What can a guy who has failed his entire life teach you about being passionate about your career? A lot; especially when that guy happens to be a guy who failed his way to success and ended up giving this to the world:

Scott Adams is not just the creator of Dilbert but in his own words: a professional simplifier.

I've talked about the perils of the passion hypothesis but Scott's dissection and simplification of the passion hypothesis, in his book: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, is blunt and yet, shockingly real (like most of his comic strips).

In his book, Scott grabs the passion hypothesis by its horns and throws it flat on the ground, using a pinch of humor with some bitter sweet reality. Scott explains how passion is overrated in today's world and how it's nothing more than bullshit:

You often hear advice from successful people that you should “follow your passion.” That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection, and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?

Here’s the counterargument: When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank in San Francisco, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don’t want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He’s in business for the wrong reason.

My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over thirty years, said the best loan customer is one who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or invest in a fast-food franchise—boring stuff. That’s the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job.

The argument Scott makes is that the individual who are driven by their passion often lose their head and take irrational decisions when left to make a choice between realities and their whimsical dreams and so-called passions. The ones who are passionate and are not grinders are even worse.

Scott provides a very compelling argument about why Passion sells in today's world and why so many self-help Guru's and even successful individuals (like Steve Jobs) sell passion. Scott explains:

Passionate people who fail don’t get a chance to offer their advice to the rest of us. But successful passionate people are writing books and answering interview questions about their secrets for success every day.

Naturally those successful people want you to believe that success is a product of their awesomeness, but they also want to retain some humility. You can’t be humble and say, “I succeeded because I am far smarter than the average person.”

But you can say your passion was a key to your success, because everyone can be passionate about something or other. Passion sounds more accessible. If you’re dumb, there’s not much you can do about it, but passion is something we think anyone can generate in the right circumstances. Passion feels very democratic. It is the people’s talent, available to all.

What's really impressive about Scott's writing is his open hearted honest confessions about how most success (including his own) works:

It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I’ve been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion. The ones that didn’t work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded.

For example, when I invested in a restaurant with an operating partner, my passion was sky-high. And on day one, when there was a line of customers down the block, I was even more passionate. In later years, as the business got pummeled, my passion evolved into frustration and annoyance. The passion disappeared.

On the other hand, Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, it looks as if the projects I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

Grab a copy of the book and just like you see a directionless seeker in Steve Jobs in the book Little Bets, you'll see Scott make literally dozens of little bets in his life and nearly failing badly and royally in most of them.

By the time you're done with the book all  you can do is wonder how much more inspired we would be to work hard; and just how many stupid startup disasters would the world avoid, if only more successful people started keeping their humility aside, stopped using politically correct democratic clichés like Passion, and talked about the real ingredients of successful life. At-least we would avoid discussions like these in our offices:

If you're thinking of dropping out of your job without a concrete residual income and a solid real life validation of your plan just because you want to follow your passion, don't you think that you've been reading too many self-help books lately?

Why not give a thought to the thought that your passion for your new found business, as Scott Adams puts it in artistically exaggerated style - may really be nothing more than... Bullshit?

When I started writing my first book I decided to take a style of writing that was a tad bit confrontational. Career advice, especially one that involves self-introspection is like bitter medicine and when you are trying to convince the world that their problems are their own fault, you have to assume a tone that is (for lack of a better word) authoritative.

When I picked that confrontational style of writing, little did I realize that the cloud of self-introspection and doubt would haunt me quite literally with every chapter that I would add to the book. I mean, who was I to give career advice to anyone?

Maybe my dozen+ promotions in the last 14 years were just a rather strange coming together of luck and timing. Maybe all my hikes were just a result of the fact that I happened to be in the right industry, at the right place with the right teams. I am not the richest person on the planet, nor am I the smartest. I am not the most successful person to have walked this planet either. In my past, I've been part of one colossal failure and have run away from one entire project while it headed towards disaster. And now by assuming a tone of a person who knew what he was talking about, wasn't I being what you would call a... phony?

