So Good They Can't Ignore You | Cal Newport | Talks at Google

CAL NEWPORT: Good morning, everyone. So I'm going to talk about career counseling, my topic. I want to backtrack a little on some of the ideas that we assume are true and don't question much anymore. And I'm going to try to replace them with some ideas that I think the evidence actually supports better. And I thought that, being at Google, the right place to start would be to say controversial things about Steve Jobs. So I think that's a

good

place to start. In particular, I want to talk about the summer, early summer of 2005, when Steve Jobs took the podium at Stanford Stadium to give his...

I recognize someone down there, Chris. AUDIENCE: Hey, how's it going, man? CAL NEWPORT: Very

good

. Here we go. You remember those ages. Anyway, I'm sorry. I'm not going to get distracted by Chris' stories. So let's go back to the summer of 2005. Steve Jobs takes the podium at Stanford Stadium. He is there to give the commencement speech to Stanford's graduating class. So this is an important thing, because Jobs didn't give many of these kinds of personal

talks

, reflective

talks

. It really wasn't his style. But he did give this talk. The wine. He was wearing sandals under his cloak, but he came.

And he gave this talk, and it was good. And if you look at, say, YouTube views (and I think that's the authoritative way to classify social impact), the two videos in this talk have 6 million views. So this was an important talk. He went very far. He had a lot of points that he made, but I went back and looked at the reactions on social media and the reactions in the news that immediately surrounded the release of the talk. And what you could see was that there was one point in particular that seemed to excite people. And that's about half of this speech where he says, "You have to do what you love.

And if you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." So again, if you go to these reactions on social media, you go to the news surrounding the speech, it's pretty clear how people interpreted what Steve Jobs was saying there. They interpret it as saying, guys, if you want to love what you do for a living, you need to figure out what it is that you love, and then you need to combine this with your job, and then you'll have a career that you love. This was the people's interpretation. Now, in popular slang we often sum this up with the phrase "follow your passion." Jobs didn't say the phrase "follow your passion," but this was people's interpretation of what he meant by that point in his talk.

So, of course, Jobs wasn't the first person to put forward this idea that you should follow your passion. I actually went back to investigate where this was coming from. When did this phrase enter our cultural conversation? Good? What is the history of this phrase that seems so universal right now? And once again, since I seem to depend on Google for almost everything I do, I used Google's Ngram Viewer. Do you know this Google Labs tool? So I used Google's Ngram Viewer to try to understand where this phrase was coming from. So if you don't know this tool, you can put a phrase.

And it will actually review Google's corpus of digitized books and try to understand the occurrences of this phrase in the printed English language over time. So you can put "follow your passion" into this tool and see where it appears in printed books and when we see it actually brought up. And it really surprised me. Here's my morning trivia question: When do you think in the first decade we saw the phrase "follow your passion" in the English language in print? What would you guess? AUDIENCE: 1960s. CAL NEWPORT: 1960s. AUDIENCE: 1980s. CAL NEWPORT: 1980s. AUDIENCE: 1700s. CAL NEWPORT: I don't think

they

'll go that far in Ngram Viewer.

But I'm sure if

they

did, I could be there. Actually, it was in the 1940s and 1950s. There was a play in which there was a group of three lumberjacks. And someone uttered for the first time that I can find in the printed English language: "Follow your passion." But they were talking about a different kind of passion and I wouldn't recommend using this work as a basis for your career advice. So that was in the '50s. You see sort of an increase throughout the '60s as that work is reprinted. It's really in the 1980s that we started to see "follow your passion" appear in the context of career advice.

In the 90s, this graph of occurrences began to have an upward trend. In the early 2000s, it really took off and peaked. By the time Jobs stood there and gave his speech at Stanford Stadium, "follow your passion" had become something of a de facto piece of advice for American career planners and seekers. It's gotten to the point where non-technical professional guides no longer bother trying to explain what the strategy is or trying to give a justification for why it's a good strategy. They assume you know. They assume that you agree that it is the right strategy.

