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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. - Hey friends, good morning. This is Joshua Sheets and this is episode 28 of the Radical Personal Finance podcast for today, Friday, July 25, 2014. I'm calling in sick again on the show this morning. As you can tell probably from the sound of my voice, I'm not quite really able to speak.

I could barely get out a whisper this morning. But I didn't want to leave you without something thought-provoking for your Friday to take you into the weekend. So what I've chosen to do is today I'm going to play you audio from a speech by Cal Newport. And this audio that I've chosen, I found it on YouTube.

You can see the link in the show notes. And this audio that I've chosen is from a speech that Cal delivered at the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon. The World Domination Summit is a project by Chris Guillebeau. And he brings together a bunch of interesting people for a weekend and they talk about how to change the world.

That's the best summary that I can give it. Now I have never had the opportunity to do this and I have never had the opportunity to go in the past. I would like to go in the future. It just finished up. It was actually just a week or two ago, the 2014 version.

But I'm hoping that in the future that I am able to go. Maybe next year. Maybe next year will be the magic year because it just seems like what an awesome gathering of people that Chris has put together. I would encourage you to check out-- if you haven't read any of Chris' writing, you can find it at chrisguillebeau.com.

C-R-I-S-G-U-I-L-L-E-B-E-A-U. Kind of the French spelling there. chrisguillebeau.com And he's written a book called The $100 Startup, which is a very useful book for someone who's interested in starting a business but put off by having the money to be able to do so. But this speech by Cal is basically, "Why follow your passion is the wrong career advice." And Cal's written a book called So Good They Can't Ignore You.

Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. It's an excellent book. I would commend it to you. You would notice if you listened to the episode-- I think it was 25--with Jacob Lundfisker, Jacob actually mentioned this book and mentioned Cal as part of that conversation. So today's speech is about 30 minutes long, so you can expect the show to be about 30 minutes long.

If you have the ability, you're in front of a computer, just click through to the YouTube video and watch it on YouTube if you'd like to see the visuals. It's nice to see him deliver the speech visually. However, there should be no problem. If you just want to hear the audio, there's nothing that he talks about that you need to see the video.

But that's going to be today's show. I hope to be back with you ready to go on Monday morning for another week of great content. Thank you for sticking with me while I've been ill. Thank you, Chris. Chris has been doing a great job, hasn't he? He's fantastic. Most of you don't know this, but during that last break, Chris visited three more countries on his list.

He's really-- He's an amazing guy. His publisher is here. We actually shared for a brief moment the same publisher, and I'm a little bit relieved that we don't anymore because when it came to the marketing meetings where you sit down and you give your plan for how you're going to market your book, nothing made it harder than knowing that Chris was just in there giving his plans for marketing his book, so you would show up and say, "I'm going to do some guest blog posts and a reading at the local Barnes & Noble." You know Chris was in there the day before with his plans to go to the bottom of every ocean and do a reading on Mount Kilimanjaro.

I'm glad I have left, and now I can feel a little bit better about it. I'm here to talk about career advice, and as Chris previewed, I want to push back against some ideas that we have taken for granted and sort of assume are true. I want to replace them with some more nuanced ideas that the evidence suggests might work better.

This is sort of my professorial approach to these type of questions. I wanted to start with someone who I think would be well appreciated by this crowd, and that's the late Steve Jobs. In particular, I want to go back to the early summer of 2005. This is when Steve Jobs took the podium at Stanford Stadium in front of a crowd of 23,000, and he was there to give the commencement address to Stanford's graduating class.

This was a big deal. Jobs did not give a lot of these sort of touchy-feely speeches, but he showed up. He may have been wearing sandals under his robes, which he was, but he did show up, and he gave his talk, and by all accounts, it was a really good one.

Someone posted this unofficial video of it on YouTube, 3.5 million views. Stanford then released their official version, another 3.5 million views. I would assume that the number of people in this crowd who have not seen this video is very small. I mean, we could probably fit them in this sinister cage thing right here that Chris set up.

(laughter) I sort of assumed when I came here for rehearsal that he was going to have an investment banker trapped in here, sort of slowly rotating around. (laughter and applause) Sort of disappointed. (laughter) So as most of you saw it, most of you know, he had quite a few interesting points in this talk, but there was one in particular that really seemed to get people fired up.

