly when you’vebecome valuable enough to yourcurrent employer that they willtry to prevent you from makingthe change.

courage culture (brieflyintroduced in Rule #2; elaboratedin Rule #3): A term thatdescribes the growing number ofauthors and online commentators

who promote the idea that theonly thing standing between youand a dream job is building thecourage to step off the expectedpath.

Though well-intentioned, thisculture is dangerous, as itunderplays the importance ofalso having career capital to backup your career aspirations. It hasled many people to quit theircurrent job and to end up in anew situation where they aremuch worse off than before.

the law of financial viability(introduced in Rule #3): A

simple law that can be deployedto help sidestep the two controltraps when trying to introducemore control into your workinglife. It suggests that whendeciding whether to follow anappealing pursuit that willintroduce more control into yourwork life, you should askyourself whether people arewilling to pay for it. If so,continue. If not, move on.

mission (introduced in Rule #4): Amission is another important traitto acquire with your careercapital when creating work you

love. It provides a unifying goalfor your career. It’s more generalthan a specific job and can spanmultiple positions. It provides ananswer to the question “Whatshould I do with my life?”

the adjacent possible (introducedin Rule #4): A term taken fromthe science writer StevenJohnson, who took it from StuartKauffman, that helps explain theorigin of innovation. Johnsonnotes that the next big ideas inany field are typically found rightbeyond the current cutting edge,in the adjacent space that

contains the possible newcombinations of existing ideas.The key observation is that youhave to get to the cutting edge ofa field before its adjacentpossible—and the innovations itcontains—becomes visible. Inthe context of careerconstruction, it’s important tonote that good career missionsare also often found in theadjacent possible. Theimplication, therefore, is that ifyou want to find a mission inyour career, you first need to getto the cutting edge of your field.

little bets (introduced in Rule #4): An idea borrowed from thebusiness writer Peter Sims.When Sims studied innovativecorporations and people, henoted the following: “Rather thanbelieving they have to start witha big idea or plan out a wholeproject in advance, they make amethodical series of little betsabout what might be a gooddirection, learning criticalinformation from lots of littlefailures and from small butsignificant wins” [emphasismine]. In the context of career

construction, little bets provide agood strategy for exploringproductive ways to turn a vaguemission idea into specificsuccessful projects.

the law of remarkability(introduced in Rule #4): Asimple law that can help youidentify successful projects formaking your mission a reality.(This can be used in conjunctionwith the little-bets strategy.) Thelaw says that for a mission-driven project to succeed, itshould be “remarkable” in twodifferent ways. First, it must

compel people who encounter itto remark about it to others.Second, it must be launched in avenue that supports suchremarking.

Notes

Chapter 2: Passion Is Rare1. Roadtrip Nation,

http://roadtripnation.com. Ifyou click on the “Watch” link,you can browse the PBS seriesby season, and within eachseason browse each episode bythe interview subjects.

2. Interview with Ira Glass,Roadtrip Nation OnlineEpisode Archive, 2005,http://roadtripnation.com/IraGlass

3. Interview with Andrew Steele,

Roadtrip Nation OnlineEpisode Archive, 2005,http://roadtripnation.com/AndrewSteele

4. Interview with Al Merrick,Roadtrip Nation OnlineEpisode Archive, 2004,http://roadtripnation.com/AlMerrick

5. Interview with William Morris,Roadtrip Nation OnlineEpisode Archive, 2006,http://roadtripnation.com/WilliamMorris

6. Vallerand, Blanchard, Mageauet al., “Les passions de l’âme:On Obsessive and HarmoniousPassion,” Journal ofPersonality and Social

Psychology 85, no. 4 (2003):756–67.

7. Wrzesniewski, McCauley,Rozin, et al., “Jobs, Careers,and Callings: People’sRelations to Their Work,”Journal of Research inPersonality 31 (1997): 21–33.

8. See the following for anacademic overview: Deci andRyan, “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’of Goal Pursuits: Human Needsand the Self-Determination ofBehavior,” PsychologicalInquiry 11 (2000): 227–68. Formore popular coverage, see

Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: TheSurprising Truth About WhatMotivates Us (New York:Riverhead, 2009), or theofficial website for the theory:http://www.psych.rochester.edu/SDT/

Chapter 3: Passion Is Dangerous1. Daniel H. Pink, “What

Happened to Your Parachute?”FastCompany.com, August 31,1999,http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/27/bolles.html

2. Google Books Ngram Viewer,http://books.google.com/ngrams

3. Arnett, “Oh, Grow Up!

Generational Grumbling andthe New Life Stage ofEmerging Adulthood—Commentary on Trzesniewski& Donnellan (2010),”Perspectives on PsychologicalScience 5, no. 1 (2010): 89–92.See section titled “Slackers orSeekers of Identity-BasedWork?” for the quote andrelated discussion.

