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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Today we re talking with Cal Newport.
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This guy, I ve been waiting to have this guy on the show for a long time.
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I m really stoked.
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We re gonna talk about why following your passion is bad advice and we re gonna prove it.
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And why is this advice so popular if it doesn t work?
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Of course, we re gonna give you alternate strategies with, of course, naturally practical exercises to take things in a different direction.
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construct a working life you actually love, along with all the pitfalls along the way, and something called career capital and how it can help you get a job that you love.
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So, Cal Newport is going to crush it for you.
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Welcome to the Yard of Charm, guys and gals.
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The Yard of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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Imagine having a mix of experienced mentors teaching you their expertise,
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packing decades of research, testing, and tough lessons into a curriculum.
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We may not have all the answers, but we certainly have all the questions.
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Make sure to stay up to date with AOC, get some stuff we don t share on the show by signing up at theartofcharm.com.
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We ll also send you our Fundamentals Toolkit that covers body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, public speaking, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
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Of course, I m doing my regular videos every week with drills and exercises to help you move forward, so don t forget those.
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People are liking those, which makes me happy, because I think they re fun.
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I also want to encourage you to join us in our social capital challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444.
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This challenge is about improving your networking and connection skills and inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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This will make you a better networker.
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It ll make you a better connector.
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If you want some accountability, invite your friends as well.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444 and they can join the challenge too.
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Alright, here s Cal Newport.
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Cal, thanks so much for coming on.
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Actually, you re a hard man to reach.
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I had flunkies back when I had flunkies before I hired Jason reaching out to you, and it was just dead air, and I thought, Cal Newport doesn t like us.
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But it turns out you just have really good filters, and we ll get into why that is in a little bit, but tell us what you do in one sentence.
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I m a professor and a writer.
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All right, well that was really short.
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Okay, perfect, that s how we do.
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What we re here to talk about today is your new book, So Good They Can t Ignore You, which debunks the long-held belief that follow your passion is actually good advice.
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And I love that because I hate that bit of advice, and I think one of the reasons that it s so widely popular is because when you ask people who are really successful, they say it a lot because they don t know what the hell else to talk about.
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And I want to get into why it s terrible,
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why it s become so popular, almost kind of like a maxim of the millennial, and maybe even before that, and I think it s toxic.
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So, let s dive in and discuss, first of all, why are you picking on that?
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I mean, of all the crappy slogans to pick on, why is follow your passion chiefly in your crosshairs?
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Well, I didn t set out to pick on it.
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What I set out to do was actually, I think, a little bit more humble.
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When I was writing the book So Good They Can t Ignore You, it was during a major career change in my own life, and so I decided if there was any time in my life that I had an answer to the question, how do people end up loving what they do for a living, this was going to be the time where I was going to get the most leverage for it.
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Now, because I m also a writer, I figured, well, instead of just looking into this myself, why don t I actually sell a book on this and really go at it?
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Let me really try to understand the answer to this question.
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And basically, if you look at the question of how people end up loving what they do from almost any angle, the first thing you re gonna hear from almost all directions is, you just have to follow your passion.
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So this was in my face as soon as I set out to try to understand this question.
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But what s interesting is if you then push a little bit farther,
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and say, well, why is that true?
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What s the evidence?
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Why do we think that this actually works for a lot of people?
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It crumbles very quickly.
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And pretty quickly, you realize that this advice that s everywhere and you can t avoid is actually a pretty terrible piece of advice.
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Interesting.
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Yeah, I think that s probably largely true, although I can t necessarily prove it, so let s dive into that and actually try to prove this as terrible advice.
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Because when I, for lack of a better term, piss all over this phrase, a lot of people don t like it, especially if they just got off stage saying it, they really don t like it, because it s like I m picking on them.
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But there s so many reasons why it s bad that literally the first third of your book kind of debunks it.
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Why is follow your passion bad advice?
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Yeah, and I think we should establish, you know, right up front, you know, for the listener that neither you nor me are saying that the goal of ending up passionate about what you do is bad.
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In fact, the whole point of the book was to try to figure out how I could end up with a job I was very passionate about.
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So I think a lot of the anger that comes from people when they first hear me say, follow your passion is bad advice, is what they hear is me saying, give up on the goal of being passionate about your life, just settle for a job you don t like.
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And of course that s not at all what I m saying.
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The key separation is follow your passion is a specific piece of advice, a specific strategy for trying to accomplish the goal of ending up passionate about your work.
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And this specific strategy says the key is two steps.
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One, everyone has a pre-existing passion.
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You have to identify it through introspection.
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And then two,
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You have to use this pre-existing passion as the basis for your career choices or deciding what it is you want to do.
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And if you do those two things, you ll end up loving what you do.
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That s the foundation for this advice.
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And if you push a little bit closer, you see it doesn t work for a couple of reasons.
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most people don t have clear pre-existing passions that they can use to make career choices.
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So for this large group of people, if you say, just follow your passion, they re screwed.
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They don t have a passion to follow.
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And if you think about it, why would we expect that most people, especially at a young age, were somehow hardwired for a particular career in the knowledge work industry, which is so new.
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The second problem with this piece of advice is that it assumes that the match of your work
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to something intrinsic in you is the primary source of people s satisfaction and meaning in their work.
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That if you re really interested in something and then match that to the job, then you re really gonna like that job.
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And we don t have a lot of evidence that that s true either.
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Okay, got it, that makes sense.
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I wanna go back to the first bit because I get a lot of email about what should I do with my life and things like that.
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And even people that are my own age, not necessarily younger people, they ask me the same question.
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And it s based on this premise that
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Well, I don t have passion.
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I can t think of anything I m passionate about, so they re stuck.
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I know a guy that s been unemployed for more than a decade because he refuses to quote-unquote settle for something that he s not passionate about, and so he doesn t have a job, even though he s got, I want to say, a master s degree in engineering from a great school.
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and he used to have a multi-six figure job, which is why he got away with being unemployed for 12 plus years.
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It s based on this fundamentally flawed bit of advice, this premise that you re supposed to have this passion about something and dot, dot, dot, go after that, and then you will succeed.
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So if you don t have that, and you re 15, 20, 25, or 30, or whatever age, you re just thinking, oh my god, I m screwed.
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Yeah, this is what s so dangerous about this advice is that it really plants the seed in people s mind that you are wired to do something.
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And when you find it, you ll know it right away.
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And when you plant that idea, it creates exactly the type of problem you saw with your friend with the engineering degree.
