This book is a practical guide to shaping a career they love.
Madhav gave it to me as a recommendation — the discovery method with the highest success rate.
Primarily young people who still have time to choose their career. It is particularly good if you are in knowledge work, or have a sense of anxiety because you aren’t sure what you will want to do.
If you do not have much time left in your career, or are decades specialized into a field, this is probably not going to be overly helpful.
<aside> 💡 How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.
</aside>
rule 1: I think this helps me to not worry so much about alternative career paths where maybe “I should’ve done computer science” or physics or whatever. This rule diminishes the importance of the starting place. Instead there are strategies to build from almost any starting point. I was familiar with the triad before, but it’s nice to see it re-iterated here.
rule 2: this is one where I hope to implement deeply into my life. The idea of deliberate practice seems to ring true. I need to think longer about what that looks like in my field. But one concrete example he gives is to read important but difficult papers and master them. I’ll start with one every two weeks and I’ll add them to a Paper bible.
his other ideas are
one of the fundamental ideas here is to move away from productivity-centric thinking toward building your craft. the issue is that important things tend to take a back seat because of the ambiguous path toward their completion and their lack of urgency. So especially in grad school, they get pushed to the back burner.