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Here are a few principles I’ve found helpful in steering my career.
Be useful. Solve problems.
As a student, I used to worry a lot about how much I enjoyed my studies. There were points in time when I felt deeply absorbed by a subject only to find that my interest soon waned. As humans, we’re wired with an inherent drive for novelty - this is what I was picking up and interpreting as passion in those early days. It wasn’t until I read Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You that I fully cut through the illusion that following passion was an especially useful career-building strategy. It turns out that there are other, more sustainable drives. Today I love the work that I do, but that has nothing to do with the domain in which I work. It’s because, through my work, I solve problems and create things that others find useful.
Multiply your efforts by working with great people.
It’s possible to work very hard and achieve very little of substance. The context in which you work matters a lot. If you’re isolated in your own bubble, you will be very limited in what you can achieve. The people around you are a potential multiplier on your efforts. This is why great entrepreneurs can achieve things that seem superhuman or impossible. They wield great leverage through people and capital. And what is more, this is a very good thing for many of the people who work for them too. Living on their own in the wilderness, they might produce enough to survive but not much more. Instead, by working for a great company, the things they produce are in turn used by their colleagues, and the total produced becomes more than the sum of the parts. You don’t have to work for a great company to do useful work, but your work should still be embedded within some larger context or community.
Self-belief is self-fulfilling.
Consider the following passage from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk:
Musk had run out of money, Tesla was hemorrhaging cash, and SpaceX had crashed three rockets in a row. But he was not ready to give up. Instead, he would go for broke, literally. “SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward,” he announced a few hours after the failure. “There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit. I will never give up, and I mean never.”
In the SpaceX conference room the next day, Musk got on a conference call with Koenigsmann, Buzza, and the launch team on Kwaj. They went over the data and figured out ways to allow more separation time so the bump would not happen again. Musk was in a somber mood. “It was the shittiest period of my life, given what was happening with my marriage, SpaceX, and Tesla,” he says. “I didn’t even have a house. Justine had it.” The team worried that he would, as he often did, try to single out people to blame. They prepared for a cold eruption.
Instead, he told them that there were components for a fourth rocket in the Los Angeles factory. Build it, he said, and transport it to Kwaj as soon as possible. He gave them a deadline that was barely realistic: launch it in six weeks. “He told us to go for it,” says Koenigsmann, “and it blew me away.”
A jolt of optimism spread through headquarters. “I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that,” says Dolly Singh, the human resources director. “Within moments, the energy of the building went from despair and defeat to a massive buzz of determination.”
Carl Hoffman, a Wired reporter who had watched the failure of the second launch with Musk, reached him to ask how he maintained his optimism. “Optimism, pessimism, fuck that,” Musk answered. “We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”
With that level of determination, many things that are otherwise impossible crossover into the possible.
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