Scott Hanselman's post on the topic comes as close to it as possible in terms of articulating the kind of thoughts every artist has to confront and conquer. Scott explains:

I've got 30 domains and I've only done something awesome with 3 of them. Sometimes when I log into my DNS manager I just see 27 failures. I think to myself, there's 27 potential businesses, 27 potential cool open source projects just languishing. If you knew anything you'd have made those happen. What a phony.

I hit Zero Email a week ago, now I'm at 122 today in my Inbox and it's stressing me out. And I teach people how to manage their inboxes. What a phony.

When I was 21 I was untouchable. I thought I was a gift to the world and you couldn't tell me anything. The older I get the more I realize that I'm just never going to get it all, and I don't think as fast as I used to. What a phony.

I try to learn a new language each year and be a Polyglot Programmer but I can feel F# leaking out of my head as I type this and I still can't get my head around really poetic idiomatic Ruby. What a phony.

Every creative person worth his salt feels like a phony sometimes. Most creative individuals feel like that with most creative endeavors they undertake. The interesting thing about this weird combination of self-introspection and self-doubt is that it's a two edged sword. It can motivate you and push you forward. Or it can cripple you and cast clouds of anxiety which can forever stop you from drawing your art in bold colors and confident strokes and just push you towards the side of safe.

When it comes to our creative endeavors, each artist goes through his / her own bouts of ups and downs. At times the stars align, everything falls in place, your 10000 hours of hard work results in flow that ascends you to a level that makes you shine and others look up to you like you're a reflection of some form of excellence.

On other occasions your work bombs, the time just isn't right, you seem unconfident and you fall plat on your face embarrassing yourself and others who laid their trust on you. You question your own credentials and capabilities and you feel like a Phony. Elizabeth Gilbert describes this dilemma in her life-changing TED talk:

Because in the end it's like this, OK -- centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity.

And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." That's God, you know. Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "Allah, Allah, Allah," to "Olé, olé, olé," which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is -- a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that.

But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life.

The problem here isn't just about feeling like a Phony. The problem here is that we often confuse having an opinion or telling a story, or giving an awesome performance once with having authority or being an expert who has to be right and awesome all the time.

When you write a book, build software or ship any creative work, you are expressing an opinion or telling a story. You may express your opinion strongly, or tell your story articulately or you may give an awesome performance once - but that doesn't make you an authority or an expert who will never fail again. The problem is; the world sees you as an expert; when you know deep down inside that you are still an aging mortal with inherent limitations and flaws, walking down the path of life long learning, failing every now and then and learning from those failures. Suddenly the burden of failing seems higher than it has ever felt before. Suddenly the repercussions of sounding like an idiot seem huge.

When you are dancing the fine dance of drawing in bold strokes and also being authentic in your self-introspection, self-doubt is a part of the game; especially when you know that you are going to fail again and again and again and now that you've been awesome once, twice or a few times, your next failure is just going to grab that much more attention.

In the same talk Elizabeth Gilbert talks about a way to deal with this dilemma:

This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success.

And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance.

If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "Olé!" And if not, do your dance anyhow. And "Olé!" to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. "Olé!" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.

And so in a world where most of us fail most of the time and yet we continue to celebrate success and use it as a Metric, everyone is a phony at some level or the other. The question isn't if you are a phony. The question really is, do you keep showing up. In the end my book was completed and published. It also ended up being in the Kindle Best sellers list for sometime and received a few good reviews; but I'm still not certain that I'm not a Phony. What I am happy about though, is that I showed up.

As artists we are inherently programmed to love our craft. We blog, we code, we start weekend projects and we tell ourselves stories like - If you build it they will come.

The 2014 figures published by NetCraft don't seem to support the - if you build it they will come - hypothesis. The numbers are discouraging - demotivating even.

If your site depends on volume of users to be successful, here is how your chances of success have declined over time:

If you go by averages and don't believe in the dream of the outlier your chances of building anything that gets any attention by a considerable number of users were done and dusted by 1998, which is when we went to each site having less than 100 users.

As of 2014 we are at a depressing number of 3 users per website.

But wait, we've not just lost users to other competing sites. We've lost their attention too. This survey for example seems to suggest an average bounce rate of about half for your visitors:

As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.

