Cal Newport: "Follow Your Passion" Is Bad Advice

so this is a question I've been researching and writing about for the past three or four years now and what I wanted to do today was talk about three ideas from this work and I figured we'd go from the philosophical towards the more practical so we'll begin with the sort of contrary in hair raising ideas it will end up with the sort of concrete habits that you could actually put into practice tomorrow to get more out of your working life so for the first big idea to help me illustrate this idea I wanted to use the late Steve Jobs as my example in particular I want to talk about the summer of 2005 and this is when Steve Jobs took the stage at Stanford Stadium and he was there to deliver the commencement address - to Stanford's graduating class so this was a talk that very quickly went viral I think it has something like 6 million views or counting on YouTube it's now seen as an iconic talk it's a famous talk many of you in this audience have probably seen it so you know that in this address Jobs made a lot of really interesting points but if you go back and look at the traditional media and the social media reactions that immediately follow this speech it becomes clear that there was one point in particular that people got really excited about and that's when he said about a third of the way through the talk - following now again there's different ways to interpret what Jobs actually meant by this but if you go back to the traditional media and the social media reactions that surrounded a talk a clear consensus emerges people are pretty sure they understand what Jobs meant to say and in particular we see this phrase show up often in those some reason so the reason I'm telling you this story is the fact that people got so excited about this one piece this one idea from the otherwise very long and sort of full of good ideas speeches the fact that they got so interested in this particular idea emphasizes something that I've found time and again when I've been researching this issue and that's the fact that American culture is obsessed with this idea that the only way to end up happy in what you do for a living is to follow your passion you'd be hard-pressed to find a career guidebook a career counselor or a career advisor blogger whose whole philosophy somewhere deep down is not based on this idea but there's also a problem here so the more I researched into this issue the more I became convinced that in addition to being an astonishingly popular piece of advice follow your passion is also an astonishingly bad piece of advice I want to be clear about what I mean by that in science just let me in science it's very hard to get things named after you so I really overcompensate when it comes to my writing there's nothing that's not too much but what I'm saying here is that I have nothing against the goal of Indiana passionate about what you do in fact that's what this whole talk is about how do people actually get there what I'm arguing however is that the specific strategy of identifying a pre-existing passion then following it is a bad strategy for achieving that goal there's a couple reasons I believe this first follow your passion presupposes that you have a pre-existing passion that you can identify and follow we actually don't have a lot of evidence that this is true for most people in fact one study I wrote about had a psychologist take a large group of seniors this is at a Canadian university a large group of seniors and they subjected them to all of these questionnaires to try to figure out what if anything they were passionate about when I went back and went through the data and even being very generous in my accounting it was less than 5% of these students that actually had a passion that was even remotely relevant to a career choice probably guess the number one passion is Canadian University was hockey the second problem is that follow your passion presupposes that if you really like something and then match that to your job you will then from then on out have a sort of long-term engaging and meaningful career and this turns out to be an incredibly simplistic and reductive understanding of workplace satisfaction and what's involved in actually building a long term career that provides both meaning and engagement if you want this emphasized look no farther than all the examples of passionate amateur photographers or passionate amateur bakers that end up miserable and overworked when they open their own photography studio or their own bakery this tells us that something more is going on here but I think actually the most ironic let's say the most ironic example of the insufficiency of this advice is actually Steve Jobs himself so even though Steve Jobs stood on that stage in 2005 and said what people at least interpreted the mean follow your passion his biographers make it clear that's not at all what he did right his biographers tell us that in the period leading up the Apple Computer Steve Jobs did not have an unusual passion for technology entrepreneurship Apple was something that he stumbled into one of his biographers put it this way Apple was a small-time scheme that unexpectedly took off but of course no one doubts that Steve Jobs ended up quite passionate about what he did for a living which tells us the lesson here is it's not how you get started that matters maybe what matters is what you do once you get going and that's the theme I want to explore in the second idea that we're going to talk about today so if our first idea is follow your passion does not consistently bring people to a working life they love let's ask what does and help illustrate my idea here I want to use this gentleman as my case study so this is the environmental writer the celebrated environmental writer Bill McKibben now Bill McKibben is someone who loves what he does for a living okay he is a celebrated author he writes books full time maybe one every two or three years their big idea books their books on topics that he's interested in he lives in this sort of a Dilek town in Vermont and he has a life by all accounts that he's very passionate about so let's use him as our case study let's ask the question how did Bill McKibben end up with a working life that he loved now I would conjecture that the short answer to that question is skill if we dive into the details of Bill McKibben's life we see the turning point for him happened with the publication of his first book in the late 1980s this was a book called the end of nature and it was quickly heralded as a new classic in the field of environmental books the most important environmental book since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and immediately made him a celebrity author at least within this field that allowed him to quit his magazine job and quit the freelance assignments he moved first to the Adirondacks and then to this small town in Vermont and it allowed him to kick off this life of just writing about what interest to him have an impact on the world and really enjoying his life but if we ask well how did he write the end of nature the important thing to keep in mind is