You need to be good at something before you can expect a good job

Don’t follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become so good that they can’t ignore you

Rule #1: Don't Follow Your Passion

'You’ve got to find what you love. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.' - Steve Jobs

Do as Jobs did, not as he said

It takes time to get good at anything

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase

It’s hard to predict in advance what you’ll eventually grow to love

Set goals for yourself to be the best you can be at whatever you do

A job 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

The happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do

Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery

Three basic psychological needs required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important; Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do; Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

If you feel close to people at work, you’re going to enjoy work more

The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it

Rule #2: Be So Good They Can't Ignore You

The craftsman mindset: a focus on what value you're producing in your job

The passion mindset: a focus on what value your job offers you

The craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating work you love

Eventually you are so experienced that there's a confidence that comes out

Stop focusing on the little details. Focus instead on becoming better

If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind

When you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness

Leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is “just right,” and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it

You adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows

Develop muscle memory the hard way, by repetition

Focus on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and provide immediate feedback

It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence

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

If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better

Stretch your abilities by taking on projects that are beyond your current comfort zone

Obsessively seek feedback on everything

Spend time on what's important instead of what's immediate

You need clear goals. If you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, then it’s hard to take effective action

Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration

You have to get good before you can expect good work

Traits that define great work: creativity, impact, and control

More control leads to better grades, better sports performance, better productivity, and more happiness

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment

Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable

Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after

A unifying mission to your working life can be a source of great satisfaction

Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world—a crucial factor in loving what you do

People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback

For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking

We’re a society trained to watch what’s on and then discuss what caught our attention the next day