Assuming you have an average of 3 users and half of them drop out within seconds of hitting your website, you're left with 1.5 users. But then of course you can't have half a user so let's round that down and you're left with ---- 1 user.

There are two ways to look at this data. The grumpy pessimist in you can look at the data and get depressed. The dumb optimist in you can continue to blissfully dream that some day you will build your own FaceBook. But the artist in you probably knows that 1 visitor. The only visitor who will really use and benefit first from your product --- You.

And so the next time you pick up a project, either have a bunch of paying customers ready or build something You yourself would love to use for an extended period of time. After all, in most cases, particularly when it comes to innovative products and side projects that you might be working on, You are Your User.

Author, Speaker and legendary Evangelist Guy Kawasaki, is bold, loud and un-ashamed about shipping revolutionary stuff that is basically... crappy.

Guy is famously known to say:

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

I've written extensively about the Don't Worry Be Crappy Philosophy before. The central premise of this idea is that it's okay to roll out a new idea before it's fully baked without worrying about the fact that it's not perfect yet.

After one year of working on my first book I fought an internal battle with myself questioning if the book was good enough to go live. After over two months of proof reading and editing I realized that I was getting to defensive about my work. It was time to let go and ship. And even though the book made it to best sellers list in its category for a few days and received a very good response, I still go back and read the book and push out updates to it every other week in an attempt to make it better.

The beauty of shipping creative work (whether it's a movie, book or code) is that you are never done; but you still ship and when you do that you have an opportunity to get real world feedback from real customers. You can then intently listen to that feedback and change fast.

In Pixar this process is often referred to as the process of going from suck to non-suck. Author Peter Sims describes Pixar's philosophy of throwing out something that sucks and then blazing from suck to non-suck really fast in his book, Little Bets - How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries. Peter describes:

Pixar’s experience with Finding Nemo in 2001 was just one example. The film came at a critical time for the company, too, since Disney was considering its option to renew its contract with Pixar. And after six years in the movie business, Pixar hadn’t had a bust. Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner, was given a sneak preview of how the movie was unfolding nine months before its release.

As David Price recounts in The Pixar Touch, Eisner emailed the Disney board: "Yesterday we saw for the second time the new Pixar movie 'Finding Nemo' that comes out next May. This will be a reality check for those guys. It's okay, but nowhere near as good as their previous films. Of course they think it is great."

Eisner wanted to wait until the film released (and failed) before conducting further negotiations with Steve Jobs about renewing the Disney/Pixar coproduction deal.

Eisner wasn’t wrong, per se, at least about the state of the movie itself. Finding Nemo needed dramatic improvement. However, his assessment severely missed Pixar's ability to recognize the issues, iterate, and improve. The team, led by director Andrew Stanton, understood the problems, including the fact that the movie had at least one too many plotlines and endured a frantic nine months to fix them.

Finding Nemo would, of course, become another huge Pixar hit, validating Ed Catmull’s belief that it’ s better to fix problems than prevent errors.

Look around you and you'll realize that most masters in their fields have at one point or the other in their life produced stuff that's crappy to begin with. Getting paralyzed in search of perfection won't make you a master of your field - failing early, failing often and then recovering from those failures even faster might.

It is a recurring trait you see in individuals and companies that ship remarkable products. They all go from suck to non-suck. They just do it way faster than you and I do it today. And That's a craft we should all try to learn, practice and make a part of our lifestyle. People have short memories and no-one is going to remember the crap you shipped, as long as you can take real feedback and move from suck to non-suck... really fast.

(And the Art Of Keep Sending Them Up)

Anyone who practices their craft fails. We'd all love to learn from other people's mistake, but when you become really good at something you slowly start experimenting with the basic laws of the field. The laws that not many before you have broken. Suddenly, you are in unchartered territories. The mistakes you make now are not mistakes that a lot of others have made; and there are not many examples to learn from. Your only option is taking small baby steps of experimentation and embracing failure when it shows up.

Awesome organizations and companies usually become awesome by embracing craftsmen who have the courage to charter into this unchartered territories, take calculated risk, sometimes fail and then look back and learn from the stories of these failures.