They just jump right into how to figure out what you're passionate about, how we muster up the courage to pursue our passion. So when Jobs stood there and said something that people interpreted as "follow your passion," that wasn't the introduction of the idea. It was more like the idea was being canonized. So we can think of this as a sort of de facto moment when “follow your passion” became the American career gospel. I mean, that's how we think about building a meaningful career in this country. As I mentioned, this got people very excited, if you look at the reports surrounding the talk.

We shouldn't be surprised that they were excited. If you look objectively at this idea of ​​“follow your passion,” we see that it is kind of a surprisingly attractive concept. Because it tells us that not only can you have this work life where you love what you do and it's very meaningful and engaging, but it's actually not that hard to get there. It's a simple equation. You have to figure out what you love, which may take a month of introspection. You do some strength seeking or whatever. You have to figure out what you love and then combine it with your work.

Problem solved. You will love what you do for a living. So it's surprisingly attractive advice. But here's the problem. The problem is that "follow your passion," in addition to being surprisingly attractive, also happens to be surprisingly bad advice. And that is the idea that brought me here today for this talk. So I just published this new book and the idea of ​​this book was to answer a simple question. Why do some people end up loving what they do for a living, while others don't? Now, obviously I'm young. So in this book it wasn't me who said that I would now take advantage of my years of professional wisdom and share my advice, having been in the professional market for two years, if you don't count graduate school.

The point was that I didn't have these answers. I was at a key transition point in my first few years of working life. I was just finishing my academic training, I was about to enter the academic job market. And if this is done correctly, a professorship is supposed to be a job for life. So I was about to take what could have been the first and last job interview of my life. And on the other hand, it had very strict geographic limitations and it was a really bad academic market. So there was a chance that I would have to start more or less from scratch after having trained for something.

So in that transition period I said that if there's ever a time in my life when I need to understand how people build the careers they love, this has to be the time I understand it. If I wait 10 more years, it may be too late. So the book came about because I needed an answer to that question. It is not a chronicle of my own wisdom. It chronicles my own quest to gain this wisdom from other people. So you can think of the book as roughly divided into two parts. In the first part I make my argument for why "following your passion" is actually bad advice if your goal is to end up passionate about what you do for a living.

And then generally speaking, the second part is about, well, what should you do instead? If you study people who end up loving what they do, if they don't follow their passion, what did they do instead? And that's pretty much the second part. So I thought what I would do today is tell two stories. I can tell a story from part one, and we can draw some lessons from it about why I think "follow your passion" is bad advice. And then I'll tell a story from the second part, and then we can draw some lessons from that about what I observed that seems to work best.

And then we can move on to the questions. So let's dive right in. In the first story, I want to go back to Steve Jobs. But now I want to go back a little more in time. Let's say you have a time machine and you can meet a young Steve Jobs again. The first thing you'd probably do is buy Apple stock, but let's say you go back even earlier, to a high school-age Steve Jobs. The biographical sources we have today suggest that if you talk to a young Steve Jobs, you won't get the idea that he was passionate about building a technology company.

He didn't have at that time in his life the passion to change the world through technology. Good? So Steve Jobs didn't go to Berkeley to study electrical engineering, which is what you would have done at that time and place if you were really passionate about electronics. And he didn't go to Stanford or UCLA to study business, which is probably what you would have done then and there if you're passionate about entrepreneurship and business. But instead he went to Reed College, a liberal arts school in Oregon. He studied history, he studied dance. Shortly afterward he dropped out and stayed on campus, walking barefoot, experimenting with extreme diets, and eating free meals from the Hari Krishna temple.

Eventually, he got tired of being completely homeless, returned to California and took a night shift job at Atari. And that was very specific, because he wanted flexibility and not too much responsibility. And he began to study Eastern mysticism, much more seriously. He had just arrived on the shores of the West Coast in this period. At this point he undertook a begging journey to India. After a months-long trip as a beggar to India, he returned, began studying seriously at the Los Altos Zen Center, and began spending more and more time in the All One commune in the north of the state.

So the point of this is that it's a portrait of someone he's looking for. The classic example of someone young, early in his life, trying to figure out what life is about, what he wants to do with it. Many of us went through this stage, but Jobs, being Jobs, couldn't just read Kerouac. In fact, he had to go to India and spend three months, because he is intense in everything he does. But it's basically reflecting something that many of us go through. Trying to understand what we are doing here, what the meaning of life is. He was in search mode.

