Summary: The core message of this book is about strategies/philosophy to adopt in order to have a fulfilled working life, to achieve a great career. It starts by arguing why “Follow your passion” is not as good advice as it seems to be.

Instead, it stands for working right in order to find the right compelling work opportunities.

This philosophy is less sexy than the fantasy of dropping off everything in order to pursue a compelling passion/dream/project, but it gives a realistic approach to how to structure your career so that it could be outstanding.

The author organized his book into 4 essential rules, filled with lots of career examples. Explaining why some were a success while others failed to reach their goals even with burning passion and great efforts.

Rule 1: Follow your passion is bad advice, it can be disturbing. Instead, focus on mastering valuable and rare skills that you could offer in return for a valuable job opportunity.

Rule 2: Build up a set of valuable skills that will set you apart from concurrence. This will be your “career capital”This will demand high intense efforts to bring in. The principle of “deliberate practice” is interesting to tackle this issue. Remember, be happy when it gets hard. Difficulty creates scarcity, scarcity creates value.

Rule 3: Once you gathered enough career capital, invest it into gaining more control and autonomy and finding a compelling mission. Control and Mission are two traits that definitely separate a normal career from an outstanding one.

Control traps :

Be aware abt the two control traps. The first one could be encountered when trying to gain autonomy and flexibility in your work without enough career capital to back up this decision.

The second one is the total opposite, it happens when you have abundant career capital that you will face resistance from your superiors/employer to give you further flexibility and control over your schedule. This happens because control usually benefits YOU more than it does for any other part.

The law of “financial viability” is a good tool to avoid these traps.

Rule 4: Once you have all the traits/skills cited above, you need to start focusing on devoting them to a specific mission or career project.

This part of the book discusses the strategy to adopt in order to fill the gap (leap) between a compelling mission and great achievements.

It says that it is not necessary to have a detailed clear vision of what your career mission should be. However, you need to be capable of stating one or two sentences summarizing your larger vision.

In this aim, The author introduces the notion of the “adjacent possible”. Which is defined as a zone that provides the catalyst to breakthrough new ideas and access innovative callings. Career capital plays a huge importance in accessing the cutting edge and being able to contemplate the adjacent possible.

Another effective strategy/tool to make the leap between a tentative mission and its accomplishment is the “Little bets”. Which is nothing other than using little projects (less than one month in general) that will help/force you to acquire/master new skills, keep with the news and explore your mission at the same time.

It is to mention that structuring all these tools and strategies into a well-enclosed feedback loop is a life-changer / career-lifter.

The book underlines hell a lot more than these ideas. I really encourage everyone to read it. “Follow your passion” is vague advice, and most times disturbing.