Most organization obsessed with the line of best fit may not directly fire someone for failing in a venture or a project, but penalties of failures are usually high in these cultures.

Fail a project once and see how your company quietly removes you from the next mission critical project the organization is going to take up. Go through a rough time in your personal life, slip up on a couple of tasks and see how the next collection of mission critical tasks are quietly and politely passed on to someone else.

Embracing failures and putting your trust on the best of your team members is not something that requires deep intellectual and philosophical conversations. Most of the times, a simple mind-set of "keep sending him up" is good enough:

Trust in the best of people you work with isn't conveyed by delivering talks of embracing failure in company get together and all-hands-meetings. This trust is often tested by how much responsibility you give to the best of your builders when they have failed colossally. The story Pixar and how Steve Jobs, Yet Catmull and John Lesseter put their faith in Brad Bird is a classic story of this trust rightly placed. Author Peter Sims tells the story in his book, Little Bets - How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries. Peter explains:

Perhaps no story I heard about Pixar exemplifies the growth mind-set at the company as clearly as that of the making of The Incredibles. When Pixar recruited Brad Bird as a director, Bird was coming off directing a Warner Brothers film called The Iron Giant that was a box-office disappointment. Pixar, meanwhile, already had three big hits. Yet Catmull, Steve Jobs, and John Lasseter (Pixar’s creative lead) told Bird, "The only thing we're afraid of is complacency — feeling like we have it all figured out.

We want you to come shake things up. We will give you a good argument if we think what we’ re doing doesn't make sense, but if you can convince us, we'll do things in a different way , "Bird told Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Hayagreeva Rao. "For a company that has had nothing but success to invite a guy who had
just come off a failure and say , 'Go ahead, mess with our heads, shake it up'; when do you run into that?"

And this trust is not just about words and tag lines like 'shake it up'. It is about empowering your builders. And so when you do place this trust in your builders, they will in return expect that you put your money where you mouth is; just what Bird expected from Pixar:

Bird would soon test that invitation with his ambitious ideas for The Incredibles.  His vision for the film had so many characters and sets that members of  Pixar’s technical team believed it would take ten years and cost $500 million to make.  "How are we going to possibly do this? " they asked.

But continue this trust and it is contagious. It even helps you find the rebels and the troublemakers in your own organization who have the potential to produce outputs your organization has never ever produced before. How the story of making of Incredibles ends is a classic example of this:

A determined Bird implemented a number of changes in Pixar's process in order to do so, from which Pixar learned a great deal. In order to help shake things up, one thing Bird did was to seek out people within Pixar whom he described as black sheep, whose unconventional views could help find solutions to the problems. "A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things," Bird said. "We gave black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here."

Among those changes, they altered the approach to storyboards and computer graphics standards. For example, they created what Bird called super elaborate storyboards that emulated camera movement to show which parts of the images of scenes needed to be perfect (e. g. , have fine-grained detail) and which ones didn't. This allowed the animators to focus their efforts more on the aspects of the movie that required the most attention, such as the action scenes, which were the primary drivers of the film's plot.

They eventually made the film for less money per minute than Pixar's previous movie, Finding Nemo, despite significantly more complexity, including three times as many sets.

"You want people to be involved and engaged," Bird said. "What they have in common is a restless, probing nature: 'I want to get to the problem. There's something I want to do. ' If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.

The story is inspirational and like most stories of genuine builders it's not made up of deep philosophies. Just a simple idea of placing your trust in people who deserve your trust and empowering them to make a difference and then if they fail once in a while - keep sending them up there.

How does that stack up with your organization? How does that stack up with your own personal management style? How do you deal with otherwise immensely talented and hard working people in your team who are having a rough time in their lives or have just been hit by a colossal failure?

Do you write them off and in an attempt to replace them like a cog in a machine slowly hand over their responsibilities over to other cogs, or do you place your trust in them? Do you see them as losers or do you see them as individuals who are capable of listening to the stories of their own failures and learning from these stories?

In really simple words - do you keep sending them up there?

Because if you don't the loss is all yours - Your best builders are what makes or breaks your organization. Of course they can recover from failures, but when you start seeing them as losers because of a failure or two... eventually, both you and your organization loose.

