So Good They Can’t Ignore You — Cal Newport

Book in 3 Sentences

1. Instead of listening to the vague cliché “follow your passion”, you should first instead master rare and valuable skills, and then cash in those skills for the work you love.
2. The craftsman mindset is crucial for building a meaningful career. It focuses on what you can offer the world, whereas following your passion focuses instead on what the world can offer you. First you adopt the craftsman mindset, then the passion will follow as you gain those rare and valuable skills.
3. Avoid the trap of attempting to gain control over your career by pursuing an unsustainable idea. You can avoid this by making “little bets”, where you make small executions that return concrete feedback. It’s worth pursuing the mission if people take notice and are willing to pay you.

Impressions

We’ve all heard the term “follow your passion”, and that usually comes from people in successful positions. For example, in Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address he spoke about the importance of having passion, which don’t get me wrong is in theory correct. However, instead of listening to what he said in that speech, we should instead do what he did. Jobs was not as big of a tech wiz like Wozniak, but he occasionally dabbled into when it was necessary to make a quick buck as a teenager. So, I’m saying that relying on your passion to guide your career will result in disappointment. On the other hand, in the book ‘Shoe Dog’, Phil mentions the importance of having a passion for what you’re doing. He portrayed this by not quitting during the dark days of Nike. In hindsight, what all them say is correct. Yes having a passion for what you’re doing will result in huge returns when executed correctly, but I don’t think anyone is suddenly born with a passion.

The core idea of the book is mastering valuable skills, then cashing in that “career capital” for work you love. Cal goes much deeper into this topic which I really enjoyed, he debunks the many myths of the “passion hypothesis” with statistical evidence. This is the first book I’ve read of his, and I really like his writing style.

So, in addition to finding the work you love, you must at some point use the “career capital” you’ve gained from being so good that they can’t ignore you. This should be into traits that define great work or in other words, control over your life. Before we get into how to cash in the career capital, you might ask how we gain this career capital without any idea of what to do.

Well, Cal says that we need to adopt the “craftsman mindset”. It essentially is acquired through the implementation of deliberate practice. The infamous theoretical physicist Richard Feynman took advantage of deliberate practice. He did it by going deep into important papers and mathematical concepts, until he could understand the material concretely. He had a modest level of intelligence growing up, but what differed him from others was his habit of being used to the strain. Obviously, nowadays there are millions of resources to learn pretty much anything you want without using too much brain capacity. Use the internet to your advantage, you can find what you need to learn for pretty much any topic.

The biggest trap a lot of people fall into is attempting to gain control without having any career capital to cash in. There are many examples in the book, but a modern example are those “lifestyle influencers”. What we see with these influencers is they have all the autonomy in the world, enjoying their life and posting it for others to see. But what we don’t see is their frustration of not having any means to support their unconventional lifestyles. You don’t want to end up in that situation where you can’t even afford your next meal but put yourself blind to it.

Who Should Read It?

As this book is more catered to landing a successful career, new grads are going to gain the most value from it. But, that doesn’t mean people already in their career shouldn’t read it. I find that from what I’ve read, you might already be in the position of being good at your work, but have limited control over what to do next. On the other hand, a new graduate with no idea what to do would follow the “passion hypothesis” and end up in regret obtaining a degree with no use. Obviously, what I’m saying is by no means correct, but thats the best audience I can frame this book for as it fits perfectly for them. If you’re someone my age and just turning 18, it wouldn’t hurt to read this book as well.

How It Impacted Me

• Reframed the term “follow your passion” into pursuing something you’ve become good at, instead of diving head first into something you love but has no prospects.
• Focused now on becoming truly great at some skills to offer people, instead of expecting people to pay me because I love what I do with no real purpose.
• Embraced having my brain “melting” when learning new stuff. For example I’ve been getting into Deep Learning topics like AI, but has been really difficult trying to grasp the technical concepts. After a while I’ve started to get a much better understanding of the benefits and limitations of AI instead of just following the buzzwords.
• When I do end up working in a company, I’ll be aware of trying to have the best possible control over my career. I don’t want to have employers convincing me to invest the career capital back into their company. This would result in me gaining more money and prestige, instead of the control I’m aiming for.

Some Quotes

• “Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.”
• “If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an ‘acceptable level.’”
• “In other words, in most jobs you should expect your employer to resist your move toward more control; they have every incentive to try to convince you to reinvest your career capital back into your career at their company, obtaining more money and prestige instead of more control, and this can be a hard argument to resist”
• “If you’re not in control of your career, it can chew you up and spit you out.”
• “Working right trumps finding the right work.”

