In 2007, Steve Martin was on the Charlie Rose show to talk about his memoir Born Standing Up. He talked about his rise in comedy, and Rose asked him for his advice to aspiring performers.
His
response? “Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the
answer they wanted to hear. 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.’ ”
Cal
Newport, an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown,
became intrigued by this notion, and set out to find out how people do
just that. One of the concepts he lit upon, while writing his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, is career capital.
“Career
capital are...
the skills you have that are both rare and valuable and
that can be used as leverage in defining your career,” Newport said by
phone. It is crucial to developing a successful career, one that Newport
describes as being marked by creativity, impact and control, or
autonomy.
“Basic
economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare
and valuable,” he writes, “you need something rare and valuable to offer
in return—this is Supply and Demand 101. It follows that if you want a
great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.”
Earlier
this month, when I wrote about the seven ways successful people
approach their work, one of the concepts that intrigued a number of
readers was the notion of career capital. While that article used a
broad definition that includes skills, a portfolio of work and a network
of people loyal to you, Newport’s research — and this article — will
show you how to develop the “skills” portion of career capital with
these seven tips.
1. Adopt the craftsman mindset, not the passion mindset.
Newport
says one of the biggest fallacies being promoted in the career world
today is that occupational happiness comes from finding a job that
corresponds with a preexisting passion. “Passions don’t come before skills,”
Newport explains. “That’s often a roadblock — it’s hard to get around
this idea that we all have a preexisting strong passion, and it’s just
whether or not we follow it.”
The
problem with the passion mindset is that it leads people to approach
their work asking, “What can the world offer me?” — and that results in a
lot of job hopping.
“First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like
about it, leading to chronic unhappiness,” he writes. This is
especially true for entry-level positions, which rarely offer fulfilling
challenges. He also objects to the passion mindset, because the
questions it prompts — “Who am I?” “What do I truly love?” “Is this who I
really am?” — are not only hard to answer but are, as he writes,
“almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused.”
Instead, he says, embrace the craftsman mindset, in which you ask, “What can I offer the world?”
2. Know what’s really valuable in your field.
In
his book, Newport describes a blogger who had identified — and devoted a
lot of time to — a path to success … that would never lead there.
He
says of the blogger, “In his conception, there are many different types
of capital relevant to your blog — from its format, to its post
frequency, to its search‐engine optimization, to how easy it is to find
it on social networks (this particular blogger invested serious time in
submitting every post to as many social networking sites as possible).
He viewed the world through statistics and hoped that with the right
combination of capital he could get them where he needed them to be to
make money.” The problem? His blog was no good — and he wasn’t spending
time improving it.
If
you’re having a hard time figuring out what skills would be important
for the specific vision you have of your career, Newport says suggest
identifying two people in your field — one who resonates with you and
one who doesn’t. “Then, figure out the difference,” he says. “What did
Person A do that Person B did not?”
Once you know what kind of expertise you need, go after it — and never let yourself plateau.
Newport
compares improving knowledge skills to bodybuilding. “If you approach
the goal of being musclebound with the mindset ‘I never want my muscles
to never burn or ever be strained,’ you won’t do well with your goal,”
he says. “It’s the same with learning a new programming language or
knowing an arcane part of the law.”
The
problem with “deliberate practice,” which Geoffrey Colvin detailed in
his book Talent Is Overrated, is, as Colvin wrote in Fortune, “Doing
things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the
opposite of what deliberate practice demands.”
So,
push past your natural inclination to only do what you’re good at and
what you enjoy, says Newport: “You should be seeking to be in a state of
mental discomfort frequently.”
4. Seek feedback.
But
your practice should not take place in a vacuum. He depicts a
screenwriter who rose quickly in Hollywood partially because he focused
relentlessly on learning more about his craft and practicing, but also
partially because he consistently chose projects in which he’d be
compelled to show others his work. The writer says of an early
television script: “When I look back now, I’m humiliated that I ever
showed it to anyone.” But doing so helped him see where he needed to
improve.
