Last week, I wrote about finding flow at work in 2020. Really, I spent a lot of last year thinking about work and my career trajectory. A lot happened—between finishing my dissertation, “going on the market” without an affiliation, and beginning to explore a career outside of academia—and it all gave me plenty to reflect on.
One of the reasons I had sought more flow in work was because I felt like was somehow necessary to developing expertise, something I felt lacking in my life. On the one hand, I recognized the importance of being an expert on something that matters to career advancement in academia; on the other, I was frustrated with my first attempt to really become an expert in something. It didn’t really go how I was expecting it to and has not led me to the kind of place that I wanted to be. So, naturally, I sought solace and guidance to address this conundrum where I often do: in essays and books.
One piece about the work of scholarship that stuck with me was Chad Wellmon’s essay about Max Weber, titled “The scholar’s vocation.” There is more to the piece, but I want to focus on a passage about Weber’s idea that scholarship—i.e., intellectual work—is a kind of spiritual work. That is, intellectual labor involves a kind of mental discipline, concretized in practices and rules whereby information is consumed, processed, and novel ideas are produced and circulated. In this, scholarship is not unlike monasticism, in that it entails forming your life around and being formed by exemplary standards and ideals of action in the world. Monastic orders encoded this not only in ideas, but in the daily and seasonal rhythms of living the liturgy. Such spiritual disciplines were designed to transform the body, the mind, and the soul. By analogy, scholarship as a kind of spiritual work also requires its own liturgies for living scholastically.
What I took from Wellmon was that the most important spiritual discipline for the scholar is the control over attention. Spiritual discipline—i.e., keeping the liturgies for living—staves off the “inertia of disobedience” that erodes attention. It calls on us to be attentive to the world around us, to listen, to see, to stay present. Spiritual discipline thereby helps us maintain our link to reality. It helps us stay in a mental and emotional state where we can feel flow in practicing our life’s labors. Spiritual discipline thus allows us to “claim a life as one’s own.”
I suppose I had been developing my own liturgies for living since I began graduate school without calling them by that name. I’ve variously called them coping mechanisms, lifehacks, productivity strategies, you name it. I have been more or less intentional about developing these over time, but in 2020, I really sat down to examine my own process and to try to improve it.
One book I had read previously but came back to in playing the Feelings Collector last year was Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” which outlines a theory of how one can find and then do Great Work. The core of the book concerns practical advice about how to approach developing the necessary “career capital”—in my case: expertise—to cash in and score a job that meets one’s material needs, is fulfilling, and can be considered Great Work.
Great Work has three traits: creativity, impact, and control. To find work that allows you to have all three, you must be able to offer some compelling skill or valuable service in exchange. But these aren’t just a list of attributes in a job description, they are also the personal attributes of the worker themselves.
Among other interventions, Newport’s book talks at length about how to develop these traits through adopting the craftsman’s mindset, which I understand as a sort of liturgy for living your work-life. In order to get what you want (Great Work) you need to provide some kind of value, skill, or service that you can trade for it. While I don’t love the human capital and market-oriented conceptual framing, it is important to note that ultimately there is a kind of “cashing in” that must occur. The craftsman’s mindset is the framework that is most effective for generating the kind of value that you can exchange for having a job that allows you to do Great Work.
At any rate, the five habits that constitute the craftsman’s mindset are (91):
1) Decide what career capital market you’re in
a. What are the realistic paths to creativity, impact, and control in your chosen field?
2) Identify your human capital type
a. What skills/aptitudes do you want to build to use to cash in?
3) Define the good for yourself
a. Set clear goals for acquiring the skills and aptitudes needed to generate the career capital needed to cash in for the Great Work you desire.
4) Stretch yourself and destroy barriers
a. Through deliberate practice, systematically:
i. Push your focus and concentration;
ii. Push past your comfort zone; and,
b. Embrace honest feedback.
5) Be patient and diligent
a. Pay attention to your main pursuit and ignore others as they pop up along the way, within reason.
b. Stretch yourself daily.
On a very simple level, the takeaway from Newport is that, in order to do Great Work—to have control over your work-life, to ensure that you are able to engage in your craft creatively, and to have an impact on the world—you will need to specialize in something through deliberate practice, so as to acquire the career capital needed to be able to cash in on the right opportunities.
In keeping with the K. Anders Ericsson “deliberate practice” model I wrote about previously, Newport writes that in the pursuit of Great Work if you just show up and work hard, you’ll hit a performance plateau before too long and fail to improve. You won’t develop the expertise or career capital that you need to do/have Great Work. Deliberate practice is therefore key. Newport advises that we dedicate ourselves to constantly learning, and to not stop even once we’re good, because we can be even better. In pursuit of Great Work, we must commit to regularly push ourselves beyond our comfort zones.
