and a dream job is building the courage
to step off the expected path I argued
that it was this courage culture that
led Lisa fuer to quit her corporate job
to chase an ill-fated yoga venture this
culture also plays a big role in egging
on the less successful members of the
lifestyle design community in light of
the second control trap I need to
moderate my previous disdain courage is
not irrelevant to creating work you love
Lulu and Lois as we now understand
required quite a bit of courage to
ignore the resistance generated by this
trap the key it seems is to know when
the time is right to become courageous
in your career decisions get this timing
right and a fantastic working life
awaits you but get it wrong by tripping
the first control trap and a premature
bid for autonomy and disaster lurks the
fault of the courage culture therefore
is not its underlying message that
courage is good but it’s severe
underestimation of the complexity
involved in deploying this boldness in a
useful way imagine for example that you
come up with an idea for injecting more
control into your career as I argued
earlier this is an idea worth paying
attention to because control is so
powerful in transforming your working
life that I call it the dream job elixir
also imagine however that as you toy
with this idea people in your life start
offering resistance what’s the right
thing to do the to control traps make
this a hard question to answer it’s
possible that you don’t have enough
career capital to back up this bid for
more control that is you’re about to
fall into the first control trap in this
case you should heed the resistance and
shelve the idea at the same time however
it’s possible that you have plenty of
career capital and
resistance is being generated exactly
because you’re so valuable that is
you’ve fallen into the second control
trap in this case you should ignore the
resistance and pursue the idea this of
course is the problem with control both
scenarios feel the same but the right
response is different in each by this
point in my quest I’ve encountered
enough stories of control going both
right and wrong to know that this
conundrum is serious perhaps one of the
single most difficult obstacles facing
us in our quest for work we love the
cheery slogans of the courage culture
are obviously too crude to guide us
through this tricky territory we need a
more nuanced heuristic something that
could make clear exactly what brand of
control trap you’re facing as you’ll
learn next I ended up discovering this
solution in the habits of an
iconoclastic entrepreneur someone who
has elevated living his life by his own
chapter 11 avoiding the control traps in
which I explain the law of financial
viability which says you should only
pursue a bid for more control if you
have evidence that it’s something that
people are willing to pay you for Derek
Siver’s is a control freak not long into
his 2010 TED talk on creativity and
leadership Derek Siver’s plays a video
clip of a crowd at an outdoor concert a
young man without a shirt starts dancing
by himself the audience members seated
nearby look on curiously a leader needs
the guts to stand alone and look
ridiculous Derek says soon however a
second young man joins the 1st and
starts dancing now comes the first
follower with a crucial role the first
follower transforms the lone nut into a
leader as the video continues a few more
dancers join the group then several more
around the two-minute mark the dancers
have grown into a crowd
and ladies and gentlemen that’s how a
movement is made the Ted audience gives
Derrick a standing ovation he boughs
then does a little dance himself on
stage no one can accuse Derek Siver’s of
being a conformist during his career he
has repeatedly played the role of the
first dancer he starts with a risky move
designed to maximize his control over
what he does and how he does it
by doing so he’s at risk of looking like
the lone nut’ dancing alone throughout
Derek’s career however there always
ended up being a second dancer who
validated his decision and then
eventually a crowd arrived defining the
move as successful his first risky move
occurred in 1992 when he quit a good job
at Warner Brothers to pursue music
full-time he played guitar and toured
with the Japanese musician and producer
ryouichi Sakamoto and by all accounts
was pretty good at it his next big move
was in 1997 when he started CD Baby a
company that helped independent artists
sell their cds online in an age before
iTunes this company filled a crucial
need for independent musicians and the
company grew in 2008 he sold it to disk
makers for 22 million dollars at this
point in his career conventional wisdom
dictated that Derek should move to a
large house outside of San Francisco and
become an angel investor but Derek was
never interested in conventional wisdom
instead he put all of the proceeds from
the sale into a charitable trust to
support music education living off the
smallest possible amount of interest
allowed by law he then sold his
possessions and began traveling the
world in search of an interesting place
to live when I spoke with him he was in
Singapore I love that the country has so
little gravity it doesn’t try to hold
you here it’s instead a base from which
you can go explore he said
when I asked him why he’s living
overseas he replied I follow a rule with
