The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.

"Follow your passion" might just be terrible advice.

Most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

Self-Determination Theory tells us that motivation requires that you fulfill 3 basic psychological needs: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important; Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do; Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people.

Working right trumps finding the right work.

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.

I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.

Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.

The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming "so good they can’t ignore you", is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. 

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration.

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an "acceptable level."

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.

To summarize, if your goal is to love what you do, your first step is to acquire career capital. Your next step is to invest this capital in the traits that define great work. Control is one of the most important targets you can choose for this investment.

Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

"If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea."

Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.

A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field.

Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a "big" action.

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.

If career capital makes it possible to identify a compelling mission, then it’s a strategy of little bets that gives you a good shot of succeeding in this mission.

The Law of Remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.

The core idea of this book is simple: To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers. Mission is one of those traits.

I argued that the best ideas for missions are found in the adjacent possible—the region just beyond the current cutting edge.

Rule #1: Don't follow your passion. Rule #2: Be so good they can't ignore you by acquiring enough career capital with rare and valuable skills. Rule #3: Cash in your career capital by gaining Control and other traits that make great work. Rule #4: Think small, act big - the importance of missions.

Even before coming into the industry, I was a big fan of Motown, the Jackson 5, Gladys Knight, the Temptations, Diana Ross and The Supremes.

The ambitions for Thatgamecompany are very exciting to me.

I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.

In 1987 I got dartitis, a psychological condition which means you can't let your darts go properly. For a time, I wondered what the hell I was going to do if I didn't recover. But I remained positive and, thankfully, got over it. It occurred during the Swedish Open when I found I couldn't let the darts go.

I'm proud to be on the CBC and to see the management here represents both sides of every story. This is what's unique about the new CBC: you get a Kevin O'Leary on it when five years ago you wouldn't.

Jealousy is just love and hate at the same time.

To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive. Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won't keep on that way.

Any abhorrent behavior is more interesting to me. I'm always amazed when somebody asks me, 'Why don't you write something about nice people?' Because nice people are boring, that's why.

You don't learn charm. It's not something that you can acquire. I have used it much in my life with great success, but it's not necessarily what makes me an actor. It became a very easy label to attach to me. It also feels a bit dismissive. People go, 'You're so lovely and charming', but it's a wee bit, 'That's all you are.'

As far as I was concerned the important thing was that the music was getting the attention as well as me so it was always a great way to get more of the public to connect with classical music, and opera particularly.

My first impression when I made it through was Good because Im going to prove to you that I deserve to be here because they told me that sometimes I lack confidence in my performance and sometimes Im not as consistent as theyd like me to be.

Being a club pro and all, a guy trying to keep up with golf's modern technology, I hadn't found much time for Internet dating, but then one day I knew I'd met the girl of my dreams when she replied to a comment I'd made on You-and-Me.com. She said, 'I love it when you talk equipment to me.'

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

When I was, like, 5 years old, I used to pray to have light skin because I would always hear how pretty that little light skin girl was, or I would hear I was pretty to be dark skin. It wasn't until I was 13 that I really learned to appreciate my skin color and know that I was beautiful.

Outside of my work as a comic book creator and co-publisher, I'm an avid gamer.

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.

Fashions fade style is eternal.

The strength of individual greatness makes a great team.

You don't have freedom because you are a hyphenated American; you have freedom because you are an individual, and that should be protected.

Voting is completely important. People in America think democracy is a given. I think of it as an ecosystem, and what gets in the way of it is politicians and apathy.

Art that submits to orthodoxy to even the soundest doctrines but lacks imagination and deep self expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.

Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star.

You can't make positive choices for the rest of your life without an environment that makes those choices easy, natural, and enjoyable.