When Craftsmanship Fails

Not long before I started writing this chapter, I received an e-mail from John, a recent college graduate and longtime reader of my blog. He was concerned about his new job as a tax consultant. Though he found the work to be “sometimes interesting,” the hours were long and the tasks were fiercely prescribed, making it difficult to stand out. “Aside from not liking the lifestyle,” John complained, “I’m concerned that my work doesn’t serve a larger purpose, and, in fact, that it actively hurts the most vulnerable.”

This chapter has argued in favor of the craftsman mindset and against its passion-centric alternative. Part of what makes the craftsman mindset thrilling is its agnosticism toward the type of work you do. The traits that define great work are bought with career capital, the theory argues; they don’t come from matching your work to your innate passion. Because of this, you don’t have to sweat whether you’ve found your calling—most any work can become the foundation for a compelling career. John had heard this argument and wrote me because he was having a hard time applying it to his life as a tax consultant. He didn’t like his work and he wanted to know if, like a good craftsman, he should just suck it up and continue to focus on getting good. This is an important question, and here’s what I told John:

“It sounds like you should leave your job.” On reflection, it became clear to me that certain jobs are better suited for applying career capital theory than others. To aid John, I ended up devising a list of three traits that disqualify a job as providing a good foundation for building work you love:

THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET

1. The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable.

2. The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world.

3. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.⁷

A job with any combination of these disqualifying traits can thwart your attempts to build and invest career capital. If it satisfies the first trait, skill growth isn’t possible. If it satisfies the second two traits, then even though you could build up reserves of career capital, you’ll have a hard time sticking around long enough to accomplish this goal. John’s job satisfied the first two traits, so he needed to leave.

To give another example: As a computer scientist at MIT, which I was while writing this book, I got quite a few e-mails from Wall Street headhunters. They were hiring for jobs that provide plenty of room to develop skills and they’re not afraid to compensate you well for your time. “There is a small handful of firms on Wall Street that pay better than everyone else, about three or four of them,” said one headhunter who wrote me recently. “This company is one of them.” (I was later told by friends that the starting salary for these firms was in the two to three hundred thousand dollar range.) But to me, these firms satisfy the second condition listed above. This realization allowed me to confidently delete these offers as they arrived.

The big-picture point worth noting here, however, is that these disqualifying traits still have nothing to do with whether a job is the right fit for some innate passion. They remain much more general. Working right, therefore, still trumps finding the right work.

Now that I’ve made my pitch for the craftsman mindset, and moderated it with the exceptions listed above, it’s time to see it in action.