This is a guest post by Mike Malloy. Mike is the Director of Business Development at Waveborn, a sunglasses company that combines the cool of fashion with the soul of giving. For every pair of sunglasses sold, Waveborn donates one new pair of prescription glasses to people that need them. Mike is also a Partner at PunchRock, Washington DC’s collaborative community for social innovation. Punch Rock sub-leases their large office space to aspiring and established entrepreneurs in DC. Mike recently wrote the eBook, Becoming So Good They Can’t Ignore You, to share his story and his guidelines for success.
Last year, Mike made the tough decision to leave his corporate job with a Big Four consulting firm to pursue a journey in entrepreneurship. Recently, I got to know Mike through my coaching program. Mike is a prime example of how determination and little bit of courage can take you to places you never imagined.
Today, Mike shares his thoughts about adapting a “Craftsman Mindset” and the importance of building something everyday.
Here’s Mike -
Don’t follow your passion. That sounds like bad advice, right? Well that’s exactly what my first book, Becoming So Good They Can’t Ignore You, tells you to do if you want to find work you love. You don’t have pre-existing passions to lead you to your dream job and the work you love. Career passions are rare. And it takes time to develop a passion. If you want to find work you love, then you must adopt the Craftsman Mindset.
“Nobody ever takes note of my advice, because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear.
What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’
but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’
If somebody’s thinking, ‘How can I be really good?’ people are going to come to you.”
- Steve Martin
To fully adopt the Craftsman Mindset, you must allow yourself to spend time every day focusing on deliberate practice to stretch your abilities outside your comfort zone. In doing so, you are forced to deal with your fears, especially your fear of failure. However, failure is an imperative part of the learning process, especially as an entrepreneur who is on a quest to find work you love.
As part of my Craftsman Mindset, I spend at least one hour every day reading on topics that will increase my knowledge and enhance my personal development in a variety of areas (e.g., entrepreneurship, leadership, technology, ultimate frisbee, etc). Deliberate practice is the key to adopting the Craftsman Mindset. I cannot stress this enough. Stretch your ability. Go outside your comfort zone. Embrace failure. Succeeding 100% of the time is a waste. You must fail, so you can learn from the failures to achieve greater success in the future. Examine specific areas you want to develop. Concentrate all your efforts on performing at the highest possible level. And then find ways to stretch your abilities even more to perform at an even higher level.
There’s something liberating about the Craftsman Mindset. It tells you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is “just right,” and instead put your head down and focus on getting really, really good. No one owes you a great career. You need to earn it. And the process isn’t easy. Regardless of how you feel about your current job situation, adopting a Craftsman Mindset is the foundation on which to build a compelling career. When you deliberately practice and stretch your abilities, you acquire more career capital.
The Career Capital Theory of Great Work states that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable and therefore require rare and valuable skills – known as career capital. To acquire career capital, you must focus on deliberate practice and stretch yourself outside of your comfort zone. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, states that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill. For instance, it takes 10 years of practicing 3 hours a day to become a master in your subject. It takes approximately 5 years of full-time employment to become proficient in your field. To successfully adopt the Craftsman Mindset, you have to approach your job(s) the same way professional athletes approach training for their sport, with a dedication to deliberate practice.
People with compelling careers start by getting good at something rare and valuable, building their career capital, and then cashing in this capital for the traits that make great work great. Your first step to finding work you love is to adopt the Craftsman Mindset. Next, you need to sit down and decide what rare and valuable skills you want to learn.
A few months ago, I worked closely with Scott in his Personal Growth Coaching program. With Scott’s help, I was able to identify several areas in my life that I wanted improve in 2013. The goal setting process taught me about the pillars of life and it allowed me to plan for the year ahead. Only two months into 2013, I have already achieved several of the goals I set for myself including:
- Maintaining strong relationships with family and friends
- Spending a month traveling down the coast of CA
- Publishing my first book
- Achieving more financial security
- Coaching Georgetown ultimate to a 2nd place tournament finish
- Attending mass on a regular basis
- Going on at least one real date each month
- Teaching my first college class (yesterday!)
Thanks again to Scott for having such a positive impact on my life. I highly encourage you to check out his Personal Growth Coaching.
If you want to learn more about adopting the Craftsman Mindset to find work you love, please download my first book and share it with your colleagues, friends, and family members. You can download it for free by clicking the image below:
The book is less than 60 pages and can be read in about an hour, much like Scott’s eBook, The 45-Minute MBA.
What are your thoughts about the Craftsman Mindset? I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.
-Mike
Mike Malloy is the Director of Business Development at Waveborn and Partner at PunchRock. A graduate of Boston College and Georgetown University, Mike’s mission is to pursue a journey in entrepreneurship while making a social impact. Follow Mike on Twitter.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Mike – nice article. The big points I take away are just chipping away every day. Everybody wants success NOW yet it’s the small incremental changes and accomplishments that get you there. They are not glitzy. They are not glamorous…yet they are necessary. As the famous saying goes, “The journey of 100 miles starts with the first step”…or something similar.
Without having goals to work towards, how would you know what steps to take? Pick something. Stick to it. Be diligent. If you’re not getting what you want, make a minor adjustment and then continue being diligent.
What I will say is missing from this is mindset. While chipping away a little at a time is great, if you have self defeating thoughts you’ll never get there. What do you do to keep yourself from allowing the “failure talk” inside your head to take over? The brain’s default mode is to move towards assuming failure so you stay in status quo. Can you offer any strategies for people to overcome that?
Congrats on reaching a number of goals already – now it’s time to set bigger ones.
/rc
Ryan – Thanks for the insightful comments! You bring up an excellent point about how can you train yourself to handle repeated failures, and I think the solution to this is mental toughness. You need to train your brain how to become mentally tough and deal with the adversity and failures you will experience. You cannot stop working and start pouting every time something goes wrong – because something always goes wrong. You need to learn how to deal with the failure, assess the situation, understand the cause of failure, propose potential solutions to fix the situation, and learn key lessons to prevent similar failures in the future. By increasing your mental toughness, you will learn how to better handle future failures and not allow self-doubt to creep into your head. Here’s a post that I wrote on mental toughness with some good links:
http://wiki.waveborn.com/ultimate/advice/mental-toughness
At the end of the day, it comes down to believing in yourself and knowing that you are on the right path. I hope that helps!