And that's when he said, "You have to find what you love. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." So judging by the news reports that came out right after this talk and the early comments on YouTube, it's clear that people interpreted him there as saying, "Guys, if you want to love what you do for a living, you have to do two things.

First, figure out what you're passionate about, and then you have to second, match that to your work." Now we are used to this idea in sort of common slang. We summarize it with the phrase, "Follow your passion," right? And we say, "Follow your passion. This is what we're talking about.

Figure out what you're passionate about, match it to your work. Things will be good." Now Jobs, of course, was not the first person to have this idea. You can actually go back, and I've done this, and track its emergence in the American cultural conversation. And here's my quiz. Which decade in the 20th century did the phrase, "Follow your passion," first show up in the printed English language?

Which decade? What would you guess? I heard a lot, but I heard the loudest was 1940s. And that is actually right. I'm very impressed. Thank you. We have a cheater. And kids, that's the lesson. You know, cheat. Thank you very much. Yeah, it actually showed up in 1940. It was in a play, a short play.

It was a bunch of woodcutters. It's not used in career advice format. In fact, I would not recommend trying to base your life off of this odd play. But that was 1940s. You actually don't see it being used in the context of career advice until the mid-1980s, and then you begin to see it show up.

By the early 1990s, you start to see full career advice books written about this concept. By the early 2000s, people stop explaining it in their books. They stop trying to convince you it's good advice. They just assume that you know it. They just assume that you think it's good advice, and they jump right in to just trying to justify it.

Or not justify it, but give strategies for taking action on it. So when Steve Jobs stood up there and promoted the idea that you should follow your passion, this was not the idea's introduction. It was the idea's apotheosis. We have this icon of American remarkable living who is giving his seal of approval on this idea, and this got people excited.

And I'm not surprised that it excited people, because if you think about this piece of advice, "Follow your passion," it is an astonishingly appealing concept. It tells you a life, a working life at least, that you love is not just possible, but it's very close. You have to do some introspection to figure out what you're passionate about.

So you take a strength finder, you pour wax in the water, and if it solidifies like a microscope, you should be a biologist. Whatever you need to do. A little bit of introspection, doesn't take long. And then you have to go find a job that matches that. Now you're going to have to read some blog post that will inspire you first to get your courage up, but then you go and you get the job that matches it.

Then you're passionate, right? I mean, you could be here in this audience today, you could be miserable about your life, and by playoff season, you could have a Steve Jobs-like love for what you do. Very appealing. But there is a wrinkle here, as Chris previewed. And the wrinkle is, as it turns out, this advice is not only astonishingly appealing, but it is also astonishingly wrong.

And that's what I'm here today to talk about. So I spent much of the last year researching and writing a book that looked at a very simple question. Why do some people end up loving what they do, while so many other people do not? This was a transition period in my own life.

I had just finished my very long career as a student, many years. And I was in a sort of purgatory known as a post-doc. And this is where, in theory, you're preparing yourself for an academic career, but this was a very sort of uncertain time for a couple of reasons.

One, I was potentially about to do the only and last job interview of my life, since professorship could be a lifetime experience. And more importantly, it was a very hard job market, so there was a very good chance I wasn't going to get this job, and after all this training, was going to have to start from scratch.

So in a massive abuse of my post-doc contract, I said, "What I'm going to do is go write a book instead, while they're paying me to do this." And I wanted to have an answer to this question, because I figured this was the time in my own life when I needed an answer.

So there's two parts in this book. In the first part, I make my case against why "Follow Your Passion" is bad advice. In the second part, I talk about what you should do instead. And in here, I chronicle this quest I went on to find people from all walks of life who do love what they do for a living, and to hear their stories and look for patterns.

What were they doing instead? So today, I want to tell you two stories. The first story I'll pull right from the first part, and we'll draw some lessons from the story about why I think "Follow Your Passion" is bad advice. The second story we'll pull from the second part, and we'll draw some lessons from that about what I think works instead.

Okay, so that's our game plan. So I'll start with the first story, and I think we should pick up where we left off. We heard Steve Jobs' advice later in his career. I'm interested in going back and asking the question of how his own career actually began. So if we rewind the clock back to a young Steve Jobs, who's about to go to college and is trying to decide, "What am I going to do?