my life that if something is scary do it
I’ve lived everywhere in America and for
me a big scary thing was living outside
the country after taking time off to
read learn Mandarin and traveled the
world Derek has recently turned his
sights on a new company muc work this
service allows musicians to outsource
boring tasks so they can spend more time
on the creative things that matter he
started the company because he thought
the idea sounded fun here’s what
interests me about Derek
he loves control his whole career has
been about making big moves often in the
face of resistance to gain more control
over what he does in how he does it
and not only does he love control but
he’s fantastically successful at
achieving it
this is why I got him on the phone from
Singapore I wanted to find out how he
achieved this feat in more detail
I asked what criteria he uses to decide
which projects to pursue and which to
abandon in essence I wanted his map for
navigating the control traps described
in the last two chapters fortunately for
us he had a simple but surprisingly
effective answer to my question the law
of financial viability when I explained
what I was after Derek got it right away
you mean the type of mental algorithm
that prevents the lawyer who has had
this successful career for 20 years from
suddenly saying you know I love massages
I’m going to become a masseuse
he asked that’s it I replied Derek
thought for a moment I have this
principle about money that overrides my
other life rules he said do what people
are willing to pay for Derek made it
clear that this is different from
pursuing money for the sake of having
money
remember this is someone who gave away
22 million dollars and sold his
possessions after his company was
acquired instead as he explained
money is a neutral indicator of value by
aiming to make money you’re aiming to be
valuable he also emphasized that hobbies
are clearly exempt from this rule if I
want to learn to scuba dive for example
because I think it’s fun and people
won’t pay me to do that I don’t care I’m
going to do it anyway he said but when
it comes to decisions affecting your
core career money remains an effective
judge of value if you’re struggling to
raise money for an idea or are thinking
that you will support your idea with
unrelated work then you need to rethink
the idea at first encounter Derek’s
career which orbits around creative
pursuits might seem divorced from
matters as prosaic and crass as money
but when he Reena rated his path from
the perspective of this mental algorithm
it suddenly made more sense
his first big move for example was to
become a professional musician in 1992
as Derek explained to me he started by
pursuing music at night and on the
weekend I didn’t quit my day job until I
was making more money with my music his
second big move was to start CD Baby
again he didn’t turn his attention
full-time to this pursuit until after he
had built up a profitable client base
people asked me how i funded my business
he said I tell them first I sold one CD
which gave me enough money to sell two
it grew from there
in hindsight Derek’s bids for control
remained big and nonconformist but given
his mental algorithm on only doing what
people are paying for they now also
this idea is powerful enough that I
should give it its own official sounding
title the law of financial viability
when deciding whether to follow an
appealing pursuit that will introduce
more control into your work life seek
evidence of whether people are willing
to pay for it if you find this evidence
continue if not move on
when I began reflecting on this law I
saw that it applied again and again to
examples of people successfully
acquiring more control in their careers
to understand this
notice that the definition of willing to
pay varies in some cases it literally
means customers paying you money for a
product or a service but it can also
mean getting approved for a loan
receiving an outside investment or more
commonly convincing an employer to
either hire you or keep writing you
paychecks once you adopt this flexible
definition of pay for it this law starts
popping up all over consider for example
Ryan Boyland from red fire farm many
well-educated city dwellers fed up with
urban chaos by some farmland and try to
make a living working with their hands
most fail what makes Ryan different is
that he made sure people were willing to
pay him to farm before he tried it in
more detail because he wasn’t a rich
ex-banker buying his first property
required a loan from the Massachusetts
Farm Services Agency and the FSA does
not give away its money easily you have
to submit a detailed business plan that
convinces them that you’ll actually make
money with your farm with ten years of
experience on his side Ryan was able to
make this argument Lulu provides another
good example of this law in action here
the definition of willing to pay
concerned her paycheck she judged her
moves toward more autonomy by whether or
not someone would hire her or keep
paying her while she made them her first
big move for example was to drop to a 30
hour per week schedule she knew she had
enough cap
to support this change because her
employers said yes
in later jobs when she negotiated a
three-month leave or insisted on working
freelance with an open schedule these
