So Good They Can't Ignore You, by Cal Newport
Ditch ‘follow your passion’ — master your craft and build a career so good they can’t ignore you.
So Good They Can't Ignore You, by Cal Newport, makes the argument that the oft-received "follow your passion" advice for finding a career is flawed. Instead, you should approach your career as a quest to develop career capital — rare and valuable skills — which will allow you to develop mastery, autonomy, and connection to your work.
When I first read this (way back in high school), I thought it was an elegant way to give me the words and ideas to express my own opposition to the passion idea. Many moons later, I gave a keynote at HackPrinceton to hint towards this general idea.
Ideas
Don't follow your passion: compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion
Self-determination theory: the three conditions for motivation are autonomy, competence, and relatedness
The craftsman mindset: you don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work
Career capital: develop rare and valuable skills, which you can then leverage to help you move towards things that resonate with you; without these skills, it's difficult to have the ability to move towards things that resonate with you
Deeper dive
Don’t follow your passion
Cal Newport presents the argument that compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion. The problem with true passions is that they are very rare and truly take time to foster; a study found that the strongest predictor of a worker seeing work as a "calling" is the number of years spent on the job.
Newport makes the argument that passion is actually a side effect of mastery when you look at it through the lens of self-determination theory. According to self-determination theory, motivation requires three basic needs: autonomy: feeling of control over your actions, and feeling that your actions are important; competence: feeling that you are good at what you do; and relatedness: feeling of connection to other people. It is important to understand the directionality of the relationship between mastery and passion — mastery begets passion, not the other way around.
So if following your passion isn't good advice, and you should rather just cultivate an interest and invest in getting better, where should you start?
One of the best reframings of the problem comes from Eugene Wallingford: instead of agonizing over what you want to do, ask yourself: "What hard problems do you enjoy working on?"
Tim Ferriss might phrase it instead as: "What is easy for you that is hard for others?"
This will help you narrow down a set of things to start working on and developing career capital in that area.
Aside: the famous Steve Jobs commencement speech is incredible, but I think people ignored most of the lessons (e.g., “You can never connect the dots looking forward”) and used choice soundbites to fuel the mythos of the passion hypothesis.
Self-determination theory
Self-determination theory is a theory of motivation which claims that humans have three basic psychological needs to have enduring motivation:
autonomy (authenticity): desire to be causal agents of one's own life and act in harmony with one's integrated self and values
competence: seek to control the outcome and experience mastery
relatedness: will to interact with, be connected to, and experience caring for others
The craftsman mindset
The craftsman mindset is a mindset in which you focus on what you can offer the world with your work. It is easiest to understand this by studying its counterpart, the passion mindset. In the passion mindset, you focus on what the world can offer you and obsess over deep questions ("Who am I?" or "What do I truly love?") that are essentially impossible to confirm.
"The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship — not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work." (p.91)
In short, don't focus on the work, but focus on your work.
"This generates an exciting implication. Let’s assume you’re a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. 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. 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." (p.69)
Related to my piece: Nerds should train like professional athletes.
Cal also presents what he calls are the Five Habits of a Craftsman:
Decide what capital market you're in
winner-take-all market: only one type of career capital available (e.g. television writing: the only thing that matters is your ability to write good scripts)
auction market: many different types of career capital, and each person might have a unique combination (e.g. clean-tech space: an expertise in renewable energy and entrepreneurship is one valuable combination)
Identify your capital type to pursue
seek open gates: opportunities to build capital that are already open to you
Define what "good" means
understand what it means to succeed
Stretch and destroy
deliberate practice is the opposite of enjoyable; it induces mental strain
seek constant stream of feedback
Be patient
patient willingness allows the acquisition of career capital
Career capital
Cal coins the term "career capital" and simply refers to it as rare and valuable skills. This fits well with the fundamental idea of supply and demand: if a skill is rare, then it has a low supply. If it is simultaneously valuable — people demand it — then the equilibrium market price for the skill should be high. The idea behind career capital theory is that you can use these rare and valuable skills to move towards opportunities that resonate with you more.
Another way to think about career capital is framing it as "idiosyncrasy credits" as Adam Grant does: "idiosyncrasy credits — the latitude to deviate from the group’s expectations. Idiosyncrasy credits accrue through respect, not rank: they’re based on contributions. We squash a low-status member who tries to challenge the status quo, but tolerate and sometimes even applaud the originality of a high-status star."
The natural extension of developing career capital is to pursue "valuable" tacit knowledge. By definition, tacit knowledge is rare; it is however, not necessarily "valuable".
You want to pursue tacit knowledge that is valuable at some time in the present and/or into the future. Naval Ravikant would say that “You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get at scale”, but that doesn't really give too much initial direction. The other piece of advice might be “Focus on acquiring specific knowledge,” which I agree with more. It's not going to give you a specific step-by-step gameplan, but I would focus on acquiring that knowledge and then constantly asking questions and exploring different ideas.
Miscellaneous
"In another clip, William Morris, a renowned glass blower based in Stanwood, Washington, brings a group of students to his workshop set in a converted barn surrounded by lush, Pacific Northwest forest. “I have a ton of different interests, and I don’t have focus,” one of the students complains. Morris looks at her: “You’ll never be sure. You don’t want to be sure.” These interviews emphasize an important point: Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion." (p.18)
I always struggle with the question as to whether I’m focusing enough, but it’s good to have this reminder.
"The Law of Financial Viability 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." (p.104)
People are always happy to give you positive feedback on your work. But the true test (especially if you’re going to pivot and dedicate your career to this), is: will they pay you for it?
"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." (p.142)