📚The Book in 3 Bullets

• Don’t obsess over discovering your true calling. Instead, master rare and valuable skills. Once you build up the career capital that these skills generate, invest it wisely. Use it to acquire control over what you do and how you do it.

• Becoming so go they can’t ignore you requires many hours of deliberate practice that is often unpleasant. This is a necessary sacrifice to build up the skills to give you control over your career.

• Becoming an expert in your field is what delivers career fulfillment and enjoyment. Sharpening your craft and becoming the best at your job is what ultimately brings joy and meaning to your work.

📖 Summary & Notes

Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion

• Follow your passion is bad advice. It fails to describe how most people actually end up with compelling careers, and for many people, it can actually make things worse: leading to chronic job shifting and unrelenting angst when one’s reality inevitably falls short of the dream.

• Career passions are rare and passion takes time.

  • A job is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.

• The happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

• The more we focus on loving what we do, the less we end up loving it.

Rule #2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You

• The craftsman mindset is a focus on what value you’re producing in your job, and the passion mindset is a focus on what value your job offers you.

• If you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.

• The Career Capital Theory of Great Work

  • The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.

  • Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.

  • The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love.

• In most types of work, most people are stuck. Let’s assume you’re a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

• You need to be constantly soliciting feedback from colleagues and professionals.

• Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

• There’s little evidence that most people have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered and believing that there’s a magical right job lurking out there can often lead to chronic unhappiness and confusion when the reality of the working world fails to match this dream.

Rule #3: Turn Down a Promotion

• You have to get good before you can expect good work.

• Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment. Therefore, control should be at the core of what to look for in a job.

• Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

• The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.

• Do what people are willing to pay for. Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.

• The Law of Financial Viability: When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.

Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big

• The Law of Remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.