In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Newport argues that we have been conditioned to think about work in the wrong way. There is a myth that tells you that if you get lucky, and you change jobs enough, you’ll finally find your true calling, your passion. It says that you should never settle for a job you aren’t passionate about, because the best opportunities are waiting for you – you just must be persistent enough to find them. The problem is that when you think in this way, you never end up finding your passion, because that’s not how it works.
Finding your passion is a bullshit idea. Passion is cultivated after many hours of work and painful dedication to a craft. Passion is the final product, not the pre-requisite.
Half of all employees in the U.S are not satisfied with their jobs.
One reason so many people might not be happy at work is that there is a mismatch between reality and their expectations. They expect this magical passion to appear, and when the years go by and it doesn’t, they become disillusioned with work – this fills them with crippling self-doubt.
You are not predestined for anything, nothing is magical. The sooner you get rid of this illusion, the sooner you can find the right way to build your passion. Experience was highly correlated with passion, which means when people spent several years doing the same thing, they were much more likely to feel passionate about their work. They also said that they were incompetent in the beginning. This gives us an important clue! When your skills are not highly developed, it is very hard to feel passionate. But as each small success leads to another, as you slowly build your skills over the years, you more easily enter flow states, you engage in deep work, and then passion is the inevitable by-product.
So how do you get good enough?
First, find a way to add value. Money is a way of measuring value. People often forget that.
If you want to make money, then, by definition, you want to become valuable. So, it is better to figure out how you can become valuable first.
There is an easy way to figure out if an opportunity is good or not. Ask yourself: are people willing to pay for it? If the answer is no, then it’s not an opportunity. That’s the first step. Find a craft, build your skills, engage in deliberate practice, get feedback from people to gauge your progress. Push yourself until you have reached a plateau, until you are minimally competent. And then push harder. That is the only way to achieve mastery – to “find” your passion.
A lot of people are reckless. They think that they’ll get a badge of honor if they drop out of their job and become full-time (Insert hobby). But that’s not how the world works. Getting people to pay you for anything is very difficult, and you need a lot of career capital for that. Many people push this dangerous idea: only your fears are holding you back from getting what you want. And worse, people believe them.
Steve Jobs might have been a yoga instructor if he had followed his passion. Instead he took small bets, and one of them worked astronomically well. But only after he had built his skills, only after he was selling a product that was truly valuable.
Creativity, impact, control are three factors that define great work. Unfortunately, when you are first starting out, you will have none of them. You must build a skillset that allows you to have these attributes. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, was an intern, who moved on to become a tape cutter. He then got the chance to host some segments on air and won awards for them. He got what he wanted with patience and hard work. The best chess players studied the game for much longer than novice chess players – about 5 times more. The main theme that Newport stresses here is time. Nothing comes easy, nothing comes without a significant investment of time.
Instead of having a grand vision that you want to carry out, think smarter. Make several small bets, implement multiple strategies without investing too much in each, and over time, with feedback, you will figure out what works.
If you’re an entrepreneur and you want a quick guide to know what to think about before launching you business, check out The Myth of Entrepreneurship.