Clay Stafford talks with Cal Newport on “Building a Meaningful Career”

Cal Newport interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I’ve followed author Cal Newport’s career for years. He’s radical, and I like that. For most of his career, he has argued against the conventional wisdom of “follow your passion,” instead arguing that passion follows mastery in the pursuit of building a meaningful career. In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, he introduces the concept of “career capital,” the idea that rare and valuable skills are the currency for building fulfilling work. In his later books, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Slow Productivity, he continues that thought by providing a roadmap for focused and meaningful success in our current digital and informational distraction age. For writers, Newport’s advice is spot on: craft quality work that people value, improve relentlessly and judiciously, write better than anyone else, and avoid the social trap. His philosophy matches my own. It’s not about chasing dreams. It’s about building skills, minimizing distractions, strategically shaping your career, and causing your dreams to come to you. I got to catch up with Cal from his office at Georgetown University, where he serves as a full professor of computer science in addition to his side gig as a bestselling author. “Cal, what is the concept behind So Good They Can’t Ignore You?”

“How do people end up loving what they do for a living? The primary answer I encountered when I looked into that question was: follow your passion. So that was the dominant advice. I think it remains the dominant advice for a lot of young people. In this book, I looked at that and said that’s kind of nonsense. That’s not how people end up passionate about their work. They don’t just navel gaze and figure out, ‘This is what I’m meant to do,’ then they do that job and are happy. It’s a more complicated picture. The really short version of it is what they tend to do—people who love what they do get really good at rare and valuable things. They use the leverage that gives them to take control of their career and shape it toward things that resonate, and away from things that don’t. Over time, their sense of passion for their work increases. The passion develops over time. It’s not the pre-existing force that aims them to what they should be doing. For most people, there are multiple things they could conceivably build a passionate life about. We could lower that bar of what you choose to do, but we have to raise the bar on what you do once you choose that job, and you have to focus on getting really good at things that matter. That is the central capital on which really cool jobs are actually built. It was a contrarian book that pushed back on the idea that you should follow your passion and say passion will follow you as you craft an awesome career.”

“And it comes down to what you put the work into. For writers, that would mean writing.”

“One of the arguments I use is an economic metaphor. Think about the traits that make good jobs good. These are goods in a market. And if these traits make a job cool, those are goods in high demand. You have to have something valuable to offer in return. The marketplace of job traits doesn’t matter your passion, or how much you think it would be cool to work from home, bring your dog to the office, travel the world, or have a big salary. They don’t care. You have to have something to offer in return, so I have this economic metaphor: as you build up rare and valuable skills, that’s your career capital. That’s what you cash in for the stuff that makes great jobs great. As you get good, your ability to make your job better grows. It’s tricky. There’s a trap here. I call it the Control Trap in the book. The problem is, in a lot of fields, as you get really good at something, that’s exactly the time when you get pressures that start pushing you away from what you want in your work life and put you onto some track that makes sense for the company or a track that tries to maximize salary. It could be a track to being really unhappy. The key is being aware that there might be pressure to be great as I get good. Let’s go through this chain of promotions, and you can become a senior VP. But no, I’m going to remember this is what I want my work life to be like, and I will use that as leverage to get there. It’s this process of building skills and then cashing them in to craft the working life you want.”

“I love the idea of capital. And as I was reading your book, capital kept coming up repeatedly because you had to earn that to play that card.”

“The results you get by cashing your career capital make people love their jobs. When you see people who love their jobs and are passionate about their work, almost always, you’re going to find a story of them getting good at stuff that was valuable and then taking that out for a spin: I’m valuable now to this marketplace, so I’m going to live here. I’m going to work here. I will go to this or that type of job. They can shape what they want. Then the advice becomes, if you’re fresh out of college, what should you care about in your first couple of years? Not, ‘is this job my passion.’ That’s a trap. You won’t love your job in your first two years.”

“Things are bumpy the first few years as a writer.”

“It’s your entry-level. They’re not going to give you the exciting stuff yet. Instead, it should be, ‘How quickly can I become indispensable here? The faster I become indispensable, the faster I begin to grab the reins of what’s going on in my job, and then I can start steering it in cool directions.’”

“So how would you apply this in practical advice to writers?”