were also bids for more control that
were validated by the fact that her
employers accepted them if she had had
less career capital they would have had
no problem telling her goodbye on the
flip side when you look at stories of
people who were unsuccessful in adding
more control to their careers you often
find that this law has been ignored
remember Jane from earlier in rule
number three she dropped out of college
with the vague idea that some sort of
online business would support a
lifestyle of adventure if she had met
Derek Siver’s she would have delayed
this move until she had real evidence
that she could make money online in this
case the law would have served its
purpose well as a simple experiment
would have likely revealed that passive
income websites are more myth than
reality and thus prevented her rash
abandonment of her education this
doesn’t mean that Jane would have had to
resign herself to a life of boring work
on the contrary the law could have
provided her structure to keep exploring
variations on her adventurous life
vision until she could find one to
pursue that would actually yield results
summary of rule number three rules
number one and number two laid the
foundation for my new thinking on how
people end up loving what they do rule
number one dismissed the passion
hypothesis which says that you first
have to figure out your true calling and
then find a job to match rule number two
replaced this idea with career capital
theory which argues that the traits that
define great work are rare and valuable
and that if you want these in your
working life you must first build up
rare and valuable skills to offer in
return I call these skills career
capital and in rule number two I dived
into the details of how to acquire it
the obvious next question is how to
invest this capital once you have it
rule number three explored one answer to
this question by arguing that gaining
control over what you do and how you do
it
is incredibly important this trait shows
up so often in the lives of people who
love what they do
that have taken to calling it the dream
job elixir investing your capital in
control however turns out to be tricky
there are two traps that commonly snare
people in their pursuit of this trait
the first control trap notes that it’s
dangerous to try to gain more control
without enough capital to back it up the
second control trap notes that once you
have the capital to back up a bid for
more control
you’re still not out of the woods this
capital makes you valuable enough to
your employer that they will likely now
fight to keep you on a more traditional
path they realize that gaining more
control is good for you but not for
their bottom line the control traps put
you in a difficult situation let’s say
you have an idea for pursuing more
control in your career and you’re
encountering resistance how can you tell
if this resistance is useful for example
it’s helping you avoid the first control
trap or something to ignore for example
it’s the result of the second control
trap to help navigate this control
conundrum I turned to Derek Siver’s
Derek is a successful entrepreneur who
has lived a life dedicated to control I
asked him his advice for sifting through
potential control boosting pursuits and
he responded with a simple rule do what
people are willing to pay for this isn’t
about making money Derek for example is
more or less indifferent to money having
given away to charity the millions he
made from selling his first company
instead it’s about using money as a
neutral indicator of value a way of
determining whether or not you have
enough career capital to succeed with a
pursuit I call this the law of financial
viability and concluded that it’s a
critical tool for navigating
acquisition of control this holds
whether you are pondering an
entrepreneurial venture or a new role
within an established company unless
people are willing to pay you it’s not
an idea you’re ready to go after rule
number four think small act big or the
importance of mission chapter 12 the
meaningful life of pardis sabeti in
which I argue that a unifying mission to
your working life can be a source of
great satisfaction the happy professor
Harvard’s state of the art Northwest
Science Building is found at 52 Oxford
Street in Cambridge Massachusetts a
10-minute walk from the tourists packing
the university’s famed central yard it’s
part of a complex of hulking brick and
glass laboratories that form the new
heart of Harvard’s fabled research
engine inside the Northwest looks like a
Hollywood vision of a science lab the
hallways defining the perimeter of each
floor are polished concrete and lit
dimly in the style of television crime
procedurals
inside the hallways in the center of the
building are the wet labs with graduate
students manipulating pipettes visible
through windowed steel doors on the
other side of the hallway are the
professor’s offices defined by
floor-to-ceiling glass partitions it was
one of these offices in particular that
drew me to the northwest on a sunny June
afternoon the office of pardis sabeti a
35 year old professor of evolutionary
biology who had mastered one of the more
elusive but powerful strategies in the
quest for work you loved one of the
first things you’ll notice if you spend
time around party is that she enjoys her
life biology like any high-stakes