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huge uncertainty, huge anxiety, this constant concern that maybe this is not the one thing I m meant to do.
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So it s not just if all your passion doesn t work.
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I think it s actually, for these reasons, can create quite a bit of harm in people s lives.
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Yeah, it seems like it s one of those things where you re starting to look at guys like Justin Bieber, and all jokes aside, I mean, he was doing the music thing since probably the single digits or early double digits in his life, super successful.
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We look at all these prodigies,
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We look at even just highly successful people that we know personally, like the Ryan Holidays, and we think, oh my God, they found their passion so early.
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I haven t, I m already that age, and I don t have this crazy drive.
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I m gonna be mediocre for the rest of my life.
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I m never even gonna find a job that I like.
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And we look at our parents for inspiration, and they just kind of got a job because they needed one.
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They didn t necessarily love what they did, and we don t want to end up like that either, so we start freaking out.
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Not only does that cause us undue stress, but it s completely unrealistic.
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Yeah, see, the subtlety that the storyline misses is that passion, if you actually study people who love what they do, it s something that snowballs over time.
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It s not something that people started with in advance at this very high level.
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It s as they went down their particular career paths, as they got better, as they made smart choices with how to direct their career, their passion for the work actually grew.
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Now, when you finally talk to them 10 years later and they love their work, they might say, somewhat flippantly, oh yeah, you should follow
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your passion, but what they really mean is I m now passionate about what I do and you should have that same goal, but that s really different than the idea that you should start with that passion in the beginning.
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Ah, interesting.
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So instead of go find your passion or follow your passion, basically bring your passion with you instead.
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Yeah, let your passion follow you.
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I think that s a much better inversion of the advice.
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Why is this advice so popular if it s a bunch of crap?
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Well, it sounds good, first of all.
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And it makes sense.
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But I think if you think about it at first, yeah, this makes sense.
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If I love something, and then I do that for my job, then I ll love my job.
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So it has this sort of logical consistency.
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It makes a lot of sense when you first hear it.
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And I think it s perpetuated because when you talk to people who are passionate about what they do,
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They say follow your passion because they don t really know what else to say, but what they really mean is you do need to follow the goal of ending up passionate about what you do.
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You should hope to one day be passionate like I am, but that s really missing the details.
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But when we hear it, we think, oh, there s the simple formula.
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Start with the passion, then use it to make your career choice.
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it does sound good.
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It s kind of up there with that whole do something you love and you ll never work a day in your life.
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You ever hear that one?
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Yeah, I ve definitely heard that one.
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And it s kind of like, my grandpa always said this, but I just find that so hard to believe, and I always think that that s kind of 2020 hindsight where this retired guy looks fondly back on his idealized version of what he used to do back in the day and forgets that he used to get up at 4 a.m.
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to work in a field and hated it most of the time.
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Now that he s retired, he s like, ah, I love doing that.
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hanging out with the guys, right?
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Because he s remembering beers after work and being out in the sun and stuff like that rather than cooped up in an office.
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He s not remembering the actual, the part that he actually hated.
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And I feel like a lot of people are giving this advice basically from a self-selecting group of folks.
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If you ask people who are making millions or more dollars doing something they truly enjoy,
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it looks really easy to say follow your passion when in truth, there are tons of people that follow their passion straight into their mother s basement and on the couch where they now sit playing video games instead of being employed gainfully or doing something that they actually even sort of enjoy.
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Right, and we re not asking the people on their mother s couch for their career advice.
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We absolutely miss that.
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I think an interesting point about this advice is I actually tracked back the phrase.
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I wanted to understand when did we start using this phrase, follow your passion, and what caught my attention was that the answer is surprisingly recently.
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So this whole idea that you should follow your passion, follow what you love, this is something that really emerged in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
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Millennials.
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So if you re a millennial like me, it s all you ve ever heard.
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But if you re even just a little bit older than that, it s actually something that arose in your lifetime.
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It s actually a relatively recent idea
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that s out there in the idea space.
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Sometimes it can feel like it s this ancient wisdom, and Aristotle must have been walking around in a toga and talking about, you know, follow thy passion.
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But it s actually a very recent idea, which I think actually helps once you recognize that, take away some of its gravitas.
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Yes, good point, right?
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When something is relatively new and you found out it was in one of those kind of viral videos like, always wear sunscreen, remember that one?
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When it s no older than that, you start to think, wait a minute, was this really thought through and tested by generations?
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Yeah, exactly.
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I mean, if you actually go back in time, let s go back and talk to Aristotle.
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He would say to you, well, no, that s crazy.
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That s not at all what you need to be doing.
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You need to flourish.
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And to flourish, you have to find skills and really hone them and develop them and really push your potential as a human to do all the things that humans can do.
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And it s going to be really hard work.
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But you ll have this sense of flourishing, a completely different conception that s been around for a long time of what it means to really live a good life.
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This notion that no, no, you just you re meant to do something.
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and if you can just choose the right job, you ll love your life, is a sort of lazy conception of how to build the good life.
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Yeah, I definitely can see that coming into play.
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Here s the problem, though.
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What advice works better for constructing a working life that we love if follow your passion turns out to be bunk?
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We definitely need to give an alternative strategy, because right now, a lot of people are relieved, but now they re going, oh, wait a minute, then what do I do instead?
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This is where things got interesting for me in my own quest.
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So after I figured out, okay, follow your passion is not going to do it for me.
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And I began to study the research literature.
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And I began to work with people who do love their work and get to the bottom of their story how they got there.
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There was a different pattern that emerged as being much more common if you study people who love what you do.
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And it s a little bit less sexy, but it s very replicatable.
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And here s how it works.
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You get really good at things that are rare and valuable.
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And as you get better at these things that are rare and valuable, you then gain more leverage over your working life.
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And once you ve earned this leverage, you use it to keep pushing your career towards things that resonate and away from things that don t resonate.
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And over time, that career will become a real source of passion for you.
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So this is, that was a lot, right?
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There s a lot we should deconstruct here.
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So essentially, where do we start with this process?
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You know, where it starts is you actually have to figure out how do I start to get good at things?
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If you buy this concept that as you get better at work, you enjoy the work more, you get more control, you gain more passion, the next follow-up question is almost always, okay, I buy that, and how do I do it?
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And in fact,
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It s funny because when we first started talking about this interview, So Good They Can t Ignore You was my last book.
