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

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.

This topic is too subtle to be reduced to the formulaic.

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.

Observing a few instances of a strategy working does not make it universally effective.

‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’

“Here’s what I respect: creating something meaningful and then presenting it to the world,” he explained.

an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music.

there’s something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is “just right,” and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good.

That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer.

It tells us that great work doesn’t just require great courage, but also skills of great (and real) value.

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

It captures well both the risk and the illogic of starting from scratch as contrasted with the leverage gained by instead acquiring more career capital.

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

I realized that my discomfort with mental discomfort was a liability in the performance world.

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.

I played. But he practiced.

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 grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study.

It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.

“You need to be constantly soliciting feedback from colleagues and professionals,” he told me.

He stretched his abilities by taking on projects that were beyond his current comfort zone;

This is what you should experience in your own pursuit of “good.” If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.”

It captures well the feel of how career capital is actually acquired: You stretch yourself, day after day, month after month, before finally looking up and realizing, “Hey, I’ve become pretty good, and people are starting to notice.”

his shyness gave way to the enthusiasm of a craftsman who knows what he’s doing and has been given the privilege to put this knowledge to work.

“No results, no job: It’s that simple,” as ROWE supporters like to say.

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.

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. This is what I came to think of as the second control trap:

But when it comes to decisions affecting your core career, money remains an effective judge of value.

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.