Where am I going to go to college? What am I going to study?" You would have found the young man who was certainly interested in electronics. He had grown up in Silicon Valley's wirehead culture. This was a culture where young men and women would tinker with electronics much in the same way that the generation before would tinker with cars.

That's what was happening around Silicon Valley at that point. So it was a hobby of his. It's something that he was interested in. But I'd make the argument that if you asked him, "Steve, what are you passionate about?" he wouldn't have said electronics. He wouldn't have said starting a technology company that's going to take over the world.

And we know this because of his college choice. He didn't go to Berkeley to study electrical engineering, which is what you would have done in that time and that place if you were passionate about electronics. And he didn't go to Stanford or USC to study business, which is what you would have done in that time and that place if you were passionate about business or entrepreneurship.

Instead, he came up here to a college not far from where we're sitting today, an elite liberal arts school known as Reed College. He went there, he was studying Western history, he was studying dance, and he started to dabble very seriously in Eastern mysticism, which had just made its way to the West Coast around this period.

So he shows up to Reed College, he's studying these things, he's asking these big questions, he drops out pretty soon, he sticks around for a while, he wanders the campus barefoot, he's sort of like a campus celebrity, he eats weird diets, he's bumming meals from the local Hare Krishna temple.

Eventually he gets tired of being completely destitute. So he comes back to California, and he talks himself into a night shift job at Atari, whose sole--one of the most important things about it was that it gave him flexibility so he wouldn't be tied down. This was a period in which he went and spent several months on a mendicant's journey in India.

He was beginning to spend more and more time at the All One commune, just upstate, and became more serious about Zen meditation, frequenting the Los Altos Zen Center more and more. So this was jobs during this period. So where did Apple Computer come from? Well, he and his friend Steve Wozniak, who he'd reconnected with, had started launching what I think is best described as a series of schemes, where they would cobble something together, maybe sell it out of the back of a car, make a little bit of money, keep the wolf at bay, keep food on the table while Jobs was seeking and searching and tackling these deep philosophical and spiritual questions.

And for lack of a better word, Apple Computer came out of one of these schemes. They had been tinkering more whys than jobs on a circuit board for what would become the Apple One. They took it to the Homebrew Computing Club. The geeks got all excited about it. I say this lovingly, being a professional geek.

They get all excited about it. Jobs says, "You know, I think we can make a little bit of money off this." So he walks over to Paul Terrell's Byte Shop, which is this sort of pioneering electronics store over in Mountain View. The myth says he walked in barefoot, though we don't have evidence for that in the biographical record.

But he walks to the store nonetheless. He brings in this circuit board, and he says, "Look, the geeks are excited about this. We want to sell you 100 of them. You sell them to the geeks. We'll all make some money." So, Andrew Young, one of his first definitive biographers, actually did, through interviews, the numbers they had worked out.

And they said, "After he sells those, we get our cut. The cost of manufacturing, me and Waz will make about $1,000." And this biographer goes out of the way to emphasize that this was a small-time idea. Their plans were circumspect, and they certainly weren't thinking about taking over the world.

Paul Terrell, fortunately, had more vision than Steve Jobs. And he said, "I don't want to buy 100 circuit boards to sell to geeks. I want to buy 500 fully-assembled computers with all the peripherals put in. I want to sell these like appliances, and I want to pay you 10 times the amount that you wanted for the circuit board." And Steve Jobs, to his credit, said, "Ah, I think this is something big that I'm on to." And they went, and they raised a little bit of money.

They built these, they raised some more serious money, they incorporated. Apple Computer was born out of that. So the point I want to draw from this story is that I don't doubt that Steve Jobs very quickly grew to be very passionate about what he did. But it's also the case that he did not simply follow his passion into Apple Computer.

He did not sit down and plan out in advance, "I want to start a technology company," and then go and try to make that happen. If you had gone back in time, if we got in a time machine today, we went back and we said, "We're from the World Domination Summit." Six months before Apple Computer was formed, and we would have gone back and said, "Steve, you have to follow your passion," he would have ended up an instructor at the Los Altos Zen Center.

This was the things he was caring about. And I'm sure he would have been an insanely great instructor, and that the meditation mats would have been laid out in a sort of beautiful but functional design. (Laughter) But these were the type of things he would have said he was passionate about.

