CAL NEWPORT: Good morning,
everybody.
So I'm going to talk about
career advice, my topic.
I want to push back a little bit
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 figured being at Google,
the right place to start would
be saying controversial things
about Steve Jobs.
So I think that's a good place
for us to get going.
So 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 [? Pleho ?]
AUDIENCE: Hey, how's
it going, man?
CAL NEWPORT: All right.
There we go.
You remember those ages.
Anyways, I'm sorry.
I'm not going to get distracted
with Chris stories.
So let's go back to
summer of 2005.
Steve Jobs takes the podium,
Stanford Stadium.
He's there to give the
commencement address to the
graduating class of Stanford.
So this is kind of a big deal,
because Jobs did not give a
lot of these sort of personal
talks, reflective talks.
It wasn't really his style.
But he did give this talk.
He came.
He did wear sandals under his
robe, but he did come.
And he gave this talk, and
it was a good one.
And if you look at, say, YouTube
views-- and I think
that's the authoritative way
of ranking social impact--
the two videos of this talk
have 6 million views.
So this was an important talk.
It went really far.
So he had a lot of points that
he made, but I went back and
looked at the social media
reactions and the news
reactions that immediately
surrounded the talk's release.
And what you could see is
there was one point in
particular that seemed to
get people excited.
And that's about halfway through
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
social media reactions, you go
to the news reports that
surround the speech, it's
pretty clear how people
interpreted what Steve Jobs
was saying there.
They interpret him as saying,
guys, if you want to love what
you do for your living, you need
to figure out what you
love, and then you need to go
match this to your job, and
then you'll have a career
that you love.
This was people's
interpretation.
Now, in popular slang we often
summarize this 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 with that
point in his talk.
So, of course, Jobs was not the
first person to introduce
this idea that you should
follow your passion.
In fact, I actually went
back to research where
did this come from.
When did this phrase enter
into our cultural
conversation?
Right?
What's the history of this
phrase there right now that
seems so universal?
And once again, because I seem
to rely on Google for just
about everything I do, I used
Google's Ngram Viewer.
Do you guys know this tool
from Google Labs?
So I used Google's Ngram Viewer
to try to understand
where this phrase came from.
So if you don't know this tool,
you can put in a phrase.
And it will actually
go through the--
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 does it show up in
printed books, and when do we
actually see it raised.
And I was actually surprised.
Here's my early-morning
trivia question--
when you think the first decade
was that we actually
see the phrase "follow your
passion" show up in the
printed English language?
What would you guess?
AUDIENCE: '60s.
CAL NEWPORT: '60s.
AUDIENCE: '80s.
CAL NEWPORT: '80s.
AUDIENCE: 1700s.
CAL NEWPORT: I don't think they
go back that far in the
Ngram Viewer.
But I'm sure if they did,
it might be there.
It was actually in the
1940s and '50s.
There was a play in which a
group of three woodcutters
stood around.
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 type of passion, and
I wouldn't recommend using this
play as the foundation
for your career advice.
So that was the '50s.
You see a kind of spike up
throughout the '60s as that
play is reprinted.
It's really the 1980s that we
start to see "follow your
passion" show up in the context
of career advice.
In the '90s that graph
of occurrences
begins to trend upwards.
By the early 2000s, it's really
spiked and hit its peak.
By the time Jobs stood up there
and gave his speech at
Stanford Stadium , "follow your
passion" had become a
sort of de facto piece of advice
for American career
planners and seekers.
It got to the point where
non-technical career guides
don't bother anymore to try to
explain what the strategy is
or try to give a justification
for why
this is a good strategy.
They assume you know it.
They assume that you agree that
it's the right strategy.
They just jump right into how do
you figure out what you're
passionate about, how do we
build up the courage to go
after our passion.
So when Jobs stood up there and
said something that people
interpreted as saying "follow
your passion," this was not
the introduction of the idea.
It was more like the idea
was being canonized.
So we can think of this as sort
of the de facto moment
when "follow your passion"
became the
American career gospel.
I mean, this is how we think
about building a meaningful
career in this country.
So as I mentioned, this got
people very excited, if you
look at the reports surrounding
the talk.
We shouldn't be surprised
that they got excited.
If you look at this idea
"follow your passion"
objectively, we see that it's
a sort of astonishingly
appealing concept.