We live in a culture that celebrates success.

If you want to understand how biased we are  towards success, ask a few candidates you interview these two questions and watch their enthusiasm take a nose-dive after sky-rocketing as they go from answering question one to answering question two:

1. What were your three biggest achievements in your current organization?
2. What were your three biggest failures in your current organization?

There is nothing inherently bad or demeaning about failing and yet every time people have to talk about their own failures they either go completely silent or go out of their way to sugar coat their responses. They edit the stories of their failures to either end with it wasn't my fault - or end with - things were out of my control.

But as a culture are we undermining the art of failing and in doing so missing out the remarkable outcomes well planned timely failures can create?

In his book Little Bets - How Breakthrough ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, Peter Sims talks about the art of failing and why the art is so important:

Chris Rock has become one of the most popular comedians in the world and, while there is no doubt he has great talent, his brilliance also comes from his approach to developing his ideas. The routines he rolls out on his global tours are the output of what he has learned from thousands of little bets, nearly all of which fail.

Peter goes on to describe how Chris picks local small comedy clubs to practice his routines when he starts working on material for a new show. Peter describes how Chris goes from one local comedy club to another trying out new ideas and jokes most of which fall flat on their face and fail miserably:

In sets that run around forty-five minutes, most of the jokes fall flat.  His early performances can be painful to watch.  Jokes will ramble,  he'll lose his train of thought and need to refer to his notes,  and some audience members sit with their arms folded, noticeably unimpressed.  The audience will laugh about his flops laughing at him, not with him. Often Rock will pause and say, "This needs to be fleshed out more if it’s gonna make it" before scribbling some notes.

He may think he has come up with the best joke ever, but if it keeps missing with audiences, that becomes his reality. Other times, a joke he thought would be a dud will bring the house down. According to fellow comedian Matt Ruby, "There are five to ten lines during the night that are just ridiculously good. Like lightning bolts.  My sense is that he starts with these bolts and then writes around them."

What Chris Rock is doing is practicing the art of arriving at success through failure. Chris is failing early and he is failing often so that he would not have to fail on the big event in front of millions of people. Chris like most others who are really good at what they do has mastered the art of dissecting and analyzing his failures. Chris has mastered the art of listening to the stories his failures tell him and learn from those stories.

In his article Malcolm Gladwell talks about a similar method to find out how good surgeons really are:

Charles Bosk, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, once conducted a set of interviews with young doctors who had either resigned or been fired from neurosurgery-training programs, in an effort to figure out what separated the unsuccessful surgeons from their successful counterparts.

He concluded that, far more than technical skills or intelligence, what was necessary for success was the sort of attitude that Quest has—a practical-minded obsession with the possibility and the consequences of failure.

"When I interviewed the surgeons who were fired, I used to leave the interview shaking,” Bosk said. “I would hear these horrible stories about what they did wrong, but the thing was that they didn't know that what they did was wrong. In my interviewing, I began to develop what I thought was an indicator of whether someone was going to be a good surgeon or not. It was a couple of simple questions: Have you ever made a mistake? And, if so, what was your worst mistake?

The people who said, 'Gee, I haven't really had one,' or, 'I've had a couple of bad outcomes but they were due to things outside my control'—invariably those were the worst candidates.

And the residents who said, 'I make mistakes all the time. There was this horrible thing that happened just yesterday and here's what it was.' They were the best.

They had the ability to rethink everything that they'd done and imagine how they might have done it differently.” - What this attitude drives you to do is practice over and over again, until even the smallest imperfections are ironed out.

The interview question isn't just for surgeons. It works for programmers (and most other fields) too. The old proverb that 'failures are pillars of success' is such a cliché. Your failures by themselves say nothing about your success; but they do tell a story that can take your life from the bad side of the line of best fit to the side where amazing outliers sit.

How intently you listen to the story of your failure and learn from it, decides which how quickly you shape a successful story of your work-life. So go on, fail early, fail often. Then reflect on and listen to the stories of your failures (both big and small) and use these to write the story of your success.

