So Good They Can't Ignore You Quotes

“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.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Summary of Rule #4 The core idea of this book is simple: 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. Mission is one of those traits. In the first chapter of this rule, I reinforced the idea that this trait, like all desirable career traits, really does require career capital—you can’t skip straight into a great mission without first building mastery in your field. Drawing from the terminology of Steven Johnson, I argued that the best ideas for missions are found in the adjacent possible—the region just beyond the current cutting edge. To encounter these ideas, therefore, you must first get to that cutting edge, which in turn requires expertise. To try to devise a mission when you’re new to a field and lacking any career capital is a venture bound for failure. Once you identify a general mission, however, you’re still left with the task of launching specific projects that make it succeed. An effective strategy for accomplishing this task is to try small steps that generate concrete feedback—little bets—and then use this feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next. This systematic exploration can help you uncover an exceptional way forward that you might have never otherwise noticed. The little-bets strategy, I discovered as my research into mission continued, is not the only way to make a mission a success. It also helps to adopt the mindset of a marketer. This led to the strategy that I dubbed the law of remarkability. This law says that for a project to transform a mission into a success, it should be remarkable in two ways. First, it must literally compel people to remark about it. Second, it must be launched in a venue conducive to such remarking. In sum, mission is one of the most important traits you can acquire with your career capital. But adding this trait to your working life is not simple. Once you have the capital to identify a good mission, you must still work to make it succeed. By using little bets and the law of remarkability, you greatly increase your chances of finding ways to transform your mission from a compelling idea into a compelling career.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s not commonplace; it’s instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard—the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives. The”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“To summarize, I’ve presented 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. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions. As I concluded after meeting Jordan Tice, 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. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy. With this in mind, it’s only natural to envy the clarity of performers like Jordan Tice. But here’s the core argument of Rule #2: 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.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you're aiming to be valuable.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea. This requires a dedication to brainstorming and exposure to new ideas. Combined, these two commitments describe a lifestyle, not a series of steps that automatically spit out a mission when completed.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“If your specialty is new—as mine is—and they can’t therefore find experts with an opinion on it either way, you’re going to have a real hard time keeping your position, as there’s no one out there to validate your stature.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills and therefore builds up your store of career capital. Similarly, 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. In other words, mission is yet another example of career capital theory in action. If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. “The truth,” Johnson explains, “is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. I like the term “stretch” for describing what deliberate practice feels like,”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“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.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You

“Se tan bueno que no puedan ignorarte.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“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. But this left him with a second question: In the world of computer programming, where does one launch remarkable projects? He found his second answer in a 2005 career guide with a quirky title: My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job.3 The book was written by Chad Fowler, a well-known Ruby programmer who also dabbles in career advice for software developers.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Pushing past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback—even if it destroys what you thought was good. As Colvin explains in his Fortune article, “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.” 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. Alex”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You’re In For the sake of clarity, I will introduce some new terminology. When you are acquiring career capital in a field, you can imagine that you are acquiring this capital in a specific type of career capital market. There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“As Ericsson explains, “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.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Think Small, Act Big.” It’s in this understanding of career capital and its role in mission that we get our explanation for this title. Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a “big” action.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“The important thing about little bets is that they’re bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“I’ve presented 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. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“The things that make a great job great...are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect to get a good job.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Pushing past what is comfortable, however is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback — even if it destroys what you thought was good.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“A job...is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path towards increasingly better work, and a calling is work that's an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“How do people end up loving what they do?”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You

“I keep a tally of the total number of hours I’ve spent that month in a state of deliberate practice.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love