So Good They Can’t Ignore You – Cal Newport

So Good They Can’t Ignore You” is a great book for any career-focused individual no matter where they are in their career. For any younger readers, this will give you a killer edge.

Cal has broken a very common and deeply rooted misconception “Follow your passion” with logical reasons and field research to support his idea. He has effectively proved that “Follow your passion” is flawed and can be harmful. It can lead to many job changes and dissatisfaction in life.

The book is divided into four sections, each section corresponding to four rules that Newport recommends you should apply to your career to find the best type of work for you:

1. Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion
2. Rule #2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
3. Rule #3: Avoid The Control Traps
4. Rule #4: Finding A Mission

KEY IDEAS

• The passion mindset – Focusing on the value your work is giving you; leads to unhappiness and work dissatisfaction.
• The passion hypothesis – The claim that to have job/career satisfaction you must first discover what you’re passionate about and then find a job in line with that passion; widely believed, but wrong and potentially dangerous.
• The craftsman mindset – Focusing on the value you can give to the world through your work; i.e., striving to constantly get better.
• Career capital – Your rare and valuable work-related skills. The ‘currency’ you use to obtain ideal work.
• Key requirements to be intrinsically motivated by your work (adapted from Drive by Dan Pink):

1. competence/mastery – The feeling that you are good at what you do.
2. autonomy/control – Having control over your day and actions.
3. relatedness/purpose – The feeling of connection other people; the desire to contribute.

• How to obtain these things:

1. Use the craftsman mindset to develop valuable skills.
2. Leverage your skills to obtain more control over your job.
3. Explore the edges of your field to find an overall goal.

• control – Having a say in what you do and how you do it.
• mission – A unifying goal in your career.

The main focal points for me were around the Passion Hypothesis — the key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion.

When you look past the feel-good slogans and ask scientists about what predicts workplace happiness, you begin to find threads of nuance that unravel the tight certainty of the passion hypothesis.

“Follow your passion” might just be terrible advice.

Why? Well, passion is rare — the more you seek examples of the passion hypothesis, the more you recognise its rarity. “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase”. Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.

The passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there’s a magic “right” job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they’ll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, such as chronic job-hopping and crippling self-doubt.

Cal presents us with two different approaches to thinking about work: the craftsman mindset, a focus on what value you’re producing in your job, and the passion mindset, a focus on what value your job offers you. Most people adopt the passion mindset. His point is that we should adopt a craftsman mindset — a focus on what value you’re producing in your job because this is the foundation for creating work you love.

Stop focusing on these little details. Focus instead on becoming better.

Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love. Put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can’t ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer.

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

Three Disqualifiers for applying the Craftsman’s 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 dislike

All of the above allows us to develop and amass what we need to have if we want a career that’s valuable and rare. Career Capital. As your skills in X grow, you become more valuable. You can leverage that valuableness into better opportunities.

Most jobs don’t offer their employees great creativity, impact, or control over what they do and how they do it. The career capital you have amassed allows you to avoid this pitfall. Once you start the journey of mastery you can acquire enough career capital to buy your freedom.

”The biggest obstacle between you and work you love is a lack of courage—the courage required to step away from “other people’s definition of success” and to follow your dream”

To end I’ll share a quote from Cal himself