So the lesson I wanted to draw from this story here is that the path to a passionate life is also, or often way more complex than the simple advice "follow your passion" would suggest. The person who I think said it better than me was Ira Glass, who's the NPR host of This American Life.

Great show, great show on NPR. Innovative award-winning show. This is someone who loves what he does, very passionate. But you can find this video on YouTube, it's great. It's a video where three undergraduates sit down with Ira Glass to interview him for his advice on how they can build a really cool, remarkable life like his.

And the one young woman says, "So how do I know what I'll be good at? What do I do once I graduate here?" And Jobs looks at her and says, "Well, you know, in the movies there's this idea that you should just go for your dreams." And you can see their faces light up.

They expect this is where he's going to say, "And that's what you should do. And I'm going to call your mom and tell her that you're not a pre-med anymore," or whatever. You know, that's what-- you could see that expectation. And instead he says, "Oh, I don't buy that." And their faces kind of fall.

And then he talks for a while about how hard it is to get good at something. And really what they need to be focusing on now is sort of persisting in the effort to get good at something. And he sees their faces fall. And at the end he says, "Really, the problem here, guys, is that you're trying to figure this all out in the abstract before you go and do it, and that's your tragic mistake." And I thought that was a poignant way of putting it.

This notion that you can sit down there in advance and figure out what's going to lead to a passionate life. And the uncertainty and heartache that can bring when you don't immediately love what you're doing is a tragic mistake. So that's the first lesson I want to draw from this story.

The second lesson is that we don't really have any reason to believe that follow your passion is actually generally good advice. So I'm a scientist. So my first inclination when I took on this project was to study the scientific literature. And there is a lot of literature on workplace happiness and workplace motivation.

And if you look in this literature, you would think that you would find lots of support for this idea because this is one of the most popular ideas in modern American career thinking. But you can't. In fact, finding evidence that matching your job to a preexisting passion is good is very hard to do.

What you find instead is studies that point in the opposite direction. So one of my favorites is by a young researcher named Amy Rizinski. At the time she was a graduate student at Michigan. She took a group of people, a group of employees, that all had the same position.

They all worked in university administration just right at the same level. She interviewed them and she found out that a third of them saw this position as a calling. So a third of these people were passionate about this. It was an important part of their identity. It was an important part of their life, this position.

The other two-thirds of people did not. Some of them just saw it as work. And the rest saw it as a stepping stone in a larger career. And they could take and leave what they were doing right then. So what I like about Rizinski is that she then said, "I'm going to dive deeper and I'm going to try to figure out "what's different between these two people.

"What was different between the calling group "and the non-calling group?" And what she found was that one of the largest predictive factors of being in the calling group, if not the biggest predictive factor, was years of experience. The longer someone had this position, the more likely they were to see it as their calling.

Which, of course, is a way more complicated story than "Follow Your Passion" tells us, which is, "No, no, no, you've matched this job to what you were meant to do. "You'll therefore immediately love it." And Rizinski's saying, "That's not what I found. "There's something more complicated happening here." Another study I like is by a Canadian psychologist named Robert Valorant, who had developed this survey that allows you to figure out what, if anything, is a person actually passionate about.

Not interested, but actually passionate about. He has this survey, and he takes it and he administers it to 539 Canadian university students. He found less than 4% of these students had a passion that you could realistically connect to a career. Less than 4%. Do you want to guess what the number one passion was from among these Canadian university students?

(audience) Hockey. It was a good crowd. It was exactly hockey, that's right. (laughter) And he was born in 1940, so you guys should know. That's right, it was hockey. Look, it's possible that this university had one of the most astonishing concentration of hockey talent to ever be assembled under one roof, and that they should all follow their passion and field nine different NHL teams.

But it's more likely that for 96% of these students to tell them, "Figure out what you're passionate about and go do that," would have failed for them as career advice in figuring out what to do right after school. So that's the second lesson I wanted to draw here. When you look through the literature, we don't have much evidence that this is generally a good piece of career advice.

Okay, so that's the negative stuff. Let's go to the positive stuff. Fine. That may be too simplistic, might not be what the research shows. What does work? So as mentioned, I went around and I found lots of people who do love what they do, and I spent a lot of time talking to them.

