Horace Mann, often credited as the father of the modern education system, began opening The Common School in the 1830s. The purpose of the Common School was to teach students how to follow directions effectively so they would be prepared for factory work.
A few years after the first Common School opened, Mann couldn’t find enough “normal” teachers to help make the students “common.” So, Mann opened the first Normal School, where teachers were trained before going to teach classes at the Common School. In the rapidly industrializing world of the 1830s, the economy needed normal teachers to train students to be common.
The modern education system was built on the back of this premise—creating normal, common workers. In the 1830s, this made sense. Factory workers were in demand and being trained to be common or normal was a way you could help people advance. We needed to train individuals to do what they were told, sit still, listen to instructions, and repeat them back to us.
Today, the world of massive factories staffed by interchangeable human cogs is fast vanishing, leaving many people asking “What should I do with my life?” Though there are many benefits to the traditional education system, helping people who don’t know what to do with their lives figure out a fulfilling (and lucrative) career path is not one of them.
What is valuable today is not learning how to be normal or common, but the opposite: developing a unique, uncommon skill set that is in high demand. The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers by allowing you to scale almost any niche obsession or interest. The fundamental property of the internet is that it connects every human on the planet to every other.
In an interview for my book, The End of Jobs with Derek Sivers, the founder of CDBaby.com, which sold to Amazon for $22 million, Derek gave an example of a successful musician on CD Baby: a woman who sailed around the world and made music exclusively for sailors. She was the best in the world at recording songs for a small, but passionate audience.
There have always been sailors, but not until the internet was it possible to reach them in a cost-effective way as a single individual. Selling a few thousand CDs a month for a record company that had tens of thousands of dollars in overhead is a flop, but for an independent artist, it’s a full-time living doing something they find fulfilling.
The trouble with figuring out a “unique skillset” is that it’s unique, so how do you do it?
What Should I Do With My Life?
The first mistake people make with this question is they ask “What am I passionate about?” The reality is that the more emphasis you place on finding work you love, the more unhappy you become when you don’t love every minute of the work you have. It creates an unrealistic expectation that can’t possibly be met.
No one spends every moment at their work in a state of unperturbed bliss. What the research shows is that a fulfilling career requires three things:
- Autonomy – The desire to be self-directed.
- Mastery – The urge to get better skills.
- Purpose – The desire to do something that has meaning and is important.
Optional viewing, but this is a great short video on the topic.
So, if you’re not quite sure what to do with your life, putting yourself in a position to get autonomy, mastery, and purpose is a good starting point.
Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
The good news is that the way you get autonomy and purpose is actually through mastery (it’s a three for one sale on what to do with your life!).
This is called the career capital theory of great work and it goes as follows:
- The traits that make a great career great is that you master something both rare and valuable.
- Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.
- Once you acquire enough career capital, you can leverage that to get a large degree of autonomy. If you are the best in the world at something, then you get to dictate the terms of the engagement.
- The happiest, most purpose-filled employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become really good at what they do.
Comedian Steve Martin referred to this strategy in an easy-to-remember phrase:
Be so good they can’t ignore you.
Steve Martin became so good at his job that he gets to call the shots and seems to have a pretty good time at it.
There are two ways to figure out what you want to do and master it:
- Become the best at one specific thing.
- Become very good (top 25 percent) at two to four things and combine them.
The first strategy is extremely difficult. Almost no 12-year-old who dreams of playing professional football actually makes it. It’s also a lot of pressure because you have to figure out that one thing pretty early in your life. Tiger Woods was hitting golf balls for two hours per day at 3 years old (If you’re at the point where you are reading articles on the internet about what to do with your life, I regret to inform you that that ship has sailed for you).
The second strategy however is very doable. This strategy was first articulated by the creator of the Dilbert cartoon, Scott Adams, who put it this way:
“Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25 percent with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people.
The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.”
The world today rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. … It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25 percent.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreesen adds:
“[Successful CEOs] are almost never the best product visionaries, or the best salespeople, or the best marketing people, or the best finance people, or even the best managers, but they are top 25 percent in some set of those skills, and then all of a sudden they’re qualified to actually run something important.”
And here’s musician Billy Joel:
“I have a theory about any success I’ve had. I don’t think I’m all that bad. I just think I’m competent. I know how to write. I know how to play. I know how to sing in key. I don’t like my own voice.”