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But actually, last week, I had a new book come out called Deep Work, which is essentially an answer to that question that everyone asked me after So Good They Can t Ignore You, which is, okay, well then how do I get good at things really quickly so that I can start to transform my life into what I m passionate about?
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So that s certainly the step that people care the most about.
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Sure, yeah, we re not stuck on so good they can t ignore you, by the way.
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We can definitely dive into deep work as it relates to these questions.
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Let s do that.
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Yeah, so deep work was basically the answer to this question of how do people actually get really good, produce stuff that s meaningful, and begin to get more control over their career.
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And the key activity seemed to be what I ended up calling deep work, which is this ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks.
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If you can give something your full attention without distraction, give it really intense intention, two things happen.
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One, you just produce things that are much better than if you re working in a distracted state.
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And two, that s exactly the state that pushes your abilities and makes you better.
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It s like doing pull-ups for your mind.
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Why is that the case?
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Well, when it comes to producing things at your highest level, there s an important theory out there called cognitive residue, which says if you turn your attention to something even very briefly, like let s say your phone or an email inbox, and then you bring your attention back to the task that you re trying to work on, that brief diversion actually leaves a residue in your brain which significantly reduces your cognitive capacity.
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So if you re working in a state of frequent distraction and diversion, you re working at a definitive impairment.
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On the other hand, if you re giving something completely unbroken concentration, you re actually using your brain at its full power.
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So you produce better things.
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And then why does it make you better?
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Well, we just know this from both performance psychology and neuroscience that in order to improve at a skill, you have to focus your attention on it very intensely without any other stimuli and really try as hard as you can to do it as well as you can.
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That s the state in which you actually improve.
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So what s the first step in this process then, Cal?
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Because it seems like right now, there s a lot of people panicking about, alright, but I can t focus, I m terrible at that, as they check their iPhone and get back to listening to the show while they re driving, right?
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What should we do first to crawl out of this mess, especially if we think, if we re in college, or maybe we re thinking about a career change, and it s predicated upon lack of passion in something, what s the first thing that we do?
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Yeah, so my pitch is that it s hard work.
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But if you re one of the few who s willing to rebuild your life to be much more centered on intense concentration and trying to produce things that are really valuable, and much less centered on sources of distraction and diversion and the type of things that keep you away from that, it s hard work, but it s going to be very meaningful and can actually be the core of a passionate life.
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So with that warning aside, then if you want to try to create this deep life, which I m a huge proponent of, you do have to actually take some drastic steps
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and it is going to involve some mental training, which we can talk about, actually improving your ability to focus, but it s also going to probably involve quite a bit of aggressive culling of these sources of distraction and attention media that s in your life.
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You re going to have to actually simplify what has access to your time and attention if you want to get serious about a deeper lifestyle.
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By the way, do you own a smartphone, just speaking of distraction?
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I do have one, though it was reluctantly foisted upon me, I must admit.
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with this phone or you can t work here or something like that?
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Well, it was more of my wife saying, you get this phone before our son is born because I need to be able to send you things and reach you.
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Is that the primary use or do you find yourself being distracted by that as well?
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Well, I m very worried about my phone.
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So I ve never had a social media account, for example, so that helps.
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So I don t have those things on my phone calling my attention, but I hate the email application.
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That s the main battle I fight in my own war to have a deeper life.
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2
SPEAKER_02
Focus hacks and focus tricks are important here, but I do want to get back to something you d mentioned earlier, which is the traits that make work great are rare and valuable, so you need to develop those rare and valuable skills in the workplace.
2
SPEAKER_02
Can you give some examples of people that have developed rare and valuable skills so that we can get kind of an idea, because it s a little ambiguous, just without any kind of example at all.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, so one of the stories I tell is of someone who started in the technology industry as a quality assurance tester.
2
SPEAKER_00
So she had graduated with a math degree, and she took this job where it was basically testing software, where you clicked a button 100 times and write down on a piece of paper, hey, it didn t break.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s a pretty terrible job, and it s far from something that she was passionate about.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it sounds awful.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is pretty awful.
2
SPEAKER_00
So what she did is she surveyed basically her job and said, there s nothing really I do here that that s rare and that s valuable, so I need to actually correct that.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the standout from other people on the QA testing team, she actually taught herself how to do the sort of automated scripting language for the computer platform they were using and built some tools that basically automated a lot of this testing that made it much easier to do.
2
SPEAKER_00
This suddenly was something that was rare and valuable.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was actually saving money for the company.
2
SPEAKER_00
They really, you know, wanted this.
2
SPEAKER_00
They wanted her to stay and help build these systems because now her skill was more rare and valuable.
2
SPEAKER_00
And she was then able to use that as leverage and say, I m not so keen on this 40-50 hour work week.
2
SPEAKER_00
Actually, what I really want to do is get a raise and reduce my hours and I m going to spend time getting this philosophy degree I ve always wanted to get on the side.
2
SPEAKER_00
She basically
2
SPEAKER_00
use those rare and valuable skills as leverage to reshape what her job was like.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the point is, if she had tried to do that at the very beginning, before she had done anything that was particularly rare and valuable, they would have said, take a hike.
2
SPEAKER_00
But she built these skills, and as she got better, she was then able to use those as leverage to start shaping her career.
2
SPEAKER_02
How do we start down that path, for example, if I ve got a regular Joe Schmo job and I m thinking, ugh, this is not something I m passionate about, how do I start to develop rare and valuable skills?
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, do I identify the skill that I need to develop and then focus on doing it?
2
SPEAKER_02
And how do we do that?
2
SPEAKER_02
How do we evaluate which skills are rare and valuable?
2
SPEAKER_02
How do you make that determination?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s a key step.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s actually harder than people think, when you actually survey your job to say, what s the skill that s most going to help me move up to the next level become more merit more valuable.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s often not that obvious.
2
SPEAKER_00
So a strategy that can help is find a specific individual
2
SPEAKER_00
in your career field or even at your organization that represents a level that you would like to get to in, say, a three- to five-year window.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s something they re doing that appeals to you.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then you need to try to understand.
2
SPEAKER_00
You should actually talk to them.
2
SPEAKER_00
Take them out for coffee.
2
SPEAKER_00
Talk to them.
2
SPEAKER_00
Try to understand
2
SPEAKER_00
what it is that they were doing that other people at the level below them weren t that allowed them to move to where they are now.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re trying to find what s the difference, what is it that they do that other people who wanted that position don t do that well.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you have to actually go out there and almost do a little bit of investigative reporting because sometimes our instincts in these matters aren t actually that accurate.
