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

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 a 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 an astonishingly appealing piece of advice.

But here's the problem. The problem is that "follow your passion," in addition to being 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 from 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 Hare 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 at 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 to 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 to 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 movies 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 4-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 makes 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 a 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 of evidence that most people have one.

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, detailed 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 undergraduate, 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 at Harvard you get an A for getting half the letters in your name correct when you sign 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 of the 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 for 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 and conjecture that any career path that 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:

1. Maybe you want autonomy.
2. Maybe you want power and respect.
3. Maybe you really want an impact.
4. Maybe you really want to be creative.
5. 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 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 on 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 work.

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 gave 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 area.

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 it 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 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 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 his 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 and batch it, 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.