So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport
Read: 10/1/12
Rating: 5/5
I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s blog for a couple years so the theme of the book didn’t surprise me. What’s surprising is that instead of reading a few pages last night before bed, I stayed up until 1am reading the e-book cover to cover! The structure, impeccable logic, and crisp writing make the book an enjoyable journey. I highly recommend it and I’ve already ordered two copies on Amazon to give away!
The book at its core is a collection of anecdotes and case studies researched by the author. Their is a downside of course to building a life philosophy from a couple success stories, which I believe is one of the main critiques Newport makes against the “follow your passion” viewpoint. Instead of directly pointing to the science that would solve this, Newport instead endlessly references popular books from the NY Times bestseller list: Outliers, Drive, Little Bets,… I think a better effort to link his opinions directly to scientific fact would help close the case. I maintain my high recommendation in light of this and see this more as a tasting menu towards further reading.
Buy it. Read it!
My Highlights & Notes:
Thomas had followed his passion to the Zen Mountain Monastery, believing, as many do, that the key to happiness is identifying your true calling and then chasing after it with all the courage you can muster. But as Thomas experienced that late Sunday afternoon in the oak forest, this belief is frighteningly naïve. Fulfilling his dream to become a full-time Zen practitioner did not magically make his life wonderful. location 90
The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job. location 128
this main thread of my argument moves beyond the mere acquisition of useful skills and into the subtle art of investing the career capital this generates into the right types of traits in your working life. location 131
As one prominent career counselor told me, “do what you love, and the money will follow” has become the de facto motto of the career-advice field. location 182
Glass continues: “I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That’s your tragic mistake.” location 254
Here’s the CliffsNotes summary of the social science research in this area: There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction, but the reductive notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them. location 272
less than 4 percent of the total identified passions had any relation to work or education, with the remaining 96 percent describing hobby-style interests such as sports and art. location 283
Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor of organizational behavior at Yale University, has made a career studying how people think about their work. Her breakthrough paper, published in the Journal of Research in Personality while she was still a graduate student, explores the distinction between a job, a career, and a calling. A job, in Wrzesniewski’s formulation, is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity. location 288
it seems that the type of work alone does not necessarily predict how much people enjoy it. location 299
the strongest predictor of an assistant seeing her work as a calling was the number of years spent on the job. location 304
If you have many years’ experience, then you’ve had time to get better at what you do and develop a feeling of efficacy. location 308
“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 location 318
In other words, working right trumps finding the right work. location 331
And yet, for all of this increased focus on following our passion and holding out for work we love, we aren’t getting any happier. The 2010 Conference Board survey of U.S. job satisfaction found that only 45 percent of Americans describe themselves as satisfied with their jobs. This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61 percent recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey. location 362
passion-centric career planning can be deemed a failure: The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it. location 369
“follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst. location 384
I liked that phrase—the tape doesn’t lie—as it sums up nicely what motivates performers such as Jordan, Mark, and Steve Martin. If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. This clarity was refreshing. location 499
Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. location 509
First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later. When you enter the working world with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks you’re assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can become too much to handle. location 512
Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindset—“Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?”—are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?” rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses. In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused, which probably explains why Bronson admits, not long into his career-seeker epic What Should I Do With My Life? that “the one feeling everyone in this book has experienced is of missing out on life.”7 location 516
No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy. location 526
In other words, forget why Jordan adopted this mindset and notice instead how he deploys it. location 549
Note: it would be easier to counter this notion with an example of a job few people admire or imagine being passionate about.
Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101. location 578
Glass emphasizes the importance of the hard work required to develop skill. “All of us who do creative work… you get into this thing, and there’s like a ‘gap.’ What you’re making isn’t so good, okay?… It’s trying to be good but… it’s just not that great,” he explained in an interview about his career. “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” location 599
THE CAREER CAPITAL THEORY OF GREAT WORK The traits that define great work are rare and valuable. Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital. The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love. location 620
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and one traveler chose the path to mastery while the other was called toward passion’s glow. The former ended up celebrated in the industry, in control of his own livelihood, and weekending with his family in a forested retreat. The latter ended up on food stamps. location 694
Note: a little extreme. Edit
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. location 715
There’s nothing mysterious about how Alex Berger broke into Hollywood—he simply understood the value, and difficulty, of becoming good. location 844
it was a really fractured market with huge information asymmetry,” location 871
Note: reminds me of the labor market. Edit
There’s a mental strain that accompanies feeling your way though a tune that’s not ingrained in muscle memory, and I hated that feeling. I learned songs reluctantly, then clung to them fiercely once they had become easy for me. I used to get upset when our rhythm guitar player would suggest we try out something new during band practice. He was happy glancing at a chord chart and then jumping in. I wasn’t. Even at that young age I realized that my discomfort with mental discomfort was a liability in the performance world. location 924
lessons focused on picking out the leads from Allman Brothers records. “So he would write out the lead and then you would go memorize them?” I asked. “No, we would just figure them out by ear,” location 929
I played. But he practiced. location 940
German psychologists set out to determine if grand masters had freakish memories. (Interestingly, it turns out they don’t: Though grand masters are fantastically efficient at storing chess positions in their minds, their general recall ability is quite average.) location 961
Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. location 992
The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity. location 993
They’re both focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback. At the same time, notice how chess-tournament play sounds a lot like my approach to guitar: It’s enjoyable and exciting, but it’s not necessarily making you better. location 1003
In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a colleague of Neil Charness at Florida State University, coined the term “deliberate practice” to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.” location 1007
“When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents,” Ericsson notes. “However, when scientists began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers… no general superiority was found.” location 1017
years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.” location 1026
Note: this is a key point for matching with Skill Honey Edit
if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. location 1026
people are stuck. This generates an exciting implication. Let’s assume you’re a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you. location 1030
There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it. Television writing is a winner-take-all market because all that matters is your ability to write good scripts. That is, the only capital type is your script-writing capability. An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection. The cleantech space is an auction market. Mike Jackson’s capital, for example, included expertise in renewable energy markets and entrepreneurship, but there are a variety of other types of relevant skills that also could have led to a job in this field. location 1103
The advantage of open gates is that they get you farther faster, in terms of career capital acquisition, than starting from scratch. It helps to think about skill acquisition like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy. In other words, it’s hard to start from scratch in a new field. location 1141
practice] requires good goals.” location 1150
Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. location 1158
Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. location 1164
This is what you should experience in your own pursuit of “good.” If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.” location 1169
Note: Apply this to my own life.
What’s interesting is that Martin redefines the word so that it’s 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. The final step for applying deliberate practice to your working life is to adopt this style of diligence. location 1185
This is why Martin’s diligence is so important: Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need. location 1189
You have to get good before you can expect good work. location 1270
Cornell followed over three hundred small businesses, half of which focused on giving control to their employees and half of which did not. The control-centric businesses grew at four times the rate of their counterparts. location 1295
Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short). In a ROWE company, all that matters is your results. When you show up to work and when you leave, when you take vacations, and how often you check e-mail are all irrelevant. They leave it to the employee to figure out whatever works best for getting the important things done. “No results, no job: It’s that simple,” as ROWE supporters like to say. location 1300
Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment. location 1311
it’s dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. location 1323
Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable. location 1350
once you have enough career capital to acquire more control in your working life, you have become valuable enough to your employer that they will fight your efforts to gain more autonomy. location 1391
This is the irony of control. When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably don’t have enough career capital to do anything interesting. location 1482
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. location 1485
The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the complexity involved in deploying this boldness in a useful way. location 1502
nuanced heuristic, location 1514
Note: great word choice
you should only pursue a bid for more control if you have evidence that it’s something that people are willing to pay you for. location 1518
“Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.” location 1556
Note: huge insight!
