1634: [Part 1] How To Develop Mastery, Make Millions, and Be Happy by Benjamin Hardy

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[00:01:22] In the book So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport dispels the myth of what he calls the Passion Hypothesis. The most common and cliché advice about seeking a happy life and prosperous career is to follow your passion. Millennials are notorious for seeking fulfilling and passion-filled jobs, only to be left disappointed and disappointing. The primary problem, according to Newport, with the passion hypothesis, is that all the attention is focused on the self.

[00:01:51] People who want a job they are passionate about are less concerned about what they can give to the world and are more concerned about what the world can give to them. There is no right job. Quote, Everything popular is wrong. Oscar Wilde Most people are unsuccessful for a reason. They operate with faulty assumptions about how the world works. One of those assumptions is that we as people have pre-existing passions we need to discover and then follow.

[00:02:20] Famed psychologist and author of Mindset Carol Dweck would call this a fixed mindset. Rather than selfishly seeking a life you're passionate about, Newport recommends becoming a craftsman, wherein you develop rare and valuable skills. Newport calls these rare and valuable skills career capital. Here's how this works. You determine skills and abilities that would be useful to the world. You set clear goals for mastering those rare and valuable skills.

[00:02:47] You engage in deliberate practice, pushing your skills and abilities to mastery. As you get better, you begin to develop confidence in yourself. Confidence doesn't create high performance. It is the byproduct of high performance. As you develop confidence, you begin to deeply enjoy what you're doing and become very passionate about it. As Newport explains, quote, Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before.

[00:03:14] In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. End quote. As your expertise, confidence, and passion grows, you begin to see your work as a calling or mission. Like passion and confidence, your identity and personality are byproducts, not innate. Because you have developed such mastery of rare and useful skills, you have the perspective and context to discern the cutting edge of your field.

[00:03:40] You can then begin making distinct connections and projections into what has been dubbed the adjacent possible, which Stephen Johnson describes as, quote, A kind of shadow future hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. End quote. In other words, this is how you become an innovator and a shaper of societal and global change. Quick recap of takeaways and then a roadmap of the how.

[00:04:10] Here's a quick recap of the core ideas in developing mastery. You don't have an innate passion that you should follow. Instead, your passion follows you. Confidence isn't what leads to success. Instead, successful behavior is what leads to confidence. As you develop career capital through mastering rare and valuable skills, you'll begin to develop confidence, passion, and personality. Thus, your personality doesn't shape your behavior, but instead, your behavior shapes your personality.

[00:04:40] You are the shaper of your identity, happiness, and the impact of your life's work. If you believe the reverse of any of these things, you have a fixed mindset, an assumption which will keep you stuck and rigid. How to develop mastery, make millions, and be happy. Quote, If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset. What can the world offer me? And instead, adopt the craftsman mindset. What can I offer the world? Cal Newport

[00:05:10] This final section briefly sketches the how-to in developing mastery, making millions, and being happy. All three of these things are byproducts of making congruent, aligned, and consistent choices. Develop mastery If you want to become successful, it's better to follow what successful people did to get there than to follow what they do after achieving success. What people do after becoming successful is often very different than what they did to get there. This is true for a few key reasons.

[00:05:40] What got you here won't get you there. In other words, what got people successful isn't what keeps them successful. There are levels, and your strategy must change the higher up you go. If you don't evolve and adapt, you'll plateau. Which is what most people do. They reach a certain level of success, become comfortable, and stop growing. To quote Greg McCune, Success becomes a catalyst for failure. In order to get out of a plateau, you must embrace a learner's mind,

[00:06:08] leverage your position, and laterally jump into new projects that force new growth and development. If you look at any person who is honestly seeking a higher level of success, they are usually waking up early, studying and learning lots, seeking advice and feedback, and creating, testing, and failing. This is harder to do once you've gained a certain level of expertise and success. Once you become comfortable, it's hard to go back to the discomfort of learning and humility.

[00:06:35] Some of the world's most famous chefs continually remake their menu from scratch, even after they've become world-class and received global recognition. Because for them, it's about the process of growth and creativity. According to Tucker Max, many people who become good at something immediately believe they are good at everything. They aren't. And this is a key reason many successful people plateau. They get fat and lazy, so to speak, and stop doing high-quality work and pushing themselves to greater mastery.

[00:07:04] They stop thinking about what they can do for the world and instead focus on what the world can do for them. According to Cal Newport, if you stop developing more career capital, it begins to fade away. You can only use up so much of what you got until you have to get more. Career capital is a resource that you use, and if you don't use it, you'll lose it. To be continued. You just listened to part one of the post titled

[00:07:33] How to Develop Mastery, Make Millions, and Be Happy by Benjamin Hardy of BenjaminHardy.com. And thank you to Benjamin. He is an organizational psychologist and the best-selling author of Willpower Doesn't Work and Personality Isn't Permanent. His blogs have been read by over a hundred million people and are featured on Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, and many others. He's also a regular contributor to both Inc. and Psychology Today,

[00:08:03] and from 2015 to 2018, he was the number one writer in the world on Medium.com. Benjamin and his wife Lauren adopted three children through the foster system in February of 2018, and one month later, Lauren became pregnant with twins who were born in December of 2018, and the family lives in Orlando. Come by BenjaminHardy.com for much more, and thank you again to Benjamin for letting us share his work. But that should do it for today. Have a great weekend if you're listening in real time,

[00:08:31] and thanks so much for being a subscriber to our show. Have a great rest of your day, and I'll see you back here tomorrow where we'll finish up this post and where your optimal life awaits. We'll see you next time.