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

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This book has valuable thoughts for anyone in college, just out of college, wanting to quit their job and follow their passion, or just uncertain about their career in general. Even if anyone wants to keep you at bay due to any reason, they will be unable to do so because talent always shows. It has a way of showing because it is natural and has been worked upon thereby making one truly excellent at their endeavors.

Career Capital – the rare and valuable skills within the working world, which is “the key currency for creating work you love”

Second control trap. “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 a change.” This is the period where you might get caught in golden handcuffs or a specific identity that keeps you from living the life you want. This is the point where you would be wise to listen to the calls of “courage culture.” Law of financial viability

The Law of Remarkability – a law that states that “for a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways: This chapter of So Good They Can’t Ignore You argues that great missions can be successful from small exploratory projects. After identifying a mission, use the following strategy from venture capitalist Peter Sim’s book, Little Bets to succeed in your mission: When you cultivate the craftsman mindset, you aren’t too concerned about “finding your passion.” Instead, you’re focused on producing more valuable work. And in that pursuit of producing more value, you end up discovering what you like, what other people enjoy, and ultimately how you can do work that you find meaningful and that’s valued by other people. Traits that define great work Money serves as a “neutral indicator of value, or a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit.” When you work to make money or seek evidence of value, you can navigate control and provide value, whether in an entrepreneurial venture or a corporate role. Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big (Or, The Importance Of Mission) Apart from the fourth and final chapter being seemingly obvious, my only other criticism is that Newport presents many relevant positive and negative stories of career success throughout his book. However, nearly every negative story appears to focus on a woman and most positive stories are about males. Although I am sure not intentional, it was a recurring thought I had throughout the entirety of the book,You need to get good before you can expect good work. Thus, invest your (extensive) career capital into gaining one of the most important traits of Control (Dream-Job Elixir) over your work: The first is that many of us do not gain something valuable to offer in return for control. Newport argues, and I agree, that we cannot obtain control of our career if we do not have something valuable to offer in return. You hear of hundreds of people quitting their jobs to start new and exciting career adventures and then failing. Why? Well, because they have no value to offer (no career capital) to keep control over their newly found career venture. The path to happiness goes much further beyond the simple question of “What should I do with my life?” In his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, Cal Newport discusses what he learned from trying to answer the following question: There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction. The notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them. In one survey, the strongest predictor of an assistant seeing her work as a calling was the number of years on the job.

The reality of each of their stories is that both men focused on “becoming so good they can’t ignore you” instead of finding their passion. This process generated career capital, which both used to attain the rare and valuable traits that made their careers amazing. Chapter Seven: Becoming A Craftsman Yet, Newport continues to promote interesting ideas. The first is that a mission must be capital driven, in a sense, you can’t skip straight into a great mission without having mastery in your field. Career Passions Are Rare: A survey found that 84% of Canadian college students identified personal passions, but less than 4% of them were related to work or education.

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This chapter of So Good They Can’t Ignore You introduces the Second Control Trap. When no one pays attention to your work, you probably don’t have sufficient career capital to do exciting work. Ironically, when you do build up the capital necessary to acquire real control, you fall prey to the Second Control Trap: Most individuals change their behavior at work for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level of performance, then they stop improving. Self Determination Theory tells us that motivation in the workplace requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs. If people are willing to pay for what you’re doing and it is valuable, the resistance you are facing is an obstacle to be overcome. Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big (Or, the Importance of Mission) Chapter 12: The Meaningful Life of Pardis Sabeti Craftsman mindset: Approach to working life in which you focus on the value of what you’re offering to the world. This mindset leads to you figuring out how to offer value that other people appreciate.

Passion takes time: the longer you stay in a field and give yourself the time to get good at what you do, the more that passion develops. Passion takes time to cultivate.However, “if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.” To break the plateau and successfully adopt the craftsman mindset, you should approach your work with a dedication to deliberate practice: If you are a knowledge worker and can figure out a way to incorporate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value. The Passion Hypothesis – “this hypothesis claims that the key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion” Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery: The Self-Determination Theory shows us why which pursuits motivate people in their work: Passion is a side effect of mastery: when you get great at something, your interest in that something often grows. In large part, that’s because you develop a stronger sense of autonomy and competence the more that you master a craft. According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), there are three basic psychological needs that we need to meet to feel motivated at work: