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Career Capital & Skill Acquisition How rare and valuable skills are built, chosen, and traded for autonomy and mission: deliberate practice, plateaus and when to quit, range versus specialisation, important problems, leverage, reputation, mentors, and the long game.
45 cards · space to flip · 1–4 to grade · d to go deeper
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Reading list The works this deck draws on, in the order worth reading them. Cards point to a specific chapter or paper where one fits.
01 Book So Good They Can't Ignore You · Cal Newport The source for career capital, the craftsman mindset, the control traps, and mission. Short, and the best single starting point for this deck. 02 Book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise · Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool Deliberate practice from the researcher who defined it, with the correction to the ten-thousand-hour story and chapters on practising in everyday work. 03 Book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World · David Epstein Kind and wicked environments, sampling periods, and match quality. The counterweight to Peak; read them together. 04 Talk You and Your Research · Richard Hamming, 1986 An hour-long transcript on choosing important problems, the open door, and compounding effort. The most quoted career talk in science and engineering, and it earns it. 05 Book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant · Eric Jorgenson Specific knowledge, leverage, and long-term games, collected from Naval's talks and posts. Free to read online; the wealth half is the relevant one. 06 Book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away · Annie Duke Kill criteria, quitting coaches, and why quitting on time feels early. Pairs with The Dip, which argues the other side. 07 Book The Dip · Seth Godin A very short book on telling a dip from a dead end, and on why scarcity on the far side of a hard stretch is what makes it valuable. 08 Essay How to Do Great Work · Paul Graham, 2023 Choosing a field, reaching the frontier, and following curiosity. Long for an essay; read the first third if nothing else. 