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

by Cal Newport

Not long after I met Giles, after he had successfully scratched his Hollywood itch, he once again moved on. A publisher had asked him to write a book, and he had agreed—and why not? It seemed like an interesting thing to do.

He approached the task of finding good projects for his mission with the mindset of a marketer, systematically studying books on the subject to help identify why some ideas catch on while others fall flat.

taking courses at the local community college. He studied painting, voice, piano, and perhaps most importantly, studio engineering, the class that introduced him to aleatoric music: composition using algorithms.

career untamed, he realized, can bring you into dangerous territory, such as being bored while writing computer code for an investment bank. He needed a mission to actively guide his career or he would end up trapped again and again. He decided that a good mission for him would somehow combine the artistic and technical sides of his life, but he didn’t know how to make this general idea into a money-making reality, so he went searching for answers. He found what he was looking for in an unlikely pair of books.

“You’re either remarkable or invisible,” says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.1 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.”

For his mission to build a sustainable career, it had to produce purple cows, the type of remarkable projects that compel people to spread the word.

Giles came up with the idea for Archaeopteryx, his AI-driven music creator. “I don’t think there was anybody else with my combined background,” he said. “Plenty of Ruby programmers love dance music, but I don’t think any of them has sacrificed the same ridiculous number of hours to tweaking breakbeats and synth patches over and over again, releasing white-label records that never made a dime, and studying music theory.” In other words, Giles’s ability to produce a Ruby program that produced real music was unique: If he could pull it off, it would be a purple cow.

If you asked a Ruby programmer about this project, he would tell you that this is solid, quality, useful work. But it’s not the type of achievement that would compel this same Ruby programmer to write his friends and tell them, “You have to see this!”

What’s nice about this first notion of remarkability is that it can be applied to any field. Take book writing: If I published a book of solid advice for helping recent graduates transition to the job market, you might find this a useful contribution, but probably wouldn’t find yourself whipping out your iPhone and Tweeting its praises. On the other hand, 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.”

If we return to my example of writing career-advice books, I realized early on in my process that blogging was a remarkable venue for introducing my ideas. Blogs are visible and the infrastructure is in place for good ideas to quickly spread, through, for example, linking, Tweets, and Facebook. Because of this conduciveness to remarking, by the time I pitched this book to publishers, I not only had a large audience who appreciated my views on passion and skill, but the meme had spread: Newspapers and major websites around the world had begun to quote my thoughts on the topic, while the articles had been cited online and Tweeted thousands of times.