it’s hard to predict in advance what you’ll eventually grow to love.

I introduced the term career capital to describe these rare and valuable skills, and noted that the tricky part is figuring out how to acquire this capital. By definition, if it’s rare and valuable, it’s not easy to get. This insight brought me into the world of performance science, where I encountered the concept of deliberate practice—a method

In other words, working right trumps finding the right work.

“Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information

“Follow your passion” might just be terrible advice.

deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse array of fields,

“You’re either remarkable or invisible,” says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow

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

As you might recall, a little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: It’s a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didn’t exist before). It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather