cal newport: good morning,everybody. so i'm going to talk aboutcareer advice, my topic. i want to push back a little biton some of the ideas that we assume are true and don'tquestion much anymore. and i'm going to try to replacethem with some ideas that i think the evidenceactually supports better. and i figured being at google,the right place to start would be saying controversial thingsabout steve jobs. so i think that's a good placefor us to get going.
so in particular, i want to talkabout the summer, early summer of 2005, when stevejobs took the podium at stanford stadium to give his-- i recognize someone down there,chris [? pleho ?] audience: hey, how'sit going, man? cal newport: all right. there we go. you remember those ages. anyways, i'm sorry.
i'm not going to get distractedwith chris stories. so let's go back tosummer of 2005. steve jobs takes the podium,stanford stadium. he's there to give thecommencement 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 personaltalks, reflective talks. it wasn't really his style. but he did give this talk.
he came. he did wear sandals under hisrobe, but he did come. and he gave this talk, andit was a good one. and if you look at, say, youtubeviews-- and i think that's the authoritative wayof ranking social impact-- the two videos of this talkhave 6 million views. so this was an important talk. it went really far. so he had a lot of points thathe made, but i went back and
looked at the social mediareactions and the news reactions that immediatelysurrounded the talk's release. and what you could see isthere was one point in particular that seemed toget people excited. and that's about halfway throughthis speech where he says, "you have todo what you love. and if you haven't foundit yet, keep looking. don't settle." so, again, if you go to thesesocial media reactions, you go
to the news reports thatsurround the speech, it's pretty clear how peopleinterpreted what steve jobs was saying there. they interpret him as saying,guys, if you want to love what you do for your living, you needto figure out what you love, and then you need to gomatch this to your job, and then you'll have a careerthat you love. this was people'sinterpretation. now, in popular slang we oftensummarize this with the phrase
"follow your passion." jobsdidn't say the phrase "follow your passion," but this waspeople's interpretation of what he meant with thatpoint in his talk. so, of course, jobs was not thefirst person to introduce this idea that you shouldfollow your passion. in fact, i actually wentback to research where did this come from. when did this phrase enterinto our cultural conversation?
right? what's the history of thisphrase there right now that seems so universal? and once again, because i seemto rely on google for just about everything i do, i usedgoogle's ngram viewer. do you guys know this toolfrom google labs? so i used google's ngram viewerto 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 actuallygo through the-- google's corpus of digitizedbooks and try to understand the occurrences of this phrasein the printed english language over time. so you can put "follow yourpassion" into this tool and see where does it show up inprinted books, and when do we actually see it raised. and i was actually surprised. here's my early-morningtrivia question--
when you think the first decadewas that we actually see the phrase "follow yourpassion" 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 theygo back that far in the ngram viewer. but i'm sure if they did,it might be there. it was actually in the1940s and '50s. there was a play in which agroup of three woodcutters stood around. and someone uttered for thefirst time that i can find in the printed english language,"follow your passion." but they were talking about adifferent type of passion, and
i wouldn't recommend using thisplay as the foundation for your career advice. so that was the '50s. you see a kind of spike upthroughout the '60s as that play is reprinted. it's really the 1980s that westart to see "follow your passion" show up in the contextof career advice. in the '90s that graphof occurrences begins to trend upwards.
by the early 2000s, it's really spiked and hit its peak. by the time jobs stood up thereand gave his speech at stanford stadium , "follow yourpassion" had become a sort of de facto piece of advicefor american career planners and seekers. it got to the point wherenon-technical career guides don't bother anymore to try toexplain what the strategy is or try to give a justificationfor why
this is a good strategy. they assume you know it. they assume that you agree thatit's the right strategy. they just jump right into how doyou figure out what you're passionate about, how do webuild up the courage to go after our passion. so when jobs stood up there andsaid something that people interpreted as saying "followyour passion," this was not the introduction of the idea.
it was more like the ideawas being canonized. so we can think of this as sortof the de facto moment when "follow your passion"became the american career gospel. i mean, this is how we thinkabout building a meaningful career in this country. so as i mentioned, this gotpeople very excited, if you look at the reports surroundingthe talk. we shouldn't be surprisedthat they got excited.
