The Capital-Driven Mission

Scientific breakthroughs, as we just learned, require that you first get to the cutting edge of your field. Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative ideas are almost always discovered. Here’s the leap I made as I pondered Pardis Sabeti around the same time I was pondering Johnson’s theory of innovation: A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only place where these missions become visible.

This insight explains Sarah’s struggles: She was trying to find a mission before she got to the cutting edge (she was still in her first two years as a graduate student when she began to panic about her lack of focus). From her vantage point as a new graduate student, she was much too far from the cutting edge to have any hope of surveying the adjacent possible, and if she can’t see the adjacent possible, she’s not likely to identify a compelling new direction for her work. According to Johnson’s theory, Sarah would have been better served by first mastering a promising niche—a task that may take years—and only then turning her attention to seeking a mission.

This distance from the adjacent possible also tripped up Jane. She wanted to start a transformative non-profit that changed the way people live their lives. A successful non-profit, however, needs a specific philosophy with strong evidence for its effectiveness. Jane didn’t have such a philosophy. To find one, she would have needed a nice view of the adjacent possible in her corner of the non-profit sector, and this would have required that she first get to the cutting edge of efforts to better people’s lives—a process that, as with Sarah, requires patience and perhaps years of work. Jane was trying to identify a mission before she got to the cutting edge and she predictably didn’t come up with anything that could turn people’s heads.

In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s not commonplace; it’s instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard—the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives.

The alert reader will notice that this talk of “getting to the cutting edge” echoes the idea of career capital, which was introduced back in Rule #2. As you’ll recall, career capital is my term for rare and valuable skills. It is, I argued, your main bargaining chip in creating work you love: 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. Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills and therefore builds up your store of career capital. Similarly, identifying a compelling mission once you get to the cutting edge can be seen as investing your career capital to acquire a desirable trait in your career. In other words, mission is yet another example of career capital theory in action. If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital. If you skip this step, you might end up like Sarah and Jane: with lots of enthusiasm but very little to show for it.

Not surprisingly, when we return to the story of Pardis Sabeti, we find that her path to a mission provides a nice example of this career capital perspective translated into practice.