Career Profile Summaries

JOE DUFFY

(introduced in Rule #2)

Current job:

Before recently retiring, Joe ran Duffy & Partners, his own fifteen-person branding and design shop.

Why he loves what he does:

He worked on handpicked international projects and was greatly respected (and rewarded) for his work. Between engagements he spent much of his time at Duffy Trails, a hundred-acre retreat he owns, tucked away on the banks of Wisconsin’s Totagatic River.

How he applied the rules described in this book to get this job:

When Joe was starting out in his advertising career, like many at his young age, he chafed at the constraints of working for a large company. He had originally planned on being an artist and was entertaining the thought of quitting his job and returning to that “dream.” Instead, Joe deployed career capital theory. He realized that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable and that therefore they require rare and valuable skills to be offered in return. He found a specialty within his field—brand communication through logos—and hunkered down to dominate the skill. He was hired away by a larger agency, which gave him more money and more freedom. As he continued to build career capital, they appeased him by allowing him to run an independent agency within the larger agency—providing Joe even more control. Eventually, he left to run his own shop on his own terms, using the monetary rewards of his expertise to buy Duffy Trails. Given that before he retired he controlled when he worked and what he worked on, he was able to get the most out of both his work and his relaxation.

ALEX BERGER

(introduced in Rule #2)

Current job:

Alex is a successful television writer.

Why he loves what he does:

When you’re good enough to find a steady stream of work, television writing is a fantastic gig. It pays you loads of money to do highly creative projects that are seen by millions. In addition, it also gives you months off every year.

How he applied the rules described in this book to get this job:

When Alex first arrived in Hollywood, Ivy League diploma in hand, he thought he could break into the industry by launching and carefully managing a variety of different entertainment-related projects. It turned out that no one cared about his big ideas. It didn’t take long for Alex to pare his attention down to a more specific pursuit: television writing. He realized that all that mattered in this field was a single type of career capital: the ability to write quality scripts.

Using the practice techniques honed as a college debate champion, he began to systematically improve his scriptwriting capability, sometimes working on as many as four or five writing projects at a time, while constantly exposing himself to ruthless feedback. This strategy paid off as his scriptwriting improved quickly, eventually earning him his first produced scripts, which in turn earned him his first staff writing jobs, which led to him cocreating a show with Michael Eisner. This is a classic example of career capital theory in action. To get a job he loved, Alex needed to first become so good that he couldn’t be ignored.

MIKE JACKSON

(introduced in Rule #2)

Current job:

Mike is a director at the Westly Group, a cleantech venture capital firm on Silicon Valley’s famous Sand Hill Road.

Why he loves what he does:

Clean-energy venture capital is a hot field. It offers a way to help the world while at the same time, as Mike admitted, “You make a lot of money.”

How he applied the rules described in this book to get this job:

Mike didn’t start with a clear vision of what he wanted to do with his life. He did understand, however, the basics of career capital theory: The more rare and valuable skills you have to offer, the more interesting opportunities will become available. With this in mind, Mike formed his early career around the goal of dominating one valuable pursuit after another, trusting that the large stores of career capital this would generate would lead him somewhere worth going. He started by choosing an ambitious master’s thesis project that ended up making him an expert on international carbon markets. He then leveraged this expertise to run a green-energy start-up that sold carbon offsets contracts to American companies.

This combination of expert knowledge on green-energy markets and entrepreneurship experience made him a perfect match for the Westly Group, the clean-energy venture capital firm where he now works. Throughout this process, Mike’s focus was on how to get better, not on figuring out his true calling. The result was an enviable job.

RYAN VOILAND

(introduced in Rule #3)

Current job:

Ryan, along with his wife, Sarah, runs Red Fire Farm, a thriving organic farm in Granby, Massachusetts.

Why he loves what he does:

Ryan has been training in horticulture since he was a teenager. To now own land that he can cultivate on his own terms is deeply fulfilling to him.

How he applied the rules described in this book to get this job:

Many people harbor a rosy image of farm life. They imagine it would be nice to spend time outdoors in nice weather and be free from the distractions of the modern office. Spend time with Ryan at Red Fire, however, and this myth is quickly dispelled. Farming, it turns out, is hard work. The weather is not something you enjoy, as if on vacation, but instead a force poised to play havoc with your crops. And far from being free from modern distractions, a farmer is a businessman, with all the e-mail, Excel spreadsheets, and QuickBooks software that come along with that role. The reason Ryan loves what he does, it turns out, is not that he gets to be outside or be free from e-mail, but instead that he has control—over both what he does and how he does it.

