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SoGood
No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it and the process won’t be easy you adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows. creativity, impact and control (dream job elixir) THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET 1. The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. 2. The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world. 3. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike. “serious study” "deliberate practice"- focus on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback. Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. markets: winner-take-all (only one) and auction (many other competitors) It’s so tempting to just assume what you’ve done is good enough and check it off your to-do list, but it’s in honest, sometimes harsh feedback that you learn where to retrain your focus in order to continue to make progress. diligence is so important: Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need. more control leads to better grades, better sports performance, better productivity, and more happiness. Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short). Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable. once you have enough career capital to acquire more control in your working life, you have become valuable enough to your employer that they will fight your efforts to gain more autonomy. When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably don’t have enough career capital to do anything interesting. passion hypothesis career capital craftsman mindset deliberate practice financial viability cutting edge (adjacent possible) small bets “I follow a rule with my life that if something is scary, do it. I’ve lived everywhere in America, and for me, a big scary thing was living outside the country.” - Derek Sivers “Do what people are willing to pay for.” -Derek Sivers “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.” - Derek Sivers 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. Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after. How do you make mission a reality in your working life? a mission launched without career capital is likely doomed to sputter and die. missions are a powerful trait to introduce into your working life, but they’re also fickle, requiring careful coaxing to make them a reality. 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. 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. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s not commonplace; it’s instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard—the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives. Pardis Sabeti thought small by focusing patiently for years on a narrow niche (the genetics of diseases in Africa), but then acting big once she acquired enough capital to identify a mission (using computational genetics to help understand and fight ancient diseases). 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” mine. This rapid and frequent feedback, Sims argues, “allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.” “You’re either remarkable or invisible,” says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow If you want to make a name for yourself in software development—the type of name that can help you secure employment—focus your attention on making quality contributions to open-source projects. This is where the people who matter look for talent. My Job Went to India Giles didn’t just find a project that compels remarks, but he also spread the word about the project in a venue that supports these remarks. In his case, this venue was the open-source software community. 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. if you’re not careful to keep pushing forward, your improvement can taper off to what the performance scientist Anders Ericsson called an “acceptable level,” where you then remain stuck. Strain, I now accepted, was good. Instead of seeing this discomfort as a sensation to avoid, I began to understand it the same way that a body builder understands muscle burn: a sign that you’re doing something right. tentative research mission—a sort of rough guideline for the type of work I’m interested in doing. Right now, my mission reads, “To apply distributed algorithm theory to interesting new places with the goal of producing interesting new results.” 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 found that without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to more urgent but less important matters. top level mission 2-3 small bets (feedback will change the top level mission) background research (related to the mission) Working right trumps finding the right work. |