STOP Following Your Passion | 854

In this manifesto, author Cal Newport considers the question: What makes people love their work? Drawing on interviews with professionals, performance science, case studies, and experimentation with strategies in his own career, Newport discovered that the popular recommendation to follow your passion is very much not the path to loving your work.

In fact, the path to loving your work is to become so good—so highly skilled—that no one can ignore you. Then, you can cash in your skills for work that comes with desirable traits, such as autonomy or the opportunity to change the world.

If you want to know how to live your life, who better to ask than people who’ve lived life to its fullest? Tribe of Mentors is distilled life advice from more than 130 world-class experts in a wide variety of fields, such as actor Ben Stiller, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, and media mogul Ariana Huffington. Author Tim Ferriss reached out to these experts and compiled their advice after a mild existential crisis left him seeking direction.

In this guide, you’ll learn the experts’ advice on how to identify what matters most to you, how to navigate non-traditional career paths, how to appreciate failure, and more. In our commentary, we’ll supplement Ferriss’s advice with tips for success from other top-performing experts and authors, including Cal Newport, Ryan Holiday, and Laura Vanderkam.

In this manifesto, author Cal Newport considers the question: What makes people love their work? Drawing on interviews with professionals, performance science, case studies, and experimentation with strategies in his own career, Newport discovered that the popular recommendation to follow your passion is very much not the path to loving your work.

In fact, the path to loving your work is to become so good—so highly skilled—that no one can ignore you. Then, you can cash in your skills for work that comes with desirable traits, such as autonomy or the opportunity to change the world.

How do figures such as Albert Einstein and Marie Curie do their greatest work? And can we follow in their footsteps? In Mastery, Robert Greene, famous for The 48 Laws of Power, argues that there is a clear path anyone can follow to achieve mastery, the highest level of creative excellence. He explains the three stages of mastery, and he argues that pursuing it yields a fulfilling life and great creative power.

Our guide explains Mastery in four parts, breaking down how Greene defines mastery and how to pursue it. You’ll learn how to develop new skills, discover why social know-how is crucial to rising in your field, and gain strategies for performing high-level creative work.

We’ll expand and scrutinize Greene’s ideas with perspectives from other prominent guides to high-level skillfulness—including The Art of Learning, Peak, and George Leonard’s Mastery. We’ll also examine where Greene appears to contradict himself, and whether you can achieve mastery at any age.

In this follow-up to Girl, Wash Your Face, blogger, motivational speaker, and author Rachel Hollis writes that she’s fed up with seeing women ignore their own dreams because of self-doubt, guilt, and society’s expectation that women put others first. Hollis offers the lessons she learned in growing from humble beginnings to becoming the founder of a multimillion-dollar media company to help her readers shed the weight of expectation and achieve their dreams.

Hollis’s advice consists of excuses to let go of, behaviors to adopt, and skills to acquire. In addition, she provides a step-by-step blueprint to take your dream from fantasy to realization. In this guide, we’ll compare Hollis’s advice to that of other popular self-help authors and expand on her messages through practical exercises.

Minimalism offers a formula for how to live a meaningful life by first getting rid of clutter (like excess stuff and debt) and then focusing on five key areas: your health, relationships, passions, growth, and contributing to others.

The authors Millburn and Nicodemus achieved the American dream of corporate success and conspicuous consumption, but it left them unhappy, exhausted, and deeply in debt. They quit their jobs, re-examined their lives, and started the popular website TheMinimalists.com. In this book, they explain how anyone can follow their path of self-examination and how to make small daily changes to achieve a clutter-free, debt-free, and fulfilling life.

In How Will You Measure Your Life? business consultant and Harvard professor Clay Christensen shows how economic theories that help businesses succeed can also help individuals make better life decisions. He presents theories and business case studies that show you pitfalls to avoid (such as marginal thinking and outsourcing your parenting), and also how to build a career that makes you happy, how to deepen your relationships with your spouse and children, and how to live with integrity. Together, they offer a philosophy for living a fulfilling life.

Many successful leaders and businesspeople are lauded as “great geniuses,” but psychologist Angela Duckworth argues that talent and intelligence matter less to success than grit: the personality trait behind perseverance, hard work, and goal-setting. In Grit, she explores what grit is, where it comes from, how it drives success, and how you can develop it.

Duckworth is primarily interested in how to raise gritty kids, and her insights have inspired parents and educators around the globe since the book’s publication in 2016. However, she believes that adults, too, can develop grit, and she lays out specific, measurable ways to do so.

Her work has fueled debates about which matters more—talent or effort. In this guide, we examine these controversies and consider insights from other psychologists who either support Duckworth’s ideas or reveal nuances of them.

In this manifesto, author Cal Newport considers the question: What makes people love their work? Drawing on interviews with professionals, performance science, case studies, and experimentation with strategies in his own career, Newport discovered that the popular recommendation to follow your passion is very much not the path to loving your work.

In fact, the path to loving your work is to become so good—so highly skilled—that no one can ignore you. Then, you can cash in your skills for work that comes with desirable traits, such as autonomy or the opportunity to change the world.

Everyone wants to make a living doing meaningful work that aligns with their values and makes them happy. However, many people feel stuck in the wrong life doing unfulfilling work. They hope that once they find their “passion,” everything will magically fall into place. According to Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, this attitude hinges on the belief that there’s only one path to a meaningful life and limits your ability to experience joy and satisfaction.

In Designing Your Life, Burnett and Evans argue there are multiple paths to career and life happiness—learning how to recognize and evaluate these paths increases your chances of experiencing satisfaction. They share principles from their popular life design courses to help you explore multiple paths and purposefully plan a balanced life in which you can truly thrive.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the authors’ methods for purposefully planning a happy and meaningful life. We’ll also expand on their ideas with research and practical advice from other self-help practitioners.

Minimalism offers a formula for how to live a meaningful life by first getting rid of clutter (like excess stuff and debt) and then focusing on five key areas: your health, relationships, passions, growth, and contributing to others.

The authors Millburn and Nicodemus achieved the American dream of corporate success and conspicuous consumption, but it left them unhappy, exhausted, and deeply in debt. They quit their jobs, re-examined their lives, and started the popular website TheMinimalists.com. In this book, they explain how anyone can follow their path of self-examination and how to make small daily changes to achieve a clutter-free, debt-free, and fulfilling life.