This book is Cal Newport’s philosophy about how to find work that you love.

TL;DR - Don’t worry about finding something you’re “passionate about”. Just pick something and get really good at it.

Rule #1: Don’t follow your passion

“Follow your passion” (aka the passion hypothesis) is bad career advice

• Most people don’t have pre-existing passions like that, and if they do then it won’t live up to their expectations.
• Trying (and probably failing) to find your “true passion” up front will just lead to confusion and unhappiness.
• Career passions are rare, take time to build, and are a side effect of mastery.

Scientifically-backed elements of a fulfilling workplace environment (Self-Determination Theory):

• Autonomy - you have control over your day
• Mastery - you feel you are good at what you do
• Relatedness - you feel a connection to other people/have a purpose for your work

“Working right trumps finding the right work”

Rule #2: Be so good they can’t ignore you

Skill is really important! Focus on that instead of finding your “passion”.

• The Craftsman mindset - focus on what value you’re producing in your job. Do this!
• The Passion mindset - focus on what value your job offers you. Most people do this. Don’t!

“…put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can’t ignore you.”

3 Qualities have been shown to consistently and dramatically increase job satisfaction:

• Creativity
• Impact
• Control (This is the most important) (Note the similarities to SDT)

You should do everything you can to get a job with those^ three qualities. How? “Career Capital”!

• The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.
• Economics - if you want rare and valuable work, you need rare and valuable skills to offer. We call those skills career capital.
• The craftsman mindset is well suited for building career capital
• The passion mindset often convinces people to quit their jobs to change careers, throwing away their career capital!

Steve Jobs once told everyone to follow their passion, but if you look at his career he definitely didn’t. He had a craftsman mindset.

3 Exceptions/Disqualifiers for applying the craftsman mindset

Don’t bother applying the craftsman mindset if the job:

1. Presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing career capital
2. Focuses on something you think is useless or actively bad for the world
3. Forces you to work with people you really dislike

(If this is the case then you should quit your job.)

How to build Career Capital

Deliberate Practice: Stretching yourself beyond your current abilities with immediate, thoughtful feedback (usually from coaches)

• Example: The best predictor of Chess success is not hours played, but is hours spent in serious study:

  • Poring over books on strategy
  • Using teachers to identify and eliminate weaknesses
  • Studying grandmaster’s games
• Deliberate practice is well known for chess, music, physical sports, etc., but not for knowledge work
• If you adopt it, you’ll quickly outpace your peers.

Beware the OK Plateau: “If you just show up and work hard [(ie without deliberate practice)], you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you’ll fail to get any better.”

Once we get to the point where we’re “good enough” at a skill, we stop improving unless a conscious effort is made to push ourselves out of our comfort zone.

The Five Habits of a Craftsman

1. Decide what capital market you’re in:

   • Winner-take-all - there’s only one type of career capital, and everyone competes for it (eg writing skill)
   • Auction - Many types of career capital, and each person may have unique collection with fine additions

2. Identify capital type:

   • In a winner-take-all market, this is trivial: Do the one type that matters
   • In an auction market, seek “open gates” - opportunities that are open to you (but not to everyone)

3. Define “good”.

   • There should be no ambiguity

   • Examples:

     • Music playing: Learning some complicated technique
     • TV writing: scripts being taken seriously

4. Stretch and Destroy

   • If you’re enjoying your practice, you’re probably not trying hard enough, and will hit the OK plateau
   • Make yourself uncomfortable with the difficulty
   • Get honest, harsh feedback

5. Be patient

   • It takes time. Sorry.
   • Keep your focus. Don’t constantly switch pursuits!

Cal’s strategies for applying the Craftsman mindset (he is a computer science academic):

1. Keep a “Research Bible”

   • Once per week, he summarizes a paper he thinks might be relevant to his research:

     • Description
     • Comparison to prior work
     • Main strategies to attain it
   • Introduces the strain of deliberate practice towards digesting research papers. (Fun fact: this is what inspired me to start this project!)

2. Maintain an “Hour-Tally”

   • Sheet of paper behind his desk with a row for each month
   • Tally for each months of the # of hours spent in a state of deliberate practice
   • Motivates him to find more ways to fit deliberate practice into his schedule

3. Have a “Theory-Notebook”

   • He bought the most expensive notebook he could find to record brainstorming sessions
   • The price helps signal the importance of it to himself
   • Strain to collect and organize his thinking == Deliberate practice.

Rule #3: Turn down a promotion

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it has been shown to increase happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.

Once you have some career capital, “invest” it to get more autonomy in your job

Beware certain traps that reduce control:

1. Control acquired without career capital is not sustainable

• Don’t be the person who quits their job to start a company before they have the skills to succeed. It’ll fail.
• Don’t be the “lifestyle designer” with a vague plan to support themselves with blogging before they have any readers.

2. As soon as you have enough career capital to get more control, people will try to keep you from doing so.

• Employers may resist if you ask for a shorter work week
• You may be offered a promotion that increases your responsibilities and doesn’t benefit your capital building.

The Law of Financial Viability - “When considering adding more control to your life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.

“Do what people are willing to pay for”

Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big

(the importance of mission)

Happiness comes from building a career on a clear and compelling mission. (Note the similarity to relatedness from SDT in Rule 1, and impact in Rule 2.)

You should build up your career capital before figuring out a mission

• New discoveries are made in the space of the adjacent possible - the cutting edge of other new discoveries

  • This is why big discoveries tend to be made at the same time in different places, such as:

    • 4 scientists in 4 countries independently discovered sunspots in the same year
    • Oxygen isolated independently in 1772 and 1774
    • Newton and Liebniz both invented calculus
  • Career missions are like scientific breakthroughs - an innovation waiting in the adjacent possible
  • Therefore to identify a mission, you must already be at the cutting edge of your field.

Little Bets - “Rather than believing [you] have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance, make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and small but significant wins.”

The Law of Remarkability - For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in 2 ways:

1. It must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. (aka “purple cows”)
2. It must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.

Example: Giles Bowkett made a program that used AI to make music (remarkable), and released it as open-source (venue that supports remarking).

Cal’s personal mission-development system:

Imagine a 3-level pyramid.

Top level: Tentative Research Mission

• Rough guideline directing where he wants to go
• Is developed after first acquiring career capital

Bottom level: Background Research

• Every week he exposes himself to something new about his field. (Read a paper, attend a talk, meet with someone, etc.)
• Adds the summary to his Research Bible (see rule 2)
• Goes on a walk every day to mull over his research

Middle level: Exploratory Projects

• Results in most of the work he does as a professor

• Uses little bets to explore promising ideas from his background research:

  • Small enough to each be completed in less than a month
  • Forces him to create new value (eg master a new skill and produce new unique results)
  • Produces a concrete result that he can use to gather concrete feedback
• Keeps track of the hours spent working on these in his monthly hour tally

“Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.”

My Opinion

I hope you found this TL;DR helpful, but this book is definitely still worth a read. Cal offers a bunch of well-cited studies and plenty of memorable anecdotes to back up his points and give you an intuition for what he’s talking about. The book is extremely digestible and an easy read, as Cal repeats the important points almost to a fault. I got everything I needed out of the first read-through, but still have reread it when I need a motivation boost. This book changed the way I think about my career, and is the reason that this TLDR project exists. Of all the books I’ve read, I would recommend reading this one first.