Oh and the next time you have to tell your stories of failure, be bold, be open, be unashamed and be elaborate because that will tell us that you're intently listening to and learning from the stories your failures tell you and that, is a good thing.

While I was growing up, I was often called and classified as an introvert. Growing up as an introvert can be hard. You're constantly struggling with the rest of the world's pre-conceived notion of what smart means and bewildered by how the world confuses 'loud' for 'smart'.

I was that typical nerd, who enjoyed the company of a very select group of friends, intellectual conversations and solitude.  Back then, I was also trying to fit in with the world's definition of a healthy teen who is loud and has a lot of equally loud friends. Those were difficult times and I have few fond memories from my school life back from those days.

But then something completely magical happened.

My dad got me a computer.

Like most geeks and programmers I fell in love with the machine the second I laid my hands on it. Jeff Atwood's description of what attracts programmers to lure of code more than articulately describes why I was attracted to the world of programming.

Like many programmers, I was drawn to computers as a child because I was an introvert. The world of computers – that calm, rational oasis of ones and zeros – seemed so much more inviting than the irrational, unexplainable world of people and social interactions with no clear right and wrong. Computers weren't better than people, exactly, but they were sure one heck of a lot easier to understand.

For me code was a way to exercise my brain in solitude without worrying about the complications of social interactions. Code for me, was also a way to connect to fellow introverts who were interested in a language / means of communication that relied on productive outputs more than it relied on emotions.

Code for me; was a platform that allowed you to go into your cave, practice your craft without the fear of hurting someone or rubbing someone the wrong way. You could be wrong as many times as you wanted to and the compiler would neither laugh at you nor judge you. And then when you were right and done; and had  something cool to share you could come out and connect to other fellow introverts and get their complete undivided attention.

Suddenly, what you lacked in talent, smartness, or loudness - you could make up for with intensity and hard work. In a GW-Basic compiler I found my first experiences of flow and in other fellow Geeks and Programmers I found a sense of community.

Not to mention that same code allowed me to connect to extroverts too. Extroverts (the 'distant relatives', that cool acquaintance, the 'business guys' and the MBA's) who wanted things built but didn't have the time, or the patience, or the intensity to sit and interact with a compiler for hours or quietly read a book on computer programming for days to pick up a new programming language.  I was their go-to-geek for getting things built (and I even fixed their computers for free).

In the end it all worked out well and I was fortunate enough to land in the right profession and find my true self through the work that I do. I like to think of it as divine intervention - and make no false pretenses of  having a plan to chase my passion. But in the end, in spite of being an introvert at heart I was able to be in a field of work that I love, have a community of very close friends, travel around the world, meet and work with really smart programmers in different cultures, connect with really smart people and speak at multiple programming events around the globe.

Years later, going through Susan Cain's book and her TED Talk was like a flashback of my own confused childhood. She narrates a story that most introverts would be able to connect to and relate with:

When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventure land inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. (Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.

(Laughter)

Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: "R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." (Laughter) Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (Laughter) But I recited the cheer. I recited the cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books.

Susan goes on to describe how our culture went from giving a lot of importance to Character, to giving a lot of importance to personality and how our self help books went from having titles like  "Character, the Grandest Thing in the World." to having titles like "How to Win Friends and Influence People." - in other words, how we moved from being a culture that appreciates depth to being a culture that appreciates loudness and salesmanship.

Both in her book and her talk Susan busts the typical stereotypes that surround Introverts; the biggest one being that introverts don't have a lot of friends. She explains:

My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read.

But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. He would take the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. And people would come from all over to hear him speak.

But here's the thing about my grandfather. Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. And even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time. But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him.

In her book Susan illustrates how a lot of such stereotypes about introverts are completely untrue and baseless. Another point she makes may sound simple but is a rather compelling one - While our culture celebrates the extroverts, we need to realize that there is no correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.

The extroverts may get the most attention of the teachers but research seems to show that the introverts get better grades. In a world where one third to a half of the population consists of introverts, instead of trying to train our introverted kids to pretend like extroverts in summer camps we may be better of training them how to embrace their own introverted natures, go out into their own caves, work on their ideas and then let them share those with the world when they are ready and comfortable.