by the time he actually got the book deal for that book he had become one of the most talented environmental writers of his generation he was a staff writer for The New Yorker who specialized in these issues he had a big book deal from Random House to go write this book to New Yorker serialized the book while he was writing it so was definitely going to be seen it was definitely going to make an impact the fact that he was such a talented writer by this point is what made him capable of transforming his life in this way that generated a lot of passion for him now there's a question we have to ask you how did he end up becoming one of the most talented environmental writers of his generation and I want to conjecture here that he was not born a brilliant or naturally talented writer and I'll use this as my exhibit a this comes from as far as I can tell in my research the first published work of a young Bill McKibben he published this in the Harvard Crimson soon after arriving as an undergraduate at Harvard University it was a sports page article about the Celtics opening day game so it doesn't take a Pulitzer committee to tell you that this is not good writing okay it's all the classic mistakes of a very young new writer is completely overblown way too effusive and of course a completely inappropriate tone for an article where people want to know whether Larry Bird was feeling healthy or not which was the concern in 1979 but the point is if you talked to crimson staffers today and this is what it's important to know about Bill McKibben they still talk about is lore at the Crimson his work ethic he wrote an absurd number of articles while there there's this tale that did they tell about it was like a late Umbra city council meeting they came back he had an hour until deadline and he bet the fellow editors you know a bottle of scotch and I'll get these two articles written and in before the deadline then he won that bottle of scotch because that's the type of work ethic he had he wrote an absurd number of articles into sheer brute practice became a better and better writer and by the time he graduated Harvard he was the editor of the Crimson that put him on the radar a bill Sean at the New Yorker who hired him to edit the short talk of the town pieces in the front of the magazine he worked at that really hard they let him start tackling longer pieces eventually became staff writer he could specialize in the environment then the end of nature happened and he was able to transform his life into this one that he's very passionate about so that gives us our long answer the question how did Bill McKibben end up loving what he did for a living he systematically over a period of almost ten years built up a rare and valuable skill and then used that skill as leverage to take control of his working life and shifted in directions that resonated with him now McKibben is an important example for us to talk about because when I went and researched this systematically and found lots of people who liked McKibben love what they do this was the pattern that showed up most frequently the most frequent pattern was they systematically built up a rare and valuable skill than used it as leverage after a while I begin to summarize it this way you cannot expect a really good working life until you're really good at something and that reality was reinforced again and again if you look into the real details and not just a short stories of how people end up in these remarkable lives now when I talk about these research results there is an objection that comes up quite a bit almost exactly at this point so I've learned to try to head it off and actually just address it explicitly in case you're worrying about it yourself this objection came up so much that in my last book I actually gave it a name as I said I like the name things I should have called this the Newport argument from pre-existing fashion or you ports law about pre-existing fashion this argument goes something like this the only way that you are going to be able to persist systematically over years and improve a rare and valuable skill is if you have a huge amount of passion for that topic therefore to say that the secret is you need to systematically build up skills that's no different than saying you have to figure out what you're passionate about and go after it so the subjection says therefore Cal you're really saying nothing different than just follow your passion it makes intuitive sense but actually there's no evidence to back it up if anything the evidence points us in the other way so I want to turn to this gentleman to help me make this argument this is the late Benjamin bloom the sort of esteemed educational psychologist from the University of Chicago now bloom launched this massive massive multi-year multi P I study whose whole goal was to understand how people build up world-class talent they took a huge number of virtuosos in both intellectual academic athletic and musical fields and they threw a bunch of grad students at them to basically break down every element of their life and quantify it and code it and try to systematically understand how did they get where they are how do they become a great neurosurgeon or a great mathematician or swimmer or violin player and one of the most striking findings from this study is that these people who ended up with an exceptional amount of skill for the most part did not start with an exceptional amount of talent for their field or an exceptional amount of passion the more consistent pattern that you see when you look in this research goes something like this early in life they have a serendipitous positive encounter with their field for example a piano teacher who was fun they come into this with no pre-existing talent or passion for they just happen to have a teacher that was fun okay because of that they have just a little bit more persistence with the practice in that very early stage of learning their craft and perhaps because of that they practiced a piano just a little bit more than their friends you had the mean or old Stern piano teacher so then they get to the recital and they play and they're playing you know chopsticks whatever they play but they sort of recognize I'm just a little bit better than some of these other people and that became a little bit part of their identity it gave them a boost of confidence enough for them to persist a little bit harder through the next stage of practice when they got a little bit better than the gap widened a little bit and that gave them enough motivation and enough interest the persist to the next even harder level where they had the practice a little bit more and over time there's a snowball effect as they got better their interest and passion grew and by the time they're a world-class they had a huge amount of passion for what they did but as blooms research makes clear that passion grew along with their skill it did not exist at that magnitude in the very beginning so that's my second idea how do people end up loving what they do well here's what the research seems to show they don't just figure out in advance here's what I'm passionate