“With writers, you must think about career capital. To be successful as a writer, it must be very blunt. I need to produce writing that is valuable to an audience that matters. I need clear indicators of this. Just because I have this big idea for a novel, it doesn’t mean that anyone wants it or that my writing is very good. The cool stuff that comes in a writer’s life is in exchange for writing stuff that people want to read, so being willing to throw yourself into editing and evaluation and feedback, writers groups, and maybe ultimately an MFA program if you’re in certain types of fiction, whatever it is, and seeing this as a craft that you were developing. You know where your skill level is. You know where you want to get it, and you’re trying to push your skill level up there. I think the career capital mindset helps. It’s how I approach my writing career. I wrote my first book when I was young. I wrote my first book as an undergraduate, and I knew I was not a great writer yet. I was twenty years old. I used a pretty simple format for that book, and then I sold a second book, where I pushed myself to a more traditional book format to learn how to do that. Then, I sold a third book that would allow me to try a much more complicated idea book format. Between those two books, I began writing for magazines where I could push some of the levels of my craft that I thought needed more work. I could take on commissions. It would force me to pick up this skill or that skill and do it for editing, where I have editors looking over my shoulders. I was systematically making myself a better writer because I knew I wanted to be a sort of front-of-the-bookstore hardcover idea writer, and it took eight or nine years of training. I got better and better until my ideas were good enough, and my writing was good enough that I turned out this book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, my first major idea, a hardcover book, and it could sell. And now, my life as a writer, I had some traction there, and I could begin to lean into it.”

“You wrote a book, Digital Minimalism, but you almost have a philosophy of minimalism across the board, right?”

“Professionally speaking, what matters is picking a small number of things and sticking with them. Do them really well. Put in the time with a scale over a long period, with systematic improvement. That’s going to open up the most interesting opportunities. I decided out of college, I’m going to write. I’m going to do computer science. And that’s all I did. After twenty years of doing that, those two things have been consolidated into one: I will write about technology, which will be my main thing. Sticking with the same thing over a long period, you will ultimately build the most career capital and open the coolest stuff if you keep getting better. I’ve always had a minimalist mindset. I’m slow to take on new projects. I’m stubbornly resilient to stick with things in directions I’ve already started. I put my head down and work. That’s always been my approach.”

“You hit those phrases I thought were important: rare and valuable.”

“If it’s not rare, then there’s no market for it. If it’s not valuable, there’s not a market for it. It’s supply and demand from Econ 101. You need to do something that not many people can do, and it has value. Then you can write your ticket. So rare and valuable. You need those two things because sometimes there are valuable skills, but many people can do them. I had this rule where I said, ‘When you’re spending a lot of time on something, ask yourself, How long would it take to train a 22-year-old to do what I’m doing right now?’ If the answer is, ‘give them an hour, and they could be doing this,’ then what you’re doing is not rare. Or, similarly, if you’re spending a lot of time on something weird, intricate, and complicated, and you’ve learned it, but no one cares, no one’s paying money for it, it’s not making any difference, then it’s not valuable. The fact is, rare doesn’t matter. It’s that both is where this starts to matter. It’s hard to do what I’m doing, and there’s an unambiguous value. That’s where you begin to get a lot of options.”

“Would this translate into writers finding their niche?”

“Rare and valuable would mean your writing is good, and there are only so many people who could do that type of writing. If you’re coming out of the gates like I’m going be a general profile writer or something like that for magazines, many people are doing that. It’s hard to be better than most people doing that. There are people who’ve been doing this for decades at all the top publications. But if you find a beat where you’re like, ‘This is using my expertise; I trained in this thing, and not a lot of people know this.’ I do technology writing for The New Yorker and have a computer science degree. That helps. I understand mathematics and technology. I’m a computer scientist who also can write ideas. That’s a rare combination, and that gives me better opportunities than if I just came to The New Yorker and said, I want to write profiles of politicians. They’d be like, ‘Get in line. We already have the world’s best profile writers here. They’ve been here for thirty years. They’re the best in the world at it.’ So, having something rare and valuable makes a big difference.”

“You are hard on social media, but probably with good reason, because I know of writers who, as part of their marketing philosophy, will spend up to—no kidding—two hours per day interacting because they’re ‘building their audience.’”