academic field is demanding because of
this it has a reputation for turning
young professors into curmudgeons who
adopt a masochistic brand of workaholism
and which relax
becomes a sign of failure and the
accomplishments of peers become
tragedies this can be a bleak existence
party for her part has avoided this fate
not five minutes into my visit for
example a young grad student one of 10
people party employees in her eponymous
sabeti lab pokes his head into the
office we’re heading down to volleyball
practice
he says referencing the labs team which
evidently takes itself seriously she
promises to join them as soon as our
interview ends volleyball is not parties
only hobby in a corner of her office she
keeps an acoustic guitar that serves as
more than decoration party plays in a
band called thousand days which is well
known in Boston music circles in 2008
PBS featured the band in a nova special
called researchers who Rock parties
energy for these activities is a side
effect of her enthusiasm for her work
the bulk of her research focuses on
Africa with studies ongoing in Senegal
Sierra Leone and most of all Nigeria to
party this work is about more than just
the accumulation of publications and
grant money at one point in our
conversation for example she pulls down
her laptop you have to see this video of
me and my girls
she says loading up a YouTube clip of
party guitar in hand leading a group of
four African women in a song the video
was shot outdoors in Nigeria palm trees
provided the backdrop the women I
learned work in a clinic supported by
the sabeti lab these women deal with
people who died in devastating ways
every day she says to no one in
particular while the video plays on
screen everyone is smiling while party
leads them with mixed success through
the verses I love going there she adds
Nigeria is my African home
it’s clear that party has avoided the
grinding cynicism that traps so many
young academics and has instead built an
engaging life it’s not always easy
she once said in an interview but I
truly love what I do but how did she
pull off this feat as I spent time with
party I recognized that her happiness
comes from the fact that she built her
career on a clear and compelling mission
something that not only gives meaning to
her work but provides the energy needed
to embrace life beyond the lab in the
overachieving style typical of Harvard
party’s mission is by no means subtle
her goal put simply is to rid the world
pardis mission as a graduate student
party stumbled into the emerging field
of computational genetics the use of
computers to help understand DNA
sequences she developed an algorithm
that sifts through databases of human
genetic information looking for traces
of an elusive target ongoing human
evolution to the general public the idea
that humans are still evolving can be
surprising but among evolutionary
biologists it’s taken for granted one of
the classic examples of recent human
evolution is lactose tolerance the
ability to digest milk into adulthood a
trait that didn’t start spreading
through the human population until we
domesticated milk producing animals
party’s algorithm uses statistical
techniques to hunt down patterns of gene
migration that match what you would
expect from selective pressure for
example a mutation that popped up
recently in human development but has
since spread quickly among a population
the algorithm in other words searches
blindly turning up candidate genes that
look like they’re the result of natural
selection but leaving it up to the
researcher to figure out why natural
selection deemed the gene useful party
uses the algorithm to search for
recently evolved genes that provide
disease resistance
her logic is that if she can find these
genes and understand how they work
biomedical researchers might be able to
mimic their benefit in a treatment it
makes sense of course that disease
resistance genes would be among the
candidates turned up by parties
algorithm as they provide a classic
example of natural selection in action
if a deadly virus has been killing off
humans in a population for a long time
biologists would say that this
population is under selective pressure
if a lucky few members of the group then
happened to evolve a resistance to the
disease
this pressure ensures that the new gene
will spread quickly people with the new
gene die less frequently than those
without it this rapid spread of a new
gene is exactly the type of signature
party’s algorithm has been tuned to
detect party’s first big discovery was a
gene that provides resistance to Lassa
fever one of the oldest and most deadly
diseases of the African continent
responsible for tens of thousands of
deaths each year people don’t just die
with this disease she emphasized they
die extreme deaths
she has since added malaria and the
bubonic plague to the list of ancient
scourge –is that she’s tackling with
her computational strategy parties
career is driven by a clear mission to
use new technology to fight old diseases
this research is clearly important an
observation emphasized by the fact that
she’s received seven-figure grants for
her work from both the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation and the NIH later in
this audiobook we’ll dive into the
details of how she found this focus but
what’s important to note now is that her
