So Good They Can't Ignore You By Cal Newport

 

• The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase.

• 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.

• If you feel close to people at work, you’re going to enjoy work more.

• The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.

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

• Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you.

• When you enter the working world with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks you’re assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can become too much to handle. Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindset—“Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?”—are essentially impossible to confirm.

• 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.

• When Feuer left her advertising career to start a yoga studio, not only did she discard the career capital acquired over many years in the marketing industry, but she transitioned into an unrelated field where she had almost no capital.

• After eight months as an assistant, Alex heard about a job opening for a script assistant on Commander in Chief, a West Wing copycat helmed by Geena Davis. He jumped at the chance to observe professional TV writers up close, even though it was still a low-level position.

• 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.

• In each stage of his path to becoming a venture capitalist he threw himself into a project beyond his current capabilities and then hustled to make it a success.

• When you look at Mike’s spreadsheet, you also notice that he restricts the hours dedicated to required tasks that don’t ultimately make him better at what he does (eighteen hours). The majority of his week is instead focused on what matters: raising money, vetting investments, and helping his fund’s companies (twenty-seven hours).

• In other words, it’s hard to start from scratch in a new field. If, for example, Mike had decided to leave Stanford to go work for a private sustainability non-profit, he would have been starting at the ground floor with no particular leg up. By instead leveraging his Stanford education to gain a position with a Stanford professor, he was acquiring valuable capital much sooner.

• Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

• When I’m learning a new mathematical technique—a classic case of deliberate practice—the uncomfortable sensation in my head is best approximated as a physical strain, as if my neurons are physically re-forming into new configurations. As any mathematician will admit, this stretching feels much different than applying a technique you’ve already mastered, which can be quite enjoyable.

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

• Acquiring capital can take time. For Alex, it took about two years of serious deliberate practice before his first television script was produced. Mike Jackson was a half decade out of college before cashing in his capital to land a dream job.

• It’s dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange.

• Enthusiasm alone is not rare and valuable and is therefore not worth much in terms of career capital.

• Once you have enough career capital to acquire more control in your working life, you have become valuable enough to your employer that they will fight your efforts to gain more autonomy.

• If Lulu had tried this during her first year of employment, her bosses would have laughed and probably offered her instead a “zero-hour-a-week schedule,” but by the time she had become a senior engineer and was leading their testing automation efforts, they really couldn’t say no.

• The key, it seems, is to know when the time is right to become courageous in your career decisions.

• I argued that it was this courage culture that led Lisa Feuer to quit her corporate job to chase an ill-fated yoga venture.

• Do what people are willing to pay for.

• 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.

• Her happiness comes from the fact that she built her career on a clear and compelling mission —something that not only gives meaning to her work but provides the energy needed to embrace life beyond the lab.

• People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work.

• Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world—a crucial factor in loving what you do. People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work.

• 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.

• The Capital-Driven Mission Scientific breakthroughs, as we just learned, require that you first get to the cutting edge of your field. Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative ideas are almost always discovered.

• According to Johnson’s theory, Sarah would have been better served by first mastering a promising niche—a task that may take years—and only then turning her attention to seeking a mission.

• If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace.

• They started by thinking big, looking for a world-changing mission, but without capital they could only match this big thinking with small, ineffectual acts.

• Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins.

• As Sims notes, he shows up on stage with a yellow legal pad, working through different jokes, taking notes on the crowd’s reaction. Most of the material falls flat.

• 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 approach stands in contrast to the idea of choosing a bold plan and making one big bet on its success.

• If you want to make a name for yourself in software development—the type of name that can help you secure employment—focus your attention on making quality contributions to open-source projects.

• A good mission-driven project must be remarkable in two different ways. First, it should be remarkable in the literal sense of compelling people to remark about it.

• Giles didn’t just find a project that compels remarks, but he also spread the word about the project in a venue that supports these remarks.