“Social media is often a trap for writers. It’s not that social media can’t be valuable to writers, but it’s not in the way they imagine. Many writers, especially early on, think that the way it works is you’re going to build this audience somehow first, and then that audience will help you sell a lot of books. It’s not how social media helps writers in the end. There are two ways where it helps. It helps other people promote your book: ‘Hey, this book is really cool.’ Other people with large social media followings can then talk about your book. Your book can spread through social media circles. That really can help. Your book can blow up on BookTok, for example. That could help a novelist. But that’s different than just, ‘I had a big audience as an author, and my audience heard about it.’ The second thing people get wrong is when authors have big social media audiences; it’s often because they first wrote a book that people loved. Why am I following this novelist’s Instagram? Because I loved her books. It’s interesting to see it. After you’ve had successful books, having a direct channel to your audience is useful. They know what’s going on. They know when new books are coming out. It’s easier to spread. But social media itself does not make books that want to be a hit into hits. Authors’ social media presences themselves, that is, don’t make non-hits into hits on their own. It makes hit writers able to talk to their audience better. It helps writers who wrote something awesome get found out by other people. Authors spend too much time on social media because it’s more concrete than writing. It feels like, ‘I know I’m making progress. I can do it. I post things. It feels productive. I see these counts grow,’ but I think it’s a misnomer that you were going to build an audience first, and then you’re going to write a book, and then that audience you already built will make that book a hit. That’s not the way it typically works.”

“Your advice would probably be to do deep work, slow productivity, and be so good that they can’t ignore you. And to do that, you will minimize those distractions in your life.”

“There we go. It all fits together. There is a direct link between causations in a lot of those books. I wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You first, which says get really good at rare and valuable things. My audience says, ‘How do I do that?’ I said, well, deep work. That’s how you get really good at things. You give it complete focus. Deep Work answered the question in So Good They Can’t Ignore You. And then people said, ‘Well, why am I having such a hard time doing deep work?’ And I was like, ‘Well, partly because of distraction,’ so you must be careful about using technology. So, then you get the book Digital Minimalism. And then you get people stepping back and like, ‘Okay, but how do I harness deep work over time to build a really good career?’ You get Slow Productivity. There’s A to B to C to D. Each of these books leads to the next in a way that makes sense to me.”

“There are many distractions in life, and we go back to preplanning the day flexibly to make sure we focus on things we need to focus on.”

“That’s the key to minimalism. The term minimalism is different than minimizing. Minimizing is just less is always better. We see that in aesthetic minimalism. It’s often really minimizing. The less stuff in my house somehow makes it better. But that’s not what minimalism means. Minimalism means focusing on the things that matter, knowing what you care about, focusing on things that help that thing you care about, and being wary of things that get in the way. That’s minimalism. Digital minimalism is not saying less technology is better than more, or here’s the list of bad technologies; don’t use them. It says technology should just be serving what you care about. Figure out what matters to you. ‘I want to be a writer, I want to be there for my family, and care a lot about nature.’ Great. If this is what matters to you now, you can evaluate all technology on the question of whether it is really helping one of these things or getting in the way. And now suddenly, the two hours you spend trying to build up your TikTok audience daily, you’re like, ‘That’s not directly supporting these things I care about. I’m not going to do that. But this other thing I do directly supports this.’ I have this email group I’m on with other authors, which helps me focus and learn writing skills. It directly helps something I care about. That technology should be in my life. I see minimalism as working backward from what you care about and using that to select what gets access to your life.”

“So, let’s work backward.”

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Empowering Writers. Creating Stories That Matter.

Clay Stafford has had an eclectic career as an author, filmmaker, actor, composer, educator, public speaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers' Conference, voted the #1 writers' conference in the U.S. by The Writer magazine. He has sold nearly four million copies of his works in over sixteen languages. As CEO of American Blackguard Entertainment, he is also the founder of Killer Nashville Magazine and the streaming educational service The Balanced Writer. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter featuring Success Points for writers and storytellers. www.ClayStafford.com

Cal Newport is a Georgetown University computer science professor specializing in distributed systems and a bestselling author of seven books, including Digital Minimalism and Deep Work. He writes for major publications, contributes to NPR, and runs the popular blog Study Hacks. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with his family. https://calnewport.com/