Because it tells us that not
only can you have this working
life in which you love what
you do and it's very
meaningful and engaging, but
that it's actually not that
hard to get there.
It's a simple equation.
You have to figure out what you
love, which maybe takes
you a month of introspection.
You do some strength finders
or whatever.
You got to figure out what
you love, and then you
match it to your work.
Problem solved.
You'll love what you
do for a living.
So it's sort of a astonishingly
appealing piece of advice.
But here's the problem.
The problem is that "follow your
passion," in addition to
be astonishingly appealing,
also happens to be
astonishingly bad advice.
And that's 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 so many
other people don't?
Now, obviously I'm young.
So this book was not me saying
I will now draw for my years
of career wisdom and share my
advice, having been in the
career market for two
years now, if you
don't count grad school.
The point was I didn't
have these answers.
I was at a key transition
point in my own
early working life.
I was just finishing up my
academic training, was about
to enter the academic
job market.
And if this is done right, a
professorship is supposed to
be a job for life.
So I was about to do what might
have been my first and
last job interviews
of my life.
And on the other hand, I had
these really tight geographic
constraints, and it was a really
bad academic market.
So there was this chance that I
would have more or less have
to start from scratch after
having trained for something.
So in that period of transition
I said if there's
any time in my life that I need
to understand how people
build careers they love, this
has to be the time when I
understand this.
If I wait 10 more years,
it might be too late.
So the book actually came out
of me needing an answer for
that question.
It doesn't chronicle
my own wisdom.
It chronicles my own
quest to get this
wisdom from other people.
So you can think of the book as
roughly being in two parts.
The first part I lay out my
argument for why "follow your
passion" is actually bad advice
if your goal is to end
up passionate about what
you do for a living.
And then, roughly speaking,
the second part is about,
well, what should
you do instead.
If you study people who do end
up loving what they do, if
they're not following their
passion, what was it that they
did instead.
And that's more or less
the second part.
So I thought what I would do
today was tell two stories.
I can tell one story from the
first part, and we can draw
some lessons from that 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
seems to work better instead.
And then we can go to questions
after that.
So let's jump right in.
The first story, I want to
return to Steve Jobs.
But now I want to rewind time
back a little further.
Let's say you had a time machine
and you could go back
to meet a young Steve Jobs.
Probably the first thing you
would do is go buy Apple
stock, but let's say you go back
even earlier than that in
a high-school age Steve Jobs.
The biographical sources we have
today suggest that if you
talk to a young Steve Jobs, you
would not come away with
the idea that he was passionate
about building a
technology company.
He did not have at that point
in his life a passion for
changing the world through
technology.
Right?
So Steve Jobs did not go to
Berkeley to study electrical
engineering, which is what you
would have done in that time
and that 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 in that time
and that place if you're
very passionate about
entrepreneurship and business.
But he instead went to Reed
College, a liberal arts school
up in Oregon.
He studied history,
studied dance.
Pretty soon afterwards he
dropped out and hung out on
campus, walking around barefoot,
experimenting with
sort of extreme diets, bumming
free meals from the Hari
Krishna temple.
Eventually, he got fed up with
being completely destitute,
came back to California, 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, way more seriously.
It had just arrived on the
shores of the West Coast in
this period.
He went on a mendicant's
journey to
India in this point.
Months' long mendicant's journey
to India, came back,
started to study seriously at
the Los Altos Zen Center, and
began to spend an increasing
amount of time with the All
One commune upstate.
So the point of this is that is
a portrait of someone who
is seeking.
The classic example of someone
young, early in their life,
trying to figure out what life's
about, what they want
to do with their life.
A lot of us go through this
stage, but Jobs being Jobs
couldn't just read Kerouac.
He had to actually go to India
and spend three months,
because he's intense about
everything he does.
But he's basically reflecting
something that a lot of us
went through ourselves.
Trying to understand what are
we doing here, what's the
meaning of life.
He was in a seeking mode.
But what's clear about that is
this was certainly not someone
with a crystal-clear vision of I
am passionate about starting
a technology company, and I'm
going to find a way to do that
one way or the other.
It was not at all his mind frame
in the years leading up
Apple Computer.
So Apple Computer, how
did it come about?
I think the right word is that
him and Woz stumbled into 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
first computer stores in the
world up in Mountain View.
So 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 it to the hobbyists
around here.
An earlier biographer of Jobs,
Jeffrey Young, actually
crunched the numbers.
