In which I justify the importance of the craftsman mindset by arguing that the traits that make a great job great are rare and valuable, and therefore, if you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuable skills—which I call career capital—to offer in return.
In the last chapter I offered a bold proposition: If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (“what can I offer the world?”).
My argument for this strategy starts with a simple question: What makes a great job great? In exploring this question, it helps to get specific. In Rule #1, I provided several examples of people who had great jobs and love (or loved) what they do—so we can draw from there. Among others, I introduced Apple founder Steve Jobs, radio host Ira Glass, and master surfboard shaper Al Merrick. Using this trio as our running example, I can now ask what it is specifically about these three careers that makes them so compelling? Here are the answers that I came up with:
Creativity: Ira Glass, for example, is pushing the boundaries of radio, and winning armfuls of awards in the process.
Impact: From the Apple II to the iPhone, Steve Jobs has changed the way we live our lives in the digital age.
Control: No one tells Al Merrick when to wake up or what to wear. He’s not expected in an office from nine to five. Instead, his Channel Island Surfboards factory is located a block from the Santa Barbara beach, where Merrick still regularly spends time surfing. ( Jake Burton Carpenter, founder of Burton Snowboards, for example, recalls how negotiations for the merger between the two companies happened while he and Merrick waited for waves in a surf lineup.)
This list isn’t comprehensive, but if consider your own dream-job fantasies, you’ll likely notice some combination of these traits. We can now advance to the question that really matters: How do you get these traits in your own working life? One of the first things I noticed when I began to study this question is that these factors are rare. Most jobs don’t offer their employees great creativity, impact, or control over what they do and how they do it. If you’re a recent college graduate in an entry-level job, for example, you’re much more likely to hear “go change the water cooler” than you are “go change the world.”
By definition, we also know that these traits are valuable—as they’re the key to making a job great. But now we’re moving into well-trod territory. Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101. It follows that if you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return. If this is true, of course, we should see it in the stories of our trio of examples—and we do. Now that we know what to look for, this transactional interpretation of compelling careers becomes suddenly apparent.
Consider Steve Jobs. When Jobs walked into Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop he was holding something that was literally rare and valuable: the circuit board for the Apple I, one of the more advanced personal computers in the fledgling market at the time. The money from selling a hundred units of that original design gave Jobs more control in his career, but in classic economic terms, to get even more valuable traits in his working life, he needed to increase the value of what he had to offer. It’s at this point that Jobs’s ascent begins to accelerate. He takes on $250,000 in funding from Mark Markkula and works with Steve Wozniak to produce a new computer design that is unambiguously too good to be ignored. There were other engineers in the Bay Area’s Homebrew Computer Club culture who could match Jobs’s and Wozniak’s technical skill, but Jobs had the insight to take on investment and to focus this technical energy toward producing a complete product. The result was the Apple II, a machine that leaped ahead of the competition: It had color graphics; the monitor and keyboard were integrated inside the case; the architecture was open, allowing rapid expansion of memory and peripherals (such as the floppy disk, which the Apple II was the first to introduce into mainstream use). This was the product that put the company on the map and that pushed Jobs from a small-time entrepreneur into the head of a visionary company. He produced something of great value and in return his career got an injection of creativity, impact, and control.
The radio host Ira Glass was given the opportunity to create his genre-defining radio show This American Life only after he had proven himself as one of public radio’s best editors and hosts. Glass started as an intern and then moved on to become a tape cutter for All Things Considered. There are many young people who start down the same path as Glass: landing an internship at a local NPR station and then moving up to a low-level production position. But Glass began to break away from the pack when he turned his focus on making his skills more rare and more valuable. The crispness of his segment editing eventually gained him the opportunity to host a few of his own segments on air. And even though Glass has a voice that mocks everything sacred about what a radio personality should sound like, he began to win awards for his segments. It’s possible that a latent natural talent for editing may be playing a role here, but recall from Rule #1 that Glass emphasizes the importance of the hard work required to develop skill. “All of us who do creative work… you get into this thing, and there’s like a ‘gap.’ What you’re making isn’t so good, okay?… It’s trying to be good but… it’s just not that great,” he explained in an interview about his career.1 “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” he elaborated in his Roadtrip Nation session. In other words, this is not the story of a prodigy who walked into a radio station after college and walked out with a show. The more you read about Glass, the more you encounter a young man who was driven to develop his skills until they were too valuable to be ignored.
This strategy worked. After the success of his short segments for All Things Considered, Glass was tapped to cohost a string of different local shows produced out of Chicago’s WBEZ station, further increasing the value of his skills. In 1995, when the station manager at WBEZ decided to put together a free-form show with any eye toward national syndication—a show called This American Life—Glass was at the top of his list. His career today is rich with creativity, impact, and control, but when you read his story, the economic undertones are unmistakable. Glass exchanged a collection of hard-won, rare, and valuable skills for his fantastic job.
With Al Merrick, not surprisingly, we get the same style of story. The rare and valuable skill that launched Merrick’s career as a professional surfboard shaper is crystal clear: His boards won competitions. What’s important to note is that this was not always the case. Merrick picked up the trade of fiberglass shaping from his years spent as a boatbuilder, and he knew about surfing from his own on-again, off-again relationship with the sport, but it took an abundance of hard work to get his board-crafting skills to the place where they were valuable. “[Starting out,] a lot of time you’re afraid that you’re going to be a failure, that this guy you’re making a board for is a world champion and his boards [won’t be] working right,” he recalled in his Roadtrip Nation session. “It just makes me work harder and try harder to accomplish what I’m trying to accomplish with a surfboard.” Having an office a block from the beach, with the freedom to take off to surf on a moment’s notice, sounds great, but it’s not the type of job that is just being handed out. To get it, Merrick realized he needed a rare and valuable skill to offer in exchange. Once he had surf pros like Kelly Slater riding his boards—and winning—he became free to dictate the terms of his working life.
Here, then, are the main strands of my argument:
The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.
Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.
The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love.
Jobs, Glass, and Merrick all adopted the craftsman mindset. (Some even use these exact words in describing themselves. “I was a craftsman,” said Merrick, in an interview on his early days as a board shaper.2) Career capital theory tells us that this is no coincidence. The traits that define great work require that you have something rare and valuable to offer in return—skills I call career capital. The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on what you produce, is exactly the mindset you would adopt if your goal was to acquire as much career capital as possible. Ultimately, this is why I promote the craftsman mindset over the passion mindset. This is not some philosophical debate on the existence of passion or the value of hard work—I’m being intensely pragmatic: You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life, and the craftsman mindset is focused on achieving exactly this goal.
But there is, I must admit, a darker corollary to this argument. The passion mindset is not just ineffective for creating work you love; in many cases it can actively work against this goal, sometimes with devastating consequences.
A pair of articles, published within two days of each other in the New York Times in the summer of 2009, emphasize the contrast between the passion mindset and the craftsman mindset. The first article concerned Lisa Feuer3. At the age of thirty-eight, Feuer quit her career in advertising and marketing. Chafing under the constraints of corporate life, she started to question whether this was her calling. “I’d watched my husband go into business for himself, and I felt like I could do it, too,” she said. So she decided to give entrepreneurship a try.
As reported by the Times, Feuer enrolled in a two-hundred-hour yoga instruction course, tapping a home equity loan to pay the $4,000 tuition. Certification in hand, she started Karma Kids Yoga, a yoga practice focused on young children and pregnant women. “I love what I do,” she told the reporter when justifying the difficulties of starting a freelance business.
The passion mindset supports Feuer’s decision. To those enthralled by the myth of a true calling, there’s nothing more heroic than trading comfort for passion. Consider, for example, the author Pamela Slim, a believer in the passion mindset who wrote the popular book Escape from Cubicle Nation.4 Slim describes on her website the following sample dialogue, which she claims she has often:
Me: So are you ready to move forward with your plan?
Them: I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I can do it! Who am I to pretend to be a successful (artist) (coach) (consultant) (masseuse)? What if everyone looks at my website and laughs hysterically that I would even consider selling my services? Why would anyone ever want to connect with me?
