So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Cal Newport

Summary

Follow your passion is bad career advice. Instead, you should focus on building career capital—rare and valuable skills—through deliberate practice that can be used to give you more control over where, when, and how you work. That control enables you to take on little bets that help you determine what your personal mission can be. A mission requires sufficient career capital, financial desirability, and marketability for it to take off into a self-sustaining calling. Individuals who follow this path not only find success but also develop a passion for their work that surpasses those who spend their time finding the right job to fit their pre-existing passion.

Key Points

The author uses this book to counter the popular advice to follow your passion to find the best career for you. This is his first rule. He presents three additional rules that are his formula for finding passion and progressing your career to a world-class level.

Pursuing a Passion Can Lead to Dissatisfaction

The first rule is to disabuse yourself of the idea that you have some innate passion that can be slaked by the right job. This is most likely to lead you to a state of perpetual dissatisfaction as you’ll always be looking for greener pastures. It results in focus on whatever may be lacking from your life and your career instead of what you are learning and how you are growing.

Cultivate a Craftsman Mindset

A craftsman mindset shifts the perspective of trying to find the right work to a focus on working right. In particular, as you focus on deliberately practicing the skills that are rare and valuable in your field, you will quickly become irreplaceable in your current role and increasingly desirable from an outside point of view. The simple strategy of deliberate practice to get better at what you do is something that is largely overlooked for knowledge workers and can give you a significant competitive advantage. It’s not easy—this kind of practice requires straining your capabilities and pushing your own limits—but it will separate you from the crowd.

Invest Career Capital in Control

This focus on increasing your own capabilities yields what the author calls Career Capital. This is the non-tangible capital that you can reinvest into your own career to get better opportunities and greater control over what you do. As you become a more valuable asset to companies or customers, you can negotiate for more autonomy in how, when, and where you work. This control allows you to continue your deliberate practice, explore adjacent opportunities that you are uniquely suited to step up to, and continue the virtuous cycle of improvement and development.

There are two control traps to watch out for. The first comes because you are now a valuable asset to whatever company or organization is lucky to have your services it will be in their best interest to not allow you more control over your work and your career in general. Therefore, you can expect opposition when move towards gaining more control of your career and your work. You may want to work fewer hours or remotely from a more convenient location. An employer will see this as a reduction in their control of a valued asset and may try to counter those moves with restrictions. You have to negotiate for what is most beneficial for you.

The second trap is trying to invest career capital in control over your career when you don’t have enough to back it up. The author gives examples of individuals who have grand ideas for ventures or career shifts that may have merit on paper, but ultimately cannot be successful without the proper career capital to fuel them. You have to follow the second rule to gather tools in your career tool belt, practice deliberately to hone the tools, and then use them to accumulate that career capital which become your currency to buy your way to control in the future.

Little Bets Can Uncover a Personal Mission

Increased freedom in your career gives you the space to take on ventures or projects to experiment and discover a mission. A mission is a work or venture that you would ultimately describe as your calling. It’s more than a job or even a career, but something you feel passionate about and fulfilled in pursuing. Not something that is necessarily innate and merely discovered as explained in the author’s first rule, but something that is earned through dedicated hard work and determination.

These missions are often discovered as you get far enough into a career to push the boundaries of the field or industry. You have the career capital that has yielded enough control to let you explore these boundaries and see opportunities that even other standing in your place would be blind to. With your expertise, you see the open door and are able to walk through and move forward.

In all likelihood there are many possible open doors that could become missions. To determine which may be viable and successful for you, take on little bets (a concept explained by Peter Sims, author of his book by the same name) to test them out. A little bet is a test project that only lasts a month or two. Many may be failures but some will give you a small win in an unexpected area. By taking on series of these little bets, you uncover the path to your mission.

Great Quotes

“The happiest, 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.”

“The Craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you.”

“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 determination.”

“Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”

“Once you understand this value of control, it changes the way you evaluate opportunities, leading you to consider a position’s potential autonomy as being as important as it’s offered salary or the institution’s reputation.

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 to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only place where these missions become visible.