All Highlights

• Motivation, in the workplace or elsewhere, requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs — factors described as the “nutriments” required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people The last need is the least surprising: If you feel close to people at work, you’re going to enjoy work more.
• Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.
• If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind.
• Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love.
• The craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you.
• In reality, as I’ll demonstrate, you adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows.
• You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life, and the craftsman mindset is focused on achieving exactly this goal.
• THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.
• Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
• If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.”
• Pushing past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback — even if it destroys what you thought was good.
• As Colvin explains in his Fortune article, “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.” It’s so tempting to just assume what you’ve done is good enough and check it off your to-do list, but it’s in honest, sometimes harsh feedback that you learn where to retrain your focus in order to continue to make progress.
• Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.
• To help these efforts I introduced the well-studied concept of deliberate practice, an approach to work where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance.
• Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.
• To summarize, if your goal is to love what you do, your first step is to acquire career capital. Your next step is to invest this capital in the traits that define great work. Control is one of the most important targets you can choose for this investment.
• Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.
• Jane recognized the second part of this argument: Control is powerful. But she unfortunately skipped the first part — you need something valuable to offer in return for this powerful trait. In other words, she tried to obtain control without any capital to offer in return, and ended up with a mere shadow of real autonomy.
• A distressingly large fraction of these contrarians, like Jane, skipped over the part where they build a stable means to support their unconventional lifestyle. They assume that generating the courage to pursue control is what matters, while everything else is just a detail that is easily worked out.
• This story provides another clear example of the first control trap: If you embrace control without capital, you’re likely to end up like Jane, Lisa, or our poor frustrated lifestyle designer — enjoying all the autonomy you can handle but unable to afford your next meal.
• When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably don’t have enough career capital to do anything interesting. But once you do have this capital, as Lulu and Lewis discovered, you’ve become valuable enough that your employer will resist your efforts.
• The Second Control Trap The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.
• In other words, in most jobs you should expect your employer to resist your move toward more control; they have every incentive to try to convince you to reinvest your career capital back into your career at their company, obtaining more money and prestige instead of more control, and this can be a hard argument to resist.
• 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.
• I asked him his advice for sifting through potential control-boosting pursuits and he responded with a simple rule: “Do what people are willing to pay for.” This isn’t about making money (Derek, for example, is more or less indifferent to money, having given away to charity the millions he made from selling his first company). Instead, it’s about using money as a “neutral indicator of value” — a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit.
• Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.
• To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. It’s more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions.
• Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world — a crucial factor in loving what you do.
• Once you have the capital required to identify a mission, you must still figure out how to put the mission into practice. If you don’t have a trusted strategy for making this leap from idea to execution, then like me and so many others, you’ll probably avoid the leap altogether.
• To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback. For Chris Rock, such a bet might include telling a joke to an audience and seeing if they laugh, whereas for Kirk, it might mean producing sample footage for a documentary and seeing if it attracts funding. These bets allow you to tentatively explore the specific avenues surrounding your general mission, looking for those with the highest likelihood of leading to outstanding results.
• But it’s not the type of achievement that would compel this same Ruby programmer to write his friends and tell them, “You have to see this!” In the words of Seth Godin, this early project was a “brown cow.” By contrast, teaching your computer to write its own complex music is a purple cow; it inspires people to take notice and spread the word.
• The Law of Remarkability For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.
• Peer-reviewed publication is a system built around the idea of allowing good ideas to spread. The better the idea, the better the journal it gets published in. The better the journal an article is published in, the more people who read it. And the more people who read it, the more it gets cited, discussed at conferences, and in general affects the field. If you’re a scientist with a remarkable idea, there’s little doubt about how best to spread it: publish! This is exactly what Pardis did with the Nature article that jump-started her reputation.
• The core idea of this book is simple: To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers.
• In sum, mission is one of the most important traits you can acquire with your career capital. But adding this trait to your working life is not simple. Once you have the capital to identify a good mission, you must still work to make it succeed. By using little bets and the law of remarkability, you greatly increase your chances of finding ways to transform your mission from a compelling idea into a compelling career.
• If you’re not in control of your career, it can chew you up and spit you out.
• According to popular legend, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist, scored only a slightly above-average IQ of 125 when he was tested in high school. In his memoirs, however, we find hints of how he rose from modest intelligence to genius, when he talks about his compulsion to tear down important papers and mathematical concepts until he could understand the concepts from the bottom up. It’s possible, in other words, that his amazing intellect was less about a gift from God and more about a dedication to deliberate practice.
• The first type was time structure: “I am going to work on this for one hour,” I would tell myself. “I don’t care if I faint from the effort, or make no progress, for the next hour this is my whole world.” But of course I wouldn’t faint and eventually I would make progress. It took, on average, ten minutes for the waves of resistance to die down. Those ten minutes were always difficult, but knowing that my efforts had a time limit helped ensure that the difficulty was manageable.
• More important than these small successes, however, was the new mindset this test case introduced. Strain, I now accepted, was good. Instead of seeing this discomfort as a sensation to avoid, I began to understand it the same way that a body builder understands muscle burn: a sign that you’re doing something right.
• Every week, I expose myself to something new about my field. I can read a paper, attend a talk, or schedule a meeting. To ensure that I really understand the new idea, I require myself to add a summary, in my own words, to my growing “research bible”.
• Working right trumps finding the right work.