So Good They Can’t Ignore You

How do you build a satisfying career?

The usual advice is to figure out what you are passionate about and to pursue a job that lines up with what you care about.

Cal Newport, however, isn’t buying it.

His book So Good They Can’t Ignore You is essentially his attempt to disprove the “passion hypothesis” and propose his own alternative.

The passion hypothesis has always seemed shaky to me for many of the same reasons that Cal points out. First of all, very few people have a definitive pre-existing passion that they know they want to follow. Some lucky few do, but the vast majority of the time when you tell someone to follow there passion you’ll get some variation of “I’m not really sure what my passion is” as a result.

There’s also the fact that your passion can change over time. There was a time when I was very passionate about learning how to draw. That’s just not the case anymore.  When I was growing up, the most passionate person I knew was my best friend’s older brother. When he got into something it became his whole world. The problem is each of his obsessions only lasted about a year and a half. He was obsessed with playing saxophone, and then skateboarding, and then constructing ponds, and then Apple computers, and then photography. So what was his “passion?”

Obviously I think that if all other things are equal, you definitely want to follow your passion. But in a world where all other things are not equal, we need a different heuristic for pursuing a career.

That’s what Cal tries to bring us.

Here are the notes that I took:

• The Passion Hypothesis (which Cal is against): “The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you are passionate about and then find a job that matches that passion.”
• He mentions that although Steve Jobs gave a famous 2005 commencement speech telling people to follow their passion, that’s not what he himself did. He was a hippy who was into eastern mysticism, but was also looking to make a quick buck. He came up with a plan to make $1,000 by selling kit computer circuit boards and then later realized the potential offered by the computer space. If he had followed his passion, he would have been much more likely to end up as a Zen instructor.
• From Ira Glass: Put in the work to get better. Don’t judge things in the abstract before you do them.
• “Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.”
• From Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale: A job is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that is an important part of your life and identity.
• In Wrzeniewski’s resrearch, the best predictor of seeing your work as a “calling” is years spent on the job.
• In Daniel Pink’s popular Ted Talk “On the Surprising Science of Motivation,” he defends Self-Determination Theory (SDT) which says that three “nutriments” are required for intrinsic motivation:

1. Autonomy: felling like you are in control and that your actions are important.
2. Competence: Felling like you are good at what you do
3. Relatedness: The feeling of connection to other people

• “Working right trumps finding the right work.”
• The 2010 Conference Board Survey of Job Satisfaction says that only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their job. The number has been steadily declining since the 61% recorded in 1987 (the first year of the survey).
• “The more we focus on loving what we do, the less we end up loving it.”
• Rule #1: Don’t follow your passion
• Rule # 2: Be so good they can’t ignore you (or, the importance of skill).
• He advocates adopting a craftsman mindset (focusing on a quality output) instead of a passion mindset (a focus on what the job offers you). One mindset is a generous focus on what you can offer the world, the other is a selfish focus on what the world can offer you.
• According to Newport, you should envy and emulate the craftsman mindset.
• He says that the most common objection to the craftsman mindset is the argument from a pre-existing passion (e.g. “that person is only able to have a craftsman mindset because they are passionate about they do”).
• The traits that define great work: creativity, impact, and control
• The Career Capital Theory of Great Work:

1. The traits that define great work are rare and valuable
2. The law of supply and demand therefore dictates that you will need to offer something rare and valuable in return –your skills or “career capital.”
3. The craftsman mindset is well suited for acquiring career capital

• Deliberate practice isn’t just putting in more hours, it’s a dedication to constantly stretching your abilities. You need to engage in the struggle to do things that you are not yet comfortable with.
• He notes that studies have found that chess masters have only average memories, but they have outstanding memories when it comes specifically to memorizing chess positions. You get better when you apply yourself to deliberate practice.
• “In other words, outside of a few extreme examples — such as the height of professional basketball players and the girth of football lineman — scientists have failed to find much evidence of natural abilities explaining expert’s successes. It’s a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.”
• Outside of chess, music, and athletics, deliberate practice is not as obvious and so many neglect it.
• “If you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.”
• “I want to spend time on what’s important instead of what’s immediate.” – Mike Jackson
• The 5 habits of a craftsman:

1. Decide what type of capital market you are in (there’s two types: winner-take-all, and auction)
2. Identify your capital type
3. Define “good”
4. Stretch and destroy (i.e. engage in deliberate practice that stretches you)
5. Be Patient

• “Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.”
• The first part of deliberate practice is pushing past the uncomfortable, the second is seeking out honest feedback (one of the reasons why music and deliberate practice go so well together is that to a large extent feedback is instant and obvious –you know immediately when you have hit a wrong note. If you are trying to get better at writing, there is no feedback built in. You need to show your writing to people so that they can help you with it)
• He cites an anecdote where Steve Martin was trying to learn the banjo. Steve said that he figured if he stuck with it for 40 years he would be pretty good.
• Rule #3: Turn down a promotion (or the importance of control)
• ROWE: Results Only Work Environment. In these work environments, when you show up, when you leave, when you take vacations, and how often you check email are all irrelevant. All that matters is your results.
• “Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.”
• The first control trap: control acquired without career capital is not sustainable.
• The second control trap: The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control of your working life is exactly the point where you become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.
• The law of financial viability: when deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.
• Rule #4: Think small, act big (or, the importance of mission).
• Missions are powerful because they focus your energy towards a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world –a crucial factor in loving what you do.
• “Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.”
• Big ideas come from the “adjacent possible” –the cutting edge.
• His idea of “think small, act big” means focus on a narrow niche until you master it and reach the cutting edge, then you can start making big, bold moves.
• The law of remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it should compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports remarking.”
• Cal keeps an “hour tally” –a sheet where he records how many hours he sends in deliberate practice a month.
• “Working right trumps finding the right work.”

This was an awesome book and I had a lot of fun reading it. It challenges a lot of popular assumptions and gives you really good food for though, exactly what I am looking for in a book.

I still think there is something to be said for following your passion for the few people who know for sure what they are passionate about, but for the vast majority of people, this book will likely be much more useful.

You can get it below: