How I Applied Rule #4

As explained in Rule #4, a career mission is an organizing purpose to your working life. It’s what leads people to become famous for what they do and ushers in the remarkable opportunities that come along with such fame. It’s also an idea that has long fascinated me.

Academia is a profession well suited for mission. If you identify professors with particularly compelling careers, and then ask what they did differently than their peers, the answer almost always involves them organizing their work around a catchy mission. Consider, for example, Alan Lightman, an MIT physics professor turned writer. Lightman started as a traditional physicist but was writing on the side—both fiction and nonfiction that grappled with the human side of science. He’s perhaps best known for his bestselling, award-winning novel, Einstein’s Dreams,² though he’s written many other books, and his essays have appeared in basically every important American literary publication.

Lightman’s career is based on his mission to explore the human side of science, and this led him to fascinating places. He left behind the grueling MIT physics tenure track to become the first professor in the Institute’s history to be dual-appointed in both science and humanities. He helped develop MIT’s communications requirement and then went on to found its graduate science-writing program. By the time I met Lightman, he had shifted to an adjunct-professor position, providing him even more freedom in his schedule, and had crafted for himself an impressively unburdened life of the mind. He now teaches writing courses that he designed and that focus on issues he thinks are important. He has freed himself from the need to be constantly seeking grant money or publications. He spends his summers with his family on an island in Maine—a location with no phone, TV, or Internet—presumably thinking big thoughts while basking in the sublimity of his surroundings. Most impressive to me, Lightman’s contact page on his official MIT website gives the following disclaimer: “I don’t use e-mail”—a move toward simplicity that a less famous academic would never get away with.

This is just one example among many of professors who leveraged mission to create an offbeat and compelling career. Some of these professors, such as Pardis Sabeti and Kirk French, I ended up tracking down and interviewing when researching this book, which is why you’ll find the details of their stories in Rule #4. Others, such as Alan Lightman, or Erez Lieberman, who earned fame by the age of thirty-one through his combination of mathematics and cultural studies, or Esther Duflo, who won a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for her work evaluating ant-poverty programs, didn’t make the cut for the book, but still weigh heavily on my thinking about how to best shape my own career.

It wasn’t until I got started in earnest in my Rule #4 research, however, and met mission mavens such as Pardis, Kirk, and Giles Bowkett, that I understood just how tricky it is to make this trait a reality in your working life. The more you try to force it, I learned, the less likely you are to succeed. True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea. This requires a dedication to brainstorming and exposure to new ideas. Combined, these two commitments describe a lifestyle, not a series of steps that automatically spit out a mission when completed. As I entered the summer of 2011, I leveraged this new understanding to try to transform my approach to work into one that would lead to a successful mission. These efforts generated a series of routines that I combined into a mission-development system. This system is best understood as a three-level pyramid. I’ll explain each of these levels below.