This is actually one of the dirty secrets of being an advice writer. Our actual number one skill we have--we don't talk about it much-- is the ability to find people and convince them to talk to us. And that's actually harder than you think. I've been doing this since I was 21.

When I was 21 and I had my first book deal, I had to go interview Rhodes Scholars. And the way I figured out to do it is you would actually read the news release from the college, you'd see who the Rhodes Scholars were, you'd then go search, typically the student newspaper, and you would find the naming scheme on their email addresses.

Was it like first letter of the first name and then the last name? And then you would guess at what the Rhodes Scholars-- you basically have to be a stalker to be an advice writer. (laughter) So anyways, I was stalking people as I normally do, and I tracked down a lot of these people, and we talked, and we tried to figure out what happened in their life.

And I was looking for patterns, and I found a pattern. And not everyone followed this pattern, but it was sort of remarkably consistent. And one of my favorite examples of this pattern is the writer and activist Bill McKibben. I think his story actually personifies it well. So I want to tell his story, and then we'll look at it and try to pull out some lessons about the pattern that he exemplifies.

So he did something that I think is smarter than just following your passion. So let's hear what that is. So Bill McKibben's story we can pick up as an undergraduate at Harvard University. So the thing about Harvard is that it's an extracurricular shop. I mean, the grade inflation at Harvard is so high that you can get an A- for spelling 9 out of 10 letters in your name correct on the test, right?

So you have all of these type As who are here. They're all very achievement-oriented, so they put all this energy into extracurriculars, and they put down these extracurricular loads that make our full-time jobs seem like we're idle. So McKibben shows up, and he's like, "Well, what am I going to do?" And he decides he's going to write for the Harvard Crimson, this sort of fabled student newspaper.

So he goes, and it's hard, you know, it's really demanding, but he works hard, and he works his way up, he stretches himself, he gets better at writing. By the time he graduates, he's an editor at the Crimson, which is a big deal. And then he gets a job at the New Yorker because he's been an editor at the Crimson, and now he has much better editors, he's been recognized by some of the best writers in American letters, and again, he's being stretched.

He's not writing 10,000-word profiles, he's writing the talk of the town, but he's stretching, and he's working hard, and he's getting better, and he starts to make a name for himself there, and he starts to move up. But what I like about his story is the twist that comes next.

So McKibben quits the New Yorker just as he's starting to establish himself as one of their star new writers, and he moves to a cabin in Vermont to write a book on man's impact on ecosystems and the environment, which, you know, 2012 in Portland is sort of old news, but back then, people didn't quite understand the scope of this, so he goes to Vermont with a book deal and a big enough advance to live there for however long it took to write this book, and he came away with The End of Nature was the book he wrote.

And this was a big bestseller, but more importantly, it was an important book in the environmental movement, and established him as an important thinker and writer in this space. And it allowed him to go on and have a career living in a cabin, living in Vermont, but writing these sort of very cool issue books around environmental issues and other types of issues.

He would come up with the ideas that were interesting, he would go around and research and write them, and they would all be very successful, and he was having a real impact on the world, too. And I've only met him in passing, but I've read a lot of the interviews people have done with him, and it's fair to say that he's very passionate about what he does, and he loves his life.

So the question is, what lessons can we draw from him? What did he do, if it was not just follow his passion? Well, the first lesson I would draw from McKibbin's story is that he got good at something that was rare and valuable. In his case, it was writing.

He got good, very good, at writing. It took him about a decade, right? He had to come up through the Crimson to get to where he was, but he got very good at writing. And this pattern is common when you study people like him who love what they do.

They tend to start by getting good at something rare and valuable, something that the outside world says, "This is valuable. You are valuable now to our economy, to our field." The second lesson to draw here is that once he got good at something rare and valuable, he used it as leverage to gain into his life the type of traits that matter to him.

So again, I'm extrapolating off of interviews, but given my somewhat obsessive stocking of Bill McKibbin, I can say that the three things that I think matter to him probably are simplicity in his life, autonomy in his life, and an impact on the world. Different people would have different answers to these questions, but that was probably what was important to McKibbin.