2
SPEAKER_00
the skills we think might matter might turn out to be not that valuable at all.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I really do recommend you need to get concrete examples in your career and actually talk to these people and get the real data on what it was that they were doing that was helping distinguish them.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right, and there s a little bit of reading between the lines too, because it s just like the follow your passion advice.
2
SPEAKER_02
You could ask,
2
SPEAKER_02
anybody, well, what did you do to get ahead?
2
SPEAKER_02
And they might not be able to identify it necessarily.
2
SPEAKER_02
It might just be that same self-selecting stuff.
2
SPEAKER_02
Well, you know, I just worked really hard and showed up on time.
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh, okay, cool.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, you really have to read between the lines and sort of filter out the wheat from the chaff here because a lot of times people don t know what makes them successful.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, this is a really great point.
2
SPEAKER_00
Actually, years ago, I wrote a book that had me interview college students who had good grades and try to figure out how they got good grades.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I discovered right away that if you just ask someone who has good grades, hey, how did you get good grades?
2
SPEAKER_00
And what should I do?
2
SPEAKER_00
you re gonna get terrible answers.
2
SPEAKER_00
People are really bad at reflecting and understanding what s important about their process and what s not.
2
SPEAKER_00
So what I discovered way back when, when I was trying to understand how to study, is that you don t ask the college student, hey, how do you get good grades?
2
SPEAKER_00
Instead you say, tell me step by step how you studied for the last test that you got an A on.
2
SPEAKER_00
You don t ask them for their evaluation, you ask them for the actual details, and then you can look at that and say, oh, wow, you did that?
2
SPEAKER_00
No one I know does that.
2
SPEAKER_00
That must be what s important.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, that same idea can apply in the career space.
2
SPEAKER_00
You don t ask someone, hey, how did you get ahead?
2
SPEAKER_00
And how can I get ahead?
2
SPEAKER_00
Instead you say, I really want to understand beat by beat your career.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you started here, okay, this was the next place you got.
2
SPEAKER_00
What did you do that got you to that next place?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like what was going on then?
2
SPEAKER_00
Was there a key project?
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so then what s the next level you got to in your career?
2
SPEAKER_00
All right, let s try to understand what it was that helped you get that promotion.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re actually getting them to walk you through the timeline, and then you later can go back, reflect on what you learned, and look for the patterns that are important.
2
SPEAKER_00
You do the evaluation, they provide the data.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right, because otherwise you re asking them to interpret the data, and they re not going to be able to do it correctly from their perspective, most likely.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it actually turns out to be pretty hard to self-reflect, especially on the fly, if someone puts you on the spot.
2
SPEAKER_00
People just want to fill that silence and have something that sounds good to say, and you re not really going to get an answer that s probably really well thought through, because that s actually more complicated than people assume.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right, they re not going to want to go,
2
SPEAKER_02
oh, I actually don t know, let me put a lot of thought and energy into that even though it doesn t benefit me.
2
SPEAKER_02
They re just gonna go, well, you know, like your old man says.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, same defects we get from pretty much any advice, only this is gonna actually be trickier because we re asking them for advice thinking they re qualified to give it when really they re not, they re just guessing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and really, you get two categories of answers if you ask these vague questions, at least I found.
2
SPEAKER_00
One, people will say something that makes them feel better about themselves, so they ll give you some sort of humblebrag answer that may have nothing to do with what really matters, but it s just something they re proud of and they want to feel good about themselves.
2
SPEAKER_00
Or they ll make some sort of commentary, like, wow, kids these days are X. It has nothing to do with how they got ahead, but it s just something that s on their mind.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s the type of answers you get if you say, how did you get ahead?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just not that useful.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, what are some of the standard pitfalls or obstacles that you see getting in people s way aside from just getting bad advice by asking the wrong questions?
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, well, the thing you want to avoid would be, for example, getting into some sort of cul-de-sac where you re really putting a lot of energy into some sort of activity or trying to build some sort of skill that really doesn t matter that much.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s pretty hard, this notion that you just put energy towards getting ahead and you re gonna keep making progress, that s too simplistic.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s really the application of energy to exactly the right places.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there really is this danger that if you re not careful to tease out what really matters, you re gonna land with something that you like the sound of working on that s actually not gonna give you much return for your energy invested.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s interesting.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can you give us an example?
3
SPEAKER_00
Are you talking about like the entrepreneur that focuses on building a big Facebook following because it looks cool or something like this?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s a classic example.
3
SPEAKER_01
You get someone maybe who s new in content marketing and puts massive amounts of time into the logistical system surrounding content marketing to get the email capture form to pop up just perfectly and at just the right time and aren t putting any energy into writing fantastic content.
3
SPEAKER_01
That, for example, is a cliche.
3
SPEAKER_01
In my own life, another example was there was times earlier in my career as a graduate student where I needed to be putting more time on
3
SPEAKER_01
the quality and impact of the research I was doing, but I kept getting sidetracked into the marketing of this research, how do I describe this research, how do I take what I ve already done and make it sound more impressive, and it turned out that that was really just a lot of wheel spinning.
3
SPEAKER_01
All of that energy should have gone into solving better proofs, writing more impactful papers.
3
SPEAKER_00
And these are real easy traps to fall in, because right now what we re saying, it almost seems so obvious, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, well, yeah, why would you focus on marketing this?
3
SPEAKER_00
Or why would you focus on these vanity metrics?
3
SPEAKER_00
You should focus on the quality of your work.
3
SPEAKER_00
Why do people get sucked into the trap?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because it seems like everybody knows that.
3
SPEAKER_01
You would think so, but there s a reason why people get sucked into these salary tasks or tasks that don t require them to give their full attention or really push themselves, and it s easier, it uses less energy in the moment, it gives you a satisfying sense of busyness and productivity, so you feel like, okay, I m making progress, I m doing things.
3
SPEAKER_01
All of that is very attractive.
3
SPEAKER_01
And often the things that you need to do are hard, sometimes they re unpleasant, they re gonna require you to strain your mind.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s much easier, for example, to work on your web profile as a salesman than it is to make cold calls.
3
SPEAKER_01
But often the salesmen that are really doing well are those that are willing to stand that discomfort of getting on the phone and dialing the numbers and getting better at talking to people in person.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is true in almost any field.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s the stuff that you would like to put attention on,
3
SPEAKER_01
and then there s the stuff that probably is gonna make a difference.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s essentially fear of failure in that area causing us to create busy work versus doing the real work.
