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"So Good They Cant Ignore You" by Cal Newport: Some Takeaways

During the last couple of months, my life changed quite a lot. I think I’ll talk a bit more about that in a following post, but a book that has been with me during these times of change is “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, by Cal Newport.

You can find my thoughts about the other, really famous book by Newport, “Deep Work”, here. Keep in mind that my main objective with these kind of post is to extract what I find useful from various sources and store it in a permanent way. The fact that this post is public is a sort of a side effect, so that’s why this post could look more like a stream of thoughts rather than a well polished article. If you had higher expectations, I’m sorry.

A bit of context

This book is a deep dive on the reasons why people end up loving their job, and the main idea is that “Follow your passion” is a really dangerous advice, although really common. Cal proves this by analyzing various career stories in different areas, and observing that the passion thing doesn’t really apply to a lot of successful careers.

But if you don’t follow your passion, what should you do? Cal says that the answer is, follow the skills. Find something, become really good at it, let the craft follow you and not the other way around, and that’s how you get a good career. In other words, find something and become “so good they can’t ignore you”.

The book is articulated over 4 different rules, and so does this post. Here’s a sneek peek:

  1. Don’t follow your passion
  2. Be so good you can’t be ignored
  3. Reject a promotion
  4. Think small, Act big

A small disclaimer, I read this book in italian (a really shitty translation). The names of the chapters, concepts and so on are translated by me, probably in a different way than the original edition. Again, sorry for that.

R1: Don’t Follow your Passion

The “Theory of Passion” states that the key for professional happines is to first understand what we are passionate about, and then find a job that matches that passion.

Cal debunks this theory by stating that

  1. “Professional” passions are rare: statistically speaking, the number of passions that have a match with a real job is really limited. A lot of people are passionate about sports, reading, art and stuff like that, but these areas have very limited professional applications
  2. Passion requires time: some research found out that a key element that makes people think about what they’re doing as a vocation, something is a important part of your life and a significant element of your identity, instead of just a job (what you do to pay bills), is the time that they spent doing something and thus becoming really good at it, and not how much what your occupation matches with your preexisting passions
  3. Passion is a side effect of being skilled: motivation is based on three key factors: autonomy (having control on what you’re doing), expertise (know and be good in what youre doing) and relations (being in contact with people)

Although it doesn’t sound as good as “follow your passion”, becoming good at something is the key element of liking what you do in your life.

Cal also talks a bit about some situations in which following your passion works, but that’s something i’ll personally talk about later in this post

R2: Be so good you can’t be ignored

The key element here is that, in order to become good in something, you have to follow the “Craftsman mindset”.

This mindset makes you ignore all the thinking about “is this the right job for me?” and puts the focus on questions like “what kind of value am I able to offer to the world?” and “how you can I improve myself to become better and more skilled in what i’m doing?”.

A confirmation of this mindset comes from a simple question: “what makes a job a good job?” The answer lies in three elements

  • Creativity
  • Impact
  • Control

These elements are rare and precious for obvious reasons, and if you want to get something that is rare and precious, you need to give something back in exchange: your knowledge, expertise and skills. That’s the reason why the craftsman mindset and the goal of “becoming so good they cant ignore you” is something to focus on, because it makes you grow something for “paying back” a good and satisfying job, that is rare and precious.