But what's clear is that he certainly wasn't someone with a very clear vision that I'm passionate about starting a technology company and I'm going to find a way to do it one way or another. It was not at all his way of thinking in the years before Apple Computer. So Apple Computer, how did it come about? I think the right word is that he and Woz stumbled upon the opportunity. Woz had been working on a circuit board for what was essentially the Apple I. Steve Jobs had recently met Paul Terrell, who had one of the world's first computer stores in Mountain View.

Then Jobs came back and said, "Look, this circuit board was popular at the Homebrew Computing Club." I want to sell you 50 so you can sell them to the fans around here. A previous Jobs biographer, Jeffrey Young, actually did the math. And they were looking to obtain between 1,000 and 2,000 dollars in profit with that exchange. And I thought that number was low. I even contacted Paul Terrell again recently and he confirmed the details. Yeah. He basically came to sell 50 of these things to hobbyists. It was a small transaction. They had made several other quick money making schemes like this before.

But Paul Terrell told Jobs: I don't want to buy circuit boards. I want to buy fully assembled computers. Paul Terrell had a vision that there was going to be a market for computers as household appliances, that that was coming. And it must be recognized that Jobs understood that opportunity when he saw it. And he did it with all his might. He did some tricks, ordering cash on delivery. He did not have money. But he brought them together and Apple Computer eventually grew out of that. So there are a couple of lessons to draw from that story.

The first lesson is that the path to passion is often much more complicated than simply figuring out in advance this is what I want to do and then going out and doing it. So when we look at Jobs' story there, he didn't have a pre-existing passion for starting a technology company. His path at Apple Computer and the passion he had for that company was more complicated than knowing in advance what he wanted to do. So if you go out and study people like Jobs, who ended up loving his work (and I studied this extensively while researching the book), you'll find that that path moreComplicated is more the rule than the exception.

That it is actually very rare to find someone who really had clarity in advance about what they were passionate about and then threw themselves into it to form a career that ended up being a true source of satisfaction. The roads there are usually much more complicated. One of my favorite quotes about this is from NPR host Ira Glass, host of "This American Life," who is someone who loves his work. And there's this cool online interview where some college students come to Glass to ask him how we build a career like his. And he says that in the movie there's this idea that you should follow your dreams.

I don't buy that. He starts talking for a while about how you have to force abilities to appear and it's very difficult. And when he sees their faces fall, he finally says, guys, I see you're trying to figure all this out in the abstract, and I think that's his tragic mistake. That's why I like the way Glass put it. The idea that you can figure out in the abstract what you're supposed to do with your career is not just a mistake, it's a tragic mistake. And I think we all feel that. Good? I mean, this notion that if you think you can figure out in advance what you're supposed to do, well, what happens when you don't have that clear passion?

It's confusion. It's anxiety. It's a chronic job change. It's reading too many blogs and spending too much time on the four-hour work week. You know what I mean? This is what happens if you get too caught up in the notion that with one big gesture you can love your life next week. That is the first lesson we can draw from that story. The path to passion in reality, when you really study it, is usually much more complicated than that advice tells us. The second lesson we can draw from that story is that we really have no reason to believe that advice should work.

We are so used to hearing "follow your passion" that we consider it self-evident. Well, of course, that's a good thing to do. But if we put on our anthropological hats and say, well, let's really look at this advice, what it really says, you'll notice that they are some really strong statements. Affirmations that really ask for support, and it is difficult to find that support. So, “follow your passion,” first of all, states that most of us have pre-existing passions that we can follow. To follow a passion, everyone must have my passion. Good? People talk about, well, I think my passion is this, I think my passion is that. “Follow Your Passion” is based on the idea that we have pre-existing passions that, for some reason, fit well into a modern knowledge work economy and that we just need to identify them.

We have no evidence that that is the case. One study I talk about in the book is that of a Canadian psychologist who is an expert in passion. He developed "the" survey that psychologists use to determine if this is one of his passions or is simply an interest. He gave it to 500 Canadian university students. And although most of them had passions, when I went through the crisis, it seemed like about 4% of those passions were relevant to a career or a job. The most popular passion by far was hockey, if that helps. Once again, there may be an amazing collection of hockey talent at this school and they could follow their passion and all go to the NHL.

But chances are, if you told these 500 students to find out what you're passionate about and follow it, all but 4% would be in trouble. So we don't have much evidence that most people have a pre-existing passion. The second statement in this advice that you should follow your passion is that combining your job with a pre-existing interest will give you an attractive and fulfilling career. At first it seems obvious. But if you really dive into this kind of voluminous research on workplace satisfaction, it's an incredibly well-studied field. And it turns out that building a satisfying and attractive professional career is complicated.

And the idea that we can boil it down to all that matters is that you've related this work to something that interests you but that doesn't match the literature. So yesterday I was on NPR with a Harvard Business School professor who talked in detail, I'll say, about her research on this topic. And I could easily spend an hour talking about the fine, detailed details they found about what really matters when it comes to building a fulfilling creative career. So this idea that I was interested in this and I adapted it to my career is all you need to make a fulfilling career, again, it's just not supported by evidence.

That's the second lesson about "follow your passion": we don't have any evidence that this should really work. So that's my case against that advice. It doesn't match the stories we find in reality and we don't have much support for it. Then we can move on to the more positive section. Well, if "following your passion" doesn't work, what do people who end up loving what they do do? So when I went out and studied people who love what they do, I found a pattern that shows up quite often. Not everyone followed it, but it was quite common.

And it's different from following your passion. That's what I want to talk about in the second story. I want to tell the story of someone whose path, I believe, is a great case study in this pattern so that we can draw lessons from a pattern about the history of it. So let's talk about Bill McKibben. So Bill McKibben is a writer. Some of you may know him. He writes environmental books. "The End of Nature" is what made him famous, but he has a dozen different books. He is now an activist too. He was arrested last year outside the White House for a climate change protest.

Anyway, Bill McKibben is someone who has always fascinated me, because his life, for me, always resonated. He lives in a cabin in Vermont and writes these important books, and I thought everything was great. So, in a somewhat stalkerish way, I've read basically everything written about him. I have gone to his events. I probably know as much about Bill McKibben as his analyst does. So I don't know that that's a good thing, but it's kind of a trait of nonfiction authors. We have to obsessively follow things. Here is the story of Bill McKibben. The short story is that he comes to Harvard as a student, so he's a smart guy.

Now, I don't know if there are any Harvard people here. But at Harvard grades aren't really what you focus on, because at Harvard you get an A for getting half the letters in your name right when you signed the test. That's not what people care about. I'm a Dartmouth guy, so I have to... that's how the Dartmouth-Harvard rivalry works. Dartmouth makes very clever comments about Harvard, and then Harvard forgets we exist. That's how that rivalry goes, but I take my hits. So for the most part it's extracurricular activities. Good? They have these serious, full-time extracurricular jobs.

If you don't, you feel like a slacker. Then McKibben got involved with the Crimson, which is the student newspaper. And he worked hard there. He worked his way up the ranks and ended up in an editor position. He left Harvard and could parlay the editor position at Crimson into a staff position at The New Yorker. Not writing 10,000-word McPhee-style essays, not giving town talks, but that's where you start at The New Yorker. So he goes to The New Yorker. He is now working with some of the best editors and writers in the world, honing his craft again.

And where his story takes this nice turn is that just when he's becoming known in that New York world, he leaves The New Yorker. He moves to a cabin in Vermont. He has a contract to write a book about something people weren't really talking about at the time: global warming. And he wrote "The End of Nature," which was one of the first important books on this topic. It put him on the map as an important thinker in environmental thought and allowed him to have this career where he was able to live in Vermont and write books on topics that were important to him.

He eventually landed a position as thinker-in-residence at Middlebury and is now dedicated to activism. So it is a career that you are very passionate about. But it's a good example, and the reason I tell you that is because it's a good example of the pattern that often emerges when you study people who love what they do. So let's figure out what that pattern is, what it did, and what we can learn from. So the first observation about his path is often the most controversial observation I make when talking about this topic: what he did didn't matter much.

