SO GOOD THEY CAN'T IGNORE YOU by Cal Newport

• ‘Follow your passion’ is dangerous advice.”
• When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.
• The narratives in this book are bound by a common thread: the importance of ability. 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.
• Don’t follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become, in the words of my favorite Steve Martin quote, “so good that they can’t ignore you.”
• RULE #1   Don’t Follow Your Passion
• 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.
• “Follow your passion” might just be terrible advice.
• “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.
• Conclusion #1: Career Passions Are Rare
• Conclusion #2: Passion Takes Time
• 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.
• Conclusion #3: Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery
• SDT tells us that 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
• working right trumps finding the right work.
• RULE #2   Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
• ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’
• Eventually] you are so experienced [that] there’s a confidence that comes out,”
• obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music.
• 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.
• Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.
• what you produce is basically all that matters.
• 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.
• They’re both focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.
• specific aspects of an individual’s performance.”4 As hundreds of follow-up studies have since shown, deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse array of fields,
• if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.
• 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.
• deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you.
• Deliberate practice] requires good goals.”
• Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
• If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.”
• There’s little evidence that most people have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered, and believing that there’s a magical right job lurking out there can often lead to chronic unhappiness and confusion when the reality of the working world fails to match this dream.
• the traits that define great work are rare and valuable. If you want these traits in your own life, you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return.
• RULE #3   Turn Down a Promotion
• control over what you do, and how you do it, is one of the most powerful traits you can acquire when creating work you love.
• 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. Acquiring control, however, can be complicated.
• it’s dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange.
• It’s really hard to convince people to give you money.
• The First Control Trap Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.
• 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.
• 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. 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 key, it seems, is to know when the time is right to become courageous in your career decisions.
• 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.
• “A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous,”
• “Now comes the first follower with a crucial role… the first follower transforms the lone nut into a leader.”
• “Do what people are willing to pay for.”
• “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”
• 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.
• the traits that define great work are rare and valuable, and if you want these in your working life, you must first build up rare and valuable skills to offer in return.
• Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.
• RULE #4   Think Small, Act Big
• a unifying mission to your working life can be a source of great satisfaction.
• To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career.
• a mission chosen before you have relevant career capital is not likely to be sustainable.
• 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.
• If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital.
• 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.
• great missions are transformed into great successes as the result of using small and achievable projects—little bets—to explore the concrete possibilities surrounding a compelling idea.
• To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.
• 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.
• great missions are transformed into great successes as the result of finding projects that satisfy the law of remarkability, which requires that an idea inspires people to remark about it, and is launched in a venue where such remarking is made easy.
• Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing.”
• 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.
• 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.
• the best ideas for missions are found in the adjacent possible—the region just beyond the current cutting edge.
• If your goal is to love what you do, I discovered, “follow you passion” can be bad advice. It’s more important to become good at something rare and valuable, and then invest the career capital this generates into the type of traits that make a job great. The traits of control and mission are two good places to start.
• the vast majority of people don’t have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered and matched to a career.
• “Don’t just talk about it,” he scolded me when I offhandedly mentioned the book idea. “If you think it would be cool, go do it.”
• if you’re not putting in the effort to become, as Steve Martin put it, “so good they can’t ignore you,” you’re not likely to end up loving your work—regardless of whether or not you believe it’s your true calling.
• Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague,
• This type of skill development is hard.
• “When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.”
• The more you try to force it, I learned, the less likely you are to succeed.
• True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea.
• Here’s my rule: 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.
• Don’t obsess over discovering your true calling. Instead, master rare and valuable skills.
• Deliberate practice requires you to stretch past where you are comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance.