Success lies in building rare skills—your Career Capital. Research your path, learn from those ahead, and align efforts with what truly matters to avoid dead ends.

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Before you burn yourself out working, do this. In the previous two lessons, I shared why you should pay attention to successful people's career capital rather than their personality quirks in trying to emulate their achievements, and then next we applied the basic model of supply and demand to understand why some people are able to negotiate great career perks, money, autonomy, flexibility, while others are not. Career capital, particularly rare and valuable skills, is the starting point for finding work you love. But how do you get them? Well, attempting answer is simply to work really hard. While it's obviously true that success requires hard work, and that more successful people tend to be really hard workers, it doesn't automatically follow that working hard will guarantee success. And the simple reason is that while there are few people who build rare and valuable skills without hard work, there are also tons of people that are consistently hard workers that don't have great career capital. As a result, while they can be relied on for their work ethic, they don't get the same perks that true top performers do. The question of how you avoid this trap, building skills that result in useful career capital, was on Cal Newport In My Mind when we began working on the first iterations of our course, Top Performer. We already had an idea of how people build skills. Anders Eriksson, the psychologist who pioneered the concept of deliberate practice, had spent decades studying the kind of mental efforts that are needed to master difficult skills. Focused practice sessions, particularly under the supervision from a coach, can make all the difference in whether you'll grow or stagnate at your underlying abilities. However, when we ran our first sessions for the course, we noticed something different. Most people had no idea which skills they needed to build. And worse, many people seemed to gravitate towards skills that seemed kind of tangential to what really would make a difference in their career. People seemed keen to improve skills where the skill itself was fun to work on, a project that was effortful, but not too hard, so they could easily convince themselves they were doing something to improve, even if what they were doing wasn't what mattered most. Look, there's nothing wrong with learning things for fun, but if your aim is to build career capital, thinking this way can be counterproductive. You can spend months improving a skill that isn't directly related to the things employers, clients, or customers really want. There are no shortcuts, but there are plenty of dead ends. Realizing that many people were heading down dead ends with their deliberate practice efforts, Cal and I made an adjustment for the next iteration of our course. Before anyone did any intensive skill building work, we'd get students to do research to figure out how their career path actually worked, to make sure that the effort that they applied was moving them in the right direction. Doing research is tricky. Most of what you need to know is too specific to be written down in a book, so a trip to the library often comes up short. Instead, what you need to do is talk to people. But talking to people who have achieved success can be equally frustrating. People who have amassed a surprisingly specific set of skills often shrink back to generic platitudes about the value of hard work when they're pressed about how they actually did it. However, doing research properly is essential. Knowing the path before you start walking it avoids a number of common traps people get into when building their career, such as getting a master's degree that nobody cares about, or working on technical skills when you need people skills instead, or not finding the right way to present the skill on your resume so that you'll land the job, or not recognizing which jobs are career building opportunities and which are dead ends. After working with many students over years, Cal and I found that the most useful people to find in order to get this advice are people who are two to three steps ahead of you in a direction that you're considering pursuing in your career. These people have recently moved up so their information is the most up-to- date and fresh in their minds. Once you find and contact these people you need to know how to get the actual advice. Here again, a mistake Cal and I found early on was that students made the obvious move of simply asking those people for advice. Unfortunately, that almost never works. Instead, you need to act like a journalist covering the story of this person's career transition. Figure out the when, what, why, and how they made the leap you're currently contemplating. These two actions, finding people two to three steps ahead of you in their career and interviewing them to figure out exactly what they did, not just the advice they want to share, helps you narrow down which elements of your career capital you need to invest in and which you can ignore going forward.