mission provides her a sense of purpose
and energy traits that have helped her
avoid becoming a cynical academic and
instead embrace her work with enthusiasm
her mission is the foundation on which
she builds love for what she does and
therefore it’s a career strategy we need
to better understand
the power of mission to have a mission
is to have a unifying focus for your
career it’s more general than a specific
job and can span multiple positions it
provides an answer to the question what
should I do with my life
missions are powerful because they focus
your energy toward a useful goal and
this in turn maximizes your impact on
your world a crucial factor in loving
what you do people who feel like their
careers truly matter are more satisfied
with their working lives and they’re
also more resistant to the strain of
hard work staying up late to save your
corporate litigation client a few extra
million dollars can be draining but
staying up late to help cure an ancient
disease can leave you more energized
than when you started
perhaps even providing the extra
enthusiasm needed to start a lab
volleyball team or tour with a rock band
I was drawn to party sabeti because her
career is driven by a mission and she’s
reaped happiness and returned after
meeting her I went searching for other
people who leveraged this trait to
create work they loved this search led
me to a young archaeologist whose
mission to popularize his field led to
his own television series on the
Discovery Channel and to a board
programmer who systematically studied
marketing to devise a mission that
injected excitement back into his
working life in all three cases I tried
to decode exactly how these individuals
found and then successfully deployed
their missions in short I wanted an
answer to an important question how do
you make mission a reality in your
working life the answers I’ve found are
complicated to better understand this
complexity let’s put the topic back into
the broader context of the book in the
preceding rules I have argued that
follow your passion is bad advice as
most people aren’t born with
pre-existing passions waiting to be
discovered if your goal is to love what
you do you must first build up career
capital
by mastering rare and valuable skills
and then cash in this capital for the
traits that define great work as I’ll
explain mission is one of these
desirable traits and like any such
desirable trait it too requires that you
first build career capital a mission
launched without this expertise is
likely doomed to sputter and die but
capital alone is not enough to make a
mission a reality plenty of people are
good at what they do but haven’t
reoriented their career in a compelling
direction accordingly I will go on to
explore a pair of advanced tactics that
also play an important role in making
the leap from a good idea for a mission
to actually making that mission a
reality in the chapters ahead you’ll
learn the value of systematically
experimenting with different proto
missions to seek out a direction worth
pursuing you’ll also learn the necessity
of deploying a marketing mindset in the
search for your focus in other words
missions are a powerful trait to
introduce into your working life but
they’re also fickle requiring careful
coaxing to make them a reality this
subtlety probably explains why so many
people lack an organizing focus to their
careers even though such focuses widely
admired missions are hard by this point
in my quest however I had become
comfortable with hard and I hope that if
you’ve made it this far in the audio
book you have gained this comfort as
well
hardness scares off the day dreamers and
the timid leaving more opportunity for
those like us who are willing to take
the time to carefully work out the best
path forward and then confidently take
chapter 13 missions require capital in
which I argue that a mission chosen
before you have relevant career capital
is not likely to be sustainable mission
failure when Sara wrote me she was stuck
she had recently quit her job as a
newspaper editor to attend graduate
school to study cognitive science Sarah
had considered grad school right out of
college but at the time she worried that
she didn’t have the right skills with
age however came more confidence and
after she signed up for and then aced an
artificial intelligence course that
would have scared a younger version of
myself Sarah decided to take the plunge
and become a full-time doctoral
candidate then the trouble started not
long into her new student career Sarah
became paralyzed by her works lack of an
organizing mission I feel I have too
many interests she told me I can’t
decide if I want to do theoretical work
or something more applied or which would
be more useful even more threatening
I believe all the other researchers to
be geniuses what would you do if you
were in my shoes Sarah’s story reminded
me of Jane whom I introduced in rule
number three as you might recall Jane
dropped out of college to start a
non-profit to develop my vision of
health human potential and a life
well-lived
this mission unfortunately ran into a
harsh financial reality when Jane failed
to raise money to support her vague
vision when I met her she was soliciting
advice about finding a normal job a task
that was proving difficult because she
lacked a degree both Sarah and Jane