if you look at this idea"follow your passion" objectively, we see that it'sa sort of astonishingly appealing concept. because it tells us that notonly can you have this working life in which you love whatyou do and it's very meaningful and engaging, butthat it's actually not that hard to get there. it's a simple equation. you have to figure out what youlove, which maybe takes
you a month of introspection. you do some strength findersor whatever. you got to figure out whatyou love, and then you match it to your work. problem solved. you'll love what youdo for a living. so it's sort of a astonishingly appealing piece of advice. but here's the problem.
the problem is that "follow yourpassion," in addition to be astonishingly appealing,also happens to be astonishingly bad advice. and that's the idea thatbrought me here today for this talk. so i just published this newbook, and the idea of this book was to answer asimple question. why do some people end up lovingwhat they do for a living, while so manyother people don't?
now, obviously i'm young. so this book was not me sayingi will now draw for my years of career wisdom and share myadvice, having been in the career market for twoyears now, if you don't count grad school. the point was i didn'thave these answers. i was at a key transitionpoint in my own early working life. i was just finishing up myacademic training, was about
to enter the academicjob market. and if this is done right, aprofessorship is supposed to be a job for life. so i was about to do what mighthave been my first and last job interviewsof my life. and on the other hand, i hadthese really tight geographic constraints, and it was a reallybad academic market. so there was this chance that iwould have more or less have to start from scratch afterhaving trained for something.
so in that period of transitioni said if there's any time in my life that i needto understand how people build careers they love, thishas to be the time when i understand this. if i wait 10 more years,it might be too late. so the book actually came outof me needing an answer for that question. it doesn't chroniclemy own wisdom. it chronicles my ownquest to get this
wisdom from other people. so you can think of the book asroughly being in two parts. the first part i lay out myargument for why "follow your passion" is actually bad adviceif your goal is to end up passionate about whatyou do for a living. and then, roughly speaking,the second part is about, well, what shouldyou do instead. if you study people who do endup loving what they do, if they're not following theirpassion, what was it that they
did instead. and that's more or lessthe second part. so i thought what i would dotoday was tell two stories. i can tell one story from thefirst part, and we can draw some lessons from that aboutwhy i think "follow your passion" is bad advice. and then i'll tell a story fromthe second part, and then we can draw some lessons fromthat about what i observed seems to work better instead.
and then we can go to questionsafter that. so let's jump right in. the first story, i want toreturn to steve jobs. but now i want to rewind timeback a little further. let's say you had a time machineand you could go back to meet a young steve jobs. probably the first thing youwould do is go buy apple stock, but let's say you go backeven earlier than that in a high-school age steve jobs.
the biographical sources we havetoday suggest that if you talk to a young steve jobs, youwould not come away with the idea that he was passionateabout building a technology company. he did not have at that pointin his life a passion for changing the world throughtechnology. so steve jobs did not go toberkeley to study electrical engineering, which is what youwould have done in that time and that place if you werereally passionate about
electronics. and he didn't go to stanfordor ucla to study business, which is probably what you wouldhave done in that time and that place if you'revery passionate about entrepreneurship and business. but he instead went to reedcollege, a liberal arts school up in oregon. he studied history,studied dance. pretty soon afterwards hedropped out and hung out on
campus, walking around barefoot,experimenting with sort of extreme diets, bummingfree meals from the hari krishna temple. eventually, he got fed up withbeing completely destitute, came back to california, tooka night shift job at atari. and that was very specific,because he wanted flexibility and not too muchresponsibility. and he began to study easternmysticism, way more seriously. it had just arrived on theshores of the west coast in
this period. he went on a mendicant'sjourney to india in this point. months' long mendicant's journeyto india, came back, started to study seriously atthe los altos zen center, and began to spend an increasingamount of time with the all one commune upstate. so the point of this is that isa portrait of someone who is seeking.
the classic example of someoneyoung, early in their life, trying to figure out what life'sabout, what they want to do with their life. a lot of us go through thisstage, but jobs being jobs couldn't just read kerouac. he had to actually go to indiaand spend three months, because he's intense abouteverything he does. but he's basically reflectingsomething that a lot of us went through ourselves.