“It’s
in honest, sometimes harsh feedback, that you learn where to retrain
your focus in order to continue to make progress,” writes Newport.
In
Newport’s book, Mike Jackson, a successful venture capitalist,
describes how he sets goals for his time use. “At the beginning of each
week I figure out how much time I want to spend on different
activities,” he told Newport. “I then track it so I can see how close I
came to my targets.”
Jackson
restricts the time he allots to what he calls “hard to change”
commitments that also don’t make him better at what he does — and then
sets goals for “highly changeable” activities, the ones that he wants to
focus on. By capitalizing on this time, he’s able to get far, fast,
with his priorities.
It
also means, for instance, that Jackson is not often on email — and
would only sporadically respond to Newport, who took to calling him
while he was commuting to work. “On reflection, of course, this makes
perfect sense from Mike’s perspective,” writes Newport. “For him to
spend hours every day sorting through non‐critical e‐mail from authors
such as myself or from business students fishing for tips, among other
trivialities, would impede his ability to raise money and find good
companies — ultimately the job he’s judged on.”
“People
who have big stores of career capital are the people that turn down
most opportunities,” Newport says. “I’ve never had a Facebook or Twitter
account, and people say there are some benefits to them since I’m a
writer, but I don’t care. I want to ruthlessly focus on the things that
matter, so I’ll write a book, I’ll write another 10,000 words. People
with career capital don’t do a lot of things, but what they chose to do,
they do with great intensity and over a great period of time.”
6. Never work without a goal, but make sure your goal is appropriate for the career stage you’re in.
“It’s
very easy to be busy, and it’s very exhausting too, which is sort of
satisfying, but what’s the end result of it? If you just generically
work hard, the bulk of that energy will be wasted,” Newport says, adding
that people can, and often do, fill their days answering emails and
building Powerpoint presentations. He says people should decide,
consciously, “This is the thing I’m working toward in my career right
now.”
Newport
advises leveraging what he calls “little bets,” coined by venture
capitalist Peter Sims, who wrote a book by that name. These, Newport
defines as projects small enough to be completed in less than a month,
that force you to create something new — for example, acquire a new
skill or produce new results — and that give you a concrete product that
can help you garner feedback.
7. Be patient.
In
his interview with Charlie Rose, Steve Martin revealed yet another
important tip for developing one’s career capital, in describing how he
learned the banjo: “[I thought], if I stay with it, then one day I will
have been playing for four years, and anyone who sticks with something
for four years will be pretty good at it.”
“To
me, this is a phenomenal display of patience,” Newport writes, noting
that Martin was acknowledging “the frustrating months of hard work and
mediocre playing ahead.”
But
Newport says this is the exact outlook one should have. “Career capital
is based on what value you offer the working world. If you can do
something of real value, that’s rare. Otherwise it wouldn’t be valuable.
Almost by definition, in order to become valuable in a market, it’s
going to take time. So you need patience, tolerance for working on
things that are hard and making progress that’s slow over a period of
years — not weeks or months.”
The Payoff
People who develop career capital are able to pursue attain something many people covet in their careers: autonomy.
And
Newport demonstrates that career capital is crucial to obtaining it. In
anecdote after anecdote, he describes people who pursued autonomy in
their work before they had accrued enough career capital, and who
therefore failed — the most memorable one being a
marketer-turned-yoga-entrepreneur who wrote an email to The New York
Times, which featured her story, while waiting in line for food stamps.
But,
he recounts numerous other tales of people who were able to demand a
three-month leave, turn down full-time offers to freelance, or take two
years off from medical residency to launch a start-up. These people had
stores of career capital and could use it to shape not only their work,
but their entire lives, into the vision of their dreams.
As
Newport writes, “control over what you do and how you do it is such a
powerful force for building remarkable careers that it could rightly be
called a ‘dream‐job elixir.’” And what’s its essential ingredient?
Career capital.
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