And they were looking to make
around 1,000 to $2,000 profit
off of that exchange.
And I thought that
number was low.
So I even got back in touch with
Paul Terrell recently,
and he confirmed the
details of it.
Yeah.
He came in to sell 50 of these
things to hobbyists basically.
It was a small-time
transaction.
They had done several other
quick money-making schemes
like this before.
But Paul Terrell said to
Jobs, I don't want
to buy circuit boards.
I want to buy fully assembled
computers.
Paul Terrell had the vision that
there was going to be a
market for computers
as appliances,
that this was coming.
And Jobs, to his credit,
understood that opportunity
when he saw it.
And he went at it full out.
He did some trickiness,
COD ordering.
He didn't have money.
But he got those together, and
Apple Computer was eventually
borne out of that.
So there's a couple lessons
to draw from that story.
The first lesson is the path to
passion is often way more
complicated than simply figuring
out in advance this
is what I want to do and then
going out and doing it.
So when looked at Jobs's story
there, he did not have a
preexisting passion to go start
a technology company.
His path in the Apple Computer
and the passion he had for
that company was more
complicated than him figuring
out in advance what
he wanted to do.
So if you go out and study
people like Jobs, who ended up
loving their work -- and I
studied this extensively
researching the book-- you
find that that more
complicated path is more the
rule than the exception.
That it's actually very rare to
find someone who really did
have clarity about what they
were passionate about in
advance and then went after it
to form their career that
ended up being a real source
of satisfaction.
The paths there are often
way more complicated.
One of my favorite quotes about
this is from the NPR
host Ira Glass, "This American
Life" host, who is someone who
loves his work.
And there's this great interview
online where some
college students come to Glass
to ask him, how do we build a
career like yours.
And he says there's this idea
in the movie that you should
follow your dreams.
I don't buy that.
He starts talking for a while
about how you have to force
skills to come and
it's really hard.
And when he sees their faces
fall, he finally says, guys, I
see you're trying to figure this
all out in the abstract,
and I think that's your
tragic mistake.
So 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, but it's a
tragic mistake.
And I think we all sort
of feel that.
Right?
I mean, this notion that if you
think that 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 chronic job hopping.
It's reading too many blogs,
spending too much time on the
four-hour workweek.
You know what I mean?
This is what happens if you
get too caught up in this
notion that with one grand
gesture you can be loving your
life next week.
So that's the first lesson
to draw from that story.
The path to passion in reality
when you really study it is
often way more complicated
than what that
advice tells us.
The second lesson to draw from
that story is that we really
don't have any reason to believe
that that advice
should work.
We're so used to hearing "follow
your passion" that we
think about it as just
being 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 actually look at
this advice, what's it really
saying, you notice that it's
some really strong claims.
Claims that really beg
supporting, and it's hard to
find that support.
So "follow your passion," first
of all, claims that most
of us have preexisting passions
we can follow.
In order to follow a
passion, everyone
has to have my passion.
Right?
People talk about, well, I think
my passion is this, I
think my passion is that.
"Follow your passion" relies
on this idea that we have
preexisting passions that for
some reason are well suited to
a modern knowledge work economy
and that we just have
to identify those.
We don't have evidence
that that's the case.
So one study I talk about in
the book is a Canadian
psychologist who's an
expert on passion.
He developed "the" survey that
psychologists use to determine
is this a passion of yours, or
is this just an interest.
He gave it to 500 Canadian
university students.
And while most of them did have
passions, when I went
through the breakdown, it seemed
to be roughly 4% of
those passions were relevant
to a career or a job.
The most popular passion by far
was hockey, if that helps.
Again, it's possible that
there's this sort of
astonishing collection of hockey
talent at this school
and they could follow their
passion and all go to the NHL.
But more likely, the point is if
you told these 500 students
figure out what you're
passionate about and follow
it, all but 4% were going
to be in trouble.
So we don't have a lot evidence
that most people have
preexisting passion.
The second claim being made by
this advice that you should
follow your passion is that
matching your work to a
preexisting interest is going
to make you have an engaging
and satisfying career.
It sort of seems self-evident
at first.
But if you actually dive into
this sort of voluminous
research on workplace
satisfaction--
it's an incredibly well
studied field.
And it turns out that building
a satisfying, engaging career
is a complicated thing to do.
And the idea that we can reduce
it down to all that
matters is that you've matched
this job to something you're
interested in just doesn't
match the literature.
