Book review and summary: So Good They Can’t Ignore You
Cal Newport’s book, released in 2012, aims to break the idea of following your passion. Instead, he suggests to flip the idea on its head: your passion follows what you are good at.
A very quick summary about this book: being a book about decoding the formula for success, Cal Newport has some idea about what may contribute to success. Then he interviewed several people to further add on to his basic idea and build a framework centered around the four main points stated above. Finally, he applied the framework above to analyze several succesful people and give concrete example on where this framework works.
The four main points of this book in having a career that you love:
- Don’t follow your passion
“Follow your passion” has become some sort of a mantra for people born in the late 20th century. The phrase promises that once you find what you are destined to do, your true passion, then you will immediately find happiness. However, adopting this mindset results in a miserable career path. Once we encounter any setback in our current job, we immediately assume that the job does not align with our passion, and start considering a career switch. This can go on and on leading to non-stop job hopping.
In reality, career passions are rare. Study shows that what actually happened may flip the passion mindset on its head: there is a correlation between how passionate people are and how long they have been working in their current job. In reality it takes time to develop the skills — and eventual passion — for your career.
Instead of focusing on whether you are doing the right work, try adopting a craftsman mindset. As a craftsman, we are more focused on the value we can bring to our job. Just focus on being the best at whatever it is that we are doing.
2. Accumulate career capital
It is no secret that great, fulfilling jobs are rare and valuable. Therefore, it is only natural we need to have rare and valuable skills in order to have go on such career paths. We refer to these skills as “career capitals”
Back to idea of adopting the craftsman mindset; view your job as an opportunity to accumulate career capital. At this point, focus on achieving mastery and get so good they can’t ignore you.
Two ways to accumulate career capitals:
- Deliberate practice. Meaning you practice with the intention to go beyond the limit of your current skills. Simply putting the hour is not enough — you must also stretch your ability, as indicated by the discomfory you may feel during the process. Case in point, unless people with terrible handwriting actively try to improve, their handwriting will stay terrible even if they have spent more than 10,000 hours writing.
- Immediate feedback. Make sure you have supervisors, mentors, or anyone who can provide feedback on how you are doing. It’s easy to think that you have done a good job and feel good about it, but when making improvement it’s more important to have someone who can give an objective assessment.
3. Obtain control
Once you have accumulated career capitals, it’s possible to start changing your career trajectory to obtain more control over how you do it. It might mean going freelance, work less hour, or change jobs altogether. You might encounter some resistance when doing this, because of two traps:
Trap 1: not enough capital. You hesitate because you may not have enough skills required to make the career transition.
Trap 2: resistance from other people. If you already have a lot of career capital, then the resistance may come from other people. For example, your superior may oppose the idea of you switching to another career.
It can be hard to determine whether the resistance comes from trap number 1 or 2. One easy way to determine whether to change your career is this: are people willing to pay for it?
Suppose you want to quit the hustle and bustle of the city and just go farming a la Stardew Valley, is it the right decision for you? Well, try to see if anyone is willing to give you funding you need to get started. If you can’t find any, then it’s not the right move. Same goes for anyone considering on quitting their day job to become influncer, writer, artists, whatever. If no one is willing to pay you for it, then you are probably not at the level where you will enjoy doing that career for a living.
4. Find a mission
In this step for having a meaningful career, it’s important to have a mission in order to have a meaningful career. As always, a good mission require career capitals to unlock, so it might not become apparent right away when you are just starting out. Some key ideas on ho to find a mission:
- Go to the cutting edge. A good mission usually lies in the adjacent empty space of the cutting edge. In research, this means the limit of knowledge in your current field, but the concept can be applied to any kind of field. A good mission would then be the next possible development step that hasn’t been done before.
- Take small bets. Instead of going all-in doing whatever it is that you are doing, try to do several smaller projects which are low-risk enough that when you fail they won’t ruin you but still give good feedback, but big enough that it matters when you succeed. The path to success is messy, and the final outcome can be very different from what we envisioned when we started.
- Be remarkable, and share it in a venue that enable people to remark about it. As you explore possible career path, try to find something that is not only important, but also unique. Once you find that thing, make sure to share it in the correct venue.
The four main points in this book are meant to flip the idea of finding happiness by following your passion. Instead, it suggests us to focus and work on what we have to obtain rare and useful skills, which can eventually be exchanged to modify our career trajectory into something that we love.
The book can feel kind of anecdotal at times, but it gets the point across. The key takeaway from this book is any path that you take will yield numerous opportunity. If handled correctly, any career would yield a career we can love. Therefore, people shouldn’t fret too much about finding that one perfect job, and focus on producing value instead.
