No one owes you a good job, you have to work hard for it, and the process will not be smooth.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “sixth man” (ID: connect_yourself) , Author: Sixth person.
“You keep expanding your range of abilities, day after day, year after year, and finally one day, you look up and realize: Hey, I’m good enough, people are starting to pay attention to me.”
People have always thought that Jobs had achieved legendary business achievements by following his passion …
However, this view may be completely wrong.
In the 1970s, after Jobs dropped out of Oregon Reed College, known as the “Arts Enclave”, in order to end the homeless life of the tramp, he entered Atari to become the No. 40 employee of the game company and began to work normally. Because of his rampage of character, in order to reduce conflicts with other employees, he was arranged to work night shifts. During this period, he was closely connected with his friend Steve Wozniak, and he was eager to do something interesting and profitable to bear the cost of meditation in India in the future.
After Steve Jobs returned from Indian meditation for a period of time in 1974, engineer Alex Kamratt, the founder of a computer-sharing service company called Access Computer, found Woz and wanted to design one. A terminal device that customers can access to their central computer. Watts was quickly involved, he was extremely good at electronics, but he wasn’t sure at the commercial level. After understanding the background, Jobs and Woz joined forces. At first, their goal was to make the cost of 25 dollars, sell 100 circuit boards for 50 dollars, and deduct the design fee of 1,500 dollars. Their net profit was 1,000 dollars.
Jobs visited the “Byte Store”, a pioneering computer store, to sell circuit boards, but the owner, Paul Terrell, made his own claim: local computer fans desperately need a set of computers that can be assembled at home. He doesn’t need a circuit board , But requires a complete assembly computer, one 500 US dollars, MOQ 50 units one-time shipment.
From selling circuit boards to selling assembled computers, the apple that accidentally hit Jobs’ head has brought him a real lucky turn, which makes the exploration attempts that have been small and fussy have gradually entered the formal business the way.
Analyzing Jobs’ career history, we can find some important clues:
1. He has a strong interest in western history, dance, and eastern mysticism, but he has no cold in business and electronics.
2. He founded the Apple Empire, but the birth of this company was not driven by his initial love and passion. He just wanted to “make some money” to support his dream of “meditation”.
3. Jobs’ inner passionIt lies in the understanding and meditation of the Eastern World, which is a long way from the Apple Technology World he eventually created and the work he loves.
4. If he follows passion, he should be a teacher at the Los Altus Meditation Center near his home, but it is considered to be obedient, but in the end, he has found his bounden duty in the electronic technology world.
5. His important partner, Woz, also had a full-time job at HP at the time.
These clues behind Steve Jobs’s legendary success have made people start to rethink a long-controversial professional proposition, which is:
1. Is one’s career success driven by passion?
2. How can a person find a career and mission that he will love for life?
3. If we can’t find our passion in life, can we still fall in love with the work we are doing, and then build our own strong business foundation?
Best-selling author Carl Newport has answered these confusions and questions one by one in his work “Too Good to Be Neglected”. He built this with a sharp pen, unique perspective, and rich research and interviews. The underlying logic of major career issues:
Passion is a by-product of mastery. Steady career development is not exactly driven by passion, but achieved by “craftsman thinking”. When you are good enough, it means you are no longer ignored. The result of excellence requires deliberately honing your skills to form workplace capital, discovering professional missions and injecting personal qualities to enable you to accomplish big things, which means that you should work correctly, rather than constantly finding the right job.
Don’t look for passion and love, you should cultivate yourself as a craftsman
If you enter the workplace with passion, then the annoying tasks assigned to you or the frustrations encountered in the company’s bureaucracy will make you unable to cope.
Attractive careers often have intricate origins, and you ca n’t simply assume that you just follow passion.
Most people are easily trapped in the illusion of “Passion Hypothesis”. The core of the passion hypothesis is that we all have some kind of passion that actually exists and needs to be discovered.
In the 2002 Canadian psychologist Robert Valleran ’s passion test for college students, the top five passions are:
Dance, hockey, skiing, reading and swimming. However, these passions do not contribute much to career choice.
Of all the passions identified, less than 4% are related to work or education, and the other 96% are hobbies or interests, such as sports and art.
On the other hand, the type of work itself does not necessarily determine how much people like it. Amy Riesnaski, a professor of organizational behavior at Yale University, conducted a study of professional assistants who also worked as administrative assistants, and found that the degree of preference for work is somewhat similar to that of a person.Working years are directly proportional. The happiest and most passionate employees are not those who turn passion into work, but those who have done it long enough and are good at what they do.
The more a person can accumulate steadily, the easier it is to obtain compound interest from the accumulation of time—the more accumulated, the better he is, and then he can feel a strong “competence”, have sufficient autonomy, and feel To a strong sense of belonging. This is the important discovery of Daniel Pinker in “Drive” ——
The “nutrients” necessary for the intrinsic motivation that individuals feel at work include:
1. Autonomy: Feeling control over your life and feeling that what you do is important.
2. Competent: Feeling good at what you do.
3. Belonging: I feel I can connect with others.
This is a good illustration that the same is the administrative assistant, different people feel the passion, happiness, sense of accomplishment and joy of work. It is the same reason to change to any other position and profession.
Passionate thinking makes people extremely concerned about the aspects of work that they don’t like, which leads to long-term unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, as they are not assigned too many challenging projects and autonomy in terms of responsibilities.
What’s more serious: The deep-seated questions that drive passionate thinking, namely “who am I” and “what do I really love”, basically have no definite answer. Passionate thinking will almost always leave you in a state of dissatisfaction and confusion.
The artisan thinking essentially pulls you out of these illusions that look like an infinite loop, focusing on some more practical needs:
One way to treat your career is to focus on your output-centered view of your career and focus on the value you bring to the world (work). This thinking is critical to building a career you love.
Artisan thinking contains something that can free people from restraints. It requires you not to be self-centered, not to worry about whether your work is “just right”, but to lean over and work hard to make yourself better. It claims that no one owes you a good job, and you have to work hard for it, and the process will not be smooth.
Artisan thinking focuses on what they can bring to the world, while passionate thinking focuses on what the world can bring to themselves. Most people treat their careers with the latter way of thinking, which is exactly the misunderstanding that everyone often enters.
Carl Newport believes that no matter what kind of occupation you are, you have to treat your job like a real craftsman, and you may also create an attractive career through “craftsman thinking”.
You can get it through artisan thinking:
1. Creativity
2. Influence
3. Autonomy
Three dimensionsIt is the most important characteristic of accomplishing great events.
Think of artisans first, passion will follow. What you have to do is not to “wait for the wind to come”, but to see how to deal with the task at hand.
Most importantly, craftsman thinking is appropriate for gaining workplace capital.
Establish, maintain, and invest in your workplace capital
Carl Newport introduced this very important concept: “Career Capital.”
Description of skills that individuals possess that are scarce and valuable in the workplace. To create a job you love, this is the key currency.
He summarized the workplace capital theory that achieves great things:
1. The traits of accomplishment are scarce and precious.
2. To acquire these qualities, you need to provide scarce and valuable skills in exchange. These scarce and valuable skills can be regarded as a person’s workplace capital.
3. Artisan thinking is constantly focused on making yourself “excellent to be ignored”, which is a strategy that is very suitable for obtaining capital.
The two protagonists in the case study are representative of passionate thinking and craftsman thinking. However, their professional destinies are very different:
Lisa Foyle, 38, gave up advertising and marketing, and she was tired of the constraints of corporate life. After 200 hours of yoga coaching training, she decided to start a business, thinking that this is her passion. However, she didn’t know that leaving her marketing career for many years also caused her to lose her biggest advantage and capital, and jumped into a new world from scratch without much job reserve.
Affected by the economic crisis in 2008, Foyle’s career was struggling. The gym she taught was closed, and the demand for personal training for fitness was greatly reduced. Her annual income was $ 15,000, and when interviewed by a New York Times reporter, she said she was receiving food stamps.
Another protagonist, Joe Duffy, who also received reports during the same period, is also engaged in advertising design and is also dissatisfied with workplace life. Before leaving his job at that time, he focused on the accumulation of workplace capital, specializing in international trademark and brand logo design.
Later, he was incurred by Faron McAry Goth Advertising Co. of Minneapolis, allowing him to independently run his own subsidiary, Duffy Design (meaning sufficient autonomy), in After working there for 20 years, he has designed trademarks for Sony and Coca-Cola, and realized his autonomy with his workplace capital; after that he left the company and founded a 15-person design studio, which is also a startup, but he has With more strength-after the accumulation of successful project experience, customers who are looking for him to design are endless.
Compared to Foyle, he bought a 400,000-square-meter retreat, owned 3 buildings, and had a successful business with autonomy at the age of 45.
The two protagonists have almost similar positions and professional accumulation.But different thinking and behavior patterns have brought different fate in the end.
Establishing and maintaining professional capital means that you have to be patient and able to survive—continuously strengthening and consolidating your skills in a field, obtaining sufficient capital and initiative, so that others can notice you I have done a good job, and then I think of ways to cash these capitals into more wealth, opportunities, and even personally create more opportunities for myself.
Duration-deliberate practice & accumulation-good at-competent-self-confidence-to become the top-to obtain professional capital and autonomy-to discover “adjacent possibilities” for innovation-to enter the field of innovation to gain more professional capital-phase Realizing professional capital-achieving professional success is the complete closed loop of artisan thinking.
The “Finance Feasibility Principle” is the simplest criterion and touchstone when deciding whether or not to pursue an attractive activity to increase autonomy in your career. You should investigate whether others are willing to pay for it. If evidence is found, continue to pursue; if not, maintain the status quo. Do something that someone is willing to pay.
Intentionally practice 5 steps to practice “artisan thinking” to accumulate workplace capital
It’s not easy to really accumulate “hard core skills” and accumulate workplace capital for yourself.
You need to design a clear goal for yourself, cut difficult tasks into deliberately practiced sections, and continue to make breakthroughs in technical and execution difficulty to ensure that you can break through the “Perfomance Plateau” after reaching the bottleneck , Always maintain the acceleration of specific skills growth.
You can complete the real skill transition in the following 5 steps:
1. First, determine which workplace capital market you are in:
In general, in a winner-take-all market: there is only one type of workplace capital available, and there are many different people competing for this capital. For example, the entertainment industry, TV screenwriters, and consulting blogs. Extending to China today, we may regard self-media content creation as a “winner-take-all” market-because your content determines the so-called open rate and bounce rate to the greatest extent. Its essence is: whether it brings inspiration to readers and audiences.
In the auction market: there are many different types of workplace capital, and everyone can generate their own unique capital.
2. Identify your capital type:
In the winner-take-all market, you have only one type of workplace capital to choose from, and you can only accumulate this type of workplace capital. In the auction market, you have great flexibility. In this case, a useful heuristic is to look for “windows”, those opportunities to accumulate capital that are open to you.
3. Define “Excellent”
You need to have clear goals. If you don’t knowWhat kind of goal you want to achieve, it is difficult for you to take effective measures. For musicians, it may be able to play a new, complicated specific technique; for screenwriters, it may be to have a good enough script to find an agent.
4. Stretch and destroy
Conscientious practice begins with concentration and energy. This is its “intentional place”, and most people are just doing things that don’t require thinking such as playing a few pianos or playing a tennis racket.
“Intentional Practice” Jeff Colvin
The benefit of deliberate practice is that it will allow you to spend the “platform period” and enter the world of few competitors; the disadvantage is that few people can achieve this achievement, deliberate practice is usually “exciting The opposite of pleasure.
Stretch means discomfort and tension, but it means progress. If you don’t feel unwell, you may be stuck at an “acceptable level”. You need to constantly use this discomfort to reach new heights, promote your skills to always maintain a high level, and also have a certain acceleration. In the process, you also need to establish a quick feedback mechanism to help yourself get an objective evaluation.
5. Be patient
Before you succeed, you have to go through difficult and discouraging years and endure mediocre performance.
The acquisition of workplace capital takes a long time.
If you do not reject those glorious new pursuits with this patience and will, your efforts will be off course and you will not be able to obtain the required capital.
Explore your career mission and promote the realization of workplace capital
Find an attractive mission = Invest in your workplace capital to gain a certain worthy quality in your career. Having a mission means having a center of gravity in your career.
Mission allows you to focus on a useful goal, which in turn maximizes your influence in your field, and influence is one of the key factors that love your work.
But you will ask: What is the difference between this and the repeated questioning of “what do I want” under the guidance of passionate thinking?
To have a mission, you need to get capital first. If you skip this step, your ending may be: enthusiastic, but useless. In other words: you do not need to find a mission as soon as you come up. The answer to this question gradually emerges with the improvement of skills and the accumulation of workplace capital.
Like the career path of Harvard’s evolutionary biology professor Patis Sarbetty, most people go through many setbacks in the search for a mission. It even comes very hard and late.
1. In high school: Sabetti is fascinated by mathematics and loves biology
2. Undergraduate: enrolled in MIT because of the influence of high school biology education