Rule 1: Don’t follow your passion
Like Steve Jobs, our path to finding where we want to pursue our career in is not from passion, it is from exploring
Competent passion (passion in a realistic career) is quite rare. Passion in a career is often a result of long-time work. Passion also arises in the mastery of a particular subject
Motivation requires 3 different things
1. Autonomy
2. Competence
3. Relatedness: connection to others
Passion can be dangerous as it warps our ability to enjoy our career because he don’t feel it to be satisfying
Rule 2: Be So Good, They Can’t Ignore You
Develop a craftsmen mindset, where you are focused on delivering extremely good products/services with intense and deep focus
Traits that define a great job: creativity, impact and control. These traits are rare, so they require rare skills and perfect work
Career capital theory of great work: Traits that are considered rare in work (above) require rare and valuable skills that offer you career capital. By developing a craftsmen mindset, you can easily acquire these skills
Career capital is often in a specific industry/occupation. Switching midway can be disastorous (Feur the marketer made a yoga business which failed)
Don’t apply the craftsmen mindset if: the job has few opportunities to help develop rare and valuabe skills, focuses on something useless or bad for the world, or if the job forces you to work with people you dislike
To become a craftsmen, you must have deliberate practice: 10,000 hours worth of practice with that time dedicated to stretching one’s ability until they become uncomfortable. The feedback should be immediate for best effects
5 habits of a craftsman:
1. Decide which capital market: either only one capital matters (winner-takes-all) or multiple skills needed (auction0
2. Identify capital types: Seek open gates, where there are ipportunities to build capital that are already open to you (ex: research at Stanford as a Stanford student). Convert capital to keep moving in career path instead of jumping onto a new path
3. Create clear goals
4. Practice many times at an uncomfortable level
5. Be patient: It takes a couple of years to build up career capital
Rule 3: Turn Down a Promotion (control)
A very appealing part of a job is the ability to have autonomy/control over what to do and how to do it. Control is the dream-job elixir
Examples of control boosting happiness: ROWE companies (results-work environment) had better churn and better products while having sky-high employee happiness
First control trap: control requires career capital, as career capital allows you to be sustainable. Examples of people that didn’t have career capital in autonomy was the marketer-turned-yoga instructor
Second control trap: when investing career capital to get autonomy, there will be resistance.
– Lulu kept turning down programming promotions so that she could have as much autonomy as possible. For example, she turned down a big QA promotion so she could work at a startup, which she then quit and became a freelancer
– Timing is extremely important in avoiding falling into 1st trap as you try to reclaim autonomy
How to know which trap is which: law of financial viability. If you want to pursue an action ,ask whether people will be willing to pay you
Rule 4: Think Small, Act Big (Importance of Mission
Happiness can come from building career on compelling mission (gives meaning to work and energy to do well
Requires that you build career capital. Launching a mission without expertise will die
– Adjacent possible: being in environment with multiple factors will often encourage new innovations that use those factors. Eg. use of linear network coding for information dissemination
– Good career mission is an innovation that uses adjacent possible of field. Requires you to be on CUTTING EDGE of field
– May require lots of time to get to edge of field and conduct research.
Make little bets to explore possibilities surrounding an idea. Go from lots of little failures to small but significant wins with CONSTANT FEEDBACK
– Ex: Chris Rock tests comedy-routines in many clubs and sees which ones are best
Missions can turn into great success if you do projects that follow the law of remarkability
– Follow the purple cow rule: something that stands out over brown cows. Should inspire people to take notice and spread the word
– Need to publish work in a community that encourages purple cows, like GitHub
Conclusion
When it comes to Rule 2, can implement through time structures (devote x hours to deliberately practice) and an informaton structure (capture results of hard focus in useful form)
Make a research bible which houses all summaries of everything that you have read
Use expensive books to signal importance of what you are writing inside
How to apply Rule 4:
1. Make a mission of what you want to do
2. Cultivate background knowledge of subject. Ex: expose something new in field every week and carve time for free-form thinking
3. Make exploratory projects. 1 month long project that force you to create vallue and produce concrete feedback for feedback
4. Use feedback to make larger projects