trying to understand what arewe doing here, what's the meaning of life. he was in a seeking mode. but what's clear about that isthis was certainly not someone with a crystal-clear vision of iam passionate about starting a technology company, and i'mgoing to find a way to do that one way or the other. it was not at all his mind framein the years leading up apple computer.
so apple computer, howdid it come about? i think the right word is thathim and woz stumbled into the opportunity. woz had been working on acircuit board for what was essentially the apple i. stevejobs had recently met paul terrell, who had one of thefirst computer stores in the world up in mountain view. so jobs came back and said,look, this circuit board was popular at the homebrewcomputing club.
i want to sell you 50 so you cansell it to the hobbyists around here. an earlier biographer of jobs,jeffrey young, actually crunched the numbers. and they were looking to makearound 1,000 to $2,000 profit off of that exchange. and i thought thatnumber was low. so i even got back in touch withpaul terrell recently, and he confirmed thedetails of it.
yeah. he came in to sell 50 of thesethings to hobbyists basically. it was a small-timetransaction. they had done several otherquick money-making schemes like this before. but paul terrell said tojobs, i don't want to buy circuit boards. i want to buy fully assembledcomputers. paul terrell had the vision thatthere was going to be a
market for computersas 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, andapple computer was eventually borne out of that.
so there's a couple lessonsto draw from that story. the first lesson is the path topassion is often way more complicated than simply figuringout in advance this is what i want to do and thengoing out and doing it. so when looked at jobs's storythere, he did not have a preexisting passion to go starta technology company. his path in the apple computerand the passion he had for that company was morecomplicated than him figuring out in advance whathe wanted to do.
so if you go out and studypeople like jobs, who ended up loving their work -- and istudied this extensively researching the book-- youfind that that more complicated path is more therule than the exception. that it's actually very rare tofind someone who really did have clarity about what theywere passionate about in advance and then went after itto form their career that ended up being a real sourceof satisfaction. the paths there are oftenway more complicated.
one of my favorite quotes aboutthis is from the npr host ira glass, "this americanlife" host, who is someone who loves his work. and there's this great interviewonline where some college students come to glassto ask him, how do we build a career like yours. and he says there's this ideain the movie that you should follow your dreams. i don't buy that.
he starts talking for a whileabout how you have to force skills to come andit's really hard. and when he sees their facesfall, he finally says, guys, i see you're trying to figure thisall out in the abstract, and i think that's yourtragic mistake. so i like the wayglass put it. the idea that you can figureout in the abstract what you're supposed to do withyour career is not just a mistake, but it's atragic mistake.
and i think we all sortof feel that. i mean, this notion that if youthink that you can figure out in advance what you'resupposed to do, well, what happens when you don't havethat clear passion? it's confusion. it's anxiety. it's chronic job hopping. it's reading too many blogs,spending too much time on the four-hour workweek.
you know what i mean? this is what happens if youget too caught up in this notion that with one grandgesture you can be loving your life next week. so that's the first lessonto draw from that story. the path to passion in realitywhen you really study it is often way more complicatedthan what that advice tells us. the second lesson to draw fromthat story is that we really
don't have any reason to believethat that advice should work. we're so used to hearing "followyour passion" that we think about it as justbeing self-evident. well, of course, that'sa good thing to do. but if we put on ouranthropological hats and say, well, let's actually look atthis advice, what's it really saying, you notice that it'ssome really strong claims. claims that really begsupporting, and it's hard to
find that support. so "follow your passion," firstof all, claims that most of us have preexisting passionswe can follow. in order to follow apassion, everyone has to have my passion. people talk about, well, i thinkmy passion is this, i think my passion is that. "follow your passion" relieson this idea that we have preexisting passions that forsome reason are well suited to
a modern knowledge work economyand that we just have to identify those. we don't have evidencethat that's the case. so one study i talk about inthe book is a canadian psychologist who's anexpert on passion. he developed "the" survey thatpsychologists use to determine is this a passion of yours, oris this just an interest. he gave it to 500 canadianuniversity students. and while most of them did havepassions, when i went
through the breakdown, it seemedto be roughly 4% of those passions were relevantto a career or a job. the most popular passion by farwas hockey, if that helps. again, it's possible thatthere's this sort of astonishing collection of hockeytalent at this school and they could follow theirpassion and all go to the nhl. but more likely, the point is ifyou told these 500 students figure out what you'repassionate about and follow it, all but 4% were goingto be in trouble.
