The first years of working life might be very hard especially if you are an enthusiastic young person, who has high ambitions, dreams of a great career, wants to have an impact and bring a change in the society. Well, all of these sound as good qualities, so from where is the hard part coming? It comes from not knowing where to start, from judging the professional choices you’ve made through the passion lens, from not having patience ... patience to see the results of your work, patience to build your passion!
We all have in mind successful people that we admire and who look so passionate about what they do that it leaves no doubt passion is the key ingredient we have to be looking for. It is widely known Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address where he talks about the importance of loving what you do, of not giving up, of always exploring. And while I can only agree with every word he says, I think it can also give you a wrong illusion … the illusion that everything will become easy if you love what you do.
But it doesn’t … even if you have found what you love, the results will not easily come. Or you can be in the situation of not finding yet what you love and as the years pass, you just think you are waisting time and you have lost the game of discovering your passion. While putting some thought on all of these, I have come across 3 books that it offered me some insights that can have a practical applicability and I recommend reading — So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Carl Newport, Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell and Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries by Peter Sims.
So, let’s get to the what can we do part :)
- Don’t expect to love what you do before you actually do it! Love and passion for your work come after you have developed some valuable skills. So, stop wondering so much about what you do for a living and focus on how you do it. Start by identifying valuable skills in your field of working and master them. This will help you get in time the traits that usually motivate people at work: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Thinking from this perspective, jumping directly to any of these traits without having first developed your career capital (knowledge, skills, competences, results) will not be sustainable. And, especially when we talk about getting more control over our work, there is a trap we can easily fall in: getting too much too soon (getting control before developing some fundamental career capital). Further on, only after developing our career capital we can be able to identify how to use our skills towards a higher purpose or career mission.
2. No matter how good you think you are, never stop practicing! After you manage to get used to your tasks and feel comfortable with your responsibilities (you know what you have to do, how to do it, whom to ask for help etc.), it is very easy to just go along with the workflow and only learn new things when the situation requires it. You have to stop just waiting for the learning opportunities to come to you and you have to start constantly challenging yourself. Related to this, there are two terms I really like: ”deliberate practice” and ”little bets”. Deliberate practice means to be aware of the things you want to learn, improve, discover etc. and make sure you are investing time or other resources into doing this. For example, this means that no matter how busy your week is, you will allocate time for what you want to learn, you will track the time invested and results obtained, you will not miss the most important events/conferences/gatherings in the field etc. Using little bets can help you focus on deliberate practice. Little bets can be small projects happening for a short period of time that can help you explore options, gain insights and test new things.
3. Be aware of your background and cultural legacies! One of the most known ideas from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, is the 10.000 hours rule which imply that you need a high amount of practicing time before you master a skill. But, another idea from the book caught my attention even more — the role of background and cultural legacies into your career development. Besides the hard work that you might put into developing yourself, you are influenced more or less by your background. This point is not about defending our culture, or being ashamed of it, but about acknowledge if there are things that might be an opportunity for us (e.g. numbers are faster to say in Chinese than in English, and so, Asian people can memorise numbers or make mathematical operations easier), or things that might drag us behind so, we have to try to change them (e.g. KIPP school from Bronx succeeds to take kids that come from cultural backgrounds that increase their chances of academic failure and helps them accomplish high academic results).
In the end, as long as you continue exploring, you make mastering skills and improving yourself a priority and you gain control over your work, you are on the right track even if it doesn’t feel like that all the time … actually, you are building your own track, you are building your passion with every little bet you make (even if you win it, or loose it).