This is how he built the life that he was passionate about as a writer. I would surmise that there are many different fields in which Bill McKibben could have built a working life that he equally loved. There is nothing intrinsic in his DNA about writing. There's no mutated gene that evolved a couple hundred years ago that means you're destined to be a writer. So what did McKibben care? Well, based on all the interviews I've read with him and the books I've read, it seems that what really matters about him is more general. That he wants autonomy in his life and he wants to have an impact on the world.

He made it as an environmental writer. But I would say, conjecturally, that any career path that would have allowed him to have a strong sense of autonomy and a strong sense of impact on the world, would have been a career path in which he would have found just as much passion and enjoyed it just as much. And this is something that came up again and again. When you study people who love what they do, the details of the job aren't what's important. There are almost always some general lifestyle traits. Maybe you want autonomy. Maybe you want power and respect.

Maybe you really want an impact. Maybe you really want to be creative. Maybe what you're looking for is a large amount of time available, that you want to have a schedule in which work plays a very small role. Different lifestyle traits resonate differently with different people. But ultimately, from my research, it seems that this is what matters when someone feels a real sense of satisfaction and commitment to his career, that his career has given him the kind of broader traits that matter. And these traits are more general than specific jobs. There are often many, many different paths that can lead you to these traits.

So there is no need to worry about deciding what is my true calling, what is the work that I should do. Because it doesn't matter. The details are much less important than these general features. So that's kind of the first observation. The details of what you do may be less important than you think. The second observation is that McKibben started out by getting really good at something. So, in his case, he became very good at writing, and it took some time. He had to go through the Crimson. He had to fight his way to The New Yorker.

But he became very good at writing, and that's how he got started. This pattern is remarkably consistent in the lives of people who end up really loving his work. They have this period where they develop what I like to call a rare and valuable skill. And when you think about this in the context of the first lesson, it suddenly makes sense. Good? We can start putting these pieces together. The way they build fulfilling careers is by starting by developing rare and valuable skills. This gives them real value in the market, in the labor market. Now you can look at these general traits that you want in your work life, whether it's autonomy or impact like McKibben or something else, depending on what resonates with you.

And they say these traits are rare and valuable too. It would be great to have them. Therefore, they are not distributed in the corners. I need something rare and valuable to offer in exchange for these rare and valuable traits that will make my career great. This way, they can take advantage of their rare and valuable skills to acquire more of these traits in their working lives. That's exactly what McKibben did. If, as a senior at Harvard, he had said that I want to live an autonomous, impactful life, that I'm going to move to Vermont and write these great books, it wouldn't have worked.

I still didn't have enough writing skills to write "The End of Nature." He had to develop a rarer and more valuable skill to offer in exchange for the rare and valuable trait of being able to live in Vermont and write books about what he wanted and have them sell, support him, and have an impact. So this equation is, in a sense, my replacement for “follow your passion,” and it is somewhat based on observing the lives of real people. They begin by developing rare and valuable skills. They then use these skills as leverage to acquire the kind of general traits that matter to them, which is why they care less about the specific job they do and much more about how they approach the job they have.

In my construction skills, have I plateaued? How can I continue developing skills? In the book I call it "professional capital." How big is my professional capital reserve? If I want to enjoy my work life more, maybe I shouldconsider growing that store faster. So it's a different way of looking at these same issues. And if we go back, we see that, in fact, this is exactly what Steve Jobs himself did. He didn't have a clear pre-existing passion: he wanted to start a technology company. But when he saw an opportunity, he took it and did it intensely. He said, if I'm going to try this computer thing, I'm going to do it to the absolute limit of my ability.

I want to be so good that they can't

ignore

me. And by doing that, by building machines that were better than anyone else was capable of building and that could blow the MITS Altair out of the water, the most advanced personal computers that existed at the time, he amassed a huge reserve of professional capital. . He was able to more or less control the way his work life progressed. He couldn't control exactly how Apple was doing, but he could be working in technology. He could set the tone for Manzana. He could pursue these other ventures later. He built a life that he was very passionate about.

Not following a passion, but passionately doing the work he was doing. So to go back to where we started, right where we started, right with Jobs, we can summarize everything we said today by noting that when it comes to thinking about your own career and building a career that is meaningful to you, we can Look at Steve Jobs . But we should do what Steve Jobs actually did and not what he said. Thank you. CAL NEWPORT: I guess we just ask questions, so yeah. AUDIENCE: It seems so... I really liked your talk. And it seems to me that a lot of what you say rings true.