So yesterday I was on NPR with
a Harvard Business School
professor who talked at some
detailed length, I will say,
about her research
on this topic.
And she could easily fill an
hour talking about the subtle,
detail things they found about
what really matters in making
a creative career that's
satisfying.
So this idea that I was
interested in this and I
matched it to my career is all
you need to make a satisfying
career, again, is just not
backed by the evidence.
So that's the second lesson
about "follow your passion" is
that we don't have any evidence
that this should
actually work.
So that's my case against
that advice.
It doesn't match the stories
we find in reality, and we
don't have a lot of
support for it.
So we can move to the more
positive section.
Well, if "follow your passion"
doesn't work, what are people
doing that do end up loving
what they do?
So when I went out there, when I
studied people who love what
they do, I did find a pattern
that shows up pretty often.
Not everyone followed it, but
it was pretty common.
And it is different than
following your passion.
So that's what I want to talk
about in the second story.
I want to tell the story of
someone whose path, I think,
is a great case study in this
pattern so we can draw lessons
from a pattern about
his story.
So let's talk about
Bill McKibben.
So Bill McKibben is a writer.
Some of you might know him.
He writes environmental books.
"End of Nature" is what made him
famous, but he has a dozen
different books out.
He's also an activist now.
He was arrested last year in
front of the White House for a
climate change protest.
Anyway, so Bill McKibben
is someone who's always
fascinated me, because his life,
to me, always resonated.
He sort of lives in this cabin
in Vermont and writes these
important books, and it all
seemed very cool to me.
So I somewhat stalkerishly have
read basically everything
written about him.
I've gone to his events.
I probably know as much about
Bill McKibben as his analyst.
So I don't know that's a good
thing, but this is sort of a
trait of nonfiction authors.
We have to obsessively
follow things.
So here's Bill McKibben's
story.
Short story is he shows up at
Harvard as an undergraduates,
so he's a smart guy.
Now, I don't know if there's
Harvard people here.
But at Harvard grades aren't
really the thing that you
focus on, because Harvard you
get an A for getting half the
letters in your name correct
when you signed the test.
That's not what people
care about.
I'm a Dartmouth guy,
so I have to--
this is how the
Dartmouth-Harvard rivalry works.
Dartmouth makes really witty
put-downs about Harvard, and
then Harvard forgets we exist.
So that's how that rivalry goes,
but I take my punches.
So it's all about
extracurriculars there
for the most part.
Right?
They have these serious,
full-time job style
extracurriculars.
If you don't, you sort of feel
like you're a slacker.
So McKibben got involved with
the Crimson, which is the
student newspaper.
And he worked hard there.
He worked his way up in
the ranks, ended up
in an editor position.
Left Harvard, could parlay the
editor position at the Crimson
to getting a staff position
at The New Yorker.
Not writing McPhee style 10,000
word essays, doing the
little talk at a town things,
but that's where you start at
The New Yorker.
So he goes to The New Yorker.
Now he's working with some of
the best editors and writers
in the world, again
honing his craft.
And where his story takes this
nice pivot is that just as
he's becoming known in that New
York world, he leaves The
New Yorker.
He moves to a cabin
in Vermont.
He has a book deal to write a
book about something that
people weren't really
talking about at the
time, global warming.
And he wrote "The End of
Nature," which was sort of one
of the first big books
about this topic.
It put him on the map as
an important thinker in
environmental thinking and
allowed him to then have this
career where he could live up
in Vermont and write books
about topics that were
important to him.
He eventually got a thinker
in residence position at
Middlebury, and now he's
doing activism.
So it's a career that he's
very passionate about.
But it's a good example--
and the reason I'm telling you
is because it is a good
example of the pattern that
comes up often when you study
people who do love
what they do.
So let's figure out what is that
pattern, what did he do
that we can learn from.
So the first observation about
his path is often the most
controversial observation I make
when I talk about this
topic, which is what he did for
a living did not matter
all that much.
So he built the life
that he was
passionate about as a writer.
I would conjecture that
there's any number of
different fields in which Bill
McKibben could have built up a
working life that he loved
equally as much.
There's nothing intrinsic in
his DNA about writing.
There's no mutated gene that
evolved a couple hundred years
ago that means you are destined
to be a writer.
So what mattered for McKibben?