so we don't have a lot evidencethat most people have preexisting passion. the second claim being made bythis advice that you should follow your passion is thatmatching your work to a preexisting interest is goingto make you have an engaging and satisfying career. it sort of seems self-evidentat first. but if you actually dive intothis sort of voluminous research on workplacesatisfaction--
it's an incredibly wellstudied field. and it turns out that buildinga satisfying, engaging career is a complicated thing to do. and the idea that we can reduceit down to all that matters is that you've matchedthis job to something you're interested in just doesn'tmatch the literature. so yesterday i was on npr witha harvard business school professor who talked at somedetailed length, i will say, about her researchon this topic.
and she could easily fill anhour talking about the subtle, detail things they found aboutwhat really matters in making a creative career that'ssatisfying. so this idea that i wasinterested in this and i matched it to my career is allyou need to make a satisfying career, again, is just notbacked by the evidence. so that's the second lessonabout "follow your passion" is that we don't have any evidencethat this should actually work.
so that's my case againstthat advice. it doesn't match the storieswe find in reality, and we don't have a lot ofsupport for it. so we can move to the morepositive section. well, if "follow your passion"doesn't work, what are people doing that do end up lovingwhat they do? so when i went out there, when istudied people who love what they do, i did find a patternthat shows up pretty often. not everyone followed it, butit was pretty common.
and it is different thanfollowing your passion. so that's what i want to talkabout in the second story. i want to tell the story ofsomeone whose path, i think, is a great case study in thispattern so we can draw lessons from a pattern abouthis story. so let's talk aboutbill mckibben. so bill mckibben is a writer. some of you might know him. he writes environmental books.
"end of nature" is what made himfamous, but he has a dozen different books out. he's also an activist now. he was arrested last year infront of the white house for a climate change protest. anyway, so bill mckibbenis someone who's always fascinated me, because his life,to me, always resonated. he sort of lives in this cabinin vermont and writes these important books, and it allseemed very cool to me.
so i somewhat stalkerishly haveread basically everything written about him. i've gone to his events. i probably know as much aboutbill mckibben as his analyst. so i don't know that's a goodthing, but this is sort of a trait of nonfiction authors. we have to obsessivelyfollow things. so here's bill mckibben'sstory. short story is he shows up atharvard as an undergraduates,
so he's a smart guy. now, i don't know if there'sharvard people here. but at harvard grades aren'treally the thing that you focus on, because harvard youget an a for getting half the letters in your name correctwhen you signed the test. that's not what peoplecare about. i'm a dartmouth guy,so i have to-- this is how the dartmouth-harvard rivalry works.
dartmouth makes really wittyput-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 aboutextracurriculars there for the most part. they have these serious,full-time job style extracurriculars. if you don't, you sort of feellike you're a slacker. so mckibben got involved withthe crimson, which is the
student newspaper. and he worked hard there. he worked his way up inthe ranks, ended up in an editor position. left harvard, could parlay theeditor position at the crimson to getting a staff positionat the new yorker. not writing mcphee style 10,000word essays, doing the little talk at a town things,but that's where you start at the new yorker.
so he goes to the new yorker. now he's working with some ofthe best editors and writers in the world, againhoning his craft. and where his story takes thisnice pivot is that just as he's becoming known in that newyork world, he leaves the new yorker. he moves to a cabinin vermont. he has a book deal to write abook about something that people weren't reallytalking about at the
time, global warming. and he wrote "the end ofnature," which was sort of one of the first big booksabout this topic. it put him on the map asan important thinker in environmental thinking andallowed him to then have this career where he could live upin vermont and write books about topics that wereimportant to him. he eventually got a thinkerin residence position at middlebury, and now he'sdoing activism.