So once he got really good at writing, he used that as leverage to get those traits into his life by moving to Vermont and being in a cabin. He had simplicity. By being a writer of nonfiction books, he had autonomy. He comes up with the idea, and then it's, "Go write it.

Send it back when you're done." And he was writing about an issue that was important, so he had an impact on the world. He was having an impact on the conversation. So he used his ability as leverage to gain those traits that matter to him. Now, these two lessons come up again and again when you study people like Jobs, and when you study people like McKibbin.

But I'd like to point out that there are some pitfalls that surround them that you have to be wary about. This approach kind of makes sense, but there are some pitfalls here. The first pitfall is that if you make the jump to try to get some of these traits that really matter to you in your life, if you try to make that jump without something valuable to offer in return, your chances at succeeding go way down.

So if Bill McKibbin had dropped out of Harvard to move to Vermont to write The End of Nature, he almost definitely would have failed and had to have moved back to Boston, or even worse, gone to law school. (Laughter) Because first of all, he wasn't a good enough writer to get the advance that could pay for him to live there, and second of all, he wasn't a good enough writer yet to write a book of such impact and importance.

It was important that he got good at writing first so he had something valuable to offer in exchange for these very valuable traits, like making a living with a simple, autonomous, impactful life. Another example of this I like is a computer programmer I met named Lulu, and she had gotten this job out of college as a QA tester, which is not the most glamorous of jobs in the sort of-- you know, in the pantheon of Google writing the Gmail app on one end and sort of cleaning the lint out of the keyboards on the other end, and being a QA tester is sort of more towards the-- you're basically pressing buttons and seeing if the software works.

But what she did is she made herself rare and valuable by learning Unix scripting and automating most of their testing process, saving them a lot of money, saving them a lot of time. And as soon as she got good at this thing, as soon as she had value in this company, she immediately leveraged it.

They said, "We want to give you a promotion, we want to put people under you, we're going to pay you more, you're going to have lots of responsibility and stress, and if you ever don't answer our email, we're going to panic." This is the standard thing you do when you get valuable.

And she said, "Well, wait a second, you need me now. I'm not interested in your promotion, I want a demotion. I want to go down to 30 hours a week, which is the minimum at which I can still get health care, because I'm going to go get a part-time degree in philosophy at Tufts." She had value to use as leverage here.

If she had walked in her first week and said, "This is boring, I want to go on a flexible schedule and go get a degree," they'd say, "Well, how about you go to a zero-hour-a-week schedule because you're fired?" (Laughter) So that's the pitfall that surrounds it. Number one is that if you don't have something of value to offer before you go for these trades, it can be damaging.

The second pitfall, and they sort of work together in a sort of insidious balance, is that once you actually are valuable to a field or valuable to a company, that is exactly when you're going to get the pressure to stick on the standard path of moving up the standard ladder.

Suddenly now, people care about that. No one cares if you're outside of your parents, if you're a freshman in college, you say, "I'm going to go write a book," or something. But the editor of the New Yorker cares when they're rising star and you quit, because you're actually valuable to them at that point.

So this is something I saw come up again and again. As soon as you were valuable enough to actually take control of your life and the pressure crashes down to take the promotion, to take the more responsibility, to take the bigger house, to stick on the straight path, I'm sure all the pressure in the world was on Bill McKibben to work up to be a senior staff writer at the New Yorker, start writing those sort of Adam Gopnik-style books that no one outside of the New York Review of Book Editor ever reads, but are very well respected, then get hired as an editor at some imprint or Harper's, then work your way up to be an editor-in-chief and be mortgaged for your apartment on the Upper West Side, and be successful.

And that was the pressure he was getting, and that was exactly the point where he leveraged it. So that's the second pitfall here. As soon as you actually have some control over your life is when it's going to be the hardest to actually take that control. OK, so those were two lessons.

Third lesson I want to offer, and this is often the most controversial when I talk about these issues. What you do for your work is much less important than we think. This is like a corollary of everything we've said so far. Bill McKibben built a life he loved as a writer.

I would maintain that there are any number of other paths he could have followed that would have led him to a life that he loved just as much. I argue what mattered for him was the fact that he had autonomy, that he had simplicity, that he had impact in his life, that he had these general traits that were important to him in his life.