3
SPEAKER_01
Fear of failure s in there, but it s also just, it s hard and unpleasant.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it s like if you talk to an athlete, for example, most of the training they have to do is physically very uncomfortable.
3
SPEAKER_01
It hurts, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, to build a muscle bigger, by definition, you re gonna have to hurt yourself.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re gonna have to be doing these weights, and it hurts, or you re doing intervals, and you re throwing up.
3
SPEAKER_01
And well, it s the same thing for cognitive improvement to become a better writer as a content marketer, for example, that s actually like an incredibly difficult thing to do.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like a really hard demanding task.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, to say someone you got to really stretch your ability to write is like saying, Hey, you should run a five minute 5k or 15 minute 5k.
3
SPEAKER_01
I guess that would be more reasonable.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s really hard.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s unpleasant to do.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve got a friend who is probably the most ridiculously successful guy that I know.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s exactly, he s a year older than me, which is, you can imagine what that does to one.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I ask him a lot of questions, and one of the things he told me about just his earlier, sort of mid-20s, maybe even early-20s life was his boss said, if you can write 10 pages of hard-hitting copy every day, I ll give you a raise.
3
SPEAKER_00
And for most of us, writing 10 pages of anything in a day is actually really hard.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he had to write really, really good, essentially world-class, ready-for-testing sales copy every day, which is a ridiculously difficult task to accomplish.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s kind of like saying,
3
SPEAKER_00
you need to write a 10-page research paper every day, including doing all the research.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s really, really tough.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he managed to do that.
3
SPEAKER_00
But it s, of course, very, very difficult for most of us to dive in and do that.
3
SPEAKER_00
It would have been much easier for him to say, well, look, I ve got all this engagement in social media instead, or I researched a bunch of copywriters that write really well, and I m about to dive into it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I ve let numerous people go from positions here at the Yard of Charm who,
3
SPEAKER_00
give me a lot of excuses about why they re not doing the important stuff, oh, I m researching it, oh, you know, I m shadowing someone today who does that, oh, I m gonna, you know, tomorrow I m ready for, oh, next week I ve got this, and then when it really comes, they ve run out of excuses, they come up with some sort of family emergency thing, and they, maybe they vanish for a couple days, and then, you know, I have to let them go, because I realize, oh, they re never gonna do it.
3
SPEAKER_00
they re never gonna do it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there are so many people who have lost jobs in the past decade or whatever here at AOC.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now I can hire a little better, but the years ago when I was giving people a shot to prove themselves, I ran into that problem all of the time.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think it s very, very common.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think a lot of people listening right now are thinking, crap, I do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s much easier to be busy than it is to be productive.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you know what your friend had there, which most of us don t get, is essentially a coach.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have someone who s pushing you through the training.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now of course, if you re in athletics, if you re in music, if you re a professional chess player, these are all difficult fields, but in all those fields, you have coaches, and there s training methodology, and there s someone saying, well of course you probably don t wanna run this interval, but I can tell you, that s what you need to do, and I m gonna yell at your face
3
SPEAKER_01
you do it, when you shift over to knowledge work, most people don t have that type of coaching anymore.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s why we really don t see as many people as you might expect, training and trying to get better at their jobs in the same way that we see in things like athletics, or music or professional chess playing, because we don t have this sort of
3
SPEAKER_01
coaching and these established frameworks and training regimens, we re all just kind of winging it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And when people are winging it, you do tend to avoid the things that are actually hard.
3
SPEAKER_01
If I was just going to casually play basketball, I m not going to do the type of incredibly difficult training that someone like LeBron James has to do every day, to stay at his peak.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s almost like we need some sort of return to coaching, because we don t have coaching in the knowledge work field, you have to play that role for yourself.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s not easy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah that s a getting coaching is not something you gotta sell to me and in fact it s something that I do for myself all the time everybody here at the AOC team does it obviously the core level of our business is coaching as well and I just think trying to figure out something on your own is completely ludicrous and usually
3
SPEAKER_00
When it comes down to people being resistant to coaching, usually it comes down to ego.
3
SPEAKER_00
I should know this already.
3
SPEAKER_00
I can figure this out on my own.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s almost always some sort of resistance there, and I find that in unsuccessful people, that resistance is what guides them through life, if you can call it that, and I think that s a huge problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
One of the things mentioned in your book is the concept of
3
SPEAKER_00
craftsmanship and skill as the foundations for meaningful work.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can you speak to that a little bit?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because craftsmanship, when I think about that, I think of somebody woodworking in a shop and making a banister for my staircase or something like that.
3
SPEAKER_00
I very rarely hear it applied to pretty much any other kind of work ever.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and this is actually a big part of my writing, is trying to reclaim this term craftsmanship for the digital age.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because I think it applies just as well to someone doing high-level knowledge work as it does to our cliched example of a woodworker in a barn somewhere up in the forest of Michigan.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because what is craftsmanship at its core?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s actually trying to take and hone a skill and apply it as well as you can to produce the best possible thing that you can.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I really make this division that there s really two mindsets you can have when you approach a job, especially in knowledge work.
3
SPEAKER_01
The common mindset we see now is what I call the passion mindset, which is where you re constantly asking, what does this job offer me?
3
SPEAKER_01
Is this my passion?
3
SPEAKER_01
Do I like this?
3
SPEAKER_01
Do I like what they just asked me to do?
3
SPEAKER_01
Is there something else I d rather be doing?
3
SPEAKER_01
And we can contrast that with the craftsman mindset, which is where you re constantly asking,
3
SPEAKER_01
What value am I producing?
3
SPEAKER_01
How good am I at this?
3
SPEAKER_01
How proud am I of the thing I m producing?
3
SPEAKER_01
How can I get better at this?
3
SPEAKER_01
How can I get better at my craft?
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s at the core of my philosophy that if you shift from the passion mindset to the craftsman mindset, your work gets much more meaningful, you get much more anxious about your career and your job, and your skills really start to skyrocket.
4
SPEAKER_01
like Carol Dweck s growth versus fixed mindset, are you familiar with those concepts at all?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, I am.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it seems like there s a couple of parallels there, potentially, because I think a lot of times people will look to something, what is this doing for me, versus looking at it as an opportunity to build the rare and valuable skills that you were mentioning earlier.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think that s absolutely right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And there s there s a metaphor I use, which helps me think about this type of career planning.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I call it career capital.