recognized the power of mission but
struggled to deploy the trait in their
own working lives
Sarah desperately wanted a party sabeti
style of life transforming research
focus yet her failure to immediately
identify such a focus led her to rethink
graduate school Jane on the other hand
slapped together something
a nonprofit that would develop my vision
of a life well-lived and then hope the
details would work themselves out once
she got started
Jane fared no better than Sarah the
details it turned out did not work
themselves out leaving Jane penniless
and still without a college degree I
tell these stories because they
emphasize an important point missions
are tricky as Sarah and Jane learned
just because you really want to organize
your work around a mission doesn’t mean
that you can easily make it happen after
my visit to Harvard I realized that if I
was going to deploy this trait in my own
career I needed to better understand
this trickiness that is I needed to
figure out what Part II did differently
than Jane and Sarah the answer I
eventually found came from an unexpected
place the attempts to explain a puzzling
phenomenon the baffling popularity of
randomized linear network coding as I
write this chapter I’m attending a
computer science conference in San Jose
California earlier today something
interesting happened I attended a
session in which four different
professors from four different
universities presented their latest
research surprisingly all four
presentations tackled the same narrow
problem information dissemination in
networks using the same narrow technique
randomized linear network coding it was
as if my research community woke up one
morning and collectively and
spontaneously decided to tackle the same
esoteric problem this example of joint
discovery surprised me but it would not
have surprised the science writers
Stephen Johnson in his engaging 2010
book where good ideas come from Johnson
explains that such multiples are
frequent in the history of science
consider the discovery of sunspots in
1611 as Johnson notes for scientists
from four different countries all
identified the phenomenon during that
same year
the first electrical battery invented
twice in the mid 18th century oxygen
isolated independently in 1772 in 1774
in one study cited by Johnson
researchers from Columbia University
found just shy of 150 different examples
of prominent scientific breakthroughs
made by multiple researchers at near the
same time these examples of simultaneous
discovery though interesting might seem
tangential to our interest in career
mission I ask however that you stick
with me as the explanation for this
phenomenon is the first link in a chain
of logic that helped me decode what Part
II did differently than Sara and Jane
Big Ideas Johnson explained are almost
always discovered in the adjacent
possible a term borrowed from the
complex system biologists Stewart
Kaufman who used it to describe the
spontaneous formation of complex
chemical structures from simpler
structures given a soup of chemical
components sloshing and mixing together
noted Kaufman lots of new chemicals will
form not every new chemical however is
equally likely the new chemicals you’ll
find are those that can be made by
combining the structures already in the
soup that is the new chemicals are in
the space of the adjacent possible
defined by the current structures when
Johnson adopted the term he shifted it
from complex chemicals to cultural and
scientific innovations we take the ideas
we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled
across and we jigger them together into
some new shape he explained the next big
ideas in any field are found right
beyond the current cutting edge in the
adjacent space that contains the
possible new combinations of existing
ideas the reason important discoveries
often happen multiple times therefore is
that they only become possible once they
enter the adjacent possible
at which point anyone surveying this
space that is those who are the current
cutting edge will notice the same
innovations waiting to happen
the isolation of oxygen is a component
of air to name one of Johnson’s examples
of a multiple discovery wasn’t possible
until two things happened first
scientists began to think about air as a
substance containing elements not just a
void and second sensitive scales a key
tool in the needed experiments became
available once these two developments
occurred the isolation of oxygen became
a big fat target in the newly defined
adjacent possible visible to anyone who
happened to be looking in that direction
two scientists Carl Wilhelm Scheele and
Joseph Priestley were looking in this
direction and therefore both went on to
conduct the necessary experiments
independently but at nearly the same
the adjacent possible also explains my
earlier example of for researchers
tackling the same obscure problem with
the same obscure technique at the
conference I attended the specific
technique applied in this case a
technique called randomized linear
network coding came to the attention of
the computer scientists I worked with
only over the last two years as
researchers who study a related topic
began to apply it successfully to thorny
problems the scientists who ended up
presenting papers on this technique at
my conference had all noticed its
potential around the same time put in
