The Blog of Marek Cottingham
By Cal Newport
Score: 10/10
In his highly readable and concise book, Cal Newport lays out how job satisfaction originates from the scare resources of autonomy, competence, creative control and meaningful relationships. He posits that a fulfilling career can thus be obtained through patient, focused and strategic skill development in the areas of our strengths, rather than the pursuit of our 'passion'.
He provides examples from various individuals as well as his own graduate career. He discusses how we can gain expertise in a scientific field, by breaking down the work of leaders in our field in order to be able to reconstruct key theories and technologies from fundamental principles.
Many aspects of job satisfaction are scarce and highly desirable. In order to obtain them, you need to be able to provide something scarce and highly desirable in return, which is your skill at what you do. This is called career capital.
Key aspects which contribute to career satisfaction are autonomy, competence, creative challenge and meaningful relationships.
Place yourself in a situation where you constantly try to do things which are unfamiliar to you, keeping track of your progress and seeking to obtain regular feedback from others, such as a mentor, in order to orient yourself towards deliberate practise.
Practise the patience to pursue your skill development for the many years it takes to become good.
If you do not have sufficient career capital, moving to increase control in your career is not sustainable, as you can't make it pay. Thus you should only make a move for more control if you have evidence that it is something that people are willing to pay you for.
In order to progress towards finding a 'mission', make small 'bets' on different ideas in the form of short projects, which take no more than a few months. This allows one to test the water as to whether an idea has potential.
Read content which challenges you by breaking it down into segments and trying to understand the underlying fundamentals. Don't always rely on the established knowledge of others, instead attempt to replicate the construction of the presented knowledge from fundamentals.
Track the dependency between knowledge, ie. what concepts does a proof rely on.
eg. Taking challenging papers and reconstructing the arguments and proofs
Keep track of how much time you spend on different types of work: planning, administrative, unfocused / unimportant, deep work, deliberate practise.
Following one's passion generally doesn't lead to a satisfying career.
Our initial passions are often vaguely defined and based on a lack of knowledge about the reality of working in a job.
Many student's passions are extremely difficult to monetize as a career, eg. Reading, dancing and sports
Passions develop and change over time. In actuality, the most important predictor for being passionate about something is the amount of time you have spent doing it.
Many aspects of job satisfaction are scarce and highly desirable. In order to obtain them, you need to be able to provide something scarce and highly desirable in return, which is your skill at what you do. This is called career capital.
Key aspects which contribute to career satisfaction are autonomy, competence, creative challenge and meaningful relationships.
Those with interesting careers often follow unusual and unexpected paths, where they can only connect the dots in hindsight.
Craftsman mindset vs. Passion mindset
The craftsman mindset focuses on what you can do in order to be better at your work. By focusing on the value you produce, you are able to increase this value and thus to gain the support and investment of others.
The passion mindset focuses on questioning whether you should be doing what you are doing right now. It can distract us from putting in the effort needed to achieve notable results.
When trying to obtain career capital, it is useful to follow the steps:
1. Identify whether you are in a winner takes all or auction market. In a winner takes all market, you are selling yourself on one core skill, which is the only thing that matters. In an auction market, you are selling yourself on a mix of traits (occupying a unique niche).
2. Identify the skills you seek as career capital. In a winner takes all market this is the core valuable skill. In an auction market, you should orient yourself towards skills where you have a learning advantage over others (ie. unusual opportunities to learn from mentors). Here you are using existing career capital to help you obtain further learning faster.
3. Identify goals for your current work which will push you to improve.
4. Place yourself in a situation where you constantly try to do things which are unfamiliar to you, keeping track of your progress and seeking to obtain regular feedback from others, such as a mentor, in order to orient yourself towards deliberate practise.
5. Practise the patience to pursue your skill development for the many years it takes to become good.
When attempting to obtain more control over our career, one faces the following challenges:
If you do not have sufficient career capital, moving to increase control in your career is not sustainable, as you can't make it pay. Thus you should only make a move for more control if you have evidence that it is something that people are willing to pay you for.
If you do have sufficient career capital, you find that your employers will often resist your attempts to gain more control, as they view greater control over you as a means to obtain higher productivity.
In order to find a meaningful mission in our work, we need to be at the cutting edge of a particular field, so that we can perceive what has recently become part of the 'adjacent possible' and pursue it. This is the reality of what it means to do breakthrough work.
The expansion of the 'adjacent possible' explains the prevalence of simultaneous discovery in science (over 150 breakthrough discoveries were made independently by more than one researcher at the same time).
Being at the cutting edge of a field is equivalent to having high career capital in that field.
This requires that we are willing to constrain our thinking to a particular small niche for many years, until we become sufficiently skilled that we can tackle big impact projects.
In order to progress towards finding a 'mission', make small 'bets' on different ideas in the form of short projects, which take no more than a few months. This allows one to test the water as to whether an idea has potential.
In order to make your 'mission' something that other people will pay attention to, aim to make it remarkable and to present it in a space where people will share it. By making something which is not mundane, you can get people's attention. However, in order for your work to be shared, it needs to be presented in a medium and methods which support the audience in sharing your work.
Useful techniques for deliberate practise in a scientific / intellectual field
Require yourself to summarise content that you read, so that you develop and test your understanding.
Read content which challenges you by breaking it down into segments and trying to understand the underlying fundamentals. Don't always rely on the established knowledge of others, instead attempt to replicate the construction of the presented knowledge from fundamentals.
Experiment with how to study basic course content best so you can do so efficiently and free time for other activities.
Challenge yourself to seek deeper insight from others, being able to ask questions to this effect.
Don't just talk / think about it, if you think it would be interesting, do it.
Keep track of how much time you spend on different types of work: planning, administrative, unfocused / unimportant, deep work, deliberate practise.
Deliberate practise often doesn't feel productive when doing it.
Where Good Ideas Come From by Steve Johnson
Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims
The structure of the book is very well done. The author regularly employs summarisation of a point presented in order to improve the reader's memory of the information.