Speaker 1
I do think you should read this book because it's going to push back on this idea that what you're trying to do is figuring out what your calling is. It pushes back on this idea that we are pre-wired for a particular professional pursuit. that career satisfaction comes from when we match what we do to this pre-wired inclination an idea that we often summarize with the helpful phrase follow your passion this is basically nonsense it sometimes happens but for most people career satisfaction is something that is cultivated over time. It is built on a foundation of rare and valuable skills. Those skills are then used as leverage to move your work towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. And if you are careful in how you do this, you can craft a very passionate relationship with your career. It's not just about some magical match between what you do and some pre-existing inclination. Anyways, that book gets into it. That's all that book is about. So it's going to change the way, at least give you a new way of thinking about career satisfaction, hopefully get you away from this mythological notion that you're just one career switch away from instant happiness. Now, the second book I will recommend is Range by David Epstein. And Range really hits at this idea of polymath. And in particular, this notion of getting pretty good at a lot of different things, and then allowing those things to mix and match, and perhaps unexpected ways to open up really meaningful or high impact work. So it's a manifesto of sorts that argues for this is a completely legitimate path that you don't have to just choose one thing and specialize your whole life in it. That trying a few things, doing a few things, as you say, and look at your question here, averagely good, can actually add up to something exceptional. And it's a really cool book about how that happens, and it has a lot of examples. You will also see this idea echoed in So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I talk about the auction market for career capital. All of those terms sound needlessly technical, and they are, but it basically is a technical gloss on some of the ideas that epstein much better elaborates in his book range that's where i talk about how by building up career capital that's my terminology for rare and valuable skills by building up career capital in multiple loosely related or unrelated fields you might then be able to get a lot of impact by combining them in a unique configuration. So I give a case study in this chapter of my really good childhood friend, Mike Jackson, who applied this theory and built a really, really cool career that I write about in environmental focused venture capital. He mastered a few different things and then their combination was really unique. It was in demand and it had a lot of value. And so I write about my friend, Mike Jackson, in that case study and he still gets emails to this day, occasionally, from people who say are you the mike jackson from that chapter of so good they can't ignore you so i thought that's funny actually just as an aside his name is actually michael jackson i i think i did abbreviate it to mike jackson in the book so as to disambiguate him from the uh the late pop star mich Jackson. In retrospect, probably not necessary. Probably would not be a lot of people who would otherwise have read that chapter and said, huh, two things I didn't know. Cal hangs out or hung out quite a bit as a child with the artist who recorded Thriller in the 1980s. And that artist was in DaVinci Capital. Didn't know. Interesting. Probably wouldn't have been a problem. But I think I did very purposefully. I'm saying there's some embarrassment. I think I very purposefully abbreviated his name to Mike. So as to prevent people from thinking that as a child, I hung out with the pop star, Michael Jackson, while he made venture capital investments into environmental firms. All right, but Vickis, I love your energy. I love what you're doing. Read So Good They Can't Ignore You. Read Range. I think you're going to absolutely love what you find in there and it's going to give you a lot of ideas how to go forward on your quest towards a fulfilling professional life.