Well, based on all the
interviews I've read with him
and the books I've read, it
seems that what really matters
from him is more general.
That he wants autonomy in his
life, and he wants to be
having an impact on the world.
He achieved this as an
environmental writer.
But I would say in conjecture
that any career path would
allow him to have a strong sense
of autonomy and a strong
sense of an impact on the
world, would have been a
career path that he would have
found just as much passion in
and he would have enjoyed
just as much.
And this is something that
came up time and again.
When you study people who love
what they do, the specifics of
the work is not what's
important.
There's 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 great amount of time
affluence, that you want to have
a schedule where you can
have work play a very
little role into it.
Different lifestyle traits
resonate differently with
different people.
But ultimately, it seems from my
research that this is what
matters in someone feeling a
real sense of satisfaction and
engagement in their career, that
their career has given
them the sort of more general
traits that matter.
And these traits are more
general than specific jobs.
There's often many, many
different paths that can lead
you to these traits.
So there's no need to sweat
the decision of what is my
true calling, what is the
job I'm meant to do.
Because it doesn't matter.
The specifics are much
less important than
these general traits.
So that's sort of the
first observation.
The specifics of what
you do might be less
important than you think.
The second observation is that
McKibben started by getting
really good at something.
So in his case he got really
good at writing, and this took
him some time.
He had to go through
the Crimson.
He had to work his way
up to The New Yorker.
But he got really good
at some writing, and
that was how he started.
This pattern is remarkably
consistent in the lives of
people who end up really
loving their work.
They have this period where they
build up what I like to
call a rare and valuable
skill.
And when you think of this in
the context of the first
lesson, that suddenly
makes sense.
Right?
We can start putting these
pieces together.
The way they build satisfying
careers is they start by
building up rare and
valuable skills.
This gives them an actual value
in the marketplace, in
the work marketplace.
Now they can look to these
general traits that they want
in their working life, be it
autonomy or impact like
McKibben or something
else depending what
resonates for you.
And they say these traits are
rare and valuable, too.
They'd be great to have.
Therefore, they're not
being handed out
on the street corner.
I need something rare and
valuable to offer in return
for these rare and valuable
traits that are going to make
my career great.
So they are then able to
leverage their rare and
valuable skills to gain more
of these traits in their
working life.
That's exactly what
McKibben did.
If he said as a senior at
Harvard I want to live a life
that's autonomous and has a big
impact, I'm going to move
to Vermont and write
these big books, it
wouldn't have worked.
He didn't have enough writing
skill yet to write "End of
Nature." He had to build up more
of a rare and valuable
skill to actually offer in
return for the rare and
valuable trait of being able to
live in Vermont and write
books about what he wanted and
have them sell and support him
and have an impact.
So this equation is in some
sense my replacement for
"follow your passion," and this
is sort of based off of
observing actual
people's lives.
They start by building up rare
and valuable skills.
They then use these skills as
leverage to gain the type of
general traits that matter to
them, and that's why they care
less about what specific job
they do and care a lot more
about how they're approaching
the job they have.
In my building skills,
have I plateaued?
How can I continue
to build skills?
In the book I call it "career
capital." How big is my career
capital store?
If I want to enjoy my working
life more, maybe I should look
at increasing that
store faster.
So it's a different way of
looking at these same issues.
And if we go back, we see,
actually, this is exactly what
Steve Jobs himself did.
He didn't have some clear
preexisting passion he wanted
to start a technology company.
But when he saw an opportunity,
he went after it,
and he went after
it intensely.
He said, if I'm going to make
a go at this computer thing,
I'm going to do it at the
absolute limit of my ability.
I want to be so good that
I can't be ignored.
And by doing that, by building
machines that were better than
anyone else was able to build
that could blow the MITS
Altair out of the water, the
most advanced personal
computer machines at the time
that were in existence, he
built up a huge store
of career capital.
He was able to more or less
control the way that his
working life progressed.
He couldn't control exactly how
Apple went, but he could
be working on technology.
He could set the
tone for Apple.
He could go do these other
companies afterwards.
He built a life that he was
very passionate about.
Not by following a passion, but
by passionately doing the
work that he was doing.
So to bring it back to where we
very began, 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's meaningful to
you, we can look
to Steve Jobs.
But we should do what Steve
Jobs actually did
and not what he said.
Thank you.
[CLAPPING]
CAL NEWPORT: So I guess we just
do questions, so yeah.
