All right, let's do one more question here. I have one from Matt. Matt says, in college, I had a couple influential role models tell me to follow my passion. This led me to get my bachelor's in cultural anthropology. Now I'm in a PhD program. Only after I started my PhD did I read your book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

And I became convinced of your philosophy of acquiring career capital rather than following a pre-existing passion to attain career fulfillment. Now I've committed to a path based on a philosophy that I no longer believe in. How would you adjust the advice that you give in So Good They Can't Ignore You for people who have already committed to a passion-based path and now see it as a sunk cost?

Well, Matt, there's no adjustment you need to do, because here is the reality of my advice. I say, when it comes to figuring out what path you set down, you can lower the bar. There's lots of paths that you can transform into a life, a professional life, that's a real source of passion and fulfillment.

So what really is going to matter is once you fix one path, for whatever reason you chose that path, is what you do once you chose it, which is focus on building rare and valuable skills, use the career capital that generates to take control of your career, move it towards things that resonate and away from things that don't.

Have a clear lifestyle in mind that you use to help guide these decisions. So the key to that philosophy is, I don't care that much how you chose your current path. So the fact that you chose your current path because you were using passion philosophy, that's fine. If you thought, described this as a passion, that means it's something that was interesting to you, that probably had interesting opportunities associated with it, and that you had some sort of inclination for.

So great. That's a perfectly good reason to choose a path. So the idea is not, let's be really clear about this, that if you follow your passion, that that will lead you to a bad career. That's not true. The issue I have is if your only strategy for getting to a good career is matching a job to a passion, and then sitting back and saying, my work here is done, I should love this now.

I'm saying, no, no, no, your work is just beginning. So I don't care much about how you chose your career. You chose it because you thought it was your passion, great. Good way to do it. What matters is what you do next. And what you do next is you focus with deliberate practice on becoming so good you can't be ignored.

Take the career capital that earns you to have leverage over your career. This is where you're going to need courage, not in choosing what to do, but choosing to change what you do to be different than what other people are doing. This is where you step back and say, I'm going to not take a professorship, or I'm going to be a professorship at this school and still write books, or I'm going to do my own thing, or whatever it is.

But you're investing your career capital to create a career that pushes towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. And again, the way you hone those instincts of residence and anti-residence is lifestyle-centered career planning. Fix in your head a really clear image of what your life is like, where you live, what you do, who you're with, what your time is like, how you feel.

Fix an image you can taste, that you can smell, that just touches something right in you. And let that be your guide to figuring out, I want to go more towards this in my career or more towards that. And the thing that allows you to make those choices is career capital.

It is being good at things that are rare and valuable. So Matt, you're in a great position. You've already chosen a good path. It's a good match for you. Now let's focus on actually navigating that path as effectively as possible. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)