At this time last year, I felt dissatisfied with my job. I remember sitting at my desk in the morning and wondering why I didn’t feel passionate about it. This subject that I spent two years getting a Master’s degree in! I thoroughly enjoyed my graduate program and learning the ins and outs of sonar and underwater acoustics. But now that I was out in the field working, something wasn’t quite right. And my thoughts kept wrapping back around to one single thought: How do I find a job that I’m really passionate in? I asked the wrong question, and it’s a question that’s keeping millions of American workers unhappy.
The Myth of Passion and Current Work Dissatisfaction
It’s heartening to know that I was not alone in being unhappy with my job. A recent survey revealed that only 57% of workers under 35 are satisfied with their current jobs. Others show that Gen Z increasingly finds passion as one of the most important parts of a career. I think these two survey results are connected (especially when I find articles like this one encouraging businesses to focus on passion to retain employees). If you want to be passionate about your job so badly, how can you be satisfied with it if you don’t feel that passion? It’s certainly a feeling that I encountered. But based on my searching and learning over the past year, I found that focusing on passion first is the wrong, potentially harmful approach to finding career satisfaction.
The Craftsman Approach to Job Satisfaction
Cal Newport recognized that the passion mindset led to widespread dissatisfaction in his 2012 book So Good They Can’t Ignore You (affiliate link). He proposed to adopt a Craftsman Mindset for job satisfaction. It draws from the example of great performers, who practice for long hours to the point of cognitive (or physical discomfort). The craftsman mindset places a relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” which is where the book gets its title from.
The reason that this mindset leads to better job satisfaction can be seen in a study by researcher Amy Wrzesniewski. Her research showed that the people most likely to report loving their jobs were also the ones who had been working it the longest. In other words, the ones who are happiest at work are the ones who have been there long enough to get really good at it. The whole point of adopting the Craftsman Mindset is to focus on gaining the rare and valuable traits necessary to both love your job (because you’re really good at it) and have the control over your career to get the job that you want.
Great Jobs Require Rare and Valuable Skills
Think of the people at your work that are known to be the most competent. They’re probably most in demand for technical meetings. When you have a problem, you know exactly who to ask. Now think about what skills they have that nobody else does. They have a mastery of their work that few others are able to match. The end goal of the Craftsman Mindset, the way to gain control over your career, is to have these rare and valuable skills. You need to have mastery over your work subject that your coworkers with similar education and job history don’t have. There are different things that we can do to gain these skills. We can take on difficult projects that are just beyond our current capabilities. Being forced to learn something to meet a deadline is a powerful motivator. The first step, which can be done concurrently with taking on difficult projects, is to be an undisputed master over the basics in your field.
The Road to Mastery Has to Start Somewhere
In my field, there are three broad subject areas. There’s oceanography (the ocean’s physical properties and how they change), signal processing (taking data from some ocean instrument and using math to filter it into something usable), and acoustics. The people that are in highest demand are typically masters of one of these subjects. But, they all have a basic working knowledge of all three. Which tells me that if I want to build rare and valuable skills to the point where I am in control over my career, I need to master the basics of these three subject areas. My drive over the past year has been on getting better at my job overall. But it was only recently that I realized that I need better mastery over the basics in my field. Of course I have working knowledge of a good handful of topics from my master’s program. It’s far from a complete mastery over the foundations of acoustics (my background) and even further from knowing the basics of the other two subjects.
Executing My Long Term Plan for Mastery- and Career Satisfaction
This is going to be a multi part series on the process of gaining mastery in a technical field. An important point to note is that gaining mastery is not a quick or easy process. I am preparing for a process that will take years and serious cognitive discomfort. Understanding complex math and how it interacts with the ocean environment is not an easy endeavor. The key to my success here is consistency and time. For now, my plan is to read and digest a foundational paper in my field. This means going back to the early papers on ocean acoustics from just after WWII and working through the math that created the field. I’ll go through my method of doing this in some later posts. At the very least, it gives me something to distract me from the current state of the stock market!
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Hey, Jon. I agree with your premise here. I’m in sales in the cruising and vacation industry, and the longer I am here (almost 9 years into it now), the more I know about the places we visit, the more I develop the skills in my key result areas, and the better I am at the sales and consulting end of my job. I now enjoy my job because the core competencies are familiar to me.