To Find Work You Love, Don’t Follow Your Passion (with a Giveaway!)

(What I'm Reading, No. 3)
By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

In this post I’m reviewing Cal Newport’s compelling book, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love.” I will be giving away one free copy of the book; to enter the giveaway, all you need to do is subscribe via email to my blog. If you are a current subscriber and would like to enter the giveaway, send me an email at listenlearnactandreflect (at) gmail (dot) com with the subject, “June giveaway.” I will accept entries until June 30^th, randomly select a winner, and notify the winner by email by July 6^th. Unfortunately, at this time I can only ship to US addresses.

“So, what’s your dream job?” I remember being taken aback by this question when I first started my job search after college. Every informational interview, and even some full-fledged job interviews, included this question. How was I supposed to know what my dream job was? I had already changed my mind three times about the field I wanted to get into. I’m sure I came up with some passable answer, but my answer was definitely a dream because I don’t even remember it. In the year 2000, there were jobs galore in the US, and we graduates had the luxury and misfortune of believing that the perfect job was out there for us if we could dream it. It was the decade of dot.com start ups, so those who “followed their passion” could easily find an investor. Fast forward over a decade later, and many college graduates are dreaming just to have a job, any job. And yet, according to Cal Newport’s book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, the “follow your passion” advice is still common in career counseling—and it is bad advice.

I mention pursuing your passion as one possible direction to take while looking for work in my popular blog post, Unemployment Opportunity, but with a very important caveat – one must have the necessary skills and resources to make economic success out of it. In Newport’s book, he calls this “building career capital,” an essential element for finding work you love. Strengthening key skills does two things: it actually increases passion because passion for your work often comes with mastering your skills (not before); and it builds the “career capital” necessary to gain more resources and autonomy and lead the life you want to lead.

One of the most useful chapters I found in this book is the chapter “Becoming a Craftsman,” which discusses a type of discipline known as “deliberate practice.” Newport writes, “if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better … deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you” (p. 85). Newport uses examples of master chess players, musicians, and screenwriters to explain how they used deliberate practice to excel in their fields and end up doing work they love. This involves not just setting aside enough time to practice, but eliciting sometimes painfully critical feedback to continue to improve their craft. The skill that these craftsmen needed to deliberately practice was very clear (chess, guitar playing, writing), but Newport provides steps for determining how all workers can actually determine for themselves what “craft” they need to deliberately practice in order to become “so good they can’t ignore you.” Newport himself schedules as much time as he can for deliberate practice in his own work as a computer science professor at Georgetown University. You can read more about his work on his blog Study Hacks.

Newport does not extensively address external factors that affect workers, such as other colleagues, and issues like workplace and hiring discrimination. In his quest to disprove the “passion mindset,” he also does not address enough how personal interests, abilities and talents do play a role in finding work you love. That being said, I found this book very empowering, challenging the reader to work rightly first, instead of looking for the “right work.”

I read the chapter on “mission” with great interest, since this is a common word used in non-profit work. Newport, however, uses this word in regard to individual careers: “To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career,” he writes. “It’s more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions … 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” (p.152). In case you confuse “mission” with “passion,” Newport spends the rest of the chapter talking about how to make mission a reality in one’s working life, and his examples show that it takes some time building career capital in order to formulate that mission. Newport provides one example from the life of evolutionary biologist Pardis Sabeti, but I wish he would have included other examples, especially those of social entrepreneurs (David Bornstein’s book, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas highlights some very inspiring stories).

Although Newport wrote this book for a US context, I found that it is actually quite applicable to people working in emerging markets like India, China, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, and Egypt. Emerging markets have smaller markets than the US and thus fewer available jobs, the advice in this book would help workers in these markets to stand out even more than they would in the US, where there is more competition. This is in stark contrast to the “passion” mindset, which can only be applied in larger markets where there are more job opportunities and more diversity of industries, thus lending more credence to the (bad) idea that your dream job is out there waiting for you if you can just figure out your passion.

Who should read this book? I find it a great resource for anyone wanting to improve their professional lives, anyone sensing a “plateau” in their careers, as well as anyone just starting out, making it an excellent gift for students graduating from college or graduate school.