AUDIENCE: So it seems--
I really liked your talk.
And it seemed like a lot
of what you're saying
seems true to me.
But it also seems that if you
really want to build up that
skill, don't you have to love
the skill that you're building
up to build it up?
Because if I wasn't interested
in computers, I don't think I
would ever have become a
reasonably competent
programmer.
Right?
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Because it would
be too painful.
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
I call this the argument from
preexisting passion, because
it's one of the more common
questions that actually comes
up when you talk about this
philosophy about how people
build work they love.
There's actually interesting
research on this.
There's research on how
virtuosos, for example, build
up their virtuoso
level of skill.
This came out of Bloom's work
at University of Chicago.
And they studied a whole
variety of virtuosos.
Not just musicians and
athletes, but also
mathematicians and scientists.
And they tried to understand
how did they build up this
huge level of skill.
And their most surprising
finding was there was not a
clear, burning passion
in advance.
And, in fact, what tends to
happen when people build up a
huge amount of skill is that
it's a snowball effect.
So something happens early
on that gives you an
interest in a field.
So you might have an interest in
computers early on 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
build up some skill and get a
little bit of separation from
other people and oh, yeah,
you're good with computers.
That becomes part of
your identity.
That gives you enough intrinsic
motivation to do the
next hard stage of deliberate
practice.
You come away from that.
And now you've separated
yourself more, and you feel
more strongly about it.
So this is what happens is that
over time the snowball
effect pushes up your ability
in 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 blossoms into a
stronger and stronger passion
as time goes on.
So what I counsel people is if
something is interesting to
you, the research says that's
enough to begin the skill
acquisition phase.
It is a really long road.
It's thousands of hours of
deliberate practice, but you
can be assured that you're
not going to have
to do that all blind.
As you move along, you're
going to have little
milestones of accomplishment
which is going to give you
more motivation to get
to the next one.
AUDIENCE: Is this that
10,000 hours thing?
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
So 10,000 hours is Anders
Ericsson's rule that for
expert level performers, it
takes usually 10,000 hours of
deliberate practice, which works
out to about 10 years of
more or less full-time work.
My argument is that in a lot
of fields, especially
knowledge work fields, very
few people are doing any
deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice like a
surgeon would do to get better
at surgery-- they require
10,000 hours to
become great surgeons--
is very uncomfortable.
You have to stretch yourself.
You have to be systematic about
here's where I'm weak,
and I'm going to have to do what
I don't like doing to get
better at it.
Most people in knowledge
work don't do that.
We avoid discomfort.
We use email to get away from
any sort of mental discomfort
if something requiring focus.
So I conjecture that in
knowledge work fields , if you
put systematic deliberate
practice into what you do,
you're going to find a
separation from your peers
well south of 10,000 hours.
So it might take 10,000 hours to
become a chess grandmaster.
But it may only take a few
hundred systematic work at
learning some, say, new
programming paradigm to
actually open up a pretty large
and invaluable gap.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: I really like the
notion of rare and valuable
skills, but I'm curious about
valuable to who and how you
decide that it's valuable.
I raised my hand because I was
talking about something
similar to my girlfriend.
And she said, but I really
wanted to be a social worker.
But it turns out that being
valuable to people who have no
money doesn't really
get you that far.
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a crucial point.
I think one of the more
difficult points of the career
capital approach to work
is understanding
where to build capital.
So something I noticed that
caught my attention when I
studied people who had seemed
to apply this philosophy is
that they tended to be people
who either by design or
happenstance had had exposure
to stars in their field or
otherwise people in their field
whose current status
really resonated with them.
So they're rarely
flying blind.
Right?
They have some sense of in my
field this person sort of
represents where I'd
like to get.
And now I can sort of understand
what was the skill
that got him there.
What does he do that other
people don't do?
Now, for a lot of people I
studied, this was just
happenstance.
It's not a surprise why often
you'll find someone successful
in a field has parents
in that field.
Right?
That means they have this expert
level knowledge of what
capital to build.
But I posit that once you
understand that, you can go
out deliberately 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 with my career.
You can actually systematically
go and try to
understand what do they do well
that other people don't
that's given them that
sort of control.
So I actually counsel people to
systematically investigate
working backwards from stars,
trying to understand what
specific skills are.
And I think it's really
good to point out.
Because if you're not deliberate
in trying to
understand what capital you
should build, it's very hard
to get it right just by luck.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Is there any
kind of cutoff point?