But it also seems like if you really want to develop that skill, don't you have to love the skill you're developing to develop it? Because if I wasn't interested in computers, I don't think he would have ever turned me into a reasonably competent programmer. Good? CAL NEWPORT: Yes. AUDIENCE: Because it would be too painful. CAL NEWPORT: Yes. I call this the pre-existing passion argument, because it's one of the most common questions that comes up when talking about this philosophy of how people construct work they love. In fact, there is interesting research on this. There is research on how virtuosos, for example, develop their level of virtuoso skill.

This arose from Bloom's work at the University of Chicago. And they studied a whole variety of virtuosos. Not only musicians and athletes, but also mathematicians and scientists. And they tried to understand how they developed this enormous level of skill. And his most surprising discovery was that there was no clear, burning passion in advance. And in fact, what tends to happen when people develop a lot of skills is that it's a snowball effect. So something happens early on that generates interest in a field. Therefore, you may have become interested in computers early in your life because some encounter with them seemed interesting to you.

That interest gives you enough intrinsic motivation to get through that first stage of deliberate practice where you develop some skills and separate yourself a little from other people and, oh yeah, you're good with computers. That becomes part of your identity. That gives you enough intrinsic motivation to move on to the next difficult stage of deliberate practice. You move away from that. And now you have separated yourself further and you feel it more strongly. So, here's what happens: over time, the snowball effect increases your skill into something better and better, because at each stage you feel like you're better at it.

And it feels more and more like your identity. In other words, an initial interest becomes a stronger and stronger passion as time goes by. So what I advise people is that if something is interesting to you, the research says that is enough to start the skill acquisition phase. It's a really long road. It's thousands of hours of deliberate practice, but you can rest assured that you won't have to do it completely blind. As you progress, you will have small milestones of achievement that will give you more motivation to move on to the next. AUDIENCE: Is this the 10,000 hours thing?

CAL NEWPORT: Yes. So, 10,000 hours is Anders Ericsson's rule: for expert-level artists, it typically takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which is equivalent to about 10 years of more or less full-time work. My argument is that in many fields, especially knowledge work fields, very few people do any deliberate practice. Deliberate practice like a surgeon would do to get better at surgery (it takes 10,000 hours to become great surgeons) is very uncomfortable. You have to work. You have to be systematic about this is where I'm weak, and I'm going to have to do what I don't like to get better at it.

Most people in knowledge work don't do that. We avoid inconvenience. We use email to get away from any type of mental discomfort if it is something that requires concentration. So guess that in the fields of knowledge work, if you put deliberate, systematic practice into what you do, you will find a gap from your peers well below 10,000 hours. Therefore, becoming a chess grandmaster could take 10,000 hours. But it may only take a few hundred systematic work to learn some, say, new programming paradigm to open a fairly large and invaluable gap. Yes. AUDIENCE: I really like the notion of rare and valuable abilities, but I'm curious about what's valuable to whom and how you decide what's valuable.

I raised my hand because he was talking about something similar to my girlfriend. And she said, but she really wanted to be a social worker. But it turns out that being valuable to people who don't have money doesn't get you that far. CAL NEWPORT: Yes. Yes. This is a crucial point. I think one of the most difficult points of the work approach to career capital is understanding where to generate capital. So one thing I noticed that stood out to me when I studied people who seemed to apply this philosophy is that they tended to be people who, either by design or by chance, had been exposed to stars in their field or people in their field whose status current really resonated with them.

That's why they rarely fly blind. Good? They have a certain feeling that in my field this person represents where I would like to go. And now I can understand what the skill was that got him there. What does he do that others don't do? Now, for many people I studied, this was just a coincidence. It's no surprise that you often find that someone successful in a field has parents in that field. Good? That means they have this expert-level knowledge about what capital to build. But I propose that once you understand that, you can deliberately go out and try to find this information.

So when you're in a particular field, you can say who within Google, for example, represents where I would like to be in my career. In fact, you can go systematically and try to understand what they do well that other people don't, and that gives them that kind of control. That's why I advise people to systematically investigate how to work backwards from the stars, trying to understand what specific skills are. And I think that's really good to point out. Because if you're not deliberate in trying to understand what capital you should build, it's very difficult to do it right just by luck.

Yes. AUDIENCE: Is there some kind of limit point? You mentioned that it could be 10 more years before you have these opportunities. Good? Is there a point where the game changes, like after a certain period of time in a race or on a track it's harder to make a jump? Sometimes you see people who say: I worked at this advertising company and now I'm a beekeeper or whatever. CAL NEWPORT: Yes. AUDIENCE: Is there any point where it is more difficult to change? CAL NEWPORT: Well, that's a good question. I think career capital as a kind of metaphor helps you understand those kinds of decisions.

That's why I tell a story in my book about a marketing executive. Exactly your example here. Except instead of the beekeeper, she quit and took a four-month yoga instruction course—or four weeks, really—to become a yoga instructor in the New York area. And at the end of that first year, she was on track to make something like $15,000, which supposedly in the New York area doesn't go as far as you'd like. Professional capital helps you understand the mistakes of that movement. She had a lot of marketing capital. She had no capital in yoga. So, by jumping into a four-week instructional course, she gained some career capital.

Not much at all. Therefore, she shouldn't expect to be able to get big things in her life right away, because she doesn't have much capital there. So when you think about things like that, it helps temper the impulse to try to start over or make something from scratch. Because if you believe that accumulating capital and leveraging it is what makes you love your job and not the problem of matching, I'm more meant for this job than that job, you'll be much less likely to jump into something completely new. Because you are actually slowing down your progress to have more control and leverage.

So I think this career capital metaphor helps you evaluate whether a change that you're making is that I'm bringing my capital with me, but I'm bringing it to a new market within my field that will have some impact, versus I'm leaving my capital on the table and do something completely new. It allows you to have those nuances that without the metaphor can be a little confusing. Yes. AUDIENCE: I guess I'm old enough to miss the whole "follow your passion" thing. CAL NEWPORT: It really was my generation. Yes. AUDIENCE: And the advice I received, although it was never so summed up in just a handful of words, was more to try as many things as possible.

Don't be afraid to try things. Don't be afraid to fail them. And this could somehow have the same end result, as long as you're willing to pay attention to what you're doing and be persistent? Is this... CAL NEWPORT: Yeah. It's an interesting point, because in a sense... AUDIENCE: Is that bad advice or... CAL NEWPORT: So I think it's good advice if it's in context. from a particular source of professional capital, if that makes sense? So if you're accumulating capital in technology, exposing yourself to a lot of things is actually a great way to find potential opportunity asymmetries in the market, somewhere where you can actually make a move like Steve Jobs did.

But being on Google and exploring theater and film and also exploring beekeeping, well, you're crossing strong fault lines of professional capital. They have no relationship. And then you run the risk of slowing down your capital acquisition in any particular. So I always understand the kind of hybrid approach where you have a general field where you're generating capital. By putting yourself out there, you are actually gaining more knowledge. In fact, having more experience can help you develop and apply it. So I think that's where that advice is valuable. I think it's dangerous when people apply themselves too broadly and cover too many things that are too disparate, if that makes sense.

AUDIENCE: That's right. CAL NEWPORT: Once again, what I'm doing here is geekizing something that isn't geeky. Good? It is my life and my passion. I am a scientist. I'm a computer scientist like you, so you understand this. So I'll approach it from that point of view. But I think it's helpful, and I'm surprised people haven't done this before, to have a little more systematic approach to this, even if it's a little overkill in some cases. I think it actually gives us a lot of insight into these more confusing types of questions. Yes. AUDIENCE: If you were a parent and you wanted your children to do this, would it make sense for them to become interested in things that you believe will one day be rare and valuable?

CAL NEWPORT: Well, it seems like it's more important if you're young, that you need to develop the ability to develop skills, to deliberately focus on something. I look at university, for example: there you acquire specific skills, but you also acquire the ability to face difficult intellectual challenges. Or if you are given a term paper, you have a month to understand this topic and write about it intelligently. The reason you should try to get an A in that is not because you're looking for a job where you'll have to write term papers to make a living. It's because you will be in a knowledge-based work economy and you will have to tackle difficult and cognitively demanding tasks.