She ends the talk with three calls to action which every school, company and manager should take a note of:

Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. Just stop it. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions -- you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. That is great. It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. (In) School, (we need the) same thing. We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. This is especially important for extroverted children too. They need to work on their own because that is where deep thought comes from in part.

Number two: Go to the wilderness. Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often.

Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. Or maybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment. Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy. But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. And that's okay. But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry.

So every now and then, when you come across an article or two that tries to convince you that One is the loneliest number - also realize that sometimes, there is nothing wrong with going into the wilderness to practice your craft - as long as you eventually come back and share your new found insights with your tribe in your very own soft introverted voice. After all, you don't always have to be loud to be heard.

What's the most common career advice that most middle aged successful individuals dispense out to their younger generations today? Find what you love doing and start doing it (even if that involves dropping everything else you are doing).

In 2005, when Steve Jobs took the podium at Stanford to give his commencement speech he offered similar advice to hundreds of young students gathered there to listen to, cling on to and learn from each word Jobs spoke. Jobs concluded his remarkable speech with the ending:

You’ve got to find what you love…. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.

The video went viral on YouTube and while the most of us (me included) were clinging on to every word of the speech Jobs gave, following his advice, Cal Newport was actually questioning Steve's advice and the passion hypothesis.

In his book So Good They Can't Ignore You Newport explains the basic idea behind Passion hypothesis and how it's a de facto career advice in today's world. He explains:

The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion.

This hypothesis is one of modern American society’s most well-worn themes. Those of us lucky enough to have some choice in what we do with our lives are bombarded with this message, starting at an early age. We are told to lionize those with the courage to follow their passion, and pity the conformist drones who cling to the safe path.

If you doubt the ubiquity of this message, spend a few minutes browsing the career-advice shelf the next time you visit a bookstore. Once you look past the technical manuals on résumé writing and job-interview etiquette, it’s hard to find a book that doesn’t promote the passion hypothesis.

These books have titles like Career Match: Connecting Who You Are with What You’ll Love to Do, and Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type, and they promise that you’re just a few personality tests away from finding your dream job. Recently, a new, more aggressive strain of the passion hypothesis has been spreading—a strain that despairs that traditional “cubicle jobs,” by their very nature, are bad, and that passion requires that you strike out on your own. This is where you find titles like Escape from Cubicle Nation, which, as one review described it, “teaches the tricks behind finding what makes you purr.”

These books, as well as the thousands of full-time bloggers, professional counselors, and self-proclaimed gurus who orbit these same core issues of workplace happiness, all peddle the same lesson: to be happy, you must follow your passion. As one prominent career counselor told me, “do what you love, and the money will follow” has become the de facto motto of the career-advice field.

What I really like about Cal Newport's writing is is ability to ask questions. When all of us are swayed with the herd mentality of following well meaning advice provided by a legend like Jobs, Newport is asking more fundamental questions like - Did Jobs really become famous by what he is asking us to do, or was there more to his success than finding what he loved doing and not settling? Newport explains:

If you had met a young Steve Jobs in the years leading up to his founding of Apple Computer, you wouldn’t have pegged him as someone who was passionate about starting a technology company. Jobs had attended Reed College, a prestigious liberal arts enclave in Oregon, where he grew his hair long and took to walking barefoot. Unlike other technology visionaries of his era, Jobs wasn’t particularly interested in either business or electronics as a student. He instead studied Western history and dance, and dabbled in Eastern mysticism.

Jobs dropped out of college after his first year, but remained on campus for a while, sleeping on floors and scrounging free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. His non-conformity made him a campus celebrity—a “freak” in the terminology of the times. As Jeffrey S. Young notes in his exhaustively researched 1988 biography, Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward, Jobs eventually grew tired of being a pauper and, during the early 1970s, returned home to California, where he moved back in with his parents and talked himself into a night-shift job at Atari. (The company had caught his attention with an ad in the San Jose Mercury News that read, “Have fun and make money.”)

