The first week’s Media 1 readings asked a significant amount of self-reflection.

First, a series of blog posts by computer scientist Cal Newport discuss what the author terms the “passion trap”: the idea that society’s default formulation of the key to a fulfilling career (summed up as “first figure out what you’re passionate about, and then go find a job to match”) is not only backwards but actually harmful, and the more self-imposed pressure one feels to love their work, the more unhappy they will be when they don’t.

When reading this passage I found myself thinking of some of my friends who have recently graduated from university and are struggling to enter the job market in their chosen field. They put so much pressure on themselves to find the perfect graduate job (so that their degree isn’t a “waste”) that when they don’t immediately find that elusive perfect job they feel like failures before their career has really even begun. This will then necessarily lead to a decrease in confidence, which itself adversely affects their ability to find a job, and the cycle repeats itself.

Newport offers an alternative way to think about workplace satisfaction, one that places high emphasis on craftsmanship and deriving pleasure through expertise. In other words: people enjoy doing things they’re good at, so if a person gets really good at something they’ll feel satisfied doing it regardless of what the activity actually is.

But how does one get good at something? By coincidence I recently finished reading a book that Newport cites in one of his posts, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which argues that to master a given skill or activity – such as playing a sport, or performing a job – you generally have to have devoted at least 10,000 hours to it. Only those with the dedication and drive to obsessively pursue something for much longer than others (and, in the early part, to be really bad at that thing) are able to truly master it.

But Newport also points out an important caveat to the 10,000 hour rule, and it’s that while work or study is necessary to become successful, it’s not by itself sufficient. It has to be the right kind of practice, a specific form termed “deliberate practice”, with specific attributes that orient it towards developing one’s skills to a point beyond that possible with ordinary practice.

And so, taken together, these posts suggest that the key to a successful career is to systematically attain the skills to become a master in a particular field, and then train yourself to find value in just doing the work. Luckily, the media and creative industries are fields where, thanks to the democratisation of the internet and technology, it’s possible to continue to engage in the activity even if it’s not your job.

This sounds both reassuring and scary, and seemed an interesting choice of reading given that so many students must have chosen Media because it’s their passion.