Study Hacks [School & Career Success]

Study Hacks [School & Career Success]

                                     

A lot of people say that you should follow your passion to have a successful career. What are your thoughts on that?

I think "follow your passion" is terrible advice. Most people don't have preexisting passions that can be easily matched to their work. And for those who do enjoy such passion, there's little evidence that building a career around it will lead to satisfaction. If you want to love what you do for a living, what does seem to matter is to have traits such as autonomy, impact, recognition, creativity. These traits are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer instead. In other words, if you want to love what you do, first focus on becoming exceptional at a rare and valuable skill, then leverage this value to gain the types of traits mentioned above. This strategy has very little to do with matching your job to some mythical, hard-wired passion.

What steps should a young professional take to get good at a skill? How do they figure out what skills are important?

To discover what skills are important in a field, study its stars. Ignore the subjective descriptions of their intelligence or work ethic, and instead identify the specific things they know how to do that are rare and valuable to the organization. Once you have a skill in mind, take practice tips from athletes or musicians. They know how to build a focused practice routine that develops your skills in targeted ways.

Why do you think that what people do for a living isn't as important as how they do it?

Above, I talked about the traits that seem to lead to people loving their work. These traits are agnostic to specific fields. You can have autonomy, for example, or impact, in any number of fields.

You interviewed a lot of people in your book. What was the most interesting one and why?

They were all interesting in their own way. Take, for example Ryan Voila, who was this young guy who runs a successful organic farm with his wife. The idea of dropping everything to go buy some farmland is a well-trod day dream of the cubicle class. When you hear Ryan's story, however, you discover that he spent years and years honing his skill as a grower, including four years studying horticulture at Cornell, before he made the move into full-time farming. In other words, even the most idyllic career success stories require that you first get really good at something rare and valuable. If Ryan had just decided one day that he was "passionate" about farming and then bought some farmland, he would have almost certainly failed. He needed to get really good at horticulture before he could make a successful, happy career from farming.