So he got those by being a writer, but what was more important is that he got good at something valuable and used it as leverage to get the traits. And any position, any field of pursuit in which he could have got leverage and got those traits in his life, I would maintain that he would be just as happy and he would love his life just as well.

And this was certainly the sense I got with the people I interviewed who loved their life. I got this sense that, look, it was these general traits they had. They're different for different people. Different people want different things. Some people want to be at the center of everything. Some people want to live in a cabin.

Some people want impact. Some people just want creativity more than anything else. This differs for different people. But the sense I got studying these great examples was that it wasn't the specific work that mattered. It was these traits. And the get good and then exchange that value for these traits was the most consistent formula for getting those, the most consistent formula for loving what you do.

Now, when I give this advice, people often push back and they say, "Are you saying that, you know, any job I take, "I can be, you know, just as happy? "I could be the guy at the zoo that shovels the elephant crap "and build a passionate life out of it?" No, I'm not saying that.

But what I'm saying is that the threshold that a position or a pursuit or a college major must cross in order for it to be potentially the foundation of a life you love is much lower than we think. It's somewhere between, "Is this, like, my one true passion that for some reason "evolution has made my genes be wired for me to do "and only be happy doing this type standard that we have now?" Somewhere between that and shoveling the elephant crap, in between, there's a threshold that's much lower.

And the way I define that threshold is that if something is interesting to you and if it looks like it will give you interesting options if you start to do well in it and start to become valuable, that's good enough. That's all you need for that particular job, that field or that major to be the foundation of a remarkable life.

And for a lot of people, there's actually lots of things that match this criteria. That's OK. Flip a coin. I would go so far as to say flip a coin. Because, again, it's not the specific work that leads people to love it. It's not the fact that you're using the microscope or that you're actually writing that makes you love that work.

It's these general traits. If it's interesting to you, that means you're going to be able to stick with it and get good. If it gives options to people when they get good, that means you're going to be able to leverage that ability once you have it. And that's what you need.

So to summarize my contrarian take on this queer advice world, my reason for you throwing Chris's book out in disgust. (Laughter) Chris's book is not-- By the way, it's a very smart book. It has lots of disclaimers. We're in very much agreement on this issue. I think he's just being facetious.

Though I won't object if you want to throw out his book and buy mine instead. That's fine. He's made enough money. Come on. Starving college professor. (Laughter) Is that not a thing? Can I not get away with that? I used to do the starving grad student bit. This is getting harder.

But to summarize what I'm saying here, since the mid-1980s, that's 20 years or so, we've been dominated by this idea that if you want to be happy, you have to figure out in advance what you're passionate about, and you have to match it to your work. You can actually look at this graph.

There's a cool superimposed graph where you can actually graph the occurrence of the word "follow your passion" in printed American books. So as time goes on, you see this thing curve up and really shoot up in the '80s and '90s. You can put on that same axis American job satisfaction.

(Laughter) In fact, let's just graph job satisfaction among 20- to 30-year-olds. People have a lot of options in their life. You see that plummet down starting in the '80s, just around the time that "follow your passion" started taking up, and you see it plummet down. In the last US Job Board survey, the rating among 18- or I guess 20- to 30-year-olds, their rating was the lowest it had ever been.

It was actually the lowest rating for any group they've ever measured in job satisfaction. So my generation has grown up being told, "Figure out what you're passionate about and go for it." That's what's important. It's one of the most unhappiest generations there's ever been in terms of how much we like our jobs.

And there's other factors there, but I think it's sort of a poignant display. Our 20-year experiment with "follow your passion," I think we can say has concluded and has failed. (Laughter) (Applause) But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have the goal of being passionate about what we do. In the model I gave you instead, my hypothesis-- I'm going to use my professor's speak-- my hypothesis is the model that works instead is pick something interesting.

If there's nine things that are interesting to you, throw a dart. Pick something that's interesting. Get good at something rare and valuable. While your friends are switching jobs nine times because they don't love it in the first week, take advantage of that to get better, to focus down, to do the satisfying work of craftsmanship, of building up an actual ability.

Once you have it, that's where you apply the courage, at this point, to use it as leverage to gain the traits that matter to you. That's my new formula. I will summarize it for you to bring it back to where we started by saying, I guess the easiest summary here is, "Do what Steve Jobs did, not what he said." Thank you.

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