Me: Time for a little work on your backbone.5
Motivated by these encounters, Slim launched a phone-seminar product called Rebuild Your Backbone. Its goal is to convince more people to be like Lisa Feuer by finding the courage to follow their dreams. The course description says Slim will answer questions like “Why do we get stuck living other people’s models of success?” and “How do we get the courage to do big things in the world?” It costs forty-seven dollars.
Rebuild Your Backbone is an example of the courage culture, a growing community of authors and online commentators pushing the following idea: The biggest obstacle between you and work you love is a lack of courage—the courage required to step away from “other people’s definition of success” and to follow your dream. It’s an idea that makes perfect sense when presented against the backdrop of the passion mindset: If there’s some perfect job waiting for us out there, every day we’re not following this passion is a wasted day. When viewed from this perspective, Feuer’s move appears courageous and long overdue; she could be a guest lecturer in Pamela Slim’s teleseminar. But this idea crumbles when viewed from the perspective of career capital theory—a perspective that makes Karma Kids Yoga suddenly seem like a poor gamble.
The downside of the passion mindset is that it strips away merit. For passion proponents like Slim, launching a freelance career that gives you control, creativity, and impact is easy—it’s just the act of getting started that trips us up. Career capital theory disagrees. It tells us that great work doesn’t just require great courage, but also skills of great (and real) value. When Feuer left her advertising career to start a yoga studio, not only did she discard the career capital acquired over many years in the marketing industry, but she transitioned into an unrelated field where she had almost no capital. Given yoga’s popularity, a one-month training program places Feuer pretty near the bottom of the skill hierarchy of yoga practitioners, making her a long way from being so good she can’t be ignored. According to career capital theory, she therefore has very little leverage in her yoga-working life. It’s unlikely, therefore, that things will go well for Feuer—which, unfortunately, is exactly what ended up happening.
As the recession hit in 2008, Feuer’s business struggled. One of the gyms where she taught closed. Then two classes she offered at a local public high school were dropped, and with the tightening economy, demands for private lessons diminished. In 2009, when she was profiled for the Times, she was on track to make only $15,000 for the year. Toward the conclusion of the profile, Feuer sends the reporter a text message: “I’m at the food stamp office now, waiting.” It’s signed: “Sent from my iPhone.”
Two days after Lisa Feuer’s profile was published, the Times introduced its readers to another marketing executive, Joe Duffy.6 Like Feuer, Duffy worked in advertising and eventually began to chafe at the constraints of corporate life. “I was tired of the agency business,” he recalls. “I [wanted] to simplify my life and focus on the creative side again.” Given that Duffy’s original training was as an artist—he had entered the advertising industry as a technical illustrator only after he had a hard time making a living with his paintings—supporters of the passion mindset might encourage someone in Duffy’s situation to leave advertising behind and return to his passion for the creative arts.
Duffy, it turns out, is from the craftsman school of thought. Instead of fleeing the constraints of his current job, he began acquiring the career capital he’d need to buy himself out of them. His specialty became international logos and brand icons. As his ability grew, so did his options. Eventually, he was hired away by the Minneapolis-based Fallon McElligott agency, which allowed him to run his own subsidiary within the larger organization, calling it Duffy Designs. In other words, his capital had bought him more autonomy.
After twenty years at Fallon McElligott, working on logos for major companies such as Sony and Coca-Cola, Duffy once again invested his capital to gain more autonomy, this time by starting his own fifteen-person shop: Duffy & Partners. This entrepreneurial move contrasts sharply with Feuer’s. Duffy started his own company with enough career capital to immediately thrive—he was one of the world’s best logo men and had a waiting list of clients. Feuer started her company with only two hundred hours of training and an abundance of courage.
