So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love - by Cal Newport

Date read: 2016-12-22
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Fantastic book on how "following your passion" is bad advice and how instead to get ahead and be the best at what you do. Recommend this for anyone starting out and not sure where they want to go with life or considering a career move.

My Notes

Follow your passion is dangerous advice.

You need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.

RULE #1 - DON'T FOLLOW YOUR PASSION
Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.

Career passions are rare.

Most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) - why some persuits get our engines running while others leave us cold. Factors described as the "nutriments" required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work include:

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 passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it's also dangerous. It's the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

RULE #2 - BE SO GOOD THEY CAN'T IGNORE YOU - THE IMPORTANCE OF SKILL
If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind.

The craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you.

Working right trumps finding the right work. You don't need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness - you need instead a better approach to the work already available to you.

No one owes you a great career, you need to earn it - and the process won't be easy.

Approach your work like a true performer.

You adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows.

Traits that define great work are Creativity, Impact, and Control.

The Career Capital Theory of Great Work:

The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.
Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.
The craftsman mindset is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital.

You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life.

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.

If you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

Deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can't ignore you.

Deliberate practice - stretch your abilities by taking on projects that are beyond your current comfort zone; and not just one at a time. Obsessively seek feedback, on everything.

To combat the resistance of deliberate practice, deploy two types of structure: 1) time structure: "I'm going to work on this for one hour" and 2) information structure: a way of capturing the results of my hard focus in a useful form (i.e. create outputs).

Restrict the hours dedicated to required tasks that don't ultimately make you better at what you do.

Create an hour tally - a sheet that has a row for each month to keep a tally of the total number of hours you've spent that month in a state of deliberate practice.

Track your Work-Hour Allocation by week, separating tasks into two buckets: hard-to-change commitments (e.g. e-mail, lunch/breaks/other, family commitments, etc.) & highly changeable commitments (e.g. networking/professional development, improving x process, book notes, etc.). Try to limit your hard-to-change commitments to a certain number of hours per week. At the end of every week review the numbers to see how well you achieved the goal of working on what's important. Use this feedback to guide yourself in the week ahead.

The Five Habits of a Craftsman:

Decide what capital market you're in - winner-take all market (there is only one type of career capital available and lots of different people competing for it, e.g. television writing) or an auction market (there are many types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection. A variety of other types of relevant skills that also could have led to a job in this field.

Identify your capital type - you have more flexibility in an auction market than a winner-take all market. Seek open gates - opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. Open gates get you farther faster, in terms of career capital acquisition, than starting from scratch.

Define "Good" - you need clear goals with no ambiguity about what it means to succeed at this goal.

Stretch and Destroy - deliberate practice if often the opposite of enjoyable.

Be patient - diligence is less about paying attention to your main pursuit, and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you.

TURN DOWN A PROMOTION - THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTROL
Control = investing in extensive career capital to gain control over what you do and how you do it. More control leads to better grades, better sports performance, better productivity, and more happiness.

Autonomy = living a meaningful life on your own terms.

Focus on a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) where all that matters is your results.

Control Trap #1 - Control that's acquired without career capital is not sustainable. You need something valuable to offer in return for this powerful trait.

Control Trap #2 - 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.

The Law of Financial Viability - When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek eveidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.

THINK SMALL, ACT BIG - THE IMPORTANCE OF MISSION
You need to build your career on a clear and compelling mission.

Mission requires that you first build career capital - a mission launched without this expertise is likely doomed to sputter and die.

A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough - it's an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field.

To identify a mission for your working life, you must first get to the cutting edge.

"Think Small, Act Big" - advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of "small" thinking. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a "big" action.

Rather than believing you have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance, make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins.

To maximize your success with little bets, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.

In Seth Godin's 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow: "The world is full of boring stuff - brown cows - which is why so few people pay attention...A purple cow...now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing."

A good mission-driven project must be remarkable in two different ways (The Law of Remarkability): 1) be remarkable in the literal sense of compelling people to remark about it and 2) spread the word about a project in a venue that supports these remarks.

Contents:

My Notes