Rule 1:
- Passion is fake. Rule 2:
- Career capital: there are many things that make up having a good job, and you need to build the necessary skills over time in order to get there. In order to do this, it’s important to adopt a Craftsman’s mindset.
- The way to become a craftsman is through stretching to what’s difficult and receiving immediate feedback so that you know what to work on and improve
- The craftsman’s approach to Deliberate Practice isn’t present in most fields outside of things like sports and music, so if you can be one of the few ppl doing it, you’ll blow by others.
- Steps to becoming a craftsman
- Decide what capital market you’re in (either a winner-take-all market where there’s only one major skill that’s in high demand or an auction where multiple skill combos can exist)
- If you’re in an auction market, identify the capital types that are important and try to build capital in open opportunities
- Define “good”. what is your goal?
- Stretch and Destroy: practice should feel uncomfortable
- Be patient Rule 3:
- An important aspect of work satisfaction is gaining control over what you do. However there’s two traps.
- It’s dangerous to try to gain more control without enough capital to back it up
- Other people who benefit from your capital will try to keep you one a more traditional path.
Rule 4:
- It’s important to find a mission (but don’t try to have one right away because then you fall into similar traps as the passion people.)
- Finding a mission takes getting to the edge and looking into the “adjacent possibles”
- Validate your interesting mission ideas thru little bets abt whetever seems to be a promising direction. Don’t start out w/ a full plan in mind. This matches up with Paul Graham’s Outside advice for ambitious teenagers about doing lots of fun projects and following what’s excitingly ambitious.
- Advice from Seth Godin here from How to make ideas spread. You have to build purple cows. Do what’s remarkable if you want to stand out.
- You have to build remarkable things to spread ideas.
- Build these things and show them to off to a community that would remark about it.
- Apply this to my own life. Try to do at least one remarkable thing in as many aspects of my life as possible.
- Write a remarkable blog post
- etc Conclusion
- Stop being productivity-centric. This will cause you to sidestep deliberate practice types of tasks because they are harder and take longer to do. Become craft-centric and try to optimize for # of deliberate practice hours.