bets allow you to tentatively explore the specific avenues surrounding your general mission, looking for those with the highest likelihood of leading to outstanding results.

Conclusion #2: Passion Takes Time

Conclusion #3: Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery

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

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

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

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 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; it’s instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is