You mentioned it could be 10
more years before you even
have these opportunities.
Right?
Is there any point at which the
game changes, right, like
after a certain period of time
in a career or down one track
it's more difficult
to make a leap?
Sometimes you see people who
are like, I have been in my
job at this advertising
firm, and now I am a
beekeeper or whatever.
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
AUDIENCE:Is there a point
at which it becomes more
difficult to change?
CAL NEWPORT: Well, it's
a good question.
I think career capital as sort
of a metaphor helps you
understand those type
of decisions.
So I tell a story in my book
about a marketing executive.
Exactly your example here.
Except for instead of the
beekeeper, she quit and did a
four-month--
or four-week, actually, yoga
instruction course to become a
yoga instructor in the
New York area.
And by the end of that first
year, she was on track for
making something like $15,000,
which supposedly in the New
York area doesn't go as far as
you might like it to be.
Career capital helps you
understand what was flawed
about that move.
She had a huge amount of
capital in marketing.
She had zero capital in yoga.
So by jumping to a four-week
instructional course, she give
herself just a little bit
of career capital.
Not very much at all.
So she shouldn't expect to be
able to gain much great traits
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
do something from scratch.
Because if you believe that it's
building up capital and
leveraging it is what makes you
love your work and not the
matching problem, I'm more meant
for this job than that,
you'll be much less likely
to jump into
something completely new.
Because you're actually
retarding your progress at
having more control
and leverage.
So I think this metaphor of
career capital helps you
assess whether a change you're
making is I'm bringing my
capital with me, but I'm
bringing it into a new market
within my field that it's going
to have some impact,
versus I'm leaving my capital
on the table and doing
something completely new.
It allows you to have those
nuances that without the
metaphor can get sort
of confused.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So I'm, I guess, old
enough that I sort of missed
the whole "follow your
passion" thing.
CAL NEWPORT: It was really
my generation.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: And the advice that
I got, although it was never
sort of so summarized in just
a handful of words, was more
like try as many things
as possible.
Don't be afraid to try things.
Don't be afraid to
fail at them.
And does this in some ways
might have the same end
result, as long as you're
willing to be paying attention
to what you're doing and
being persistent?
Is this--
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
It's an interesting point,
because in some sense--
AUDIENCE: Is that
bad advice or--
CAL NEWPORT: So I think it's
good advice if it's within the
context of a particular
career capital source,
if that makes sense.
So if you're building capital
in technology, to expose
yourself to lots of things is
actually a great way to find
potential opportunities
asymmetries in the market,
someplace where you can
really make a move
like Steve Jobs did.
But to be at Google and to also
be exploring theater and
to also be exploring filmmaking
and also be
exploring beekeeping, well,
you're crossing strong career
capital division lines.
They're completely unrelated.
And then you run the risk of
slowing down your acquisition
of capital in any particular.
So I always understand the sort
of hybrid approach that
you have a general field in
which you're building capital.
By doing exposure within there,
you're actually gaining
more knowledge.
More expertise can actually help
you build and apply it.
So I think that's where that
advice is valuable.
I think it's dangerous when
people apply too broadly and
are covering too many things
that are way too disparate, if
that makes sense.
AUDIENCE: It does.
CAL NEWPORT: Again, what I'm
sort of doing here is
geekifying something
that's not geeky.
Right?
It's my life and my passion.
I'm a scientist.
I'm a computer scientist
like you guys, so
you understand this.
So I'm coming at it from
that point of view.
But I think it's helpful-- and
I'm surprised that people
haven't done this before--
to have a bit of a more
systematic approach to this,
even if it's a little bit
overkill in some cases.
I think it actually gives us
lots of insight into these
sort of more fuzzy questions.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: If you were a parent
and you wanted your kids to
[? learn ?], would it make sense
to get them interested
in things that you believe will
someday be rare and valuable?
CAL NEWPORT: Well, it seems like
it's more important if
you're young, that you need to
build up the ability to build
up skill, to focus deliberately
on something.
I see college, for example--
you are picking up specific
skills there, but you're also
picking up the ability to
do tough, intellectual
challenges.
Or if you're given a term paper,
you have a month to go
understand this topic and write
about it intelligently.
The reason you should try to
get an A on that is not
because you're looking for a job
in which you're going to
have to write term papers
for a living.