4
SPEAKER_00
And essentially, career capital is what I call your rare and valuable skills.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you can imagine that as you get more skills that are more rare and more valuable, it s as if you re acquiring more of this career capital.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then when you flip it around, you say this career capital is what I invest.
4
SPEAKER_00
to get in my career the type of traits I really like.
4
SPEAKER_00
So if you don t like something about your job, if you see it through this craftsman mindset, you say, huh, well do I have enough career capital that I can invest in getting rid of this or changing what my job is like?
4
SPEAKER_00
And if I don t, then the real question is how do I get more career capital as quickly as possible?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s more of an economic way of thinking about it, but actually I think it s a lot more effective.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s really interesting, the concept of career capital.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, going back to the QA tester example, she didn t like the repetitive QA testing, so if memory serves, because I did read the book, did she not invent some kind of, almost like an automated or software process to do something similar, because she hated that repetitive function?
4
SPEAKER_01
So she essentially created a better way to do it, and therefore became the manager of that process instead.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and got leverage over the terms of her job.
4
SPEAKER_00
So if you see that through the lens of career capital, instead of saying, I don t like this job, this is a bad job, this is not my passion, let me quit and move home until I find something I love.
4
SPEAKER_00
She instead assessed her career capital.
4
SPEAKER_00
And at first she had no real career capital.
4
SPEAKER_00
entry-level QA has no particularly rare and valuable skills.
4
SPEAKER_00
So she level-headedly decided the right thing to do here is not to quit, it s to decide what s the quickest way that I can increase my store as a career capital so I can start making some investments and make this job better.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s what she did when she set out to say, you know what, if I learn how to do this scripting, which is kind of a pain, but I bet I could because I m smart.
4
SPEAKER_00
If I master this, and I do the hard work to actually build a product that works with this, that will give me a lot of career capital in my bank account.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then I can invest that right away to stop having to do the repetitive testing and to get the 30 hour week that she wanted because she had this other degree she wanted to pursue.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so she saw it in those economic terms, and that worked much better for her.
4
SPEAKER_01
Alright, back to the show.
4
SPEAKER_01
We have a couple guys who graduated from their Art of Charm boot camps here.
4
SPEAKER_01
Years ago, one example that comes to mind, he worked for a defense contractor, and he really, really liked working with certain types of clients.
4
SPEAKER_01
And after his program, he became really adept at dealing with difficult clients.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so what happened was his boss started to assign him to all of the most difficult clients, which sounds awful, but he didn t have a problem with these people.
4
SPEAKER_01
They thought he was great and he can get along with anybody given the skill set that he had learned.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what happened was his boss decided to give him not only a raise but a promotion because you can t have
4
SPEAKER_01
clients dealing directly with somebody who has a low title in the company.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of almost insulting to that client.
4
SPEAKER_01
So he ended up getting a promotion and a raise, and he ended up getting multiple job offers from these different clients because he became essentially a specialist in not only in dealing with difficult people, but in what those particular, I think they were like missile companies or something like that, and what they were doing because he was assigned to deal with all of them, and they just happened to be
4
SPEAKER_01
Very similar industry and he became somewhat of a subject matter expert and that later allowed him to transition out of one company and into another given his new sort of level of expertise and almost as his newfound affinity for whatever sort of sub niche that was and he did that.
4
SPEAKER_01
at first accidentally just having a new skill set to deal with difficult people, and later on decided to build that consciously.
4
SPEAKER_01
We see this all the time with people changing jobs, they focus on a totally different subject matter, but doing it within your own job will allow you to go from entry level this, to not only getting promoted within the organization, but possibly even creating your own position within that organization.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so that s why this metaphor career capital is so useful is because it makes clear the factors involved in these type of decisions.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we hear this a lot that you have someone who s in a job, there s things they don t like about it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And their first reaction is, well, maybe I should quit this and do something completely different.
4
SPEAKER_00
Maybe I should quit the defense contractor, and I should go become a mixed martial arts instructor.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s something I like that topic, and maybe I ll like that if I do that instead.
4
SPEAKER_00
But when you start to view career happiness and passion through this craftsman mindset, we start to think about career capital, suddenly that decision really doesn t make a lot of sense.
4
SPEAKER_00
because unless you re actually just really excellent at mixed martial arts, what you would be doing in that case would be throwing out all the career capital you ve already acquired in your field and moving somewhere where you had zero career capital.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if in the end it s really career capital that allows you to invest in the traits that make you like your work, you re basically starting from scratch.
4
SPEAKER_00
So once you start thinking about career capital, you can say, hey, I m actually pretty good at this job already.
4
SPEAKER_00
If I really stepped it up and found, for example, your friend working on the difficult clients or built some new skill that s in demand and is a pain to lose, I could really pump up this career capital pretty quickly.
4
SPEAKER_00
and then start investing it right away and make this job into something that s really cool or do a horizontal transfer that takes my career capital with me and allows me to sort of write the rules of my new job of where I m going.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I hear that story succeeding all the time.
4
SPEAKER_00
I hear tons of stories of people who build their capital in their current job and use that to rework their career.
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Those are often very successful stories with happy ending.
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The stories of people who quit what they re doing and go start something completely new in the hopes that maybe that s their passion, well, really, nine times out of 10, those stories aren t ending with that happy ending.
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Yeah, and just to sort of play devil s advocate here, what s the harm?
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I mean, so what if it encourages a couple folks to leave bad jobs?
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That s a good thing, right?
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Yeah, I think it causes massive harm to my generation, to the millennial generation.
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You have a whole generation that s doing this chronically.
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It s not a few people.
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You have a whole generation that s chronically leaving jobs before they can actually build any capital, jumping from thing to thing without any skills to actually follow them.
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It creates anxiety.
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It creates a failure to launch situation where they never really get out of the entry level.
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It creates unnecessary unemployment.
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So I m not so casual about this idea that, no, no, just find something you re passionate about.
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It will all work out because it s not just
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It s a harmless fantasy.
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I think it actually, for a lot of people, makes their working lives a lot more frustrating and a lot less happy than if they had instead followed maybe a more rational, a little bit less sexy, but much more effective approach, like building skills and using them as leverage.
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But what about people like athletes and musicians?
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I mean, most of them, when you see interviews with them and things like that, they say, well, I ve always been passionate about music, I ve always been passionate about hockey and basketball.
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Where s the fault in that logic?