To return to where I began; this was what I felt I was missing in grad school. I showed up and worked hard, but I didn’t engage in enough of the right kind of deliberate practice, nor did I insist on feedback when it wasn’t forthcoming. Now, the fact that I have thus far not attained gainful employment post-PhD has as much to do with COVID-19 and the already long-since fucked up academic labor market as much as my own efforts. But I have certainly seen plenty of peers from my institution and department advance to postdoctoral positions. In Newport’s terms, what they all share in common is that they continued to develop their career capital—or already started with more, let’s face it—whereas I plateaued after fieldwork and stopped improving at the rate that was needed to be competitive on the market fresh from defending.
So naturally, Newport’s framework was attractive to me. It seemed to explain what went wrong and what might help to fix it. But there is a twist. Newport’s thesis on expertise, specialization and the craft of work is contradicted by one of the arguments made by David Epstein in “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.” Epstein contends that over-early specialization is actually counterproductive in finding and doing Great Work.
One of my take-aways from the excellent chapter on Francis Hesselbein is that the extent to which one can really plan ahead for career moves in the way that Newport prescribes is pretty limited actually. This is true when you look at the reality of most peoples’ life situations, but it especially when you look at those people who do/have Great Work. My understanding of Epstein’s argument in the chapter “Flirting with Your Possible Selves” is that Newport’s model can be viewed as an ex post facto explanation for what is—for most people doing Great Work—actually a relatively unguided and ad hoc process of adjusting for “match quality” over time. Match quality is the degree of fit between the work someone is doing and who they are, their abilities, and their proclivities.
Epstein’s evidence comes from his study of so-called “dark horses,” i.e., people with unusual career paths. What Epstein found is that these people were constantly on the hunt for match quality. Such people are unconcerned with “falling behind,” but rather work from where they are at the moment, what their current motivations are, what they have learned they enjoy doing, what they would like to learn how to do, and what the present opportunities available to them are. The question that guides is: “what is the best match for me right now?”. And crucially, with respect to the longer term: “maybe a year from now, I’ll switch because I will have found something better.”
For Newport, deliberate practice is something you do while oriented toward the predetermined long-term goal of finding Great Work. Epstein shows that in practice, long-term goal setting does not tend to be characteristic of those people who are widely recognized as doing Great Work. Instead, deliberate practice is something that people who do Great Work do with the goal of doing whatever it seems like will teach you something and allow you to be of service in the moment.
For Epstein, it is the process of accumulating diverse experiences that ultimately adds up to something that, only in retrospect, can be identified as having an explicable path, or seem to have been planned. Instead, Great Work is an incidental outcome, resulting from the accretion of skills and know-how over time through the constant pursuit of shorter-term goals.
Reading Newport through Epstein: people who do Great Work, and who are fulfilled in their work, do pursue long-term goals, but they only formulate these goals and pursue them after a (long) period of discovery. In fact, it can be extraordinarily risky to make a long-term commitment to something before you know how it fits you, especially if you consider the path to be fixed. I feel like my life is a living testament to the fact that people tend to learn things about themselves halfway through medical school or getting a PhD that they could not have ever known at the outset. Indeed, our life and work experiences always change, if for no other reason than we always change.
Regardless of any divergence over the degree of intentionality required, both Epstein and Newport agree on the importance of honest craftsmanship; it seems to me that their primary difference concerns how far in advance you should plan before going all chips all-in on something. I learned this lesson the hard way in graduate school.
To bring this post to a close, I want to return to the question of expertise and intellectual work from another angle. In “Confessions of an Advertising Man,” David Ogilvy argues that creating a successful career in any field is a craft. This will partly involve inspiration, but mostly, know-how and hard work. In Ogilvy’s telling, self-confident professionals are craftsmen who do their jobs with superlative excellence and who respect the expertise of their colleagues. Seems like a fine thing to aspire to if you ask me. Perhaps I will return to Ogilvy another time, as he does have some useful advice, pithy to the point of self-parody though it might be—and certainly soaked in the zeitgeist of its time of writing, which could be unpalatable for some, I’ll admit.
In 2020 is that I wanted to up my game, to hone my craft, and to learn to do Good Work. I was particularly interested in refreshing my spiritual discipline and learning new liturgies for living the scholarly life. What I learned is that, regardless of field, Good Work is a craft that requires deliberate practice to accomplish. But, at the same time, I came away with valuable lessons about how far in the future it is advisable to plan for the kind of payoff that Newport writes about.
Either way, one of the most important things that you can do is to pay attention to your surroundings so that you can position yourself to make good on opportunities when they arise. But most significantly, you’ll never be able to do so if you aren’t focused on what you can be doing now. On that score, I think Ogilvy, Epstein, Newport, and Csikszentmihalyi would all agree. It is best to apply yourself where you are and be ready to try something new when what you have been doing isn’t working out for you any longer.