By Cal Newport
This book has some interesting ideas about the importance of cultivating skills that are valuable and that have leverage over others.
It states that there are three kinds of occupation: * jobs * carrer
Passion didn’t bring us here
As it states the importance of cultivating a different perspective about passion. And instead of following your peassion, you should create your passion instead.
This means that career passions are rare and that passions takes time. And passions is a side effect of mastery.So you should do your best at the tasks ahead and make it become something that you like because you’re good at. Instead of aiming at some ideal and trying to stretch your way there.
The self-determination theory tells us that motivation, requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs — factors described as the nutriments required to feel motivated for your work: 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 (if you feel close to people who you work with, you’re going to enjoy work more.)
So this means that the passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it is also dangerous. And in contrast we should cultivate the craftsman mindset. Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you an offer the world the passion mindset focuses on what the world can offer you And that’s why we need to go beyond passion.
By being so good they can’t ignore you.
It is known that ‘If somebody is thinking “how can I be really good?” people are going to come to you’. And regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career.
What can I offer the world?
This is a list of things that define great work: creativity: pushing the boundaries impact: change the way of things control: results driven
How to become great → deliberate practice: “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individuals performance.”
I have an ever going thirst to get better. It’s like a sport, you have to practice and you have to study.
You stretch your ability by taking on projects that are beyond your current comfort zone: and not just one at a time, but often up to three or four concurrently. All while holding on a day job.
And then obsessively seeking feedback on everything.
Five habits of a craftsman
- Step 1 : Decide what capital market you’re in. there are two kinds:
- winner-take-all : in a winner take all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it. All that matters is your ability to perform.
- Auction: an auction market by contrast is less structured: there are many different types of career capital and each person might generate a unique collection. The clean tech space is an auction market. Including expertise in multiple fields is good. A variety of other types of relevant skills could also have led to a job in the field.
- Step 2 : Identify your capital type
- If you’re in a winner-take-all market this is trivial: by definition, there’s only one type of capital that matters. It is getting good at your craft.
- For an auction market, however, you have flexibility. A useful heuristic in this situation is to seek open gates… opportunities to build capital that are already open you. The advantage of open gates is that they get you farther faster, in terms of career capital acquisition, then starting from scratch.
- Step 3: Define “Good”
- One you’ve indentified exactly what skill to build, begin to draw your ideal.
- The first thing this tell is that you need clear goals. If you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, then it’s hard to take effective action. Deliberate practice requires good goals.
- Step 4: Stretch and destroy
- Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands… deliberate practice is an effort of focus and concentration. that is what makes it deliberate as distict from the mindless playing. Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
- This is what experience tells. If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.” And pushing past what’s comfortable is one part of the deliberate practice. Another part is seeking honest feedback. You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts. It’s only by honest, sometimes harsh feedback, that you learn where to retrain your focus in order to continue to make progress.
- The continuous and harsh feedback one receives accelerates the growth of ones ability.
- Step 5: Be patient
- The importance of diligence for success is less about paying attention to the main pursuit, and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you. The final step for applying deliberate practice to your working life is to adopt this style of diligence.
- Without patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the career capital you need.
- Career capital is acquired by stretching yourself day after day, month after month, before finally looking up and realizing, “hey, i’ve become pretty good, and people are starting to notice.”
The traits that define great work are rare and valuable. If you want these traits in your own life, you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. These rare and valuable skills are called career capital. And they are the foundation of constructing work that you love. By acquiring this capital.
With this in mind, we turned our attention to this process of capital acquisition. It’s important to adopt the craftsman mindset, where the focus is on what value you’re offering the world. This stands in stark contrast to the much more common passion mindset, which has you focus only on what value the world is offering you.
Even with the craftsman mindset, however, becoming so good they can’t ignore you is not trivial. To help these efforts, it requires 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.
If you can introduce this strategy into your working life you can vault past your peers in your acquisition of career capital.
Seek a job that gives people more control over what they do and how they do it. This increases happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment in their work.
If your goal is to love what you do your first step is to acquire career capital. Your next step is to invest this capital in the traits that define great work. control is one of the most important targets you can choose for this investment.
the key is to know when the time is right to become corageous in your career decisions.