Follow Your Passion is Terrible Advice. Here’s Why.

following your passion is really bad advice there's this classic thing of like you do what you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life Follow Your Passion all of that kind of stuff but it's not really true like it's not really the way that you find meaningful work that you actually enjoy hey friends welcome back to the channel so I read this book so good they can't ignore you by Cal Newport way back in 2016 while I was still a medical student and it pretty significantly impacted what I decided to do with my career and so in this episode of book club which is the ongoing Series where we distill and discuss highlights and summaries from some of my favorite books I'm going to share the four key rules the four key points from the book that really resonated with me and if you're anything like me and you're also on this quest to find work and a career and stuff that actually fulfills you and that you actually enjoy then hopefully some of these insights will be useful key Point number one don't follow your passion the only way to do great work is to love what you do if you haven't found it yet keep looking and don't settle now what Cal says is that it's all well and good for Steve Jobs to be like hey man you got to follow your passion you got to love what you do you got to keep on looking you've got to not settle but that's not what Steve Jobs actually did apparently back in the day when he was in his early 20s he was super into Zen Buddhism so had he followed his passion he would have become some kind of Buddhist monk but he didn't follow his passion instead he took these sort of winding circuitous steps in his career he got really good at the thing that he was trying to do with his career and he eventually found something that he really enjoyed but he found it by virtue of being really good at the thing rather than it being a pre-existing passion and that's really the whole concept throughout the book and that's why it's called so good they can't ignore you because this whole model is that if you become so good that they can't ignore you then you will find a career or a job that you love there's a few other key points here so firstly generally if you actually take what you love and you make it a job that is the quickest path to become miserable at doing the thing this is pretty classic amongst musicians apparently there was an interview I was watching with Ed Sheeran where he was kind of saying that like you yeah I enjoy music but like now that it's a career I have to try and find things outside of music that I also enjoy and so he's taking up painting or whatever because he's trying to find a thing that's not his day job because what used to be fun music has now become work and you see this with video game streamers as well on the surface that is the absolute dream career you make a living you make stupid amounts of money doing what you love I.E playing video games but when you speak to streamers when you watch interviews with them a lot of them don't seem like they're having a lot of fun playing video games I was chatting to a huge streamer the other day and he was like you know what I'll do anything to not have to make a video and it's like this thing that once was his passion video gaming has now had the passion kind of sucked dry from it because it's a thing that's become his job the other thing here is that if you actually ask someone what are they passionate about like right now I'm gonna ask you what are you currently passionate about it's like it's actually really hard to answer that question and the things that we're passionate about are generally not the things that we can reliably and feasibly make a reasonable career out of back when I was young I was passionate about playing World of Warcraft there's no way in hell I'm actually going to be able to play World of Warcraft for a living and I probably wouldn't want to because then I'd be going into that streamer trap as well these days I'm passionate about playing the guitar but I suck at the guitar and so I'm not actually reliably going to be able to make a living out of it the sorts of people that succeed in a field like playing video games and playing the guitar are the 0.0001 of people and so it's generally inadvisable to try and Chase a career path thinking that you're going to be one in a billion people that actually succeeds at that thing and the final point that Cal says in this chapter is that passion actually takes some amount of time to build there's a good study that was done by a psychologist called Amy rosenski and she studied a bunch of admin assistants I.E people doing a generally fairly boring on the surface office job and she tried to see like what was the difference between the people who were passionate about the admin job and the people who weren't and you found that the biggest predictor of it was just how long they were doing the thing and generally the theory was that if you're doing something for a long time you become good at doing the thing and therefore you develop a passion for doing the thing so all that to say don't follow your passion following your passion is generally a bad way to actually find a career or a job that you love and when I read this back in 2016 I really took that to heart because at the time I was struggling of like what medical specialty do I want to go into there's all these like 25 different options to choose from and I wasn't really passionate about any of them but what I decided after speaking to a few Consultants as well is that you know what I'm just gonna pick something and go for it and I'm just going to try becoming really good at that thing and then I can always change my mind further along the path similarly with making YouTube videos what I tell people is that like don't worry about like oh I need to make videos about stuff that I enjoy just try and get good at making videos first because once you've gotten good at it then you'll see do I actually enjoy doing this thing and once you're good it actually becomes way more possible to enjoy making videos because it's actually not very fun when you first start out because you're really bad and generally the better we are at something the more passionate we're going to be about the thing anyway that brings us on to key Point number two in the book which is to develop a Craftsman mindset so what is the crossing mindset well to introduce that Cal talks about the career Capital theory of great work so the theory basically says like what is a job that you actually want what is a desirable job and Cal basically says a desirable job