so it's a career that he'svery passionate about. but it's a good example-- and the reason i'm telling youis because it is a good example of the pattern thatcomes up often when you study people who do lovewhat they do. so let's figure out what is thatpattern, what did he do that we can learn from. so the first observation abouthis path is often the most controversial observation i makewhen i talk about this
topic, which is what he did fora living did not matter all that much. so he built the lifethat he was passionate about as a writer. i would conjecture thatthere's any number of different fields in which billmckibben could have built up a working life that he lovedequally as much. there's nothing intrinsic inhis dna about writing. there's no mutated gene thatevolved a couple hundred years
ago that means you are destinedto be a writer. so what mattered for mckibben? well, based on all theinterviews i've read with him and the books i've read, itseems that what really matters from him is more general. that he wants autonomy in hislife, and he wants to be having an impact on the world. he achieved this as anenvironmental writer. but i would say in conjecturethat any career path would
allow him to have a strong senseof autonomy and a strong sense of an impact on theworld, would have been a career path that he would havefound just as much passion in and he would have enjoyedjust as much. and this is something thatcame up time and again. when you study people who lovewhat they do, the specifics of the work is not what'simportant. there's almost always somegeneral lifestyle traits. maybe you want autonomy.
maybe you want powerand respect. maybe you reallywant an impact. maybe you really wantto be creative. maybe what you're looking foris a great amount of time affluence, that you want to havea schedule where you can have work play a verylittle role into it. different lifestyle traitsresonate differently with different people. but ultimately, it seems from myresearch that this is what
matters in someone feeling areal sense of satisfaction and engagement in their career, thattheir career has given them the sort of more generaltraits that matter. and these traits are moregeneral than specific jobs. there's often many, manydifferent paths that can lead you to these traits. so there's no need to sweatthe decision of what is my true calling, what is thejob i'm meant to do. because it doesn't matter.
the specifics are muchless important than these general traits. so that's sort of thefirst observation. the specifics of whatyou do might be less important than you think. the second observation is thatmckibben started by getting really good at something. so in his case he got reallygood at writing, and this took him some time.
he had to go throughthe crimson. he had to work his wayup to the new yorker. but he got really goodat some writing, and that was how he started. this pattern is remarkablyconsistent in the lives of people who end up reallyloving their work. they have this period where theybuild up what i like to call a rare and valuableskill. and when you think of this inthe context of the first
lesson, that suddenlymakes sense. we can start putting thesepieces together. the way they build satisfyingcareers is they start by building up rare andvaluable skills. this gives them an actual valuein the marketplace, in the work marketplace. now they can look to thesegeneral traits that they want in their working life, be itautonomy or impact like mckibben or somethingelse depending what
resonates for you. and they say these traits arerare and valuable, too. they'd be great to have. therefore, they're notbeing handed out on the street corner. i need something rare andvaluable to offer in return for these rare and valuabletraits that are going to make my career great. so they are then able toleverage their rare and
valuable skills to gain moreof these traits in their working life. that's exactly whatmckibben did. if he said as a senior atharvard i want to live a life that's autonomous and has a bigimpact, i'm going to move to vermont and writethese big books, it wouldn't have worked. he didn't have enough writingskill yet to write "end of nature." he had to build up moreof a rare and valuable
skill to actually offer inreturn for the rare and valuable trait of being able tolive in vermont and write books about what he wanted andhave them sell and support him and have an impact. so this equation is in somesense my replacement for "follow your passion," and thisis sort of based off of observing actualpeople's lives. they start by building up rareand valuable skills. they then use these skills asleverage to gain the type of
general traits that matter tothem, and that's why they care less about what specific jobthey do and care a lot more about how they're approachingthe job they have. in my building skills,have i plateaued? how can i continueto build skills? in the book i call it "careercapital." how big is my career capital store? if i want to enjoy my workinglife more, maybe i should look at increasing thatstore faster.
so it's a different way oflooking 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 clearpreexisting passion he wanted to start a technology company. but when he saw an opportunity,he went after it, and he went afterit intensely. he said, if i'm going to makea go at this computer thing, i'm going to do it at theabsolute limit of my ability.
i want to be so good thati can't be ignored. and by doing that, by buildingmachines that were better than anyone else was able to buildthat could blow the mits altair out of the water, themost advanced personal computer machines at the timethat were in existence, he built up a huge storeof career capital. he was able to more or lesscontrol the way that his working life progressed. he couldn't control exactly howapple went, but he could
be working on technology. he could set thetone for apple. he could go do these othercompanies afterwards. he built a life that he wasvery passionate about. not by following a passion, butby passionately doing the work that he was doing. so to bring it back to where wevery began, right where we started, right with jobs, wecan summarize everything we said today by noting that whenit comes to thinking about
your own career and building acareer that's meaningful to you, we can lookto steve jobs. but we should do what stevejobs actually did and not what he said. thank you. [clapping] cal newport: so i guess we justdo questions, so yeah. audience: so it seems-- i really liked your talk.
