So Good They Can't Ignore You

by Cal Newport

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

The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous.

“follow your passion” is bad advice.

In which I introduce two different approaches to thinking about work: the craftsman mindset, a focus on what value you’re producing in your job, and the passion mindset, a focus on what value your job offers you. Most people adopt the passion mindset, but in this chapter I argue that the craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating work you love.

an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music. “It trumps your appearance, your equipment, your personality, and your connections,”

If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. This clarity was refreshing.

I’ll call this output-centric approach to work the craftsman mindset.

Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love.

two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you.

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy.

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.

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

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.

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.

You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life, and the craftsman mindset is focused on achieving exactly this goal.

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.

In the end, Mike’s focus on capabilities over callings obviously paid off. He has a fantastic job, but it was one that required a fantastic store of career capital to be offered in exchange.

“I develop muscle memory the hard way, by repetition,” he said, echoing Jordan’s long, skill-stretching practice sessions. “The harder I work, the more relaxed I can play, and the better it sounds.”

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].

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

if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

We all hit plateaus.

To successfully adopt the craftsman mindset, therefore, we have to approach our jobs in the same way that Jordan approaches his guitar playing or Garry Kasparov his chess training—with a dedication to deliberate practice.

“I have a never-ending thirst to get better,”

The other thing I noticed about Alex is that this learning is not done in isolation: “You need to be constantly soliciting feedback from colleagues and professionals,”

He then obsessively sought feedback, on everything—

Mike was not only stretching himself, he was also receiving direct feedback.

“I want to spend time on what’s important, instead of what’s immediate,” Mike explained.

Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You’re In

There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction.

blogging in the advice space—where his site existed—is not an auction market, it’s winner-take-all. The only capital that matters is whether or not your posts compel the reader.

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.

If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.”

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.”

“I read everything about growing that I could get my hands on … zillions of different things,”

It is, instead, autonomy that attracts the Granby groupies: Ryan and Sarah live a meaningful life on their own terms.

giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.2

Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short). In a ROWE company, all that matters is your results. When you show up to work and when you leave, when you take vacations, and how often you check e-mail are all irrelevant.

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

To summarize, if your goal is to love what you do, your first step is to acquire career capital. Your next step is to invest this capital in the traits that define great work. Control is one of the most important targets you can choose for this investment.

Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

“A lot of those days I would take a niece or nephew and have fun. I went to the children’s museum and zoo probably more than anybody else in the city,” she recalls. “They couldn’t stop me from doing these things, as I was just a contractor.”

Her first client really wanted to hire her full-time to work on the project, but she refused. “They really didn’t want a contractor,” she recalls, “but they didn’t have anyone else who could do this type of work, so they eventually had no choice but to agree.”

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.

The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.

In other words, in most jobs you should expect your employer to resist your move toward more control; they have every incentive to try to convince you to reinvest your career capital back into your career at their company, obtaining more money and prestige instead of more control, and this can be a hard argument to resist.

The key, it seems, is to know when the time is right to become courageous in your career decisions. Get this timing right, and a fantastic working life awaits you, but get it wrong by tripping the first control trap in a premature bid for autonomy, and disaster lurks.

It’s possible that you don’t have enough career capital to back up this bid for more control. That is, you’re about to fall into the first control trap. In this case, you should heed the resistance and shelve the idea. At the same time, however, it’s possible that you have plenty of career capital, and this resistance is being generated exactly because you’re so valuable. That is, you’ve fallen into the second control trap. In this case, you should ignore the resistance and pursue the idea. This, of course, is the problem with control: Both scenarios feel the same, but the right response is different in each.

The Law of Financial Viability