“Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,” Martin said. “What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’… but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’ ”
The new college life looks so exciting and over-whelming. With new found freedom from the protected environment of parents. We start slacking. After having been grinded since the time we started our education, this new freedom seems sweet. If not guided properly they may tend to end up lost and just follow the crowd in the fear of being not left behind.
As a fresher in a university, a lot of students are bored, available and ambitious, which according to Cal Newport is a dangerous combination.
The 4 years of college is the time when one should explore all the posibilities available to him/her and actually start working on it. If you ask me, while I was in college, I came across 3 kind of students:
The high schoolers- who are academically engaged and still in the trance of joint exams and boards are bend on bringing top marks.The passionate buds: these people are the lucky ones who have found their true calling and work towards it. Some of them are so full of of it that they can't stand people who are not "passionate" enough.The lost souls: These people have realised the scam of getting good marks and have given up on academics. But nevertheless they fancy passion but are lost just the same.
I being a lost soul was blinded by the passion hypothesis. But how do we know our true calling? I tried my hands on a couple of things but nothing seem to interest me. Sooner or later I gave up.
The reason I am writing this blog post is because when I was a kid, I desperately wanted some help and guidance but I couldn't. I hope this helps those who are just as lost as I was and need some guidance. This blog post is more like a book summary/review. I read this book to uncover the secret behind so many people ending up loving what they do and also why some people feel empty and hate their work. Today I write about what I learnt from this book, which I could recommend everyone to read, "So good they can't ignore you." by Cal Newport.
"If you want realistic path towards a meaningful and engaging life and be freed of the catchphrases like, "follow your pasion" and "do what you love" , the catch phrases that spawn the career confusion that afflicts so many today, " this post is for you. If you are a book-worm and have time to spare, I would rather recommend you give this book a read.
Rule #1 Don't follow your passion.
Just something I was wanting to hear?
This rule dismisses the passion hypothesis that you should just follow your passion. Not everyone is born with an inborn aim or know what they want to do in their life from the first day. One may argue that people with passion seems to always succeed in life compared to those who didn't have any passion, for example Steve Jobs. But if you go into details about how these successful people actually became so, you will see each of them follows the same set of pattern instead of just waking up one day and finding their true calling, which will be discussed later.
"In which I question the validity of the passion hypothesis, which says that the key to occupational happiness is to match your job to a pre-existing passion."
Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor of Organizational behaviour at Yale University, differentiated between a job, career and calling as-
"A job is way to pay bills, a career is a path towards increasingly better work, and a calling is a work that's an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity."
Each of the three are just as important as the other for us.
We need a job to earn our daily bread.
Career is a measure of our personal growth. Growth gives us a sense of achievement. It keeps us motivated and excited towards life. It drives us to do even better to make the best version of ourself.
Calling according to me, is a cause towards which we tend to work to have the sense of our contribution to something. We human are social being, need an existential assurance. The fact that our work, is infact a contribution to something great and we are a part of the bigger picture, gives us such assurance.
Rule #2 Be so good they can't ignore you.
Rule 2 replaced passion hypothesis with career capital theory.
Let's face the truth, each and everyone of us craves to be unique in a crowd. We want to be known. We want to be identified. So what sets one apart?
"the traits that make a great job great are rare and valuable, and therefore, if you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuable skills—which I call career capital—to offer in return."
"Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return."
So now, we shift our focus from a passion mindset to becoming good at a skill so that we have something rare and valuable to offer to the world.
Traits that define great work:
Creativity: opportunity to improvise your work and implement your ideas.
Control: you have some say on how, when and where your work gets done.
Impact: your work has a positive influence on your co-workers or customers.
Now the question is, How do you get these traits in your working life?
The world is full of a lot of oppurtunities to make your life interesting and it has nothing to do with having a passion. But in order to avail those oppurtunities, you need to have an open and curious mind and something rare and valuable to offer.
While on the path of mastering any skill, if we stop pushing ourself forward, we get stuck in this "Plateau of Acceptable level." To jump from this Plateau to the Magical land of "Rare and Valuable", we need what is called deliberate practice. The Plateau of acceptable level is dangerous because it prevents us from becoming rare and valuable. We'll be discussing more about deliberate pratice in coming posts.
Rule #3 The Dream-Job Elixir - Control
The second trait defining a great work is Control. In our lifetime, we would be coming across 2 control traps, while the first one should be dismissed at all cost, the second one is the one that sets us free.
The 2 control traps.
the first control trap: A warning to heed when trying to introduce more control into your working life. It represents the principle that control that’s acquired without career capital (skill) is not sustainable.
the second control trap :Another warning to heed when trying to introduce more control into your working life. It represents the principle that when you acquire enough career capital (skill) to acquire meaningful control over your working life, that’s exactly when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.
Rule #4 Think small, act big.
Importance of mission (impact).
"To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. It’s more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question, What should I do with my life? Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world—a crucial factor in loving what you do. People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work."
DISCLAIMER : This post is mostly a summary of what I learnt from a book by Cal Newport. The ideas mentioned here are not mine but the thoughts are.
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