This book appeals to individuals who want to learn a framework for career happiness which is different than “follow your passion”. The framework is to invest in skills and then leverage them to acquire a career that you personally enjoy.

Summary

Introduction

  • “Follow your passion” is not a sufficient answer for how to love your career.
  • The common thread of this book is you need a valuable skill before you can expect a good job.
  • A valuable skill won’t guarantee happiness. You must invest career capital to earn happiness.

Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion

  • Matching your job to a pre-existing passion does not lead to workplace satisfaction.
    • Career passions are rare because many passions don’t have a respective career.
    • Passion takes time. The happiest employees are the ones good at what they do.
    • Passion is a side effect of mastery.
  • Intrinsic motivation comes from fulfilling three basic psychological needs:
    • Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important.
    • Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do.
    • Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people.
  • Statistically, follow your passion hasn’t lead to happiness over the last several decades.

Rule #2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Or, the Importance of Skill)

  • The career capital theory of great work:
    • The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.
    • Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.
    • The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital.
  • Three disqualifiers for applying the craftsman mindset:
    • The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable.
    • The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world.
    • The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.
  • Deliberate practice, an approach to work where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance.
  • The Five Habits of a Craftsman
    • Step 1: Decide what capital market you’re in. (winner-take-all or auction)
    • Step 2: Identify your capital type (winner-take-all has one type, auction has multiple types)
    • Step 3: Define “Good”.
    • Step 4: Stretch and Destroy.
    • Step 5: Be Patient.

Rule #3: Turn Down a Promotion (Or, the Importance of Control)

  • Control is one of the most important traits that defines great work.
  • The First Control Trap: Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.
  • The Second Control Trap: The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making change.
  • Money is a neutral indicator of value. It may be used to determine when you should stay at a job to acquire more career capital or trade your current career capital for a different pursuit.
  • The Law of Financial Viability: When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence whether people are willing to pay for it.

Rule #4: Think Small Act Big (Or, the Importance of Mission)

  • Mission is one of the most important traits that defines great work.
  • People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work.
  • The next big ideas in any field are found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. You must be proficient.
  • Use “little bets” to a determine mission. These are small projects that generate concrete feedback. Use the feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next.
  • The Law of Remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a avenue that supports such remarking.

Conclusion

  • To conclude, I will describe how I am applying these ideas in my own working life.
  • Don’t obsess over specific paths. There will be many opportunities for a remarkable life.
  • Deliberate practice-inducing tasks are often sidestepped, as the ambiguous path toward their completion, when combined with the discomfort of the mental strain they require, makes them an unpopular choice in scheduling decisions.
  • Craft-centric": Getting better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice.
  • Working Right Trumps Finding the Right Work. Occupational happiness can be found from approaching work already available with a different mindset.
  • Don’t obsess over discovering your true calling. Instead, master rare and valuable skills. Once you build up the career capital that the skill generate, invest it wisely. Use it to acquire control over what you do and how do it, and to identify and act on a life-changing mission.