Do you love your work? What about it makes you love it?

It's About Time

(From paper to electronic planning, with a free resource!)

By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

Starting today, everyone who subscribes to my blog by email will receive a free resource that I developed: “Keeping it together: the essential elements of a time management system.” It’s a one page checklist of the five things necessary for an effective planning system. Please allow 3-5 days to receive the resource when you subscribe. Current subscribers will automatically receive the resource via email. In this post, I’ll share the specific five examples I use in my system, and contains affiliate links to the products I use.

Call me a geek, but nothing beat the feeling of putting new planning pages in my FranklinCovey binder, the excitement of all the future plans that would be recorded on those pages, the inspiration from the quotes on every page, the notes that would be taken during interesting talks and productive meetings …

Those days are over. My husband got a tablet and converted to electronic planning, and it only made sense that I follow suit so that we could share calendars. So finally, I made the move to a hybrid electronic and paper planning system.

For my calendar, we decided on Cozi, a wonderful (and free!) app that allows the whole family to share an online calendar through a common family password. Every family member is color coded so that we know which appointments pertain to which family members, and the app synchs with the online K12 calendars and with Microsoft Outlook, which many people use at work. Its visually appealing user interface and ability to print out calendars to post in the kitchen or on bulletin boards almost replaces that paper planning feeling.

I access my Cozi calendar on my smart phone and my Amazon Kindle Fire, which I purchased mainly for its low price considering all its features, its smaller size compared to other tablets, and its “Free Time” feature for kids. Cozi works on Kindle Fire, Android tablets and phones, Ipads, and Iphones. It took me about two hours to transfer all my appointments and tasks from my paper planner to the online calendar, but the ability to share calendars with my husband (and potentially my kids when they get old enough to use it) has saved us hours and frustration trying to coordinate our daily changing schedules.

I keep my master list on Cozi, but I use these Moleskin Cahier Journals to keep my daily task lists and notes. Some of the pages in these notebooks are perforated, making them perfect for disposable notes like shopping lists. I use this inexpensive pen/stylus combo to keep with me (the package contains five), and keep it all together in this Kindle Fire Folio, which also has pockets to hold things like business cards and my kids’ vaccination cards. 

My planning system

Finally, I store my completed notebooks (and unused ones) in this plastic bin that I bought in a package from Costco:

How do you keep yourself organized? Please share your ideas in the comments!

I'm Gonna Wash Your Mouth Out with Soap

What I've Been Reading (No. 2)

by Phoebe Farag Mikhail

By Boy's Life (Boys' Life - Apr 1937 - Page 38)

[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I'm talking about that bad word discipline again today, but this time, in the context of children. As I mentioned in a previous post about the topic, we often think of discipline as a bad word because, when it comes to children, it refers to how we deal with children when they misbehave. It brings up memories of the ways we were "disciplined" as children, and the ways we try to do differently (or the same) with ours.
I'm trying to think about discipline with my children a little differently. I've shared how I'm trying to link discipline with desire for myself. How do I do that with my children? Specifically,

1- How do I help my children desire good behavior?
2- How do I help my children develop the self-control they need to achieve their own goals in the future?

One helpful resource I have found for the first question is one of the best parenting books I have ever read, The Five Love Languages of Children, by Gary Thomas and Ross Campbell. In it, they discuss what the five love languages are, how they specifically manifest themselves with children, and how parents can discover their child's love language. Numerous behavior problems can be preemptively solved when we learn how to show our children how much we love them.

I've seen my own children respond much better to me and my instructions to them when my husband and I intentionally show them love in their language. Once, when my son was giving me a hard time getting dressed and ready to go, his dad got on the phone with him and gave him a few words of affirmation, one of the five love languages. Within minutes my son had fully cooperated with me, and we were ready to go without frustration.

The book also has a chapter specifically about discipline and the love languages. I've read many parenting books, and The Five Love Languages of Children tops my must-read list. I refer to it again and again.*

Recent studies, like this one reported on NPR, are proving the importance of instilling self-control and self-discipline in children for their future success. Children that could demonstrate better self-control in childhood were more financially successful later in life and had fewer health problems.