It’s fair to guess that by the time Duffy recently retired, he loved what he did. His work gave him heaps of control and respect and, depending on your view of the importance of advertising, also had a great impact on the world. To me, however, the most vivid contrast to Feuer’s story was Duffy’s purchase of Duffy Trails, a hundred-acre retreat on the banks of Wisconsin’s Totagatic River. Duffy is an avid cross-country skier, and the five miles of wooded trails, skiable from November through March, made the retreat irresistible. As reported by the New York Times, the property can comfortably house at least twenty guests, spread over three different residential outbuildings, but on the hottest summer nights, it’s the screened gazebo by the retreat’s sixteen-acre, bass-stocked lake that attracts the most visitors.
Duffy purchased this property at the age of forty-five: in other words, not long after the age at which Feuer left advertising to pursue her yoga business. It’s this parallel that gives this pair of stories their Frostian undertones. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and one traveler chose the path to mastery while the other was called toward passion’s glow. The former ended up celebrated in the industry, in control of his own livelihood, and weekending with his family in a forested retreat. The latter ended up on food stamps.
This comparison is not necessarily fair. We don’t know that Feuer could have replicated Duffy’s success if she had stayed in marketing and advertising and had focused her restless energy on becoming excellent. But as a metaphor, the story works nicely. The image of Feuer, waiting in line for food stamps, while Duffy, at a similar age, returns from a successful overseas trip to spend a relaxing weekend skiing at Duffy Trails, is striking. It captures well both the risk and the illogic of starting from scratch as contrasted with the leverage gained by instead acquiring more career capital. Both Feuer and Duffy had the same issues with their work; these issues emerged at around the same time; and they both had the same desire to love what they do. But they had two different approaches to tackling these issues. In the end, it was Duffy’s commitment to craftsmanship that was the obvious winner.
Not long before I started writing this chapter, I received an e-mail from John, a recent college graduate and longtime reader of my blog. He was concerned about his new job as a tax consultant. Though he found the work to be “sometimes interesting,” the hours were long and the tasks were fiercely prescribed, making it difficult to stand out. “Aside from not liking the lifestyle,” John complained, “I’m concerned that my work doesn’t serve a larger purpose, and, in fact, that it actively hurts the most vulnerable.”
This chapter has argued in favor of the craftsman mindset and against its passion-centric alternative. Part of what makes the craftsman mindset thrilling is its agnosticism toward the type of work you do. The traits that define great work are bought with career capital, the theory argues; they don’t come from matching your work to your innate passion. Because of this, you don’t have to sweat whether you’ve found your calling—most any work can become the foundation for a compelling career. John had heard this argument and wrote me because he was having a hard time applying it to his life as a tax consultant. He didn’t like his work and he wanted to know if, like a good craftsman, he should just suck it up and continue to focus on getting good. This is an important question, and here’s what I told John:
“It sounds like you should leave your job.” On reflection, it became clear to me that certain jobs are better suited for applying career capital theory than others. To aid John, I ended up devising a list of three traits that disqualify a job as providing a good foundation for building work you love:
The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable.
The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world.
The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.7
A job with any combination of these disqualifying traits can thwart your attempts to build and invest career capital. If it satisfies the first trait, skill growth isn’t possible. If it satisfies the second two traits, then even though you could build up reserves of career capital, you’ll have a hard time sticking around long enough to accomplish this goal. John’s job satisfied the first two traits, so he needed to leave.
To give another example: As a computer scientist at MIT, which I was while writing this book, I got quite a few e-mails from Wall Street headhunters. They were hiring for jobs that provide plenty of room to develop skills and they’re not afraid to compensate you well for your time. “There is a small handful of firms on Wall Street that pay better than everyone else, about three or four of them,” said one headhunter who wrote me recently. “This company is one of them.” (I was later told by friends that the starting salary for these firms was in the two to three hundred thousand dollar range.) But to me, these firms satisfy the second condition listed above. This realization allowed me to confidently delete these offers as they arrived.
The big-picture point worth noting here, however, is that these disqualifying traits still have nothing to do with whether a job is the right fit for some innate passion. They remain much more general. Working right, therefore, still trumps finding the right work.
Now that I’ve made my pitch for the craftsman mindset, and moderated it with the exceptions listed above, it’s time to see it in action.