Skills trump passion in the quest for work you love. You need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.
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Key Takeaways
The narratives in this book are bound by a common thread: the importance of ability. The things that make a great job great, I discovered, 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 a good job.
How do people end up loving what they do for a living?
We spend most of our lifetime working and if we don’t find a job that we love, we miss out on a significant amount of joy in our lives.
Many of the people that love what they do for a living, didn’t have a preexisting passion for it. Over the years, as they became more experienced and competent at their jobs, their passion grew.
This goes against conventional wisdom. The advice we hear is “follow your passion”. However following pre-existing passion is no more likely to lead you to a career full of passion, than simply going into one of many fields that you’re mildly interested in.
Why people love their work?
1. Creativity you have an opportunity to improvise your work and implement your ideas.
2. Control you have some say on how, when and where your work gets done.
3. Impact your work has a positive impact on your co-workers or customers.
If you go into a career because you’ve always had a passion for it, but you fail to experience these three work traits, your passion will fade away and you’ll hate what you do or a living.
Control, creativity and impact are the keys to sustaining a level of passion in your work, so how do you acquire these work traits?
These three traits are rare and valuable and if you want to attain them , you need to have a rare and valuable skill set. Basic capitalism. If you want something rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return.
How do you develop a rare and valuable skill set?
1. Scrap the passion mindset where you want to enjoy what you do and Have a craftsmanship mindset, Where your goal is to become better at something.
- The passion mindset is problematic because it causes people to think, what can the world offer me?
- If the job is providing them with a sustained level of passion, they start looking for the next thing.
- This makes it hard to gain valuable experience and build a valuable skill set.
- A person with a Craftsman mindset, focuses on what they can offer the world.
- They dedicate themselves to constantly improving at their craft so they can be uniquely valuable to their team, their company and their customers.
- They don’t fret about a lack of passion at any given moment. They know that if they want to get better at their craft, the passion will fade from time to time.
- They don’t ask themselves, do I have a passion for this? Instead they ask, will I love the process of getting better at this? Despite how boring or tedious it might become.
2. Take on niche challenging projects that others would maybe normally stay away from. This differentiates you from your peers and force you to develop rare and valuable skills.
3. Daily Deliberate Practice deliberate practice is the gold standard for improvement. You want to incorporate the practices of deliberate practice into your daily work routine if you want to become rare and valuable.
- Carve our periods of undistracted focus where you push your abilities to the edge of what you are capable of by continually cycling between moments of comfort and discomfort. Then getting immediate feedback and guidance form people who are more experienced than you.
- Execute using the PEAK technique as taught by Anders Ericsson. Where you are challenging yourself at the limit of your capabilities during 30-60 minutes of un-distracted slots of times. Get feedback on your execution. And use your creativity and visualization to come up with ways to simplify your process.
- Just as you go to the gym and lift weights to build muscle, you need to approach your work in the same manner and intensity in order to build skill.
"If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset ("what can the world offer me?") and instead adopt the craftsman mindset ("what can I offer the world?").