So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love - Cal Newport
Don’t follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become, in the words of my favorite Steve Martin quote, “so good that they can’t ignore you.”
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, whil the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.
No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it - and the process won’t be easy.
Three disqualifiers for applying the craftsman mindset
The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable.
The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world.
The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.
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.
Rule #1 took on the conventional wisdom about how people end up loving what they do. It argued that the passion hypothesis, which says that they key to loving your work is to match a job to a pre-existing passion, is bad advice. There’s little evidence that most people have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered, and believing that there’s a magical right job lurking out there can often lead to chronic unhappiness and confusion when the reality of the working world fails to match this dream.
Rule #2 was the first to tackle the natural follow-up question: If “follow your passion” is bad advice, what should you do instead? It contended that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable. If you want these traits in your own life, you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return.
Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.
enthusiasm alone is not rare and valuable and is therefore not worth much in terms of career capital.
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 the making the change.
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.
Missions are peowerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes yoru 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.
If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s not commonplace; it’s instead quite rare. This rareness, we noew 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.
For a mission-drive project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.
Working right trumps finding the right work