It's because you're going to
be in a knowledge work
economy, and you're going
to have to tackle tough,
cognitively demanding tasks.
And you want to do it not only
well, but stretch yourself
while you're doing it.
So my assumption-- and I'm not
a parent yet, but in two
weeks I will be.
So I'm thinking quite
a bit about this--
is but focus less--
I'm thinking that I will
be focusing less.
We'll see.
We'll see what actually
happens.
But I will be focusing less on
the specifics of you need to
choose right now what you want
to do, because that goes to
this whole myth that you have
a preexisting aptitude, a
passion that you have
to uncover.
And really put the more focus on
working hard at something,
taking something and building
the skill because that's--
ability to do that is what's
going to serve you well, not
the particular skills you pick
up when you're 16 years old.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I'm sorry.
Have you discovered any best
practices in terms of like
daily habits that knowledge
workers do to
mimic deliberate practice?
I mean, you mentioned being
distracted by email.
We all work at a company where
we probably get hundreds of
emails a day.
And it's very easy to just like
push the email button.
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: What are the ways that
like if I wanted to put
in, even if it's a couple
hundred hours of deliberate
practice are there things that
high performers do that--
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: --lead more
to success?
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
There are.
There are.
In fact, I have a chapter in
the book where I take two
particular high performers,
a venture capitalist and a
television writer, and I tried
to understand how they apply
deliberate practice in their
work right now and how they
used it to get where
they were.
And there's tips.
Like the venture capitalist
actually used a spreadsheet to
track his time.
And, in particular, to
track is email time.
And he had these well-chosen
goals for how much time he
should be spending on email
because he wasn't getting much
value out of there as compared
to actually vetting deals.
And he would track his time
daily to make sure that he hit
his numbers.
Because he was tracking it, it
forced him to check much less
often in the batch, because he
had particular numbers that he
was trying to hit.
And that helped him become
more efficient.
The television writer,
similarly, his whole thing was
that he had--
he was very clear on
what good meant.
He had a whole group of sort of
collaborators and advisers
that could look at scripts and
say what was bad with them.
And he wrote this sort of
intense amount of writing.
He was working on four or five
projects at a time when he was
trying to break in and getting
intense feedback on them,
which is another piece of
deliberate practice.
So there are a lot of
specific strategies.
I talk about some of them.
I think having the general idea
of deliberate practice
which I go through can help
you craft your own.
I also think that it's a rich
topic that needs to be
explored by itself.
This is one of the number-one
questions I get.
People are really interested in
the specifics of deliberate
practice of knowledge work.
I think this is actually going
to be a convergence.
It's going to be a big deal in
the next five, ten years.
So you're asking the
right questions.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Let me back up a
question on what you teach
your kids, for whatever
it's worth.
My wife and I have looked to the
professionals and so forth
for our kids.
So it worked out
decently well.
But, in fact, David Brooks and
folks have written about a
fair amount of this and a lot
of-- the thing that you really
learn from your parents, if
you're lucky, which my kids
weren't necessarily, is
sort of fortitude
and stick to itiveness.
The idea that you don't give
up, that you learn how to
concentrate deeply
on a problem.
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: It's a much more
fundamental, more attitudinal
approach to life, approach to
stuff thing, than anything
that has something to do
with your specific
professional skills.
That seems to be better
correlated with
how successful kids--
how successful parents
have successful kids.
CAL NEWPORT: Yeah.
That's right.
And Angela Duckworth's research
on grit, actually, is
sort of in vogue right now,
and it captures a
lot of these ideas.
I think it's absolutely true.
I work with a theoretical
computer scientist at
Georgetown who's a phenomenal
problem solver.
It turns out his dad was a
mathematician that used to
give him these puzzles when he
was young, and he would slip
in there every once in a while
unsolved problems.
And it gave him great practice
with sticking with problems
and working on them and not
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 just I'm
going to spend 10 hours with
this problem today.
And I don't know.
Maybe it's unsolvable.
Maybe it's not, but you're
getting the hours in.
AUDIENCE: But it probably
generalizes, too.
CAL NEWPORT: I think it
absolutely does, which is why
I think thinking of school as
practicing, taking on hard
intellectual challenges, not
only doing them well, but
stretching your ability is a
great way to think about it at
least in today's economy.
All right.
Well, again, thank you.
It was great to come 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
having me come speak.
I really enjoyed it.
Thank you.