And you not only want to do it well, but also work hard while doing it. So my guess...and I'm not a father yet, but in two weeks I will be. So I'm thinking about this a lot... it's just concentrating less... I'm thinking I'll concentrate less. We'll see. We'll see what really happens. But I'll focus less on the details that you have to choose right now what you want to do, because that leads to this whole myth that you have a pre-existing aptitude, a passion that you have to discover. And really focus more on working hard at something, taking something and developing the skill because that's... the ability to do it is what's going to be useful to you, not the particular skills that you acquire when you're 16.Yes.

AUDIENCE: I'm sorry. Have you discovered any best practices in terms of similar daily habits that knowledge workers do to mimic deliberate practice? I mean, you mentioned getting distracted by email. We all work in a company where we probably receive hundreds of emails a day. And it's very easy to just press the email button. CAL NEWPORT: Yes. AUDIENCE: What are ways I would like to participate, even if it's a couple hundred hours of deliberate practice? Are there things that high performers do? CAL NEWPORT: Yes. AUDIENCE: Lead more to success? CAL NEWPORT: Yes. There is. There is. In fact, I have a chapter in the book where I take two high-performing people, a venture capitalist and a television screenwriter, and tried to understand how they apply deliberate practice in their work right now and how they used it to get to where they want. were.

And there are tips. As if the VC actually used a spreadsheet to track his time. And in particular to track email time. And he had these well-chosen goals about how much time he should spend on email because he wasn't getting much value out of it compared to researching deals. And he tracked his time daily to make sure he hit his numbers. Because he was tracking him, he forced him to check much less frequently on the lot, because he had particular numbers that he was trying to hit. And that helped him be more efficient. The television writer, similarly, everything was based on the fact that he had... he was very clear about what good meant.

He had a whole group of collaborators and advisors who could look at the scripts and say what was wrong with them. And he wrote such an intense amount of writing. He was working on four or five projects at a time and trying to go in and get intense feedback on them, which is another part of deliberate practice. So there are many specific strategies. I talk about some of them. I think having the general idea of ​​the deliberate practice I do can help you create your own. I also think it's a rich topic that needs to be explored on its own.

This is one of the number one questions I get. People are really interested in the specifics of deliberate practice in knowledge work. I think this is really going to be a convergence. It's going to be a big problem in the next five or ten years. Then you are asking the right questions. Yes. AUDIENCE: Let me back up a question about what you teach your children, for what it's worth. My wife and I have used professionals and such for our children. So it worked out pretty well. But in fact, David Brooks and his people have written about a lot of this and a lot of... what you really learn from your parents, if you're lucky, which my kids weren't necessarily, is a kind of strength and perseverance.

The idea that you don't give up, that you learn to focus deeply on a problem. CAL NEWPORT: Yes. AUDIENCE: It's a much more fundamental and attitudinal approach to life, an approach to things, than anything that has anything to do with your specific professional skills. That seems to be better correlated with how successful the children are, how successful parents have successful children. CAL NEWPORT: Yes. That's right. And Angela Duckworth's research on value is, in fact, hot right now and captures many of these ideas. I think it's absolutely true. I work with a theoretical computer scientist at Georgetown who is a phenomenal problem solver.

It turns out that his father was a mathematician who used to give him these riddles when he was young, and from time to time he would get in there with unsolved problems. And he gave her great practice in sticking with problems and working on them without expecting to get an answer right away. It turns out that's exactly a skill you need to be a successful professional mathematician, because you have to be able to do it. Today I am going to spend 10 hours on this problem. And I do not know. Maybe it's unsolvable. Maybe it's not, but you're making the most of the hours.

AUDIENCE: But it's probably also generalized. CAL NEWPORT: I think so, and that's why I think thinking about school as a practice, taking on difficult intellectual challenges, not only doing them well, but also expanding your ability, is a great way to think about it, at least in the current economy. Alright. Well, again, thank you. It was great coming here. It was great to meet you all. If you're interested, the book is called "So Good They Can't Ignore You." Get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or wherever. I want to thank you again and thank you for inviting me to come speak.

I really enjoyed it. Thank you.