So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

A job, in Wrzesniewski’s formulation, is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.

THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET 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 distressingly large fraction of these contrarians, like Jane, skipped over the part where they build a stable means to support their unconventional lifestyle. They assume that generating the courage to pursue control is what matters, while everything else is just a detail that is easily worked out.

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.”

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.

if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.

As I was struggling to make sense of Kirk’s story, I stumbled across a new business book that had been making waves. It was titled Little Bets, and it was written by a former venture capitalist named Peter Sims.2 When Sims studied a variety of successful innovators, from Steve Jobs to Chris Rock to Frank Gehry, as well as innovative companies, such

when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness.

“I have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules,” he said. “Do what people are willing to pay for.”