comes down to three things number one it is creative number two it is tactful and number three allows you to have autonomy or control over your life and your schedule and I would add a fourth thing to that is that like a desirable job a lot of people desire jobs that seem fun which is why video gaming seems like a fun job because this is fun and being an artist seems fun because it's just fun but being an accountant to generally people won't say oh my God incredibly desirable job because it just doesn't take that box of being superficially at least fun and so given the laws of supply and demand if everyone wants a desirable job then there's going to be clearly competition for desirable jobs and so you need to exchange something you need to have something to give in order to land yourself a desirable job and Cal argues that that thing is basically career Capital I.E rare and valuable skills broadly the more rare and valuable skills that you can develop the more career Capital you'll have and then you can cash in that career capital and exchange it for a desirable job there's no point trying to get a desirable job if you have zero skills because it's just not going to happen because five zillion other people are trying to land that same desirable job but if you have rare and valuable skills you're way more likely to be able to get one of those jobs or to be able to craft that kind of job yourself and so coming back to this Craftsman mindset thing the Craftsman mindset is the pursuit of rare and valuable skills and that's basically where you focus on becoming so good they can't ignore you and the Craftsman mindset is the opposite to the passion mindset the passion mindset is I want to follow my passion The Crossing mindset is I want to become really freaking good I want to develop rare and valuable skills and then as a result I will become passionate about the thing that I'm doing by default and I'll also be able to land myself a desirable job so at this point it's all about developing rare and valuable skills but what are rare and valuable skills and the answer is that that depends on what sort of Market you're in what he says in the book is that there's two different types of markets and I broadly agree with this although I don't really like the terminology here and the first one is a winner takes all market now this is the sort of Market you're in when there's loads of people trying to do the thing and there are just a very very small number of people who are successfully making a living out of doing the thing so for example musicians and basketballers and YouTubers millions of people around the world trying to become musicians tens of millions hundreds of millions trying to become basketball players hundreds of millions trying to become YouTubers but realistically only a small percentage of people are actually going to succeed at the thing the market is very much when it takes all now if you're trying to succeed within a winner takes all market then the career skill that it makes sense to try and optimize for is the one skill that's important just become the best basketball player ever become the best musician possible try and make the best YouTube videos the more you can do that the more likely you are to be able to succeed in that field because that is the rare and valuable skill that people need and yes you know especially in things like the music industry and to an extent through YouTube there is an element of timing right place at the right time and who you know but you know increasingly thanks to the power of the internet if you're really really really really freaking good at the thing you're way more likely to succeed than someone who's less good at the thing and so in a winner takes all Market spend all of your time not trying to develop a passion for the thing but just trying to get really good trying to get as he says so good that they can't ignore you and there is a somewhat relevant Point here which is from another book a good to Great by Jim Collins this book is basically about what is the difference between a good company and a great company and to what extent does Luck play a part in it he talks about in the book and basically what he says is that you know if you look at companies that were okay and companies that did really really well they both had similar numbers of Lucky breaks they both had the same number of Lucky events happening to them but the companies that really succeeded had higher return on luck is what he calls it they had more of a capacity to capitalize on those lucky breaks and so similarly I I think that advice really applies to careers as well yes for example music industry like right place right time it kind of depends on who you know but if you're really good at music or singing guitar or whatever your thing is you're more likely to be able to take advantage of a lucky break similarly with YouTube sometimes it's luck of the draw which video gets promoted by the algorithm but if your videos generally are really good then once video number I don't know 115 goes viral you're way more likely to be able to translate that into long-term growth because you're very good at making videos compared to someone who just got lucky for their videos are trash and you know therefore they're not going to be able to capitalize on that particular lucky break okay so that was when it takes all Market but there's a second type of Market that he talks about and that is auction markets now I don't really like the terminology here because it's not particularly clear but essentially when he says auction Market what he's describing is not a Winner Takes for Market a kind of Market where there isn't quite this clearer become really good at the thing and that will directly almost directly translate to your career success and actually I'd probably suggest that most careers most jobs that you and I would want to have are not when it takes all markets they're more like auction markets where it's not just about one skill that you just get really good at one skill and suddenly you're like successful in your career but it's more like you can develop interesting combinations of different skills and that can develop this thing of rare and valuable skills which is what career capital is all about for example back when I was a medical student and Junior doctor I was interested in potentially pursuing plastic surgery as my residency specialty whatever whatever you want to call it and through various kind of backdoor channels I'd managed to become friends with a bunch of different plastic surgeons and they would give me careers advice and what they would