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. location 1569
To understand this, notice that the definition of “willing to pay” varies. In some cases, it literally means customers paying you money for a product or a service. But it can also mean getting approved for a loan, receiving an outside investment, or, more commonly, convincing an employer to either hire you or keep writing you paychecks. location 1573
her mission provides her a sense of purpose and energy, traits that have helped her avoid becoming a cynical academic and instead embrace her work with enthusiasm. Her mission is the foundation on which she builds love for what she does, and therefore it’s a career strategy we need to better understand. location 1675
The Power of Mission 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. It provides an answer to the question, What should I do with my life? 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. People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work. location 1677
The Baffling Popularity of Randomized Linear Network Coding location 1727
Note: catchy title Edit
This example of joint discovery surprised me, but it would not have surprised the science writer Steven Johnson. In his engaging 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson explains that such “multiples” are frequent in the history of science. location 1732
Big ideas, Johnson explained, are almost always discovered in the “adjacent possible,” location 1740
“We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape,” he explained. The next big ideas in any field are found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. location 1745
Note: amazing definition Edit
discoveries often happen multiple times, therefore, is that they only become possible once they enter the adjacent possible, at which point anyone surveying this space—that is, those who are the current cutting edge—will notice the same innovations waiting to happen. location 1748
We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. “The truth,” Johnson explains, “is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.” location 1761
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. location 1771
From her vantage point as a new graduate student, she was much too far from the cutting edge to have any hope of surveying the adjacent possible, and if she can’t see the adjacent possible, she’s not likely to identify a compelling new direction for her work. location 1775
If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. location 1784
Note: boom! Edit
Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. 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. location 1834
Kirk’s path to American Treasures was incremental. He didn’t decide out of nowhere that he wanted to host a television show and then work backward to make that dream a reality. Instead, he worked forward from his original mission—to popularize archaeology—with a series of small, almost tentative steps. location 1953
“Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they 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”. This rapid and frequent feedback, Sims argues, “allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.” location 1963
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. location 1992
aleatoric location 2051
Note: cool word Edit
“You’re either remarkable or invisible,” says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow. As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: “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.” location 2057
if I publish a book that says “follow your passion” is bad advice, (hopefully) this would compel you to spread the word. That is, the book you’re holding was conceived from the very early stages with the hope of being seen as “remarkable.” location 2091
Note: clever Edit
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. location 2107
We’re a society trained to watch what’s on and then discuss what caught our attention the next day. location 2134
Once you identify a general mission, however, you’re still left with the task of launching specific projects that make it succeed. An effective strategy for accomplishing this task is to try small steps that generate concrete feedback—little bets—and then use this feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next. This systematic exploration can help you uncover an exceptional way forward that you might have never otherwise noticed. location 2143
Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dweller’s obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that’s more mentally demanding? location 2251
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. location 2269
I actually ended up finding a pair of mistakes in the paper. When I told the authors, it turned out I was only the second person to notice them, and they hadn’t yet published a correction. location 2298
If I had to describe my previous way of thinking, I would probably use the phrase “productivity-centric.” Getting things done was my priority. When you adopt a productivity mindset, however, deliberate practice-inducing tasks are often sidestepped, as the ambiguous path toward their completion, when combined with the discomfort of the mental strain they require, makes them an unpopular choice in scheduling decisions. It’s much easier to redesign your graduate-student Web page than it is to grapple with a mind-melting proof. The result for me was that my career capital stores, initially built up during the forced strain of my early years as a graduate student, were dwindling as time went on. location 2326
Note: huge!
Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice. location 2331
a little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: It’s a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didn’t exist before). It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback. location 2442
In other words, the system as a whole is a closed feedback loop—constantly evolving toward a clearer and better supported vision for my work. location 2455
He didn’t need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness—he needed instead a better approach to the work already available to him. location 2480
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