about they're set they instead build up these rare and valuable skills you cannot expect a really good working life till you're really good at something the role of passion in this process is more often better seen as a side effect in a starting point passion grows as they get better and as they gain more control this notion that you have to identify it in advance does not have a lot of evidence to bear it out so let's get a little bit more concrete with this third idea let's say you buy this notion that the systematic development of rare and valuable skills is key to a working life you love how do you actually do that say today let's say in a creative or knowledge work type fuel so I think the evidence suggests that this type of work plays a crucial role but we have decades of research from performance psychology as well as neuroscience that tells us that this state of cognitive strain where you persist even though it's uncomfortable is exactly a state in which you improve at a cognitive skill so the heuristic is simple if you want to be cultivating a rare and valuable skill in a knowledge worker creative pursuit a non-trivial fraction of your work hours have to be dedicated to this type of work there's actually no way to get around that so that's easier said than done so what I want to talk about now in these final minutes are what are some actual concrete things you can do within your working life that make sure the deep work plays a successful and frequently occurring role so the first of these three concrete ideas is something that you've heard about before it's something that is simple and because of that people ignore it but they really shown it and that's the simple technique of time blocking wait we know what this is right instead of being reactive about your day you plan out in advance that's what I'm going to do here this what I'm gonna do there this is a sample time block document from my notebook as you can see I block my hours on the left on the right i elaborate we're needed on the immediate right I leave myself extra space so that I can repair the schedule as it gets disrupted during the day it's simple now of course time blocking has lots of sort of general productivity benefits it forces you to make critical decisions about your time I think more importantly it forces you to come to grips with how long things actually take which turns out to play a crucial role in scheduling but when it comes to deep work in particular it's absolutely necessary deep work is not a natural activity it's not something that you're going to do spontaneously if you're not planning in advance what you do win it's not going to show up in your schedule so this is sort of the foundation on which deep work makes its way into knowledge work working schedules as you can see in line 4 there's a mistake and I'm embarrassed about that and you all caught that I didn't have time to fix it now this is an example the second technique I wanted to talk about and no you don't have to actually do algebra for this technique this is an example of me applying the technique which says even if you put aside time for deep work it doesn't mean that you're actually going to get the right cognitive strain out of that period right because our brains have evolved to be very conservative about energy expenditure deep work is fabulously energy intensive if you just tell your mind let's think hard about this it'll find a way to avoid the hard things it'll be like well this is kind of interesting well what what about this no no no we got to stop thinking about this as soon as you actually have to solve an equation which happens often in your field I'm sure the solution that I have found works well is to have as the goal of every deep work session an artifact a clearly defined outcome that forces your mind to tackle the hard things it doesn't want to so I'm a theoretical computer scientist in my day job that means most of my deep work sessions are aimed at proving theorems the artifact I try to produce from each of these sessions is what I call a problem notes document as an example of one it's a document where I force myself to take the technique I was trying and actually work through the mathematics formalize it and figure out exactly where the counterexample is or exactly where I get stuck now this is a terrible pain in the ass to do and my mind would prefer not to do this I prefer to say this is probably not going to work let's try another technique but because I have this artifact it forces me to do that strain to the final technique is to understand the act of focusing itself okay so let's say you put aside the time let's say you have an artifact now you actually still have to think hard and produce this artifact err in your session and the best piece of advice I have about this from thinking and writing about focus for a while now is that you have to think about it like you would think about pull-ups it's easy to understand what it is but it's very hard to do a lot of it if you're not training now I've worked with students and graduate students and professors on this for quite a while the systematic training of your ability to focus and that's why I'm showing you up here one of these filters like leach blocked it can help you turn off access to distracting websites that's actually the mindset you need like an athlete to build your ability up to focus I often tell people when they're working on this ability that adding ten minutes to your amount of time you can focus after every ten sessions is about the rate at which your ability can grow if you start with 30-minute sessions do ten of those successfully before you go to 40 and they do ten of those before you go to 50 that's about how slow it is to increase this ability to focus what's crucial to make this happen so my time is short let me summarize what I had to say today so how do people end up loving what they do for a living well we know that follow your passion sounds good but it's too simplistic the more common story is that they systematically build up a skill passion grows along with the skill you can't have a good job until you're good at something and in knowledge work deep work and the different rituals and habits that surround it is what's going to help you build up those skills and therefore build this working life that you really love so to bring it back to where we started if we look back to Steve Jobs we see actually this is what he did so he might have stumbled into Apple Computer but once that opportunity was there he was obsessive about building things are actually a value to the world and he as he did this better and better as he became more valuable to the world he became more and more passionate about what he did for living so if I had to summarize this in one phrase I'd say if you want to love what you do do what Steve Jobs did and not what he said thank you you

Channel: 99U

Views: 221,739

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Keywords: Making Ideas Happen, 99U, 99U conference, 99 percent conference, 99% conference, entrepreneurship, Behance, design

Id: IIMu1PGbG-0

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2015