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Yeah, you have to ignore athletes and musicians.
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They re not a good example for anyone except for people who are gonna be athletes or musicians, because those are weird,
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career fields in the sense that it s almost always something that you have to get started at, at a very early age, which requires you have very specific circumstances in place.
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They re doing this from such a young age, by the time you get them into their 20s or their 30s and you start asking them about how to do career advice, these are not the right people to ask.
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They ve had no other options, their whole life has been built around it.
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their coaches, their parents, everything has been built around making a career about this often.
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So I find them as very interesting people to know about, very interesting people to know, but terrible sources of career advice if you re trying to be, for example, a knowledge worker.
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Right, they re essentially outliers of some sort.
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Yeah, it s a very interesting path to go through, but it s really not one from which you can draw a lot of general lessons.
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Well, let s give some practical exercises as well.
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I mean, you ve got some really interesting stuff here in the book and that we talked about pre-show.
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One, which is a great question that got me thinking and got me spinning around in circles a little bit earlier, which was if you could choose one skill in your industry to magically master overnight, which skill would bring you the most value?
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Why is that important?
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That seems really hard-hitting and it kinda, I got a little nervous when I read that, to be honest.
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It does make people a little bit nervous because it gets you out of the comfort zone of what s an approachable skill, something that you would kind of enjoy practicing or messing around with and something you re kind of thinking about doing anyways, it gets you out of that comfort zone and really gets you thinking, all right, if I m being honest,
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what s the skill that s really the most valuable that if I could do overnight would make me really powerful.
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And it s a scary exercise, because often once you identify it, you re also identifying how hard it s going to be to actually pick up that skill.
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It s not always the answer.
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you wanna hear, but I think it s important to step out of your comfort zone of the nearby skills that are fun to mess around with and actually step back and say, let s be honest, what s really the game changer?
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And even if I d have to go through a lot to get this skill, it s at least worth identifying what it is.
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Yeah, what if we don t know the answer?
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Yeah, so you need to be thinking a lot more about this.
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This stuff is hard, and I think identifying the skills is something that is hard, but if you spend time with people who end up becoming stars in their field, one of the things you ll notice is that they put a lot of thought into those type of questions.
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They re very curious about what s going on, what s valuable right now, why is that guy getting ahead, what skills are important.
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This sort of meta thinking, this meta thinking about what s important and what s not, how does my career work, it s something that stars really master and I think there s probably some causality here.
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It s no coincidence that the people who naturally really put a lot of time into trying to understand their industry and how it works and how people get ahead also tend to be the people who do get ahead.
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And, of course, the follow-up question, which is, what are you doing to improve at the key skill from the above question?
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What kind of action steps do we need to be taking once we identify that skill?
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What if it s like, oh, okay, I need to learn how to write sales copy, just going back to my previous example, then what?
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Yeah, it s helpful to put on the mindset that you would have if you were, for example, a professional athlete, that I m going to train this skill, just like I would train to get better at a sporting event.
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Because that s really the right mindset for picking up skills, whether it s something knowledge work based like writing or something physical, like trying to get a faster time.
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in a foot race.
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So what are the elements that go with having this sort of athlete training type mindset?
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Well, that means you re going to have specific exercises that you ve planned that are designed to stretch your ability past where you re currently comfortable.
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We understand
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this concept when it comes to, say, muscle building or increasing cardiovascular.
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You have to stretch yourself to get better.
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The same thing is true for knowledge work.
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You have to give yourself, just like an athlete would, these exercises that stretch your ability, that push you past where you re comfortable, that keep you at this edge of, this is a little bit too hard for me, and I m gonna try as hard as I can.
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And each time you do that, you get a little better.
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Nice, I like that.
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Jason, did you have a question?
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I was just wondering what kind of goal setting goes along with that so you know what s working how you re improving how you re getting to that next level.
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Yeah, so again, having this sort of athlete type mindset is important.
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So athletes use concrete metrics, so it might be their time on a race.
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You can find similar metrics for what you re doing, similar things that you can track and try to actually improve.
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So I like to get sort of geeky on this when I think about skill building in the knowledge work.
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Find metrics, measure things, give yourself training exercises, see if they move the needle on those metrics.
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Which ones move the needle the most?
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All right, let s keep that one and throw out the other ones.
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That type of mindset is really rare in knowledge work right now.
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But the good news is if you re one of the few who s using it, you re going to be surprised by how quickly you get good at things that your colleagues really seem frustrated by.
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Perfect, and last but not least, you recommended identifying someone in your field whose life resonates with what you want to be.
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How do we deconstruct the skills, the accomplishments, what assets allowed them to get there?
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How do we actually separate that and break it down?
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Kind of goes back to our earlier discussion about not just asking them, right?
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Yeah, so I like the mindset that it s almost as if you re writing a business biography about this person.
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What you want is the beat by beat timeline.
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Alright, so you want to understand this happened at this point, and then this was the next step in your career.
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And this was the next step your career, this was the next step.
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Once you have this beat by beat timeline, you really understand their path, you can look in here and identify, ah, here s the big leaps, like these are the leaps that made the difference.
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And now you can go back and isolate those more.
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And the type of question I like to ask people when understanding
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how they made an important leap in their career is I have them imagine other people that they were working with at the time before they made the leap who are also trying and interested in making similar leaps and have them identify what was it that you did that they weren t doing.
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that allows you to make leap X, and then you go to the next leap.
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Okay, so you were with this group here, and then you got promoted.
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What was it that you did that these other guys didn t do that got you noticed?
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And so you actually make them do this type of differential analysis and say, well, now that you put me on the spot about this, I m thinking about it, it was my ability to write, or it was the fact that I had this great contact.
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And that s where you really start to get the really valuable sort of data-driven answers that tell you what s important.
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Excellent.
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Is there anything else that we haven t asked you that you want to make sure you leave with the AOC family?
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Yeah, so let me try to put sort of a bow on these ideas that we ve been talking about.
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We ve heard our whole lives that if you follow your passion, that s all that matters.
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And what I m arguing instead is that passion is something that follows you on your path to become really good at things that are valuable.
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if you focus on what s important, and let me really focus on doing those things better.
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And let me use these skills as leverage to keep shaping my job.
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It s not a sexy process, but it s one that very consistently helps people build these types of working lives that really resonate with them that are a real source of passion.
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So Jordan, for example, I think you provide
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I m going to assume a good case study of this philosophy in action.
