So Good They Can't Ignore You

This is the irony of control. When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably don’t have enough career capital to do anything interesting. But once you do have this capital, as Lulu and Lewis discovered, you’ve become valuable enough that your employer will resist your efforts.

In which I introduce the second control trap, which warns that once you have enough career capital to acquire more control in your working life, you have become valuable enough to your employer that they will fight your efforts to gain more autonomy.

flawed. It not only fails to describe how most people actually end up with compelling careers, but for many people it can actually make things worse: leading to chronic job shifting and unrelenting angst when, as it did for Thomas, one’s reality inevitably falls short of the dream.

People] thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are—and connecting that to work that they truly love.”6 Po Bronson wrote this in a 2002 manifesto published in Fast Company. This should sound familiar, as it’s exactly the type

it’s dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange.

focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle—one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.

carve out one walk each day for free-form thinking about the ideas turned up by this background research

many fans of lifestyle design, who left their traditional jobs to try to make a living on passive income-generating websites. Many of these contrarians quickly discovered that the income-generating piece of that plan doesn’t work well if you don’t have something valuable to offer in exchange for people’s money.

again: A distressingly large fraction of these contrarians, like Jane, skipped over the part where they build a stable means to support their unconventional lifestyle.