As one prominent career counselor told me, “do what you love, and the money will follow” has become the de facto motto of the career-advice field. There is, however, a problem lurking here: When you look past the feel-good slogans and go deeper into the details of how passionate people like Steve Jobs really got started, or ask scientists about

even after you have the capital required to acquire real control, things remain difficult, as it’s exactly at this point that people begin to recognize your value and start pushing back to keep you entrenched in a less autonomous path.

Step 3: Define “Good”

The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.

The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.

lifestyle-design community. This movement argues that you don’t have to live life by other people’s

Chapter One The “Passion” of Steve Jobs

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

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is arguably the best understanding science currently has for why some pursuits get our engines running while others leave us cold.8 SDT tells us that motivation, in the workplace or elsewhere, requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs—factors described as the “nutriments” required to feel