johnson’s terms this technique redefined
the cutting edge in my corner of the
academic world and therefore it also
redefined the adjacent possible and in
this new configuration the information
dissemination problem like the discovery
of oxygen many centuries earlier
suddenly loomed as a big target waiting
to be tackled we like to think of
innovation as striking us in a stunning
eureka moment where you all at once
changed the way people see the world
leaping far ahead of our current
understanding I’m arguing that in
reality innovation is more systemic we
grind a way to expand the cutting edge
opening up new problems in the adjacent
possible to tackle and therefore expand
the cutting edge some more opening up
more new problems and so on the truth
Johnson explains is the technological
and scientific advances rarely break out
of the adjacent possible as I mentioned
understanding the adjacent possible and
its role in innovation is the first link
in a chain of argument that explains how
to identify a good career mission in the
next section I’ll Forge the second link
which connects the world of scientific
breakthroughs to the world of work the
capital driven mission scientific
breakthroughs as we just learned require
that you first get to the cutting edge
of your field only then can you see the
adjacent possible beyond
the space where innovative ideas are
almost always discovered here’s the leap
I made as I pondered pardis sabeti
around the same time I was pondering
Johnson’s theory of innovation a good
career mission is similar to a
scientific breakthrough it’s an
innovation waiting to be discovered in
the adjacent possible of your field if
you want to identify a mission for your
working life therefore you must first
get to the cutting edge the only place
where these missions become visible
this insight explains Sara’s struggles
she was trying to find a mission before
she got to the cutting edge she was
still in her first two years as a
graduate student when she began to panic
about her lack of focus from her vantage
point as a new graduate student she was
much too far from the cutting edge to
have any hope of surveying the adjacent
possible and if she can’t see the
adjacent possible she’s not likely to
identify a compelling new direction for
her work according to Johnson’s theory
Sara would have been better served by
first mastering a promising niche a task
that may take years and only then
turning her attention to seeking a
mission this distance from the adjacent
possible also tripped up Jane she wanted
to start a transformative nonprofit that
changed the way people lived their lives
a successful nonprofit however needs a
specific philosophy with strong evidence
for its effectiveness Jane didn’t have
such a philosophy to find one she would
have needed a nice view of the adjacent
possible in her corner of the nonprofit
sector and this would have required that
she first get to the cutting edge of
efforts to better people’s lives a
process that as with Sara requires
patience and perhaps years of work Jane
was trying to identify a mission before
she got to the cutting edge and she
predictably didn’t come up with anything
that could turn people’s heads in
hindsight these observations are obvious
if life transforming missions could be
found with just a little navel-gazing
and an optimistic attitude
changing the world would be commonplace
but it’s not commonplace its instead
quite rare
this rareness we now understand is
because these breakthroughs require that
you first get to the cutting edge and
this is hard the type of hardness that
most of us try to avoid in our working
lives those who have been paying
attention will notice that this talk of
getting to the cutting edge echoes the
idea of career capital which was
introduced back in rule number two as
you’ll recall career capital is my term
for rare and valuable skills it is I
argued your main bargaining chip and
creating work you love most people who
love their work got where they are by
first building up career capital and
then cashing it in for the types of
traits that define great work getting to
the cutting edge of a field can be
understood in these terms
this process builds up rare and valuable
skills and therefore builds up your
store of career capital similarly
identifying a compelling mission once
you get to the cutting edge can be seen
as investing your career capital to
acquire a desirable trait in your career
in other words mission is yet another
example of career capital theory in
action if you want a mission you need to
first acquire capital if you skip this
step you might end up like Stara and
Jane with lots of enthusiasm but very
little to show for it not surprisingly
when we return to the story of party
sabeti we find that her path to a
mission provides a nice example of this
career capital perspective translated
into practice parties patience
I think you do need passion to be happy
party sabeti told me at first this
sounds like she’s supporting the passion
hypothesis that I debunked in rule
number one
but then she elaborated it’s just that
we don’t know what that passion is if
you ask someone they’ll tell you what
they think they’re passionate about but
they probably have it wrong in other
words she believes that having passion
for your work is vital but she also
believes that it’s a fool’s errand to
try to figure out in advance what work
will lead to this passion when you hear
party’s story the origin of this
philosophy becomes clear in high school
I was obsessed with math she told me
then she had a biology teacher whom she
loved which made her think that biology
might be for her when she arrived at MIT
she was forced to choose between math
and bio it turns out that the MIT bio
department has an unbelievable emphasis
on teaching she explained
so I majored in bio with a bio major
came a new plan she decided she was
destined to become a doctor I perceived
myself as someone who cared about people
I wanted to practice medicine party did
very well at MIT won a Rhodes
Scholarship and used it to go earn her
PhD at Oxford she focused on biological
anthropology a typically archaic
Oxfordian name for a field most would
simply call kinetics it was at Oxford
that party decided that Africa and
infectious diseases were also a
potentially interesting topic to study
if you’re keeping count
this was the third field that at some
point in her student career attracted
her the full list now contains math
medicine and infectious disease this is
why she’s wary of the strategy of trying
to identify your one true calling in
advance in her experience lots of
different things can at different times
seem compelling
given her new interest in Africa party
joined a research group using genetic
analysis to help African Americans trace
their genealogy back to regions of
Africa after a year or so party decided
to switch labs and she moved into
another suggested by a friend this lab
was tackling the genetics of malaria
after Oxford party returned to Harvard
Medical School to earn her MD amazingly
even as she was finishing up a PhD in
genetics she wasn’t ready yet to abandon
her earlier premonition that she was
somehow meant to be a doctor the result
was that she became a young med student
finishing a PhD thesis during her spare
time if you want to write a thing about
having a quality enjoyable life don’t
ask me about my time at Harvard she
warmed Harvard was a tough time party
finished her dissertation and became a
postdoctoral fellow continuing to juggle
this work with the end of her MD program
taking the subway back and forth between
Harvard and MIT where she was now
working at the Broad Institute with the
famed geneticist Eric Lander it was
during this period that her ideas about
using statistical analysis to find
evidence of recent human evolution began
to yield results culminating in the 2002
publication of a major paper in nature
with the innocuous title detecting
recent positive selection in the human
genome from haplotype structure
according to Google Scholar the work has
been cited over 720 times since its
publication people started treating me
differently after that paper party says
that’s when the faculty offers started
coming in though she finished her MD
somewhere in this period it was not
until this point that her mission
finally became clear becoming a clinical
doctor didn’t make sense
she was going to build a research career
focused on her use of computational
genetics to combat ancient diseases Part
II took a professorship at Harvard
finally ready to commit to a single
focus in her working life
what struck me about parties story is
how remarkably late it was in her
training before she identified the
mission that now defines her career this
lateness is best represented by her
decision to still attend and finish
Medical School even though she was
working on PhD research that was
starting to attract notice these are not
the actions of someone who is certain of
her destiny from day one this certainty
didn’t come until later around the time
of her nature publication when party had
finally developed her computational
genetics ideas to the point where their
usefulness and novelty were obvious to
use my terminology this long period of
training starting with her undergraduate
biology classes and continuing through
her PhD and then postdoctoral work at
the Broad Institute was when she was
building up her stores of career capital
when she took a professorship at Harvard
she was finally ready to cash in this
capital to obtain the mission-driven
career she enjoys today rule number four
is entitled think small act big it’s in
this understanding of career capital and
its role in mission that we get our
explanation for this title advancing to
the cutting edge in a field is an act of
small thinking requiring you to focus on
a narrow collection of subjects for a
potentially long time once you get to
the cutting edge however and discover a
mission in the adjacent possible you
must go after it with zeal a big action
pardis sabeti thoughts small by focusing
patiently for years on a narrow niche
the genetics of diseases in Africa but
then acting big once she acquired enough
capital to identify a mission using
computational genetics to help
understand and fight ancient diseases
sarah and jane by contrast reverse this
order they started by thinking big
looking for a world-changing mission but
without capital they could only match
this big thinking with small ineffectual
acts
the art of mission we can conclude asks
us to suppress the most grandiose of our
work instincts and instead adopt the
patience the style of patience observed
with party sabeti required to get this ordering correct