What should people do to acquire career capital fast? Work hard at their assigned stuff, or invest in self-directed labor? Cal Newport wrote a book on this[1].

What should people do to acquire career capital fast? Work hard at their assigned stuff, or invest in self-directed labor? Cal Newport wrote a book on this[1]. The short answer is "acquire rare and valuable skills." If you have a track record of applying NLP to massive data sets today, that makes you extremely valuable. Combine two or more valuable, but not necessarily complementary, skills and it makes you a unicorn. You'll almost never acquire rare & valuable skills by doing your assigned work. That's because entry level employees do commodity work. You might acquire valuable skills that way, but not rare ones. My preferred method: survey the land. Try to figure out what skills are one notch above where you are today. Come up with a side project that's beneficial to your employer and would teach you those skills. Depending on the level of autonomy you have, you might be able to get that project approved as part of your official work. A few iterations of this should put you in a position to get a promotion or a better job. The danger in doing something purely on the side, and not as part of the company, is that you don't have concrete results you can show at your next job. You might have mastered Hadoop/NLP/Machine Learning on your own, but all things being equal I'd hire the guy who used NLP to earn his company millions of dollars. By the way, one of the easiest ways to get a rare and valuable skill is to aim to be 80th percentile at two things, as opposed to 95th percentile at one thing. My current aspiration is a strong understanding of user interaction/psychology + a strong understanding of Machine Learning. The combination of the two will put me in a very unique position when designing analytic software, even if I'm not the best at either individual skill. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-ebook/dp/B0076DDBJ6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1355927128&sr=8-2&keywords=so+good+they+can%27t+ignore+you http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-ebook/dp/B0076DD...