4 Rules for Creating a Job You Truly Love by Cal Newport from “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.”

Rule 1️⃣: Don’t Follow Your Passion

Trying to find our passion first and then look for a job that matches it is not the best way to build a career. In fact, Cal Newport says that it’s quite a terrible advice!

The truth is that compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all we have to do is follow our passion. This is because:

• Career passions are rare. Think about it - most people are passionate about things like hockey, dancing, skiing, reading, and swimming, but passions like these don’t have much to offer when it comes to choosing an ideal job.

• Passion takes time. Cal suggests that the more experience one has at their job, the more likely they are to love their work. In Wrzesniewski’s research, the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

• Passion is a side effect of mastery. Motivation in the workplace (or elsewhere) requires that we fulfil three basic psychological needs (nutriments): autonomy (the feeling that we have control over our day, and that our actions are important), competence (the feeling that we are good at what we do), and relatedness (the feeling of connection to other people - if we are close to people at work, we’re going to enjoy our work more).
  

Cal goes as far as writing that passion is dangerous, because subscribing to the passion hypothesis can make us feel less happy. The more we focus on loving what we do, the less we end up actually loving it. So, telling someone to just follow their passion is not just an act of optimism, but can potentially be a foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

Rule 2️⃣: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Most of us adopt the passion mindset, where we focus on what value our job offers to us, but a better way of looking at work is to have the craftsman mindset, where focus is on what value we’re producing in our job. The latter is the foundation for creating the work we love as it offers us more clarity.

Rather than questioning whether our job is our true passion, we should focus on becoming so good that people can’t ignore us, regardless of what we do for a living. The truth is that no matter how we feel about our job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset first will enable our passion to follow.

Traits that define great work include creativity, impact, and control - and although this list is not comprehensive, when we think about our dream job, we’re likely to notice some combination of these. Unfortunately, these seem to be fairly rare as most employers simply don’t offer their employees great creativity, impact or control over what they do and how they do it. But they are valuable, as this is what makes our jobs feel great to us. If we want something that’s both rare and valuable, we need to be able to offer something that’s rare and valuable in return. Adopting the craftsman mindset allows us to build up these rare and valuable skills that we can later offer. This is called career capital.

“You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life, and the craftsman mindset is focused on achieving exactly this goal.”

There are three disqualifiers for applying the craftsman mindset:

1. The job presents few opportunities to distinguish ourselves by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable.

2. The job focuses on something we think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world.

3. The job forces us to work with people we really dislike.
   
   

The strategy and the 10,000-Hour Rule

Researchers believe that 10,000 hours is the magic number for true expertise. In other words, great accomplishments are not about our natural talents, but about being in the right place at the right time to accumulate such a massive amount of practice.

Note that if we just show up and work hard, we’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which we fail to get any better. That’s why most types of work that don’t have a clear training philosophy make us feel stuck. To successfully adopt the craftsman’s mindset, we have to approach our jobs with deliberate practice, when it allows us to do this.

For example, Mike carefully tracks his daily work to ensure that he spends most of his time on things that are important, instead of immediate. At the end of every week, he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved this goal and then uses the feedback to guide himself in the week ahead.

The five habits of a craftsman:

1. Deciding what capital market we’re in. There are two types: winner-take-all (where only one type of career capital is available, and loads of different people are competing for it, for example, television writing) and auction (where there are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection, for example, cleantech).
   

2. Identifying our capital type. If we’re in a winner-take-all market, then there’s only one type of capital that matters. For an auction market, on the other hand, we can be more flexible and should seek opportunities to build capital that are already open to us.
   

3. Defining what “good” means to us. Once we identify what skills to build, we can begin to draw from the research on deliberate practice. This includes setting clear and good goals for what we’re trying to achieve. In other words, the “good result” we’re trying to achieve.
   

4. Stretching and destroying. Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, but the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. We need the effort of focus and concentration so that it’d push us past the plateau into a realm where we have little competition. This is, of course, much less enjoyable, but if we don’t constantly feel uncomfortable, then we’re probably already stuck at an “acceptable level”. Deliberate practice also means accepting negative feedback as it can accelerate our growth and ability.
   

5. Being patient. Acquiring capital can take years, and it may mean ignoring other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract us. Without diligence and patience, we may not be able to reject shiny new pursuits that will derail our efforts before we’re able to acquire the capital we need.
   
   

Rule 4️⃣: Turn Down a Promotion

Control over what we do, and how we do it, is one of the most important and powerful traits we can acquire when creating the work we love as well as a happier, more successful, and meaningful life.

More control leads to better grades, better sports performance, better productivity, and more happiness. Research also showed that control-centric businesses that gave control to their employees grew at 4 times the rate of those that didn’t.

