'Follow Your Passion' is B.S. - an interview with Cal Newport

I had the privilege of interviewing author Cal Newport for Beyond the Uniform about his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. It was one of the most compelling books I read in 2016 and, while the interview was tailored for fellow veterans, the lessons Cal mines are relevant to anyone seeking career enjoyment.

You can listen to the full interview here, and find the book here, but I wanted to provide a summary of just a few of the items we discussed.

“Follow your Passion” is not just bad advice… it’s harmful advice

The central premise of the book is that the [relatively new] concept of seeking one’s passion in the workplace is terrible advice. As Cal puts it, “Telling someone to follow their passion is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.”

He gives many great examples, but one is of Steve Jobs who, had he followed this adage, would have ended up in a Zen Monastery rather than Apple. What makes this advice so detrimental is that it sets up false expectations for immediate enjoyment of job, when in Cal’s research he found that career enjoyment most often comes from expertise.

A “Craftsman Mindset” is a much more likely to lead to career fulfillment

When I spoke with former PepsiCo CEO, Steven Reinemnund, he talked about a “Hip Pocket Skill,” and how he encouraged vets to refine a core skill around which they can build a career. Similarly, Cal found in his research that a “Craftsman Mindset” – of seeking to build and hones one skill over time rather than immediately seeking one’s dream job – is not only more effective but more likely to lead to career satisfaction.

As he puts it, “whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you.” I appreciated this framework for looking at one’s work. In my Beyond the Uniform interviews I have often found that veterans struggle, particularly in their first job search, as they try to redefine themselves and identify (without much reference or related experience) what their ideal civilian career will be. I found Cal’s advice to be so incredibly apt for the veteran group, as he explains it, “There’s something liberating about the craftsman mindset. It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is “just right” and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it and the process won’t be easy.”

What makes this even more appealing is that, no matter what your current occupation or tenure, it provides you with a path forward. It simplifies your focus to being the absolute best at your current position, extracting every ounce of learning you can from any experience, which will open up more doors in time. Or, as Cal puts it, “Regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career… you adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows”

Career Capital is a great lens through which veterans can view their growth

Cal found in his research that, “the things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.”

Cal discusses how, through work and “deliberate practice” one can build up career capital. This career capital can be exchanged for more autonomy and more appealing opportunities. This especially rang true from the 80 veterans interviews I’ve completed to date, and I think provides a very clear way for veterans to consider any career transition.

As one serves in the military, they build up a very specialized set of career capital. If one spends 15 years working on sonar, they have an incredible amount of career capital in the sonar space. However, this is obviously a highly specialized field. So, under this premise the first thing a veteran needs to decide in their first (and subsequent) career transitions is – do you want to continue to build career capital in this field on the civilian side or do you want to make a leap into something new?

As my interviews have shown, veterans can do anything. However, I like this framework because it becomes clearer that if a veteran decides to radically alter their career industry, they’ll be losing a significant amount of career capital. They’ll still have their experience, leadership training, discipline, etc, but their specialized knowledge will not be an advantage.

A few examples that come to mind:

• Jeff Tiegs went from 20 years of special forces to working with The Guardian Group, a civilian organization that directly utilized his career capital. In this sense, he maximized his military training in his civilian role, and was able to obtain a very senior role early on in his civilian career
• John Fenwick went from satalite in the military to business school and then satellite work in the civilian sector. His company was wildly successful, but it utilized much of the career capital he built up during his time in the military
• Jimmy Sopko went from the Navy directly to work at Pinterest… a pretty dramatic shift. And he realized he didn’t have career capital in this field. So he took an enormous pay cut, started in an Account Management position with his peers 5 years his junior. Although his work ethic and discipline allowed him to progress more quickly than most of his peers, he needed to take several steps back to make this radical shift from the military possible

Cal had a lot to say on this topic, and I found his advice on building career capital very helpful. He talks about how one can choose to cash in career capital at various points in their career. Here’s one example that stood out to me:

“Mike Jackson leveraged the craftsman mindset to do whatever he did really well, thus ensuring that he came away from each experience with as much career capital as possible. He never had elaborate plans for his career. Instead, after each working experience, he would stick his head up to see who was interested in his newly expanded store of capital, and then jump at whatever opportunity seemed most promising.”

Finding a Mission comes when you’re at the cutting edge of a field

Nearly all of the veterans I interview talk about how they miss their mission and sense of purpose from the military (particularly during the first few years of the career transition from the military). So I’m always interested to learn more about how one can find a worthwhile mission in a civilian career. Cal had some great advice on this subject.

In Cal’s research he found that, “if you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge - the only place where these missions become visible.” He shares many stories about how most people who love their work got where they are by first building up career capital and then cashing it in for the types of traits that define great work. It can be a fools’ errand to figure out what will make you passionate in advance. But by making “Bite Sized bets"? - taking small bets to get critical information through little failures - it can allow you to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.

ABOUT BEYOND THE UNIFORM

Beyond the Uniform is a program dedicated to helping military veterans navigate their civilian career. Normally I interview veterans about their civilian career - what they do, how they got their, and advice to other veterans seeking to do the same. However, in this interview, I focused on an author who's advice I believe would be helpful to any veteran.