and it seemed like a lotof what you're saying seems true to me. but it also seems that if youreally want to build up that skill, don't you have to lovethe skill that you're building up to build it up? because if i wasn't interestedin computers, i don't think i would ever have become areasonably competent programmer. cal newport: yeah.
audience: because it wouldbe too painful. i call this the argument frompreexisting passion, because it's one of the more commonquestions that actually comes up when you talk about thisphilosophy about how people build work they love. there's actually interestingresearch on this. there's research on howvirtuosos, for example, build up their virtuosolevel of skill. this came out of bloom's workat university of chicago.
and they studied a wholevariety of virtuosos. not just musicians andathletes, but also mathematicians and scientists. and they tried to understandhow did they build up this huge level of skill. and their most surprisingfinding was there was not a clear, burning passionin advance. and, in fact, what tends tohappen when people build up a huge amount of skill is thatit's a snowball effect.
so something happens earlyon that gives you an interest in a field. so you might have an interest incomputers early on in your life because some encounterwith them seemed interesting to you. that interest gives you enoughintrinsic motivation to get through that first stage ofdeliberate practice where you build up some skill and get alittle bit of separation from other people and oh, yeah,you're good with computers.
that becomes part ofyour identity. that gives you enough intrinsicmotivation to do the next hard stage of deliberatepractice. you come away from that. and now you've separatedyourself more, and you feel more strongly about it. so this is what happens is thatover time the snowball effect pushes up your abilityin something better and better, because at eachstage you feel like
you're better at it. and it feels more and morelike your identity. in other words, an initialinterest blossoms into a stronger and stronger passionas time goes on. so what i counsel people is ifsomething is interesting to you, the research says that'senough to begin the skill acquisition phase. it is a really long road. it's thousands of hours ofdeliberate practice, but you
can be assured that you'renot going to have to do that all blind. as you move along, you'regoing to have little milestones of accomplishmentwhich is going to give you more motivation to getto the next one. audience: is this that10,000 hours thing? so 10,000 hours is andersericsson's rule that for expert level performers, ittakes usually 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which worksout to about 10 years of
more or less full-time work. my argument is that in a lotof fields, especially knowledge work fields, veryfew people are doing any deliberate practice. deliberate practice like asurgeon would do to get better at surgery-- they require10,000 hours to become great surgeons-- is very uncomfortable. you have to stretch yourself.
you have to be systematic abouthere's where i'm weak, and i'm going to have to do whati don't like doing to get better at it. most people in knowledgework don't do that. we avoid discomfort. we use email to get away fromany sort of mental discomfort if something requiring focus. so i conjecture that inknowledge work fields , if you put systematic deliberatepractice into what you do,
you're going to find aseparation from your peers well south of 10,000 hours. so it might take 10,000 hours tobecome a chess grandmaster. but it may only take a fewhundred systematic work at learning some, say, newprogramming paradigm to actually open up a pretty largeand invaluable gap. yes. audience: i really like thenotion of rare and valuable skills, but i'm curious aboutvaluable to who and how you
decide that it's valuable. i raised my hand because i wastalking about something similar to my girlfriend. and she said, but i reallywanted to be a social worker. but it turns out that beingvaluable to people who have no money doesn't reallyget you that far. this is a crucial point. i think one of the moredifficult points of the career capital approach to workis understanding
where to build capital. so something i noticed thatcaught my attention when i studied people who had seemedto apply this philosophy is that they tended to be peoplewho either by design or happenstance had had exposureto stars in their field or otherwise people in their fieldwhose current status really resonated with them. so they're rarelyflying blind. they have some sense of in myfield this person sort of
represents where i'dlike to get. and now i can sort of understandwhat was the skill that got him there. what does he do that otherpeople don't do? now, for a lot of people istudied, this was just happenstance. it's not a surprise why oftenyou'll find someone successful in a field has parentsin that field. that means they have this expertlevel knowledge of what
capital to build. but i posit that once youunderstand that, you can go out deliberately and try tofind this information. so when you're in a particularfield, you can say who within google, for example, representswhere i would like to be with my career. you can actually systematicallygo and try to understand what do they do wellthat other people don't that's given them thatsort of control.