always say is that the people who succeed surgery the ones who get in to higher training and the ones who succeed and have good private practices like whatever you want to do it doesn't really correlate with what grades they got in medical school and it actually doesn't really correlate with how good of a surgeon they are because at a certain level everyone is good and you're no longer differentiating Yourself by your kind of technical competences being able to do a muscle tendon Stitch or whatever the thing is but what they said was that the people that seem to succeed are the ones that have career capital in other kinds of ways they're really good at marketing themselves they're really good at networking they're just really friendly and people really want to get to know them they're really good at like getting Publications out there because Publications and like publishing papers is like a big part of how you get ahead in the field of medicine Beyond just actually being a good doctor and the advice that they gave to me was that if I wanted to kind of get ahead and make a name for myself in the field of plastic surgery the way I could do that is obviously get the basics right of being a good surgeon and knowing the skills and being a good doctor and all that kind of stuff but what they knew is that I had a background in web design I knew how to make websites I knew how to make websites look pretty and at the time I was just sort of starting off my YouTube channel and they were saying that you know web design and video production are rare earn valuable skills that most people in medicine don't have and so if as a medic you can become the sort of person that provides that capability to a team or to a charity or to an organization or to a research group you you become more valuable and now the fact that you're a good doctor is like great everyone's a good doctor but you have something a little bit more to add and I guess what they were getting at was this idea of Courier Capital that these things these skills that synergize with your main job but aren't actually your main job are one other way of developing rare and valuable skills I.E developing career capital and so these days like when I give talks at schools and universities and stuff and you know even Keynotes at business conferences and things and people ask hey what advice do you have for people when they're in a career or when they're at University my advice is usually that try your best to develop skills that will synergize with your chosen career so for example developing a skill and becoming really good at playing video games is very unlikely to be a skill that synergizes with your career as a lawyer it's just it's just pretty unlikely maybe if you're an entertainment lawyer the fact that you're like really good at FPS games well you'll have a bit of a background but it's it's not a particularly synergistic skill but if you develop the skill of bringing example design or for example video production or video editing or public speaking or negotiation or you're just really good at working in a team or you understand the statistics because like basically everything is like big data number these days you understand how Ai and stuff works you understand coding like all of these are skills that synergize with loads of different types of careers and so if you're not really sure I'm not really sure what my passion is I'm not really sure what career to go down you can do a lot worse than just try and develop these skills that could synergize with anything you might do further down the line that will help you develop career Capital it will help you develop this Craftsman mindset and then you can cash in that career capital for more interesting things further down the line and that brings us to key Point number three which is you can cash in your career capital for control now the point here and what calcites a lot of studies in the book that attest to this now one of the if not the biggest determinant of whether you're going to enjoy your career or enjoy your job is the amount of autonomy or the amount of control you have in that job when you don't have any autonomy when you're told what to do and how to do it and when to do it and you have to show up at a certain time and you have to be there at the desk because like generally when you're very Junior in a job like Junior doctors for example you basically have zero autonomy and therefore it's really hard for that job to be particularly fun but as you become more senior in any kind of job as you develop career Capital you can then cash in that career capital for autonomy and for control now there's an interesting model here which is to appreciate that like when you have autonomy the only person that benefits is you when you are the only beneficiary of a thing then the universe will conspire to not let you have that thing like there's going to be some level of resistance if you were to just go to your boss and say Hey I want autonomy I want to be able to work from home and it's not the sort of company that just allows that then your boss's default starts is going to be well no you're going to be here in the office similarly if you decide you know what I want to quit my job and I want to be a YouTuber because being a YouTuber gives me autonomy that's going to be really hard like jobs and positions and stuff that are high in autonomy you generally have to work to get through some kind of resistance to succeed at those things because that's just how the market Works autonomy benefits you as the individual it doesn't really benefit the market and therefore it's not in the interest of the market to uphold the values of the individual and give them very much autonomy and so it's quality in the book which is something that Tim Ferriss also talks about in the four hour work week is that once you're really good at your job at that point you now have negotiating power you have negotiating leverage for example there are some people in my team who are just absolutely freaking amazing at what they do and therefore if they come to me and be like hey I want to not turn up to meetings for the next six months and I want to pay rise and I want to like go off to Costa Rica for six months I'm probably gonna be like you know what sure you can do that that's totally fine because you're so good at the thing that you do that I am happy to give you as much autonomy as you want and I think this is such an important thing that I now appreciate so much that now I've become an employer and a boss and like a manager of people when someone is really really good you want to give them the