Thinking: So good they cant ignore you

Believing that the key to happiness is identifying your true calling and then chasing after it with all the courage you can muster. This belief is frighteningly naive.

The reality was, nothing had changed. I was exactly the same person, with the same worries and anxieties

Why do some people end up loving what they do, while so many others fail at this goal?
The importance of ability: You need something rare and valuable to offer in return. You need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.
move your focus away from finding the right work and toward working right
It takes time to get good at anything

The key thing is to force yourself through the work; force the skills to come; thats the hardest part
work is hard, so suck it up.
A job is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, a calling is work thats an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity
it seems that the type of work alone does not necessarily predict how much people enjoy it
the strongest predictor of an assistant seeing her work as a calling was the number of years spent on the job. In other words, the more experience an assistant had, the more likely she was to love her work.

All jobs include difficult responsibilities
Nobody ever takes note of my advice, because its not the answer they wanted to hear
I track the hours spent each month dedicated to thinking hard about research problems

This hour-tracking strategy helped turn my attention back above all else to the quality of what I produce

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, you need to earn it - and the process wont be easy.
Turn your focus toward becoming so good they cant ignore you
Approach your work like a true performer
You adopt the craftsman mindset first and THEN the passion follows

if you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuable skills - career capital
Traits that define great work:

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come, thats the hardest part
you need to get good in order to get good things in your working life, and the craftsman mindset is focused on achieving exactly this goal.
Mike literally tracks every hour of his day, down to quarter-hour increments, on a spreadsheet
Constantly stretch himself beyond what was comfortable
Hours spent in serious study dominated all other factors (case study chess improvement)
Deliberate practice provides the key to excellence
scientists failed to find much evidence of natural abilities explaining experts successes
a never-ending thirst to get better
like a sport, you have to practice and you have to study
The easiest thing to do is to show up to work in the morning and just respond to email the whole day, that is not the most strategic way to spend your time.
The important stuff still finds its way to him, but on his schedule
The majority of his week is instead focussed on what matter... instead of whats immediate
Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable
If you're not uncomfortable, then you're probably stuck at an "acceptable level"
Diligence
Your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you
Acquiring capital can take time
You stretch yourself, day after day, month after month, before finally looking up and realizing "Hey I've become pretty good, and people are starting to notice."

Control has been found to improve peoples lives
no result, no job
Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment
A hard truth of the real work: It's really hard to convince people to give you money.
People tell me that I dont do things the way other people do... But I tell them, I'm not other people
The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaninful control over your working life is exactly the point when you've become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change

In most jobs you should expect your employer to resist your move toward more control

I have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules - do what people are willing to pay for. Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, youre aiming to be valuable
When it comes to decisions affecting your core career, money remains an effective judge of value.
Her first big move, to drop to a thirty-hour-per-week schedule

and this is hard - the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives

Most people who love their work got where they are by first building up career capital and then cashing it in for the types of traits that define great work.
Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of small thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time
Once you discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a "big" action
A small series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins. Rapid and frequent feedbacks

Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dwellers ovsessive email-checking habit
How to...

Strain, I now accepted, was good
I began to understand it the same way that a body builder understands muscle burn
HOUR TALLY

Total number of hous i've spent that month in a state of deliberate practice
By having these hour counts stare me in the face every day I'm motivated to find new ways to fit more deliberate practice into my scheule.

Thinking