So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

by Cal Newport

You shouldn’t just envy the craftsman mindset, you should emulate it. In other words, I am suggesting that you 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.

If you spend any time with professional entertainers, especially those who are just starting out, one of the first things you notice is their insecurity concerning their livelihood. Jordan had a name for the worries about what his friends are doing with their lives and whether his accomplishments compare favorably: “the cloud of external distractions.”

Fighting this cloud is an ongoing battle. Along these lines, Steve Martin was so unsure during his decade-long dedication to improving his routine that he regularly suffered crippling anxiety attacks. The source of these performers’ craftsman mindset is not some unquestionable inner passion, but instead something more pragmatic: It’s what works in the entertainment business.

If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not you’ve found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself out of work.

you adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows.

the traits that make a great job great are rare and valuable, and therefore, if you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuable skills—which I call career capital—to offer in return.

a bold proposition: If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (“what can I offer the world?”).

TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREAT WORK Creativity: Ira Glass, for example, is pushing the boundaries of radio, and winning armfuls of awards in the process. Impact: From the Apple II to the iPhone, Steve Jobs has changed the way we live our lives in the digital age. Control: No one tells Al Merrick when to wake up or what to wear. He’s not expected in an office from nine to five. Instead, his Channel Island Surfboards factory is located a block from the Santa Barbara beach, where Merrick still regularly spends time surfing. ( Jake Burton Carpenter, founder of Burton Snowboards, for example, recalls how negotiations for the merger between the two companies happened while he and Merrick waited for waves in a surf lineup.)

How do you get these traits in your own working life? One of the first things I noticed when I began to study this question is that these factors are rare. Most jobs don’t offer their employees great creativity, impact, or control over what they do and how they do

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. It follows that if you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.

The radio host Ira Glass was given the opportunity to create his genre-defining radio show This American Life only after he had proven himself as one of public radio’s best editors and hosts. Glass started as an intern and then moved on to become a tape cutter for All Things Considered. There are many young people who start down the same path as Glass: landing an internship at a local NPR station and then moving up to a low-level production position. But Glass began to break away from the pack when he turned his focus on making his skills more rare and more valuable.

His career today is rich with creativity, impact, and control, but when you read his story, the economic undertones are unmistakable. Glass exchanged a collection of hard-won, rare, and valuable skills for his fantastic job.

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.

Rebuild Your Backbone is an example of the courage culture, a growing community of authors and online commentators pushing the following idea: 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.

Instead of fleeing the constraints of his current job, he began acquiring the career capital he’d need to buy himself out of them.

His specialty became international logos and brand icons. As his ability grew, so did his options. Eventually, he was hired away by the Minneapolis-based Fallon McElligott agency, which allowed him to run his own subsidiary within the larger organization, calling it Duffy Designs. In other words, his capital had bought him more autonomy.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and one traveler chose the path to mastery while the other was called toward passion’s glow.

Part of what makes the craftsman mindset thrilling is its agnosticism toward the type of work you do. The traits that define great work are bought with career capital, the theory argues; they don’t come from matching your work to your innate passion.

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.7 A job with any combination of these disqualifying traits can thwart your attempts to build and invest career capital.

TV writing is not an easy gig to land. According to Jamie, the process unfolds as follows. First, the producers put out a call to talent agencies to send over sample scripts from their writers. For his particular show, Jamie received around a hundred packages, each containing a sample script, which Jamie read, reviewed, and graded. Only around the best twenty or so from this pile will be passed on to the producers for additional consideration. Keep in mind that the producers have already hired their favored veteran writers, so there are precious few spots left to be filled from this open call.

To provide a sense of the competitiveness of this process, Jamie sent me a copy of his script evaluations. Out of the hundred or so writers who submitted scripts, all but fourteen sent a script that had already been produced and aired on television. Of the fourteen who had not yet broken into the industry, the highest score any received from Jamie was a 6.5 out of 10. Most of this group, however, fared much worse.

television writing is attractive because it has the three traits that make people love their work: impact, creativity, and control.

What makes television a hard industry to crack is the fact that it’s a winner-take-all market.

To become the country’s best debater, therefore, Alex had to master the art of continual improvement. Hearing the story of how he then went on to succeed in Hollywood convinced me that it was exactly this skill that fueled his fast rise.

Drawing from the adage “write what you know,” Alex pitched them Master Debaters, a show that required comedians to debate humorous topics in front of a panel of judges.