so i actually counsel people tosystematically investigate working backwards from stars,trying to understand what specific skills are. and i think it's reallygood to point out. because if you're not deliberatein trying to understand what capital youshould build, it's very hard to get it right just by luck. audience: is there anykind of cutoff point? you mentioned it could be 10more years before you even
have these opportunities. is there any point at which thegame changes, right, like after a certain period of timein a career or down one track it's more difficultto make a leap? sometimes you see people whoare like, i have been in my job at this advertisingfirm, and now i am a beekeeper or whatever. audience:is there a pointat which it becomes more difficult to change?
cal newport: well, it'sa good question. i think career capital as sortof a metaphor helps you understand those typeof decisions. so i tell a story in my bookabout a marketing executive. exactly your example here. except for instead of thebeekeeper, she quit and did a four-month-- or four-week, actually, yogainstruction course to become a yoga instructor in thenew york area.
and by the end of that firstyear, she was on track for making something like $15,000,which supposedly in the new york area doesn't go as far asyou might like it to be. career capital helps youunderstand what was flawed about that move. she had a huge amount ofcapital in marketing. she had zero capital in yoga. so by jumping to a four-weekinstructional course, she give herself just a little bitof career capital.
not very much at all. so she shouldn't expect to beable to gain much great traits in her life right away, becauseshe doesn't have much capital there. so when you think about thingslike that, it helps temper the impulse to try to start over ordo something from scratch. because if you believe that it'sbuilding up capital and leveraging it is what makes youlove your work and not the matching problem, i'm more meantfor this job than that,
you'll be much less likelyto jump into something completely new. because you're actuallyretarding your progress at having more controland leverage. so i think this metaphor ofcareer capital helps you assess whether a change you'remaking is i'm bringing my capital with me, but i'mbringing it into a new market within my field that it's goingto have some impact, versus i'm leaving my capitalon the table and doing
it allows you to have thosenuances that without the metaphor can get sortof confused. audience: so i'm, i guess, oldenough that i sort of missed the whole "follow yourpassion" thing. cal newport: it was reallymy generation. audience: and the advice thati got, although it was never sort of so summarized in justa handful of words, was more like try as many thingsas possible. don't be afraid to try things.
don't be afraid tofail at them. and does this in some waysmight have the same end result, as long as you'rewilling to be paying attention to what you're doing andbeing persistent? is this-- it's an interesting point,because in some sense-- audience: is thatbad advice or-- cal newport: so i think it'sgood advice if it's within the context of a particularcareer capital source,
if that makes sense. so if you're building capitalin technology, to expose yourself to lots of things isactually a great way to find potential opportunitiesasymmetries in the market, someplace where you canreally make a move like steve jobs did. but to be at google and to alsobe exploring theater and to also be exploring filmmakingand also be exploring beekeeping, well,you're crossing strong career
capital division lines. they're completely unrelated. and then you run the risk ofslowing down your acquisition of capital in any particular. so i always understand the sortof hybrid approach that you have a general field inwhich you're building capital. by doing exposure within there,you're actually gaining more knowledge. more expertise can actually helpyou build and apply it.
so i think that's where thatadvice is valuable. i think it's dangerous whenpeople apply too broadly and are covering too many thingsthat are way too disparate, if that makes sense. audience: it does. cal newport: again, what i'msort of doing here is geekifying somethingthat's not geeky. it's my life and my passion. i'm a scientist.
i'm a computer scientistlike you guys, so you understand this. so i'm coming at it fromthat point of view. but i think it's helpful-- andi'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 uslots of insight into these sort of more fuzzy questions.
