So good they can’t ignore you

by Cal Newport

5*/10

Key Ideas:

Follow your passion is bad career advice – The happiest, most passionate employees are those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.
To get autonomy, get so good they can’t ignore you – build career capital.
Deliberate practice is how you get better – stay in a state of flow, where your work is hard enough to make you uncomfortable and forces you to learn, but not so much that frustration wins you over.

Other interesting notes:

Career passions are rare. Most passions (like reading) cannot be translated into a career or have a very small probability (playing basketball).
The strongest predictor of someone seeing their work as a calling is the number of years spent on the job.
As soon as you gain more control over your time and work, someone will try to take it from you – A shiny reward will be dangled in front of you, like a company car, a raise or a promotion. Resist this.
Leaving an advertising career to start a yoga studio is a bad career move – discards the career capital acquired over many years in the marketing industry, transitioning to an unrelated field where you have no capital.
A hard truth of the real world: It’s really hard to convince people to give you money.
Rather than believing you have to start with a big idea or a perfect plan, make a series of little bets and learn from the failures and small wins. “I didn’t quit my day job until I was making more money with my music”.
Don’t try to be top 0.001% at just 1 thing, Build a talent stack of marketable skills.
Mastery by itself is not enough to guarantee happiness. Motivation requires:

  • Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important
  • Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do
  • Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

Avoid jobs where:

  • 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

Thoughts on the book:

*Great idea, especially if you never came across it before, but could have been a blog post instead of a book. I prefer Linchpin.

Longer summary/notes: Sivers

If you like this, you’ll probably like: Linchpin, Deep work, Zen to done, Cal’s blog and podcast, books