world because you want you want to try your hardest to keep them on your team whereas when someone's less good and then they're trying to demand autonomy for whatever reason it's like uh well you know the the conversation changes a little bit the other thing here that kind of grinds my gear sometimes is when people feel like autonomy is like a human right like I I deserve the right to be able to work from home I'm not talking about in my team I'm just talking about in general when people come to me for careers advice they're like you know I don't really like my job I really want to work from home I really want to make more money I really want to be location independent I want to start a business I want to start a YouTube channel I'm like all right cool what's stopping you I'm like well you know do you reckon I can do it for like four hours a week it's like no you can't have a successful YouTube channel with four hours a week millions of people around the world are trying to be YouTubers because they see the amount of money you can make and the autonomy that you can have and the fact that it's fun if this the competition for a job like that is absolutely massive and so to be able to actually Land one of those jobs for yourself you have to put in some amount of work putting in tiny amounts of time and tiny amounts of effort thinking that the world owes you something and owes you a job that you find ready for filling and enjoy that's just not how it works you have to become really good at the thing and you generally have to put in a reasonable amount of work to make that happen and yes that might mean that if you are trying to optimize for getting really good at something and to develop a job that you enjoy and find passion in your work you might have to work a little bit harder than other people around you you might have to put in a shift on the weekends or in the evenings to learn some skills please don't cancel me for saying this this is just the way of the world like it's so unusual for people to have a job that they super super enjoy and they're super passionate about and they have autonomy over or like to get to that position you do have to work harder than other people who are also potentially trying to get there the good news is you don't necessarily have to do this in weekends and evenings ideally you can find a job where during the job you're actually being paid to learn stuff this is partly why it's generally good practice these days people say to change jobs every couple of years because usually when you're starting off in a job you'll have a very steep learning curve and you'll learn a lot of stuff but then as time goes on you'll learn less and less and now you're showing up to the job just to do the job rather than showing up to the job and being paid to learn stuff so trying to find jobs where you can actually learn things is one way of developing career capital and variant valuable skills but while being paid for it but also there's no getting around the fact that sometimes you know people who are really good at the jobs are the ones who put in more effort on the weekends and evenings I don't think there's anything wrong with that and you can choose not to opt into that kind of life if you want but if that's the case you're also potentially less likely to be become really good at the thing or to develop passion for it or to find a job that you really enjoy like probably and it's just kind of a trade-off so please don't cancel me for this but it's just like you know if you really want a job that you that you're super passionate about and you really enjoy you might have to put in a little bit of extra work on the weekends and evenings especially while you're young developing those skills for it to actually make sense so the final thing that Cal talks about in the book is key Point number four which is about the importance of finding a mission now this is another one of those things that actually leads to a lot of kind of long-term career fulfillment when you feel like your job has some kind of purpose and meaning Beyond just yourself but again cow's Point here is Again The Vibes with this idea of so good that can't ignore you he says that the most interesting missions are found at the kind of founded The Cutting Edge of a particular field and if you want a particularly interesting mission for your career then you get it by becoming really good at the thing first and then a mission or a niche or whatever will slowly emerge over time I'm not 100 sure I fully agree with this but I think the sentiment is broadly directionally very reasonable the idea that become really good at the thing develop career Capital cash in that career capital for control and then you can worry about the question of like meaning and fulfillment and stuff a little bit a little bit further down the line and I think one of the problems that a lot of young people make these days is that you get straight out of University you have no skills you have no experience at all and you're like from day one I want a job that has meaning it's really hard to find a job that feels like it has meaning from day one uh generally the jobs that feel meaningful develop once like after a while once you get really good at the specific thing so that's the book If you like this video you might want to check out the book or alternatively you can check out the short form summary of the book They're not sponsoring this video but short form is great I use it to read summaries of books for especially books I've read to revisit the key points but also I use it if for example I'm thinking of reading a book I'll just browse through the short form summary of it and if it seems interesting then I will actually read the proper book they do have so good they can't ignoring you you can check it out on the website and there'll be a cheeky affiliate link down in the video description if you want to check it out anyway thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this video you might often check out this video over here which is a video that I made after reading about 2 300 resumes for people applying to jobs to work with me and it's like my 15 top tips for how to actually Ace your application for your next job and people have emailed me saying that video has helped them land their dream job so like check out that video over there if you're applying for a job in the near future anyway thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 874,526

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, pasion, passionn, advise

Id: dE-wvWdM6jY

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 27 2022