audience: if you were a parentand you wanted your kids to [? learn ?], would it make senseto get them interested in things that you believe will someday be rare and valuable? cal newport: well, it seems likeit's more important if you're young, that you need tobuild up the ability to build up skill, to focus deliberatelyon something. i see college, for example-- you are picking up specificskills there, but you're also
picking up the ability todo tough, intellectual challenges. or if you're given a term paper,you have a month to go understand this topic and writeabout it intelligently. the reason you should try toget an a on that is not because you're looking for a jobin which you're going to have to write term papersfor a living. it's because you're going tobe in a knowledge work economy, and you're goingto have to tackle tough,
cognitively demanding tasks. and you want to do it not onlywell, but stretch yourself while you're doing it. so my assumption-- and i'm nota parent yet, but in two weeks i will be. so i'm thinking quitea bit about this-- is but focus less-- i'm thinking that i willbe focusing less. we'll see.
we'll see what actuallyhappens. but i will be focusing less onthe specifics of you need to choose right now what you wantto do, because that goes to this whole myth that you havea preexisting aptitude, a passion that you haveto uncover. and really put the more focus onworking hard at something, taking something and buildingthe skill because that's-- ability to do that is what'sgoing to serve you well, not the particular skills you pickup when you're 16 years old.
audience: i'm sorry. have you discovered any bestpractices in terms of like daily habits that knowledgeworkers do to mimic deliberate practice? i mean, you mentioned beingdistracted by email. we all work at a company wherewe probably get hundreds of emails a day. and it's very easy to just likepush the email button. audience: what are the ways thatlike if i wanted to put
in, even if it's a couplehundred hours of deliberate practice are there things thathigh performers do that-- audience: --lead moreto success? there are. in fact, i have a chapter inthe book where i take two particular high performers,a venture capitalist and a television writer, and i triedto understand how they apply deliberate practice in theirwork right now and how they used it to get wherethey were.
and there's tips. like the venture capitalistactually used a spreadsheet to track his time. and, in particular, totrack is email time. and he had these well-chosengoals for how much time he should be spending on emailbecause he wasn't getting much value out of there as comparedto actually vetting deals. and he would track his timedaily to make sure that he hit his numbers.
because he was tracking it, itforced him to check much less often in the batch, because hehad particular numbers that he was trying to hit. and that helped him becomemore efficient. the television writer,similarly, his whole thing was that he had-- he was very clear onwhat good meant. he had a whole group of sort ofcollaborators and advisers that could look at scripts andsay what was bad with them.
and he wrote this sort ofintense amount of writing. he was working on four or fiveprojects at a time when he was trying to break in and gettingintense feedback on them, which is another piece ofdeliberate practice. so there are a lot ofspecific strategies. i talk about some of them. i think having the general ideaof deliberate practice which i go through can helpyou craft your own. i also think that it's a richtopic that needs to be
explored by itself. this is one of the number-onequestions i get. people are really interested inthe specifics of deliberate practice of knowledge work. i think this is actually goingto be a convergence. it's going to be a big deal inthe next five, ten years. so you're asking theright questions. audience: let me back up aquestion on what you teach your kids, for whateverit's worth.
my wife and i have looked to theprofessionals and so forth for our kids. so it worked outdecently well. but, in fact, david brooks andfolks have written about a fair amount of this and a lotof-- the thing that you really learn from your parents, ifyou're lucky, which my kids weren't necessarily, issort of fortitude and stick to itiveness. the idea that you don't giveup, that you learn how to
concentrate deeplyon a problem. audience: it's a much morefundamental, more attitudinal approach to life, approach tostuff thing, than anything that has something to dowith your specific professional skills. that seems to be bettercorrelated with how successful kids-- how successful parentshave successful kids. that's right.
and angela duckworth's researchon 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 theoreticalcomputer scientist at georgetown who's a phenomenalproblem solver. it turns out his dad was amathematician that used to give him these puzzles when hewas young, and he would slip in there every once in a whileunsolved problems.
and it gave him great practicewith sticking with problems and working on them and notexpecting to get an answer right away. it turns out that's exactlya skill you need to be a successful professionalmathematician, because you have to be able to just i'mgoing to spend 10 hours with this problem today. and i don't know. maybe it's unsolvable.
maybe it's not, but you'regetting the hours in. audience: but it probablygeneralizes, too. cal newport: i think itabsolutely does, which is why i think thinking of school aspracticing, taking on hard intellectual challenges, notonly doing them well, but stretching your ability is agreat 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 bookis called "so good they can't ignore you." get it on amazon,barnes & noble, or wherever. i want to thank you againand thank you for having me come speak. i really enjoyed it.