4. Julianne Pepitone, “U.S. jobsatisfaction hits 22-year low,”CNNMoney.com, January 5,2010,http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/05/news/economy/job_satisfaction_report/

5. Alexandra Robbins and AbbyWilner, Quarterlife Crisis: TheUnique Challenges of Life inYour Twenties (New York:Tarcher, 2001).

6. Interview with Peter Travers,Roadtrip Nation Online VideoArchive, 2006,http://roadtripnation.com/PeterTravers

Chapter 4: The Clarity of theCraftsman

1. George Graham, “The GrahamWeekly Album Review #1551:Jordan Tice: Long Story,”George Graham’s Weekly

Album Reviews, March 11,1999,http://georgegraham.com/reviews/tice.html

2. Steve Martin, Born StandingUp: A Comic’s Life (NewYork: Scribner, 2007).

3. “An Hour with Steve Martin”(originally aired on PBS,December 12, 2007), availableonline at:http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8831

4. Steve Martin, “Being Funny:How the pathbreakingcomedian got his act together,”Smithsonian, February 2008,available online at:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/funny-martin-200802.html.

5. Calvin Newport, “The SteveMartin Method: A MasterComedian’s Advice forBecoming Famous,” StudyHacks (blog), February 1,2008,http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/02/01/the-steve-martin-method-a-master-comedians-advice-for-becoming-famous/.

6. Po Bronson, “What Should IDo with My Life?”FastCompany.com, December

31, 2002,http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/66/mylife.html

7. Po Bronson, What Should IDo With My Life: The TrueStory of People Who Answeredthe Ultimate Question (NewYork: Random House, 2002).

Chapter 5: The Power of CareerCapital

1. “Ira Glass on Storytelling, part3 and 4,” YouTube video, 5:20,video courtesy of Current TV,uploaded by “PRI” on August18, 2009,http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=BI23U7U2aUY.2. Kelly Slater, “Al Merrick Talks

Sleds,” Channel IslandSurfboards (blog), January 6,2011,http://cisurfboards.com/blog/2011/al-merrick-talks-sleds/.

3. Emily Bazelon, “The Self-Employed Depression,” NewYork Times Magazine, June 7,2009, page MM38, availableonline at:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/magazine/07unemployed-t.html.

4. Pamela Slim, Escape fromCubicle Nation: From

Corporate Prisoner toThriving Entrepreneur (NewYork: Portfolio Hardcover,2009).

5. Pamela Slim, “Rebuild YourBackbone. Because you aregood enough, smart enough,and doggonit, people like you,”Escape From Cubicle Nation(author’s website),http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/rebuild-your-backbone-because-you-are-good-enough-smart-enough-and-doggonit-people-like-you/.

6. Stephen Regenold, “A Retreat

Groomed to Sate a Need toSki,” New York Times, June 5,2009, C34, available online at:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/greathomesanddestinations/05Away.html

7. For more details on thedangers of this particular trap,see Robert I. Sutton, The NoAsshole Rule: Building aCivilized Workplace andSurviving One That Isn’t (NewYork: Warner Business Books,2007).

Chapter 6: The Career Capitalists1. “Salon Media Circus,”

Salon.com, October 1997.

Between the research andediting phases of this book, theonline version of this columnseems to have been takenoffline. It was originallyavailable at:http://www.salon.com/media/1997/10/29money.html

Chapter 7: Becoming a Craftsman1. Djakow, Petrowski, and

Rudik, Psychologie desSchachspiels [Psychology ofChess] (Berlin: Walter deGruyter, 1927).

2. Charness, Tuffiash, Krampe, etal., “The Role of Deliberate

Practice in Chess Expertise,”Applied Cognitive Psychology19, no. 2 (2005): 151–65.

3. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers:The Story of Success (NewYork: Little, Brown andCompany, 2008).

4.http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html

5. Ericsson and Lehmann,“Expert and ExceptionalPerformance: Evidence ofMaximal Adaptation to TaskConstraints,” Annual Review ofPsychology 47 (1996): 273–305.

