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

by Cal Newport

Early in his visit he asked a senior monk, who had been living in a similar cabin for over fifteen years, if he ever got tired of

walking the trail connecting the residences to the main building. “I’m only just starting to learn it,” the monk replied mindfully.

When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.

you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.

Glass emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to the point where he had interesting options. “The

key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” he says.

it’s hard to predict in advance what you’ll eventually grow to love.

Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.

A 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.

the strongest predictor of an assistant seeing her work as a calling was the number of years spent on the job.

In Wrzesniewski’s research, 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.

SDT tells us that motivation, in the workplace or elsewhere, requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs—factors described as the “nutriments” required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

Competence and autonomy, for example, are achievable by most people in a wide variety of jobs—assuming they’re willing to put in the hard work required for mastery.

Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

For some people, following their passion works.

“[Eventually] you are so experienced [that] there’s a confidence that comes out,”

What scared me most about taking over at belle point was the fact that I knew I wasn’t yet experienced and confident. How do you get past that point effectively?

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.

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.

regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career.

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.

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?”).

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

the three traits that make people love their work: impact, creativity, and control.

Reflective practice?

The difference in our abilities by the age of eighteen had less to do with the number of hours we practiced—though he probably racked up more total practice hours than I did, we weren’t all that far apart—and more to do with what we did with those hours.

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].

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

“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.

in most types of work—that is, work that doesn’t have a clear training philosophy—most people are stuck.

If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

“You need to be constantly soliciting feedback from colleagues and professionals,”

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

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 concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.

It’s so tempting to just assume what you’ve done is good enough and check it off your to-do list, but it’s in honest, sometimes harsh feedback that you learn where to retrain your focus in order to continue to make progress.

“[I thought], if I stay with it, then one day I will have been playing for forty years, and anyone who sticks with something for forty years will be pretty good at it.”

Instead, she decided to acquire the career capital required to get somewhere better.

that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable, and if you want these in your working life, you must first build up rare and valuable skills to offer in return.

what people are willing to pay for.”

innovation: 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.

Most people who love their work got where they are by first building up career capital and then cashing it in for the types of traits that define great work.

identifying a compelling mission once you get to the cutting edge can be seen as investing your career capital to acquire a desirable trait in your career.

If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital. If you skip this step, you might end up like Sarah and Jane: with lots of enthusiasm but very little to show for it.

Just because you have a good idea for a mission, however, doesn’t mean that you’ll succeed in its pursuit.

“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.”2 When Giles read Godin’s book, he had an epiphany:

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.

To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers.

It’s more important to become good at something rare and valuable, and then invest the career capital this generates into the type of traits that make a job great.

The things that make great work great, it argued, are rare and valuable.

deliberate practice—a method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond where you’re comfortable.

obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that’s more mentally demanding?