Be so good that you can’t be ignored
So far, I have written about knowing your hard constraints and doing research on the industries that you are keen in. The last idea that I use to complement with these two concepts is: “what I am good at / what I can be good in?” For this, I want to introduce the book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport.
When I first encountered this book in the library, I had already gone through a few different jobs and one career switch. This meant that by then, I wasn’t a fresh graduate seeking any form of career advice that I could. I was an experienced salary-drawing adult that had thought long and hard about some of my career options and decisions. Interestingly, I could very strongly relate to many ideas in the book because of my personal experiences navigating my own career. It felt like I met someone who finally knew what I went through, like meeting a soulmate that I never knew I had. And other than getting some sense of some external validation, the book also gave me conviction in some of the ideas that I used to built up my career.
This post will be a reflection of my own personal experiences, which will include key points that I gathered from this book. This means there will be spoilers of the book, but I still recommend anyone interested in looking for a framework to think about their career choices to read the source material by themselves.
Craftsman mindset
The core message of “So Good” is that if you want to have a rewarding and fulfilling career, you need to have a craftsman mindset. Craftsman mindset, from my own interpretation, is one’s dedication towards mastering the necessary skills to produce consistent high quality work in any industry. Newport called this process of acquiring skill sets the “building one’s career capital”. And it is with enough career capital that one can then have better control over certain career decisions, be it career opportunities, working arrangements, better remuneration packages, and so on.
So, should you follow your passion?
From his discussions on developing a craftsman mindset and building career capital, Newport was straight up against the career advice to “follow your passion”. To Newport, passion isn’t important in achieving a fulfilling career, and may even be a distraction that misleads people down unwise career paths. What is important for one’s career is having enough skill sets to make himself employable. And I agree to this to a large extent, even though I did follow one of my many passions to join the data science industry. As the saying goes, “Correlation does not mean causality“.
Why not Passion?
When it comes to my passions, I have had so many of them. Magic, basketball, banking, urban planning, art and data analytics were just some of “career passions”. And I did get lucky when I wriggled into the data science industry with no technical degree or formal computer science or analytics training.
“If I were still chasing my passions, I will still be an aspiring NBA basketball player!”
However, choosing a career in data analytics wasn’t me diving straight into a passion, but rather, it involved me taking many measured, baby steps. Firstly, I reviewed my hard constraints and on what I could forgo and researched on analytics as a career. Then, I took an online Python programming course, which I identified through my research as a necessary skill for me to even be considered for any data analytics position.
Although taking an online course meant a few months of late nights (2–3am, daily) of watching Python videos and googling for answers, while still holding a full time day job, I came to realise that things didn’t feel that bad after all (learning about my hard constraints). I liken my coding nights to someone playing online games into the wee hours. It was tiring, but also challenging, fun and exciting to be solving programming problems. It felt like I was playing a detective game that had some really bad visuals. Yes, I definitely had a love for data analytics. But more importantly, I was feeling confident in my coding skills and my ability to be a reasonably good data science professional back then (thinking what I am good at). While my confidence may or may not be justified, at least that was what I felt, and it was something that I was willing to gather more information to verify.
Nature vs Nurture
People are born with some attributes (nature), and depending on his upbringing (nurture) through life, he will gain more strengths and weaknesses. While I know about the growth mindset concept, I feel that by adulthood, given your strengths, preferences and upbringing, there will be career paths that are more suited to you. For me, as I went through my career, I slowly began to realise that with no structured training in programming, mathematics or statistics, it was just too difficult for me to work towards becoming a full fledged data scientist. I ended up being a data analyst instead.
I am not here to advice on what one should or should not do. What I am saying is by thinking about my hard constraints and what I felt I can be good at, this was the decision I made for myself. In fact, the main reason why I restarted my blog was to get people to more actively think about their own lives, starting with their careers. I am not giving anyone answers to their career woes. I am just sharing the questions I thought about when dealing with my own career situation.
Concluding thoughts
No one pays for hard work. People pay for quality work. Assuming you have normal preferences, if you can find a career where you can consistently produce quality work with reasonable effort, there will be a high chance that you will establish a career. And you happen to be working in a field of your passion, all is great for you. But if not, there is nothing wrong with earning your keep with your skill sets to feed yourself and your family, while keeping one or two personal hobbies to enrich your life on a non-financial level.
On the other hand, maybe you don’t even want the type of comfortable life that is defined by our society, and that’s all right too. What’s important is you should start to think about how you want to approach your career. Neither I am saying that I have the best framework or the right questions / answers. Remembering how lost I felt back then, I just hope that putting myself out here and my sharing my life can provide some starting point for some lost soul to evaluate their own career situation as well.
After 5+ years of honing my self-taught programming skills to write to computers, I am trying to write to humans again. If you find this post useful or interesting, do give me a clap or a like, and share with anyone who you think will benefit from this.
