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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Read between
July 27 - July 31, 2024
A job, in Wrzesniewski’s formulation, is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.
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
The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous. Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.
Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’ ”
Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.
In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused, which probably explains why Bronson admits, not long into his career-seeker epic What Should I Do With My Life? that “the one feeling everyone in this book has experienced is of missing out on life.”
I’ve presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.
With this in mind, it’s only natural to envy the clarity of performers like Jordan Tice. But here’s the core argument of Rule #2: You shouldn’t just envy the craftsman mindset, you should emulate it. In other words, I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can’t ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer.
“The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,”
In other words, his capital had bought him more autonomy.
Feuer started her company with only two hundred hours of training and an abundance of courage.
There’s nothing mysterious about how Alex Berger broke into Hollywood—he simply understood the value, and difficulty, of becoming good.
When surveyed, the participants in Charness’s study thought tournament play was probably the right answer. The participants, as it turns out, were wrong. Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by
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Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.
Mike’s goal with his spreadsheet is to become more “intentional” about how his workday unfolds. “The easiest thing to do is to show up to work in the morning and just respond to e-mail the whole day,” he explained.
When you look at Mike’s spreadsheet, you also notice that he restricts the hours dedicated to required tasks that don’t ultimately make him better at what he does (eighteen hours). The majority of his week is instead focused on what matters: raising money, vetting investments, and helping his fund’s companies (twenty-seven hours). Without this careful tracking, this ratio would be much different.
In other words, she tried to obtain control without any capital to offer in return, and ended up with a mere shadow of real autonomy.
Land and Water documentary—he
Working right trumps finding the right work.
Don’t obsess over discovering your true calling. Instead, master rare and valuable skills. Once you build up the career capital that these skills generate, invest it wisely. Use it to acquire control over what you do and how you do it, and to identify and act on a life-changing mission.