We can observe the power of control in ROWE companies (Results-Only Work Environment), where all that matters is the results that employees bring to the company. In such places, when employees show up, when they leave, when they take vacations or read their emails are irrelevant. And those who enjoy this kind of work culture explain that it allows them to feel that they’re in control of their destiny. It also noticeably improves their happiness, performance, engagement and a sense of fulfilment.

There us no surprise then that this type of control is what makes a real difference. Just imagine having a job where you could skip work to enjoy sunny days, or take an extended leave to get a side project off the ground, or do most of your work during the Winter and Autumn months to have freer Springs and Summers to enjoy life to the fullest. Acquiring career capital and investing it in the traits that define great work can help us achieve this, and control should be the most important target we should strive for.

However, there are some traps to be aware of:

1. It’s dangerous to pursue more control in our working lives BEFORE we have career capital to offer in exchange. That’s because control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable. If we embrace control without capital, we’re likely to end up enjoying all the autonomy we can handle but unable to afford our lifestyle.
   

2. Once we have enough career capital to acquire more control in our working lives, we become valuable enough to our employers that they will fight our efforts to gain more autonomy, and we will experience resistance. The secret here is to have the courage to ignore it and know when the right time is to make certain career decisions. If we get it right, we can create a fantastic working life situation; if we get it wrong by tripping the first control trap, then things might end up in a disaster.

We can avoid these control traps by looking for evidence that our idea is something people are willing to pay us for. If we find this evidence, then we should continue, but if we’re struggling to raise money for our idea, or are thinking that we may support our idea with unrelated work, then we need to rethink it. This is called the law of financial viability, and it’s a crucial tool for navigating our acquisition of control.

Rule 5️⃣: Think Small, Act Big

We need a unifying mission to our working life as it can be a source of great satisfaction. It gives meaning to our work and provide the energy we need to embrace life beyond it, too.

A mission is more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question “What should I do with my life?” It’s powerful because it enables us to focus our energy toward a useful goal, maximising our impact on the world - a crucial factor in loving what we do. And, of course, people who feel like their careers matter are more satisfied with their working lives and more resistant to hard work. For example, staying up late to save our corporate litigation client a few extra million dollars can be draining, but staying up late to help cure an ancient disease can leave us more energised than when we started.

To create an effective mission, however, requires us to first build career capital. This is because launching it without our expertise is likely to lead us to failure. But capital is not enough to make our mission a reality - we also need to systematically experiment with different proto-missions to find a direction worth pursuing.

Missions are tricky, and just because we want to organise our work around one, it doesn’t mean that we can easily make it happen. That’s why it’s important that we first get to the cutting-edge of our field - only then can we see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative ideas can be discovered easier.

Advancing to the cutting-edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, which requires us to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once we get to this cutting-edge and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, we must go after it with some “big” action.

Test Little Bets

Missions are transformed into great successes from small and achievable projects, called Little Bets - the exploration of concrete possibilities surrounding a compelling idea. As Peter Sims puts it, Little Bets allows us to learn critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins, whereas rapid and frequent feedback can let us find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes. However, these Little Bets must be bite-sized in order to work as intended and shouldn’t take more than a month to run. It either succeeds or fails, but the feedback should guide our next steps.

If our career capital allows us to identify a compelling mission, then Little Bets strategy gives us a shot of succeeding in that mission. Here’s how we can create one:

1. Research the type of work we’re interested in doing.

2. Do some background research by exposing ourselves to something new in our field on a regular basis (think research papers, interviews, workshops, talks, etc)

3. Use Little Bets to explore the projects of interest. Set deadlines, hold ourselves accountable, and keep only two or three bets active at a time.
   
   

Our mission must be remarkable

Our mission needs to be remarkable to inspire others too. As Seth Godin writes in his book “Purple Cow,” the world is full of boring things (brown cows), so very few people pay attention. But a purple cow stands out. Thus, we need to learn the art of building things worth noticing (purple cows).

A good mission-driven project should be remarkable in two different ways:

1. It should compel other people to remark about it (in other words, it needs to be different enough to catch attention so others would like to spread a word about it)

2. It must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.
   

To summarise all of the above: if our goal is to love what we do, we should NOT follow our passion. Instead, we should adopt a craftsman’s mindset and focus on gaining rare and valuable skills (career capital) to exchange into the type of traits that would make our job great for us. Deliberate practice, patience, and discomfort are essential here, because real growth happens beyond the comfort zone. Finally, meaningful careers are often driven by a strong mission, which we can discover by going deep into a field and experimenting through small, low-risk “Little Bets”.