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Because if people come into the Art of Charm world right now and they meet you and listen to your podcast, if they re like me and they listen to your podcast regularly and are impressed, this is a guy who s a really good interviewer, he s got this good show, it would be easy to imagine that the storyline is just, oh, you just followed your passion to get here.
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But, and I ll put you on the spot about this, but I m going to assume that it wasn t the case that from a very young age, you just knew, well obviously I am going to run a sort of digital media company that has a large podcast component.
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This was not some pre-existing passion that was just clear to you from the beginning.
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I m going to assume that probably your path to this career that you really love was more interesting and complicated than that.
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Yeah, in fact, when I was a kid, I thought it would be cool to be like, oh, be like a radio DJ or something like that.
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But looking back at that, at age 12 or something like that, I never did anything about it.
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And it s only 20-20 hindsight.
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Whatever job I would have now, if it weren t being a talk show host, I most likely would have found sometime during my youth that I thought that would have been cool, right?
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So I think it s mostly hindsight.
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And looking at it now, yeah, I mean, it wasn t even like, let s do a talk show.
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a good way to get other knowledge across, then I happen to think, oh, well, this is really fun, I m gonna keep doing it.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, I don t always have to do it on the same topics, I should interview people.
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I don t have to just do it alone, I can have guests and I can change the format.
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So yeah, this constantly grew and grew and grew, and now we re a large podcast, but I had several years on live radio, on satellite radio, may go back to radio.
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There s all kinds of different skill sets that we are
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honing here, not just me personally, but us as a team, and yeah, it s never something that I would have been able to plan earlier, especially, of course, the digital angle didn t even exist back then.
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Right, and I m also going to assume, if I put you on the spot, that as you got better at these skills, that you found that as your options increased and you had more impact, that you were able to get more enjoyment and more passion, that the passion and interest in the work expanded as you got better, as your career capital grew.
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Oh, absolutely.
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Five years ago, I was nowhere near as excited about the show as I was last year.
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And the last three years, I can almost measure.
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that I ve gotten much more interested and much more passionate about the show in general.
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And this year, there s so many exciting things on the table that I see my passion for this just growing.
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It s not dwindling, it s not something that has diminishing returns, it s actually getting easier and harder at the same time, more interesting, for sure, every single time.
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SPEAKER_01
So, there s, you re absolutely right.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it definitely caught my attention when you mentioned that you had your three years in radio before you even got here, because I think it s easy for someone, maybe who s just tuning into your show, you say, Hey, this guy s great.
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SPEAKER_00
This sounds like fun, I should do the same thing.
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SPEAKER_00
And that misses the years that go in, for example, to get the radio voice to get the pacing to get the clarity of speaking that there s
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There s so much that you do so well right now that probably took a ton of practice and a ton of hard work.
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SPEAKER_00
And in some sense, that often gets filtered out in the conversations about career advice and what should you do.
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And it just becomes, oh, I really like this.
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You should do something you like as well.
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But that s really the meaty part.
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That s the interesting part, is the years you spent to get as good as you are now, that s the craftsman mindset at play.
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So I find you to be a great case study of the type of things I m saying.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I appreciate that, and it s really an honor that you listened to The Art of Charm as well.
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SPEAKER_01
I was very surprised when I found that out.
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SPEAKER_01
I thought that was really cool, because of course, you know, I look up to your work.
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SPEAKER_01
Speaking of your work, So Good They Can t Ignore You, great book.
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read the whole thing, definitely pick that up.
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We ll link it in the show notes.
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SPEAKER_02
In your new book, Deep Work, give us a little blurb about what this is and where it takes over from So Good They Can t Ignore You.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so Deep Work makes this argument that the ability to focus really hard on things for long amounts of time is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy at exactly the same time that it s becoming more rare.
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As people are losing their ability to concentrate and businesses are making it harder and harder for their employees to concentrate and really do things that are hard.
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And I think that this is a great economic opportunity.
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that if you re one of the few who says, I am going to really prioritize my ability to focus and to be undistracted and to try to produce things at a great levels of intensity, that it s like a superpower in our current economy, that you really are going to thrive and you re going to find your work more meaningful.
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So basically, the book
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in the first third makes that pitch, and in the second two third really gets down into the weeds of here are the concrete types of strategies that are involved if you re really serious about building your life around this deep work and really embracing this opportunity that we have right now.
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SPEAKER_02
Awesome, so good.
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I definitely want to grab that from your people so we can get into that as well.
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SPEAKER_02
Thanks again so much for your time and your expertise.
6
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This is really, really good stuff and hopefully people are focused and paying attention and no longer feel like their lack of passion is a nail in their career coffin and now they ve got a strategy to figure out where to go from here.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I hope so too.
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SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
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SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
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SPEAKER_02
Wow, Jason, that was awesome.
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SPEAKER_02
That was so good.
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SPEAKER_02
That was amazing.
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Yeah, big fan of Cal s work.
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Seriously, go get the books.
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SPEAKER_02
They re linked in the show notes.
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SPEAKER_02
So good they can t ignore you.
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Deep Work is probably fantastic, too.
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SPEAKER_02
I m going to read that next.
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SPEAKER_02
I ve always hated the Follow Your Passion advice because it s just not real.
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It s self-selecting.
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There s a bunch of reasons.
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That Cal was able to debunk that.
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I m so glad I m not the only person who feels that way.
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And I love that we were able to give an alternative strategy to this.
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And the practical exercises about developing career capital and choosing the skills in your industry that you want to master and then creating regime to get there.
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SPEAKER_02
priceless, this stuff can change your life, not just in your career, but in your whole quality of life, having a career that you truly love and that you control, which is great.
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SPEAKER_02
So if you enjoyed this, don t forget to thank Cal on Twitter, we ll have, oh wait, just kidding, he doesn t have Twitter.
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SPEAKER_02
So you can t thank him on Twitter, but you can thank me I m at the art of charm on Twitter our live program our boot camp details at boot camp dot the art of charm comm Subscribe review and iTunes share it with your friends We ve got our Android app and our iPhone app available to if you re if you re need if you re in need of a mobile app to listen and write us a review for real it not only makes us feel proud and
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SPEAKER_02
It helps us keep up in the ranks so that other people who can use this information can find the show more easily to get the credible advice that they need, and it s the best way to support AOC other than, of course, coming to a program or grabbing one of our products.
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Special thanks to the Jasons and to Fogarty for their help in production of the Art of Charm podcast.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now have a great week.
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Leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.