If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. This clarity is refreshing. It tells you to stop worrying about what your job offers you, and instead worry about what you’re offering the world. This mindset — which I call the craftsman mindset — allows you to sidestep the anxious questions generated by the passion hypothesis — “Who am I?”, “What do I truly love?” — and instead put your head down and focus on becoming valuable.
Becoming a Craftsman
In a 2007 episode of the Charlie Rose show, Rose was interviewing the actor and comedian Steve Martin about his memoir Born Standing Up. They talked about the realities of Martin’s rise. In the last five minutes of the interview, Rose asks Martin his advice for aspiring performers.
“Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,” Martin said. “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.’ “
In response to Rose’s trademark ambiguous grunt, Martin defended his advice: “If somebody’s thinking, ‘How can I be really good?’ people are going to come to you.”
This is exactly the philosophy that catapulted Martin into stardom. He was only twenty years old when he decided to innovate his act into something too good to be ignored. “Comedy at the time was all setup and punch line . . . the clichéd nightclub comedian, rat-a-tat-tat,” Martin explained to Rose. He thought it could be something more sophisticated. It took Martin, by his own estimation, ten years for his new act to cohere, but when it did, he became a monster success. It’s clear in his telling that there was no real shortcut to his eventual fame, and the compelling life it generated. “[Eventually] you are so experienced [that] there’s a confidence that comes out,” Martin explained. “I think it’s something the audience smells.”
If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. This clarity is refreshing. It tells you to stop worrying about what your job offers you, and instead worry about what you’re offering the world. This mindset–which I call the craftsman mindset-allows you to sidestep the anxious questions generated by the passion hypothesis—”Who am I?”, “What do I truly love?”—and instead put your head down and focus on becoming valuable.
Martin’s advice, however, offers more than just a strategy for avoiding job uncertainty. The more I studied it, the more convinced I became that it’s a powerful tactic for building a working life that you eventually grow to love. As I’ll explain below, regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset can be the foundation on which you build a compelling career.
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This is a great article on improving “YOU” follow the links and hear Martin rip on the banjo:
Learn from Steve Martin: http://www.mises.org/daily/6247/What-Austrians-Can-Learn-from-Steve-Martin
Job Crafting: Job_Crafting-Theory_to_Practice-Aug_08 and Crafting a job
Become a Study Hack (Study Success) http://calnewport.com/blog/
Fed Regional Bank President Calls Out the Fed By Joseph Salerno ·
Sunday, January 13th, 2013
In a speech in New Jersey last week, Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Plosser sounded an Austrian note in reportedly calling for the Fed to slow or halt its bond purchases in the near future because their benefits are “pretty meager” and they involve “lots of risks” including distorting the economy. Plosser also criticized the Fed’s zero interest-rate policy as counterproductive, stating:
Efforts to drive real rates more negative or promises to keep rates low for a long time may have frustrated households’ efforts to rebuild their balance sheets without stimulating aggregate demand or consumption . . . Monetary policy accommodation that lowers interest rates is unlikely to stimulate firms to hire and invest until a significant amount of the uncertainty has been resolved. Firms have the resources to invest and hire, but they are uncertain as to how to put those resources to their highest valued use.
President Plosser is to be applauded for his Austrian insight that rational entrepreneurial skittishness in the face of regime uncertainty–and not a shortage of money or Krugman’s mythical “liquidity trap”– is responsible for the U.S economy’s stagnant recovery.
Black Swans
These articles reconcile Tobin’s Q with Austrian Business Cycle Theory:
Austrians and the Black Swan and Q Ratios and Stock Market Crashes
Let me know if you grasp those two articles.
PS: Now there is a way to place PERMANENT links to the investing videos and book vaults. I will post those later this week. If someone does NOT think that is a good idea let me know. Anytime someone wants to view a video lecture, they can go to the links page.