Top 5 Lessons Learned from 5 Years and 5000+ Students in my Career Course

Just over five years ago, Cal Newport and I launched the first session of our career course: Top Performer.

The release was shortly after the publication of Cal’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Cal’s career-advice book dispelled the myth that following your passion was the key to fulfilling work. Instead, the heart of great careers is rare and valuable skills — in other words, being a top performer at your job.

We designed the course to offer a structured approach to career improvement. How can you figure out how your career really works? How can you produce stellar work that will get you noticed (and rewarded)? More deeply, how can you build a career that gives you the lifestyle you want, instead of just endless ladder climbing?

Here are some of the biggest lessons we’ve learned since the early days of the course:

Lesson #1: The Machine Learning Fallacy

An inside joke among those who help run Top Performer is how often the students’ first idea about how to improve their career is to learn more about machine learning. This is not to say that machine learning isn’t valuable (it is), but its popularity in this context highlights the degree to which many imagine that the key to career success is found primarily in mastering an exotic skill.

In reality, learning to first become reliable, and then second to produce what you say you’re…