So how do you figure out what the three things are that you should work on?
Enter: the Paint Drop Method.
The Paint Drop Method to Figuring out What You Should Do With Your Life
Imagine dipping a paint brush in a can of paint and then painting a big swipe across the top of a tall wall. There would be a broad stroke where you dragged the brush, but there would also be drops of extra paint running down from that broad line.
Most of those drops would run down an inch or two and then stop. Some might run down a foot or two. And a few drops, not many, but a few, would run all the way to the bottom of the wall.
This is what a successful career looks like. The broad strokes across the top of the wall represents the timeline of your education and career. There are lots of short drops, meaning you know a little bit about a lot of things. They constitute a certain interdisciplinary understanding. Maybe you did an internship in law but decided it wasn’t for you, or you took a single class in environmental studies.
The drops running the furthest down represent deeper expertise. Many of those drops are not that long and represent only a mild specialisation. Maybe you really liked astronomy growing up so you know some about astronomy and read a few books, but you aren’t using that professionally.
However, a few of those drops run all the way down to the bottom of the wall. Those represent a deep expertise in a unique and valuable skill. If you have two to four of those, then the combination of those, along with a broad interdisciplinary understanding (the small drops), will make you a master at something.
So how do you figure out what the long drops are for you?
Finding Your Long Drops
What do you do well, that you also find interesting, and that people will pay for?
I call this finding product/market/founder fit, but it applies to not just founders but anyone.
Here are some questions to reflect on for each bucket
What Do You Find Interesting?
I believe one of the most effective ways to become the best in the world at something is to optimize for interesting. Interesting is an emotion that evolved to help humans optimize for an environment where external indicators were hard to measure. Much of what we do that improves our skills as individuals is difficult to measure.
There is no easily measurable metric which Einstein could have optimized for that would have lead him to e=mc2. He just thought the problem was interesting. This is true of every major discovery or innovation in history.
Answer these questions:
- If you won the lottery tomorrow, what would you work on the next day?
- Make a list of 10 people you would like to work with or for. Are there any commonalities in what they are working on?
- When in my life have I been in a state of flow, or in the zone and lost track of time? What was I doing?
What Do You Do Well?
You also want it to be something you are pretty good at. I find physics interesting, but I was lucky to get a B- in high school physics so I didn’t turn it into a career.
Here are some questions for figuring out what you do well:
- What could I be the best in the world at in five years?
- What are the 20 percent of the things I’m doing that are driving 80 percent of my results?
- Out of all my current work roles, what would I gladly do for free? What feels least like “work”?
- What do people most frequently ask for my help with?
Two other exercises that can be helpful here are personality assessments like the Kolbe A Index and Strengthsfinder. (I take these with quite a few grains of salt, but still find them helpful.)
What Can You Be Paid For?
If you want to have autonomy, it’s important that whatever you master not just be something that you do well and find interesting, but also that it be something valuable.
- What have I been paid to do in the past?
- If you had a gun to your head and had to leave the house to render some useful service, what would it be?
- If you have some ideas from the previous questions, start searching job sites for related roles. If there are jobs, that means it’s valuable.
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But I Really Don’t Know What I Should Do With My Life…
If you really have no idea what skills to start developing, there are a few skills that I call “peanut butter skills” because they go well with pretty much everything. If you start working on one or two of them, you will probably be able to combine them with pretty much anything else you end up finding interesting down the road.
Communication
Few people today consciously work on becoming great communicators. Yet, being able to articulate difficult points clearly and in a way that captures interest is extremely valuable. The internet has massively increased the value of communication – you can now communicate with anyone in the world.
This communication can take the form of writing, speaking, doing presentations before your team, or even creating videos. With a little practice you can become skilled at one or more of these types of communication. Developing your written skills is the obvious place to start since starting a newsletter or publishing to sites like Medium are free and available to anyone.
Organizations like Toastmasters can help you gain the confidence needed to speak in public. Dabbling in improv comedy can also help put you in a flow state to engage with your team creatively and without inhibitions.
Resources:
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- War of Art by Steve Pressfield
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser
- Story by Robert McKee
- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
Engineering
It is a cliche at this point to say you should “learn to code,” but it isn’t wrong. Even if you don’t want to spend all day, every day coding, learning the basics of software engineering is likely to be valuable in the future.