During this period, Jobs split his time between Atari and the All-One Farm, a country commune located north of San Francisco. At one point, he left his job at Atari for several months to make a mendicants’ spiritual journey through India, and on returning home he began to train seriously at the nearby Los Altos Zen Center.

Calport's point is a rather compelling one. Steve Jobs didn't start apple with the passion of changing the computer industry for ever or as he was so often known to say - 'make a dent in the universe'. Jobs saw an opportunity and placed a small bet. As Calport explains:

I tell this story because these are hardly the actions of someone passionate about technology and entrepreneurship, yet this was less than a year before Jobs started Apple Computer. In other words, in the months leading up to the start of his visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics only when it promised to earn him quick cash.

It was with this mindset that later that same year, Jobs stumbled into his big break. He noticed that the local “wireheads” were excited by the introduction of model-kit computers that enthusiasts could assemble at home. (He wasn’t alone in noticing the potential of this excitement. When an ambitious young Harvard student saw the first kit computer grace the cover of Popular Electronics magazine, he formed a company to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the new machine, eventually dropping out of school to grow the business. He called the new firm Microsoft.)

Jobs pitched Wozniak the idea of designing one of these kit computer circuit boards so they could sell them to local hobbyists. The initial plan was to make the boards for $25 apiece and sell them for $50. Jobs wanted to sell one hundred, total, which, after removing the costs of printing the boards, and a $1,500 fee for the initial board design, would leave them with a nice $1,000 profit. Neither Wozniak nor Jobs left their regular jobs: This was strictly a low-risk venture meant for their free time.

From this point, however, the story quickly veers into legend. Steve arrived barefoot at the Byte Shop, Paul Terrell’s pioneering Mountain View computer store, and offered Terrell the circuit boards for sale. Terrell didn’t want to sell plain boards, but said he would buy fully assembled computers. He would pay $500 for each, and wanted fifty as soon as they could be delivered. Jobs jumped at the opportunity to make an even larger amount of money and began scrounging together start-up capital. It was in this unexpected windfall that Apple Computer was born. As Young emphasizes, “Their plans were circumspect and small-time. They weren’t dreaming of taking over the world.”

Where Steve Jobs excelled however, was in the sheer amount of determination, hard work (and maybe even) passion that he threw at that bet when he saw just how huge a potential the small bet had. But Steve Jobs didn't start with passion and didn't go around looking for a field of work that would check-off all items on his passion checklist. If he did, he wouldn't have founded Apple computers.

Job's life, at that time, resembled the life of a young conflicted seeker trying out lots of things rather than a man with a passion for one thing and a plan to execute that passion.

In the book Newport also talks about the perils of this passion mindset. Entrepreneurs who listen to the whole "follow your passion" and "be courageous" advice and leave their jobs too early and half prepared only to follow their passions often tell a similar story. The story in most of these cases has a tragic end. The book tells a few of these stories and then offers really solid advice that teaches you to learn from what Steve Jobs and other successful masters of different professions do and not what they say you should do.

There are deep ideas in the book. Ideas of how you can gather career capital in your own craft by thousands of hours of deliberate practice and become so good at it that the rest of the world cannot ignore you. Ideas of how you try out different passions and place lots of small bets. The book also covers some basic laws like:

The law of financial viability, which says you should only pursue a bid for more control if you have evidence that it’s something that people are willing to pay you for.

The book is a must read for anyone who has ever thought of, or is thinking about going on their own, getting more control of his / her work life and anyone who has had that urge to follow-their-passions and muster-more-courage to take the plunge.

The take away? Passion is overrated and dreams that materialize have many more secret ingredients than just having the courage to follow your passion. And in today's world these ingredients are just as important as passion even when no-one seems to be talking about these ingredients.

Go read the book. If you're not a reader, you can see Newport's Video on the topic where he talks about how you should learn from What Steve Jobs did, not what he said. Maybe it's about time you stop listening to de facto career advice every time you are offered a single, one size fits all, recipe for success. Maybe it's time you grabbed a copy of the book. Maybe it's time you started asking your own questions every time a self help guru tells you about the virtues of having the courage to follow your own passion. Maybe it's time to stop worrying so much about passion and focus on becoming so good that the world literally cannot ignore you.