This trait, as described in Rule #3, is crucial for creating work you love. What’s important about Ryan’s story is that he didn’t just decide one day that farming would provide nice control and then go buy some land. Instead, he recognized that control, like any valuable career trait, requires career capital to acquire. With this in mind, he built up his farming skills for over a decade before setting out on his own. It started with cultivating his parents’ garden and selling produce by the road. From there, he slowly built up his abilities by taking on larger cultivation projects. By the time he left for Cornell to study horticulture, he was renting land from a local farmer. It wasn’t until after he earned his degree that he applied for a loan for his first parcel of land. Given his expertise, it’s not surprising that his new farm thrived. He’s a perfect example of both the value of control and the patient capital acquisition required before you can gain this trait in your working life.

LULU YOUNG

(introduced in Rule #3)

Current job:

Lulu is a freelance software developer.

Why she loves what she does:

Lulu enjoys challenging software projects, but she also enjoys having control over her life, including when she works, what she works on, and under what terms. As a freelance developer with skills that are in high demand, she has been able to maintain that control, allowing her to mix her work with a variety of different leisurely pursuits, from monthlong trips to Asia, to pilot’s training, to weekday afternoons spent with her nephew.

How she applied the rules described in this book to get this job:

Lulu, like Ryan, is a good example of the value of control. Also like Ryan, she’s a good example of leveraging career capital in pursuit of this trait. Lulu didn’t decide out of the blue to be a freelance developer; instead she built up her skills and reputation over many years in the industry. She now has more than enough career capital to set her own terms for her work. When you study her story, however, you learn that this shift toward increased autonomy didn’t happen all at once. Instead, Lulu developed a steady stream of bids for increased freedom as she got increasingly good at what she did.

It started with her first job as a software tester—the bottom of the developer heap. Lulu figured out how to automate much of the testing process. The capital this generated allowed her to then bargain for a thirty-hour workweek so she could take philosophy classes on the side. As she got even better at what she did, she invested her growing capital stores in obtaining positions at a series of start-ups, where she was given more and more control over her work. It was after one of these start-ups was acquired by a large company, which promptly added new constraints, that Lulu transitioned to a freelance role. At this point, however, her career capital stores were more than sufficient to support this final bid for even more control.

DEREK SIVERS

(introduced in Rule #3)

Current job:

Derek is an entrepreneur, writer, and thinker.

Why he loves what he does:

Derek has had enough successes in his career that he can now live where he wants and work on projects he finds interesting when he decides he’s in the mood to work. He’s in complete control over his life and is taking full advantage of this autonomy.

How he applied the rules described in this book to get this job:

Derek is another example of control being a defining trait of a great career. What made him most relevant to our discussion in Rule #3, however, is the rule he deploys when deciding whether or not to pursue a bid for more autonomy. I called this rule “the law of financial viability,” and it says that you should only pursue a project if people are willing to pay you for it. If they aren’t, you probably don’t have sufficient capital to exchange for the control you desire.

This is the law that helped guide Derek to his current levels of success. He first applied it when deciding to quit his job at Warner Bros. to become a full-time musician. He delayed this decision until the money he was making from music was equal to what he made in his day job—if he couldn’t get to this modest level of income with part-time playing, he reasoned, then he was unlikely to enjoy enough success pursuing this career full-time. He next applied the law when starting CD Baby, the company he eventually sold for millions. He didn’t drop everything to pursue his entrepreneurial ambition. Instead, he started small. When the company made a little money, he used this money to expand it so it could make a little more. When it started to make a lot of money, only then did he decide to make it into his full-time job.

The courage culture pushes us to make drastic bids for increased control over our working lives. Derek’s example provides a nice reality check. Seeking freedom is good, but it’s easy to fail in this pursuit. The law of financial viability provides a good guide past these pitfalls.

PARDIS SABETI

(introduced in Rule #4)

Current job:

Pardis is a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

Why she loves what she does:

Pardis’s academic career is built around a mission that she finds both exciting and important: to use computational genetics to help rid the world of ancient diseases.

How she applied the rules described in this book to get this job:

Pardis is a good example of the value of organizing your working life around a compelling mission. Many professors are overwhelmed by their jobs and eventually descend into a state of bitter cynicism. Pardis avoided this fate by dedicating her work toward something she finds important and exciting. Of equal importance is how she found her mission. Many people incorrectly believe that coming up with a mission is the easy part (it’s something that just happens in a moment of inspiration) and that what’s hard is mustering the courage to pursue it. Rule #4 argued the opposite. It said that real missions—those that you can build a career around—require that you build up extensive amounts of expertise before they can be identified.