Instilling self-control in my children seemed to me like a tall order until I started coming across parenting blogs that share some very useful ideas, such as this great post from One Perfect Day about helping children as young as 4 years old manage their own screen time. Each day, this mother gives her toddler 9 cards that each represent 10 minute segments of screen time. With a few rules, her son has been able to regulate his own time playing Angry Birds on her tablet, with fewer struggles when his time was up.

What ideas and resources do you have for helping children desire good behavior and instilling self-discipline in children? Please share them in the comments.  

*This post contains affiliate links. That means if you choose to purchase the book mentioned in the blog, I will get a commission if you click through my links. I will never post an affiliate link to a book unless I have read it myself, found it useful, and worth sharing.

The Road to Hell (and Other Bad Words)

What I’ve Been Reading (No. 1)

By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

“Hell,” I learned a few years ago, is a bad word in some states, like Virginia, where my Sunday School students widened their eyes in shock when their teacher from New York used it. “It’s not a bad word where I come from,” I tried to explain. 

They must never have heard their aging next door neighbor repeat the old maxim: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The proverb is used when the cause of something bad is someone’s failure to do something good, even though that person had good intentions to do otherwise.

On January 1, 2013, many of us resolved, with good intentions, to be more organized this year. Or to get more exercise this year. Or to clean out our garage this year. Or to leave work at 5 pm every day this year. Or to stop twittering away all our time on Facebook this year. Or—well, it’s February.  

Are you, like me, on the road to hell?

There is another bad word, however, that may help you and I get off that road.

Discipline.

It’s bad because we often think of discipline as something unpleasant we must inflict upon ourselves for some greater good, or some internal ability that some people have, but others don’t. Or, with regards to children, “discipline” often connotes how parents should deal with their children when they misbehave.

Link the word “discipline” with “desire,” however, and it seems less difficult to swallow. Discipline without desire can be fruitless, and almost impossible to maintain, unless there is some external threat of punishment. 

But when discipline is motivated by an intense desire, it’s not even called discipline anymore. It’s called doing what we want. Similarly, if we considered this link between desire and discipline when it comes to raising children, we might think about how we want to instill in them a desire to behave, rather than fear of punishment when they misbehave (I’ll blog about that in a future post).

Discipline (and its friend, self-control), is driven by the desire to achieve, and can be developed and strengthened. Anyone with the desire to accomplish can develop discipline and reap its countless rewards.

 I’ve discovered that to develop more discipline in my life, I must:

1. Feed my desire for my goal
2. Build discipline by developing habits that will help me achieve that goal.

  To give an example of feeding my desire, I have a goal of waking up early in the morning, before my kids, to get a head start on my day and do things I usually can’t do when they’re awake. Despite the plentiful obstacles to waking up early in the morning, I feed my desire to wake up early by investing in high quality coffee beans so I have a fresh cup of coffee to look forward to in the morning, doing things I enjoy in my early morning hours (like praying, writing, NOT folding laundry), and reminding myself of the inexpressible joy I feel when my son wakes up, runs out to the living room into my arms, and happily exclaims, “good morning Mommy!”

For developing good habits to build discipline, I came across a great resource that summarizes the most important habits needed to develop discipline and accomplish goals: a short and sweet Crystal Paine’s ebook, 21 Days to a More Disciplined Life.* These include the tried and true habits of goal setting, learning to say “no,” breaking down large projects into smaller tasks, and finding accountability partners. 

You can read the blog posts upon which blogger Crystal Paine based this book here.  To develop good habits to help me wake up early, I say ‘no’ to late night computer use, and ask my husband to wake me if he finds me shutting off my alarm.

Reformulate your goal into a desire you can feed, then develop good habits to build the discipline you need to achieve them. Do you have other resources for leading a more disciplined life? Please share them in the comments.

*This post contains affiliate links. That means if you choose to purchase the book mentioned in the blog, I will get a commission if you click through my links. I will never post an affiliate link to a book unless I have read it myself, found it useful, and worth sharing.