The Craftsman Mindset

Let me be clear about something: I really don’t care if Jordan Tice loves what he does. I also don’t care why he decided to become a musician or whether he sees guitar playing as his “passion.” Musicians’ career paths are idiosyncratic, often relying on unusual circumstances and lucky breaks early in life. (The fact that Jordan’s parents are both bluegrass musicians, for example, obviously played a big role in his early dedication to guitar.) Because of this, I’ve never found the origin stories of performers’ careers to be all that relevant to the rest of us. Here’s what does interest me about Jordan: how he approaches his work on a daily basis. Lurking here, I discovered, is an insight of great value to my quest for work I love.

The path that led me to Jordan and the insight he represents began with a 2007 episode of the Charlie Rose show. Rose was interviewing the actor and comedian Steve Martin about his memoir Born Standing Up². They talked about the realities of Martin’s rise. “I read autobiographies in general,” Martin said. “[And I often get frustrated]… and say, ‘You left out that one part here, how did you get that audition for that one thing where suddenly you’re working at the Copa? How did that happen?’ ” Martin wrote his book to answer the “how” question, at least with respect to his own success in stand-up. It was in this explanation of “how” that Martin introduced a simple idea that floored me when I first heard it. The quote comes in the last five minutes of the interview, when Rose asks Martin his advice for aspiring performers.

“Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,” Martin said. “What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’… but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’ ”

In response to Rose’s trademark ambiguous grunt, Martin defended his advice: “If somebody’s thinking, ‘How can I be really good?’ people are going to come to you.”

This is exactly the philosophy that catapulted Martin into stardom. He was only twenty years old when he decided to innovate his act into something too good to be ignored. “Comedy at the time was all setup and punch line… the clichéd nightclub comedian, rat-a-tat-tat,” Martin explained to Rose.³ He thought it could be something more sophisticated. Here’s how Martin explained his evolution in an article he published around the time of his Charlie Rose interview: “What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax?”⁴ In one famous bit, Martin tells the audience that it’s time for his famous nose-on-the-microphone routine. He then leans in and puts his nose on the microphone for several seconds, steps back, takes a long bow, and with gravitas thanks the crowd. “The laugh came not then,” he explains, “but only after they realized I had already moved on to the next bit.”

It took Martin, by his own estimation, ten years for his new act to cohere, but when it did, he became a monster success. It’s clear in his telling that there was no real shortcut to his eventual fame. “[Eventually] you are so experienced [that] there’s a confidence that comes out,” Martin explained. “I think it’s something the audience smells.”

Be so good they can’t ignore you. When I first heard this advice, I was watching the Martin interview online. It was the winter of 2008 and I was approaching my final year as a graduate student. At the time, I had recently started a blog called Study Hacks, which was inspired by the pair of student-advice guides I had published, and focused mainly on tips for undergraduates. Soon after hearing Martin’s axiom, however, I dashed off a blog post that introduced his idea to my readers.⁵ “Sure, it’s scary,” I concluded. “But, even more, I find it liberating.”

As my graduate student career had been winding down, I had become obsessed with my research strategy—an obsession that was manifested in the chronic working and reworking of the description of my work on my website. This was a frustrating process: I felt like I was stretching to convince the world that my work was interesting, yet no one cared. Martin’s axiom gave me a reprieve from this self-promotion. “Stop focusing on these little details,” it told me. “Focus instead on becoming better.” Inspired, I turned my attention from my website to a habit that continues to this day: I track the hours spent each month dedicated to thinking hard about research problems (in the month in which I first wrote this chapter, for example, I dedicated forty-two hours to these core tasks).

This hour-tracking strategy helped turn my attention back above all else to the quality of what I produce. At the same time, however, it also felt incremental, as if I hadn’t yet grasped the full implications of Martin’s radical idea. When I later launched my quest to uncover how people end up loving their work, it didn’t take long for me to return to Martin’s advice. Intuitively I grasped that it played an important role in constructing a remarkable career. This is what led me to Jordan Tice: If I really wanted to understand this axiom, I figured, I needed to understand the people who live their lives by it.

Listening to Tice talk about his routine, I was struck by his Martin-esque focus on what he produces. As you’ll recall, he’s happy to spend hours every day, week after week, in a barely furnished monastic room, exhausting himself in pursuit of a new flat-picking technique, all because he thinks it will add something important to the tune he’s writing. This dedication to output, I realized, also explains his painful modesty. To Jordan, arrogance doesn’t make sense. “Here’s what I respect: creating something meaningful and then presenting it to the world,” he explained.

Inspired by meeting Jordan, I got in touch with Mark Casstevens to gain a cynical veteran’s perspective on the performer’s mindset. Mark is a studio musician from Nashville who has certainly earned his stripes: He’s played on ninety-nine number one hit singles on the Billboard charts. When I told Mark about Jordan, he agreed that an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music. “It trumps your appearance, your equipment, your personality, and your connections,” he explained. “Studio musicians have this adage: ‘The tape doesn’t lie.’ Immediately after the recording comes the playback; your ability has no hiding place.”

I liked that phrase—the tape doesn’t lie—as it sums up nicely what motivates performers such as Jordan, Mark, and Steve Martin. If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. This clarity was refreshing.

To simplify things going forward, I’ll call this output-centric approach to work the craftsman mindset. My goal in Rule #2 is to convince you of an idea that became clearer to me the more time I spent studying performers such as Tice: Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love. Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, I want to take a moment to contrast this mindset with the way most of us are used to thinking about our livelihood.