What I like about Alex’s story is what he does next: He quit his job at the National Lampoon and took a position as an assistant to a development executive at NBC. It’s here that I see Alex’s debater instincts stir back to life. The National Lampoon was too far to the periphery of the industry to teach him what it takes to succeed. By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.

In this telling, the story of Alex’s fast rise is not one of passion triumphing over setbacks: It’s much less dramatic. Alex, the former debate champion, coolly assessed what career capital was valuable in this market. He then set out with the intensity once reserved for debate prep to acquire this capital as fast as possible. What this story lacks in pizazz, it makes up in repeatability: There’s nothing mysterious about how Alex Berger broke into Hollywood—he simply understood the value, and difficulty, of becoming good.

Mike, who is competitive by nature, tackled the project with intensity, driven by the belief that the better he did now, the better his options would be later.

“When people ask me how I got my job,” he now jokes, “I tell them to make friends with a comedian.”

Mike Jackson leveraged the craftsman mindset to do whatever he did really well, thus ensuring that he came away from each experience with as much career capital as possible.

He never had elaborate plans for his career. Instead, after each working experience, he would stick his head up to see who was interested in his newly expanded store of capital, and then jump at whatever opportunity seemed most promising.

What mattered most in Mike’s story is that once he stumbled through the door, his career capital went to work getting him a fantastic job offer.

If you spend time around Mike, you quickly realize how serious he is about doing what he does well. It’s true that he now loves his work, but he’s still quick to turn the conversation back to how he approaches it. As you’ll learn more about in the next chapter, Mike literally tracks every hour of his day, down to quarter-hour increments, on a spreadsheet. He wants to ensure that his attention is focused on the activities that matter.

I realized that my discomfort with mental discomfort was a liability

Not only did Jordan’s early practice require him to constantly stretch himself beyond what was comfortable, but it was also accompanied by instant feedback.

While practicing, the strain on his face and the gasping nature of his breaths can be uncomfortable even to watch—I can’t imagine what it feels like to actually do. But Jordan is happy to practice like this for hours at a time.

This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle—one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.

The 10,000-Hour Rule The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours [emphasis mine].

In Outliers, Gladwell pointed to this rule as evidence that great accomplishment is not about natural talent, but instead about being in the right place at the right time to accumulate such a massive amount of practice.

Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. 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.

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.

deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse array of fields,

“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.”

“Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.” Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better

“I have a never-ending thirst to get better,” he said. “It’s like a sport, you have to practice and you have to study.” Alex admitted that even though he’s now an established writer, he still reads screenwriting books, looking for places where his craft could stand improving. “It’s a constant learning process,” he said.

In each stage of his path to becoming a venture capitalist he threw himself into a project beyond his current capabilities and then hustled to make it a success. He took on an ambitious master’s thesis that he then translated into leading an even more ambitious international research project. He went from the project into the harsh world of start-ups, where, without outside investment, his ability to pay his rent was dependent on him figuring things out quickly. Furthermore, at all stages of this path, Mike was not only stretching himself, he was also receiving direct feedback.

On the sample spreadsheet he sent me, he divides his activities into two categories: hard to change (i.e., weekly commitments he can’t avoid) and highly changeable (i.e., self-directed activities that he controls). Here’s the amount of time he dedicates to each: Mike Jackson’s Work-Hour Allocation Hard-to-Change Commitments Activity Hours Allocated for the Week E-mail 7.5 Lunch/Breaks/Other 4 Planning/Organization 1.5 Partner Meeting/Administrative 4 Weekly Fund-raising Meeting 1 Highly Changeable Commitments Activity Hours Allocated for the Week Improving Fund-raising Materials 3 Fund-raising Process 12 Due Diligence Research 3 Deal Flow Sourcing 3 Meetings/Calls with Potential Investors 1 Work with Portfolio Companies 2 Networking/Professional Development 3 Mike’s goal with his spreadsheet is to become more “intentional” about how his workday unfolds.

Does he annoy some people because of this lack of availability? Probably. But take my example of eventually being forced to call him during his commute: The important stuff still finds its way to him, but on his schedule.

Once you’ve identified your market, you must then identify the specific type of capital to pursue. If you’re in a winner-take-all market, this is trivial: By definition, there’s only one type of capital that matters. For an auction market, however, you have flexibility. A useful heuristic in this situation is to seek open gates—opportunities to build capital that are already open to you.

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