DIAMONDS

Greetings one and all! I hope you’re doing well, wherever you are right now. This is the second part of my series on So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport’s insightful book. If you hadn’t read part one, you can check it out here.

And, of course, you can get the book itself from here.

Last time, we saw that ‘Follow your passion’ is an absolutely rubbish piece of advice that no one should follow, and which pretty much everyone that has followed has ended up regretting. I also mentioned that the real path to success in your endeavors is through self-discipline, hard work and effort. Well, today I want to expand on that a little by looking at what that kind of life looks like.

Suppy and Demand

When someone tells you to follow your passion, they’re making a very provocative statement. To follow something, you have to be the one deciding where you’ll go, the guy at the steering wheel. You can only follow your passion in your career if you’re at the steering wheel of your career, making all the decisions.

“Of course, I am! What does this nerdy254 prick think he’s telling me?” Easy does it, cowboy. Just hear me out for a second. If you really think about it, unless you’re the president and CEO of whatever company you founded, you’re not really in control of your life and career. You’re career path will be influenced by the interaction of dozens of factors, most notably the supply and demand for professionals from your field of expertise, in the free market. In other words, the kind of work you end up doing will be determined not by your passion, but by what someone out there in the wide world will be willing to pay you to do. That’s a rule that applies for everyone, be they Cristiano Ronaldo or the neighborhood trash man.

The price of diamonds is around $1400 per carat. A carat is 200milligrams, so the cost for a gram works out to $7000, or Ksh700,000. Meanwhile, on the roadside somewhere near your house, there’s some old lady hawking charcoal at around Ksh50 for a 2kg debe, which is 28 million times cheaper. Yet charcoal and diamonds are both just carbon, and you can even argue that charcoal is far more useful. Just think about it. If you were stuck at the South Pole in the dead of winter, with a million shillings in your pocket, which would you buy: charcoal or diamonds?

Why the unbelievable price difference, then? It’s very simple: the demand for charcoal worldwide is massive, but so is the supply. The demand for diamonds might not be as large, but the supply is extremely small.

Be a Diamond

And that’s the case that Cal Newport builds in his book. The road to career happiness begins with making yourself a diamond by getting skills that are rare and valuable and which most people don’t have. It’s not because those skills will satisfy you in and of themselves, but, once you have them, you can use them to purchase the kind of career that people dream about. Without said skills, you’re, sadly, just charcoal: common, inexpensive and not really valued highly by anyone.

The case for skills over passion is so airtight it’s surprising that anyone, anywhere sees any alternative view of the world. Yes, I’m sure Cristiano Ronaldo loves playing football with all his heart, but so do a thousand kids scattered over primary schools all across Nairobi. Ronaldo gets paid $58 million dollars a year by Real Madrid, not because he loves football, but because he is so good at it he’s been named the best player in the world multiple times.

The same argument can be used for every successful professional anywhere in the world, from Will Smith to Kendrick Lamar to Mark Zuckerburg and even, ahem, Donald Trump. Behind the millions (or billions!) there’s always some rare and valuable skill, ability, possession or expertise.

That idea that your goal, if you’re looking for a career you will love, should be to acquire some rare and valuable skill is what he dubs the craftsman mentality. That is what he had in mind when he entitled his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. He’s telling us to become so good at our chosen profession that they (those who might want to ‘buy’ us) can’t ignore us anymore.

The road to acquiring a rare and valuable skill passes through a small, unpopular little town called deliberate practice. Deliberate practice of the relevant skill is something that sports professionals and musicians know a lot about, but white colour workers don’t. The book itself goes into great detail about that, so I would really urge you to check it out for yourself.

Then there’s also the sticky issue of what kind of job you should seek out once you become rare and valuable. That’s what I’ll tackle in the third and final part of this series on So Good They Can’t Ignore You.  Until then, keep reading the book, watch the video from last time and LIKE, SHARE and SUBSCRIBE if you found this worth your time.

 

FOLLOW YOUR PASSION? RUBBISH!

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Famous, immortal words. It’s just one paragraph from Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech, but it’s the words that everyone remembers. In that single paragraph, he captured the spirit and ideals of an entire generation — my generation — the millenials. We read those words over and over, heard them repeated by our teachers, celebrities, films, books and television (YouTube!); we tried to live them and be guided by them in school, in choosing a career, and when we finally got to the workplace. Love what you do is the Millenials’ Creed, perhaps the single most valuable gem for sale in the marketplace of ideas.

And it’s all a lie.

Follow your passion?

In 2010, a guy by the name of Cal Newport became obsessed with an idea; why do some people end up loving what they do, while others end up hating it? That simple question led him on a quest that over the next several months saw him interview dozens of people from all walks of life, and which ultimately gave us So Good They Can’t Ignore You, a comprehensive manifesto on the mechanics of finding a job you will absolutely love! (You can download a PDF of the book here.

Finding, or rather creating, work that you love is a lot like building a house. It’s a painstaking process that takes quite a while and demands a lot from you in terms of raw materials. It’s such an involving process, in fact, that I’ll probably dedicate several blog posts to it. Like any construction process, however, step one is always to tear down whatever rickety, old, termite-eaten structure is currently sitting on the land you plan to build on. When it comes to building a career you will love, the old structure that needs to be torn down is what Steve Jobs expressed in the first paragraph: the idea that you should keep searching until you find work that you love.

It’s terrible advice, especially for teenager or college student who doesn’t really understand what life’s really about. Steve Jobs certainly never followed it. Read a bit of his biography on Wikipedia; it’s fascinating reading. Before founding Apple, Steve Jobs was a bright but troubled student, the kind that always has to let everyone know that they’re the smartest person in the room. He attended a liberal arts college for a while, dropped out because it was too expensive, but kept on attending the classes he liked, most famously calligraphy (which is why we have multiple fonts on our computers.) He moved out of his parents’ home, then moved back in, he worked in a video game company for a while, went to India on a pilgrimage, and for a period considered going to Japan to become a Buddhist monk. This isn’t someone who knows what they want out of life and is walking fearlessly down that road; it’s a guy who has no idea what he wants to do with his life, and isn’t finding satisfaction in any of the things he’s trying.

The fact that ‘follow you passion’ might not be the best advice is something I’ve seen in my own life. I have always loved both science and art. I spent a lot of my teenage years searching for some career that would involve the perfect ratio of the two, convinced that, if I didn’t find it, my life would be miserable. Of course, since what I was searching for didn’t exist, I never found it, and that only stressed me out more.

So, what’s the right path?

Love the Process

 

Well, as the guy in the video says, finding work you’ll love is less about finding and more about creating. You’re not so much meant to follow your passion as carry it with you on your journey. You’ll have to learn to love the journey, love the process, because that’s what the work is. But you won’t always love it:  you’ll always need self-discipline.

Or, as a wise man once said, “Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win. Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things… I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified.”

The ‘how’ of finding work you will love deserves its own blog post, and don’t worry: it’ll get it. In the mean time, watch the video and read Cal Newport’s amazing book. And if this post was worth your time, don’t forget to SHARE, LIKE and SUBSCRIBE.

Till next time, au revoir!

And don’t forget…