Once they are identified, however, pursuing them is often a no-brainer. This is exactly what we find in the story of Pardis. It took years of skill acquisition before Pardis was able to identify the mission that now defines her career. After college she went on to earn her PhD in genetics. Not quite sure what she wanted to do with her life, she also went to medical school. It wasn’t until after finishing medical school and spending time as a postdoctoral fellow that she finally had enough expertise in her field to sift out this exciting new opportunity. Overall, Pardis’s most important commitment was to patience. She didn’t try to force a direction for her working life, but instead built up her career capital and kept her eyes open for the interesting directions she knew this process would uncover.

KIRK FRENCH

(introduced in Rule #4)

Current job:

Kirk teaches archaeology at Penn State University and is the cohost of a television show on the Discovery Channel that lets him travel the country helping people figure out the historical importance of their keepsakes and heirlooms.

Why he loves what he does:

As a teacher, Kirk has long been interested in spreading the word about modern archaeology. Ever since being interviewed for a documentary on the Mayan culture (Kirk’s specialty), he has also been interested in media as a vehicle for popularizing archaeology. Landing a television show has been a fantastic realization of these interests.

How he applied the rules described in this book to get this job:

Kirk organized his archaeological career around the mission of popularizing his field. This mission has helped him turn an academic career that could become dry or overwhelming into a source of adventure and fulfillment. As with Pardis, this mission first required career capital—in Kirk’s case, this came in the form of his PhD. His story, however, also highlights the first of two strategies presented in Rule #4 for helping career missions, once they’re identified, succeed.

The idea to host a television show did not come to Kirk out of the blue. Instead, he explored his general mission idea—to popularize archaeology—by means of a series of “little bets.” Many of these, such as his attempts to raise finances for a documentary, failed, but these failures were important, as they helped Kirk shift his attention away from non-productive directions. In the end, it was one of these bets that led him directly to his television show. He decided to film a visit to a local man who claimed to have found the Knights Templars’ treasure buried in his suburban Pittsburgh property.

Not long afterward, a producer wrote Kirk’s department chair looking for ideas for an archaeology-related television show. Kirk saw the e-mail and sent the producer his Knights Templar tape. The producer loved it, and not long after, a show concept was born with Kirk as the host. Building the expertise to identify a quality career mission is the first step toward leveraging this trait. As Kirk’s story demonstrated, deploying a series of little bets to feel out the best way forward with this mission is a good second step.

GILES BOWKETT

(introduced in Rule #4)

Current job:

Giles is a well-known Ruby software programmer. His renown has allowed him to shift between many jobs, following his interest of the moment. He’s worked for the country’s top Ruby shop, supported himself entirely off of blog income, helped a Hollywood movie star launch a Web-based entertainment venture, and, most recently, started writing a book.

Why he loves what he does:

Because Giles has a hyperkinetic personality, his ability to jump from one interesting job to another, moving on once something becomes boring, is a perfect match for his rapidly shifting attention. Spend any time around Giles and you’ll realize how miserable he would be if forced by economic necessity into a long-term, traditional, forty-hour-a-week job.

How he applied the rules described in this book to get this job:

Giles is another example of mission being used as the foundation for a great career. In this case, the mission is combining the worlds of the arts and Ruby programming. Giles made this mission a success when he released Archaeopteryx, an open-source software program that writes and performs its own music. This software gave Giles the fame within his community that has supported his kinetic career trajectory ever since.

Like Pardis and Kirk, Giles needed career capital before he could identify his mission. He seriously studied and performed music and spent many years developing his programming skills before he was at a sufficient level of expertise to recognize the potential in combining these worlds. His story, however, also captures the second of the two strategies presented in Rule #4 for helping missions, once identified, to succeed. This second strategy, which I called “the law of remarkability,” says that a good mission-driven project should be remarkable in two ways: First, it should compel people to remark about it, and second, it should be deployed in a venue conducive to remarking. These were the rules that led Giles to his idea for Archaeopteryx. He recognized that a demo of a piece of computer code generating sophisticated music would be something that would catch people’s attention. He had also realized that the open-source software community was well structured to spread the word about interesting projects, making it a perfect venue for the software’s release. Combined, these two traits made the project, and therefore Giles’s career mission, a success.