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“Do what people are willing to pay for.”
“If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea.”
The Law of Financial Viability When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.
“Do what people are willing to pay for.” This isn’t about making money (Derek, for example, is more or less indifferent to money, having given away to charity the millions he made from selling his first company). Instead, it’s about using money as a “neutral indicator of value”—a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that it’s a critical tool for navigating your own acquisition of control.
Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.
her happiness comes from the fact that she built her career on a clear and compelling mission—
In the overachieving style typical of Harvard, Pardis’s mission is by no means subtle: Her goal, put simply, is to rid the world of its most ancient and deadly diseases.
Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.
Scientific breakthroughs, as we just learned, require that you first get to the cutting edge of your field. Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative ideas are almost always discovered.
If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only place where these missions become visible.
Missions Require Little Bets In which I argue that great missions are transformed into great successes as the result of using small and achievable projects—little bets—to explore the concrete possibilities surrounding a compelling idea.
“Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins”
I used Pardis Sabeti’s story to emphasize that you need career capital before you can identify a realistic mission for your career. Just because you have a good idea for a mission, however, doesn’t mean that you’ll succeed in its pursuit.
To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.
If career capital makes it possible to identify a compelling mission, then it’s a strategy of little bets that gives you a good shot of succeeding in this mission. To deploy this career tactic, you need both pieces.
(“working from home is kind of lame when you don’t have roommates, a girlfriend, or even a dog”),
He approached the task of finding good projects for his mission with the mindset of a marketer, systematically studying books on the subject to help identify why some ideas catch on while others fall flat.
He needed a mission to actively guide his career or he would end up trapped again and again.
“The world is full of boring stuff—brown cows—which is why so few people pay attention.… A purple cow … now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing.”2
For his mission to build a sustainable career, it had to produce purple cows, the type of remarkable projects that compel people to spread the word.
The Law of Remarkability For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.
To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers. Mission is one of those traits.
the best ideas for missions are found in the adjacent possible—the region just beyond the current cutting edge.
To encounter these ideas, therefore, you must first get to that cutting edge, which in turn requires expertise. To try to devise a mission when you’re new to a field and lacking any career capital is a venture bound for failure.
An effective strategy for accomplishing this task is to try small steps that generate concrete feedback—little bets—and then use this feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next.
law of remarkability. This law says that for a project to transform a mission into a success, it should be remarkable in two ways. First, it must literally compel people to remark about it. Second, it must be launched in a venue conducive to such remarking.
In sum, mission is one of the most important traits you can acquire with your career capital. But adding this trait to your working life is not simple. Once you have the capital to identify a good mission, you must still work to make it succeed. By using little bets and the law of remarkability, you greatly increase your chances of finding ways to transform your mission from a compelling idea into a compelling career.
The first trap was having too little career capital. If you go after more control in your working life without a rare and valuable skill to offer in return, you’re likely pursuing a mirage.
The second trap describes what happens when you do have enough capital to successfully make a shift toward more control. It’s at this point that you’re most likely to encounter resistance from others in your life, as more control usually benefits only you.
“When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.”
True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea. This requires a dedication to brainstorming and exposure to new ideas. Combined, these two commitments describe a lifestyle, not a series of steps that automatically spit out a mission when completed.
I use little bets to explore the most promising ideas turned up by the processes described by the bottom level of my pyramid. I try to keep only two or three bets active at a time so that they can receive intense attention. I also use deadlines, which I highlight in yellow in my planning documents, to help keep the urgency of their completion high. Finally, I also track my hours spent on these bets in the hour tally I described back in the section of this conclusion dedicated to my application of Rule #2. I found that without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work,
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