So Good They Can't Ignore You

This young generation has “high expectations for work,” explains psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, an expert on the mindset of the modern postgrad. “They expect work to be not just a job but an adventure[,] … a venue for self-development and self-expression[,]

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.

When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.

projects and autonomy—these come later.

Driven by this insight, while my classmates contemplated their true calling, I went seeking opportunities to master rare skills that would yield big rewards.

it’s dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange.

Many people have lots of career capital, and can therefore identify a variety of different potential missions for their work, but few actually build their career around such missions.

even after you have the capital required to acquire real control, things remain difficult, as it’s exactly at this point that people begin to recognize your value and start pushing back to keep you entrenched in a less autonomous path.

“One thing a lot of people struggle with in my field is that they have a lot of ideas, but don’t know how to get them turned into reality.”