To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career.
Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.
Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.
I felt like I was stretching to convince the world that my work was interesting, yet no one cared.
This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle – one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.
A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough – it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. 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. This.
If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind.
I keep a tally of the total number of hours I’ve spent that month in a state of deliberate practice.
It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.
Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?
The things that make a great job great... are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect to get a good job.
Pushing past what is comfortable, however is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback – even if it destroys what you thought was good.
If you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.
Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.
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.
Here’s a case where someone successfully followed their passion,” they say, “therefore ‘follow your passion’ must be good advice.” This is faulty logic. Observing a few instances of a strategy working does not make it universally effective.
Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills and therefore builds up your store of career capital. Similarly, identifying a compelling mission once you get to the cutting edge can be seen as investing your career capital to acquire a desirable trait in your career. In other words, mission is yet another example of career capital theory in action. If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital.
All it takes is an ideology seductive enough to convince you to discard common sense.
At the end of every week he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved this goal, and then uses this feedback to guide himself in the week ahead.
Stop focusing on these little details,” it told me. “Focus instead on becoming better.