Because software is eating the world, we are trending toward a future where every company is a software company. So taking a free or cheap online course is probably not a bad investment. You may well discover talents in one area you never knew you had!
Even if you never become a developer, a basic ability to work with software will hone your ability to think sequentially even if you never ship a line of code.
Resources:
Sales and Marketing
In his book, Average is Over, economist Tyler Cowen argues that marketing, not STEM fields, is the most important skill set for the future.
“It might appear that a masseuse is not much affected by computers, at least provided you are skeptical about these robots that now offer massages. Nonetheless, masseuses increasingly market themselves on Google and the internet. These masseuses fit the basic model that favors people who can blend computer expertise with an understanding of how to communicate with other people.”
The truth is that it’s always been the case that no matter what your skill set is, you have to be able to effectively market it. Though many people don’t realize it, getting a job is mostly a marketing problem—getting the right company to notice you and be willing to give you money in exchange for your services.
If you work for a nonprofit, you will still need to sell to recruit for your project, raise money, find business partners, and deal with the press. Even if you have no intention of being in sales, the experience of taking a job in this field for just a few months can yield great long-term rewards..
Resources:
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
- Influence by Robert Cialdini
- SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham
- Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz
- My full list of the best sales and marketing books
Finance and Markets
A strong level of financial literacy—financial theory, understanding financial statements, budgeting and planning, corporate structure, how equity and debt markets work—will be a huge boost for almost any career.
Finance is a more general skill that it appears to be; having basic financial skills will also help you in your personal life, as well as in any nonprofit organizations in which you participate.
Both of these are something you can learn by reading. Books on the history of finance, and publications like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, are invaluable.
Resources:
- The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
- Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs by Karen Berman
- Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren Buffet
- The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
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The Paint Drop Principles: How to Find the Long Drops
You won’t know starting out which skills are the long drops for you. My list and your answers to the questions above will give you a starting point to pick one or a few skills and get started on them, but as long as you keep going, you will see what strengths emerge.
The good news is that you can discover your unique skills and reach your potential no matter where you start, as long as you follow two rules.
The first rule: always do more of the things that you find easy and others find hard.
If you’re on the right path, then it should get easier over time for you relative to other people working on the same skill. Almost everyone who takes an introductory computer science or writing course finds it difficult. If the third or fourth course is still excruciating, instead of exciting, and everyone else is moving faster than you are with less work, it’s time to jump to a new field. Same with sales. Or marketing. Or finance. Or drawing. Or whatever.
The very best in a given field have not only put in a huge amount of work, but they also focused their time on where they have a comparative advantage.
People often ask me how I read so much, and although I have some tips that I can share, a big part of it is that I find it much easier to read than most people. From the outside looking in, it might seem like a lot of perseverance, but it’s easy to persevere when you feel yourself getting better more quickly than others.
I had the opposite experience in sales. I spent six months working full-time on sales, and though I got better, many of my co-workers were improving much faster than I was. I’m glad I learned some basic sales skills, but I could see within a month or so that I clearly lacked world-class sales potential.
The second rule: consistently release your work publicly.
Steve Jobs famously said, “Real artists ship.”
The only way to know whether what you are making is any good is to constantly release work and find the thread that runs through it, looking back. I advocate planning your life in 90 day chunks because then you will make something at least every 90 days.
The reality is that you have to go down many dead end paint drop paths to realize which drops are the ones you are particularly good at. This requires not just doing the work, but also putting it out in the world to be compared to and judged against others.
For pretty much everyone, this is scary. Most of those times, your work just won’t be all that good—especially when you are just starting out. The first time a world class computer programmer wrote a program, it sucked. However, the people born with a knack for programming just kept cranking out new code, and before long they were shipping software that put a dent in the world, and their lives.
Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, explained it this way:
“And if you are just starting out … the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions”
Once you have released a lot of your work publicly, you can go back and ask yourself the same question we started with:
What do you do well, that you also find interesting, and that people will pay for?
You’ll have more data to draw from and over time your answers will get better and better.
Keep reinventing and redefining what you do until you are so good they can’t ignore you.
Last Updated on July 30, 2019 by Taylor Pearson