So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport

Passion is overly romanticized. The book opens right away with Steve Jobs’s commencement address, directly pointing out that what Jobs actually did differed from what he said. I believe passion shouldn’t be something you are forced to conjure up; rather, it emerges naturally in the process of doing something. You might have a passion for XYZ, but the world usually doesn’t care about your passion—it cares about your output.

The book spends quite a bit of time telling stories, and I skipped right over the ones in the second half.

Craftsman Mindset vs. Passion Mindset

The book introduces two mindsets: the craftsman mindset and the passion mindset. The passion mindset focuses on what the world can offer you, whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer to the world. The craftsman mindset is what we should actually strive for.

Building Career Capital

To succeed in your career or life, the book offers advice right in its title: “So good they can’t ignore you.” So how do you get there? The answer is “rare and valuable skills.”

I think everyone defines rare and valuable skills a bit differently, but the book outlines the traits they typically possess:

1. Creativity
2. Impact
3. Autonomy

One point I’d like to add here is that, if possible, you should try to make your skills synergistic so they can be applied across multiple domains. For example: linear algebra, video editing, programming, music, writing, and so on. These are all highly synergistic skills that also fit the criteria outlined in the book.

Autonomy

Autonomy is one of the key elements in building career capital, but the author warns of two control traps to watch out for:

1. Autonomy without financial viability: Even if you pursue autonomy by only doing what you love, it cannot be sustained over the long run if it doesn’t give you an economic advantage (The First Control Trap).
2. Once you have accumulated enough career capital, your employer will do everything they can to keep you around and try to prevent you from making changes (The Second Control Trap).

Deliberate Practice

Just like in Outliers, this book repeatedly emphasizes the importance of deliberate practice, which is the key to mastering skills. The book describes deliberate practice as:

Activity designed, by a teacher for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.

The overarching principle is Stretch and Destroy—pushing yourself to be slightly better with every practice session.

Deliberate practice is always the opposite of enjoyable

Finding a Mission

Finding your life’s mission is an ever-evolving, constantly shifting journey. The prerequisite, however, is that you must first build sufficient career capital—that is, skills—and continually refine your knowledge. Only then do you stand a chance of finding your true direction.

Summary

• Following your passion is overly romanticized; the advice to “follow your passion” can even be dangerous.
• Mastering skills is the real key (most people only develop passion after mastering a skill). In other words, without actual output, it’s hard for people to notice your passion alone.
  • If you want to build career capital, those skills should ideally be rare and valuable.
  • They typically possess three major traits: creativity, impact, and autonomy.
• Pursue the craftsman mindset: focus on what you can bring to the world.

Lastly, I’d like to add one final thought: while pursuing passion may be dangerous, I believe upgrading passion into “desire” yields completely different results. Desire means being utterly obsessed with something—possessing an intense curiosity to understand how it works under the hood, or simply wanting to excel at something (be it a sport, an instrument, or any discipline) to the point where you are willing to dedicate your life to it. Just like 3Blue1Brown mentioned in his Ted Talk, if you have a soul, you’ll go find the answer.