6. Ericsson, Anders K. “ExpertPerformance and DeliberatePractice,”http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html

7. Geoff Colvin, Talent IsOverrated: What ReallySeparates World-ClassPerformers from EverybodyElse (New York: PortfolioHardcover, 2008).

8. Geoff Colvin, “Why talent isoverrated,” CNNMoney.com,October 21, 2008 (originallyappeared in Fortune),http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/21/magazines/fortune/talent_colvin.fortune/index.htm

Chapter 8: The Dream-Job Elixir1. Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The

Surprising Truth About WhatMotivates Us (New York:Riverhead Hardcover, 2009).

2. DeCharms, “PersonalCausation Training in theSchools,” Journal of AppliedSocial Psychology 2, no. 2(1972): 95–112.

3. “ROWE Business Case,”Results-Only WorkEnvironment (ROWE) website,http://gorowe.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ROWE-Business-Case.pdf.

Chapter 11: Avoiding the ControlFreaks

1. “Derek Sivers: How to start amovement,” TED.com, videoposted online April 2010,http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html

Chapter 12: The Meaningful Lifeof Pardis Sabeti

1. “Pardis Sabeti: Expert Q & A,”NOVA ScienceNOW, postedJuly 7, 2008,http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/sabeti-genetics-qa.html.

Chapter 13: Missions Require

Capital1. Steven Johnson, Where Good

Ideas Come From: TheNatural History of Innovation(New York: RiverheadHardcover, 2010).

2. Sabeti, Reich, Higgens, et al.,“Detecting recent positiveselection in the human genomefrom haplotype structure,”Nature 419 no. 6909 (2002):832–837.

Chapter 14: Missions RequireLittle Bets

1. Kirk and Jason hated thisname, as it goes against thetenets of archaeology to assignfinancial value to artifacts.They much preferred theiroriginal suggestion of Artifactor Fiction. In an ironic twist,after airing just three episodesof the first season, theDiscovery Channel was suedby an individual who claimedto own the rights to AmericanTreasure. They pulled theseries from the air that summerand planned to re-air it thefollowing summer, this time

using Kirk and Jason’s originaltitle suggestion.

2. Peter Sims, Little Bets: HowBreakthrough Ideas Emergefrom Small Discoveries (NewYork: Free Press, 2011).

Chapter 15: Missions RequireMarketing

1. Seth Godin, Purple Cow:Transform Your Business byBeing Remarkable (New York:Portfolio Hardcover, 2003).

2. Seth Godin, “In Praise of thePurple Cow,”FastCompany.com, January 31,

2003,http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/67/purplecow.html

3. Chad Fowler, My Job Went toIndia: 52 Ways to Save YourJob (Pragmatic Programmers)(Raleigh, NC: PragmaticBookshelf, 2005).

Conclusion1. The necessity and difficulty of

these problem sets in learningmathematics is one of thereservations I have about thegrowing self-educationmovement. Without someoneto grade your problem-set

results—a grade that mightplay a big role in what optionsare available to you in thefuture—it’s hard to imaginerepeatedly pushing yourselfthrough the dozens of hours ofstrain required to get yourselfto answers, and in turnexperience substantial skillgrowth.

2. Alan Lightman, Einstein’sDreams [paperback] (NewYork: Vintage, 2004).

Contents

WelcomeDedicationIntroduction

Rule #1: Don’t Follow YourPassionChapter One: The “Passion” ofSteve JobsChapter Two: Passion Is RareChapter Three: Passion IsDangerous

Rule #2: Be So Good They Can’tIgnore You (Or, the Importance ofSkill)Chapter Four: The Clarity of theCraftsmanChapter Five: The Power of CareerCapitalChapter Six: The Career CapitalistsChapter Seven: Becoming aCraftsmanSummary of Rule #2

Rule #3: Turn Down a Promotion(Or, the Importance of Control)

Chapter Eight: The Dream-JobElixirChapter Nine: The First ControlTrapChapter Ten: The Second ControlTrapChapter Eleven: Avoiding theControl TrapsSummary of Rule #3

Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big(Or, the Importance of Mission)Chapter Twelve: The MeaningfulLife of Pardis Sabeti

Chapter Thirteen: Missions RequireCapitalChapter Fourteen: Missions RequireLittle BetsChapter Fifteen: Missions RequireMarketingSummary of Rule #4

ConclusionCareer Profile SummariesAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorBusiness Plus

GlossaryNewslettersNotesCopyright

Copyright

Copyright © 2012 by Calvin C.Newport

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