Getting back to Cal Newport’s book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” today. I have a post dated August 14th where I share how the author suggests having a craftsman mindset to approaching your work rather than being passionate about it, that serves one in getting great at a career.
Getting deeper into the book, he talks about:
Gaining control over one’s career
that is crucial in leading a happier, more successful and a more meaningful life.
How one designs a business- with their own flair, their work ethics, using their expertise in various other areas of life; or when employees are asked to bring their own strengths to the table to accomplish their jobs rather than being micromanaged to do their jobs in a specific way.
The control people or businesses can have over their way of working gives them autonomy over their lives, their style of working and that leads to greater engagement and fulfillment.
If people are free to structure their days around their leisure and getting good work done our way, well, wouldn’t that be something we’d all want to sign up for?
In my case, since I plan my entire business by myself- I have all the control I want. Yes, there are times when I feel lost, or not knowing what path to pursue. But that also gives me an opportunity to look for all the possibilities that exist and take the path that most makes me happy and seems like I can handle it. Website design, promotion and marketing, handling sales, packaging and shipping- all these realms of my art business can be handled in multitude of ways, but when it’s all up to me, the way I do them will have my stamp over all these jobs, and that makes my business uniquely mine!
Most importantly:
I get to learn along the way, and grow in ways I never dreamt I would…
Not to mention that it’s a great pleasure to put my stamp on everything, and design my business baby my own way- nothing like being a solopreneur to get to know oneself, one’s way of working, strengths and weaknesses to grow as a human!
The book goes on to talk about the traps that come with pursuing more control over one’s career:
- Taking control without enough career capital that makes the pursuit of a successful career unsustainable. Cal Newport gives examples of people who leave their paid jobs or college programs to pursue adventures that are still out of their mastery, and it leads them to failed careers or businesses. All because they did not invest enough time and effort in learning the ropes of the jobs they took on before completely depending on these jobs for survival. In other words, the ships they jumped on was more enticing to them in terms of their interests, but it wasn’t completely built yet, and so a whole lot more probable to sink.
I truly believe that having hobbies or learning new skills is a lifelong pursuit.
I, for one, cannot not be learning something new in life, or working on some skill or the other all the time. To me, life is made interesting by growing at something or the other, bit by bit. But I am not sure I would claim myself expert at these skills any time soon, and depend on them to make me a living.
It took me over a decade of pursuing art making relentlessly, and learning on my own and from other experts to finally have the courage to say, maybe I want to make this my career.
And to add to that, my husband is the provider of the family. I am thankful to him from the very bottom of my heart to let me pursue my interests, and work on my new skills all this time. Along with housekeeping, and homeschooling (not anymore), I put in my spare time to learn something that I was interested in.
With getting better, the interest grew, and with that my ambitions with my newly acquired skills. It sure has been a very gradual, and organic process.
- The second trap associated with taking control of one’s career that Cal Newport talks about is: with enough career capital that one may have generated over time, their empoyers will prevent them from taking control of their careers for the employers advantage over the employee’s growth.
This makes sense, right? No one wants to let their star employee, who brings in all the big sales (for example), leave the company to start their own business, or move to a better job. At this point, well, courage is needed to step off the known, easy path. Courage to carve out new path with the confidence of having enough career capital to create your own dream job, and take control.
The way to avoid these control traps- to know if you have enough career capital to jump ship, and having the courage to not let others to stop you from taking control of your career
that Cal Newport argues is
To figure out if people are willing to pay for your skills
Aka, how financially viable is your idea of the new career that you are carving for yourself.
Without financial viability, it is just a house of cards.
As an artist it is a difficult place to be to become financially viable right away. It taking putting years of work in front of people to become known slowly, to get people to be comfortable with you as a person, to gaining resume points in terms of exhibitions, art market appearances and sales, and overall visibility to be a trustworthy artist to buy from. Mostly because art is not a necessity. Art is a great to have. But art can easily be done without in people’s homes.
That means financial viability comes slowly.
But one doesn’t need to put all of one’s eggs in the “being an artist” bucket right away- or in other words, maybe have such a career on the side as you’re making your name and art known in your world. Maybe don’t leave your day job yet. Till you’re making enough to know that a little more push of full time hours, you can live off of it.
My future plans…
My future plan at this point in time is to slowly build my career so at some point in time, my husband can retire, and I can keep going. Because, well, art making is a life long pursuit. Creativity is alive and kicking for a long long time in one’s life. The picture of Matisse making collages and painting with a very long stick with a brush attached at the end, all from his bed comes to mind. This was towards the end of his life, but he never let go of the creativity inside of him.
Deliberate Practice
The book also re-introduced the idea and strength behind the concept of “Deliberate Practice”.
(I have heard the term many times, but this time, hopefully I am taking it seriously enough to apply it to my life- a future post maybe?)
This concept is taking me on a whole other book rabbit hole.
In order to life an intentional life that holds deep meaning for how I want to grow and make my future look and feel like, I am seeing value in the idea of deliberate practice.
But not just that, all these new points of view, like in this book that I just talked about, there are nuggets of wisdom that we can choose based on what’s needed in our own lives at this point, and carry them forward to design our intentional lives.
Not everything will stick.
Some ideas are for a future us, for when we are ready.
But some ideas are for now…
And that we can add to our toolbox, modify them to fit us, and become more resilient, wise humans over time with those tools in our belt.