So Good they can’t ignore you – Cal Newport
Book Summaries

So Good they can’t ignore you – Cal Newport

Vikram Ramakrishnan

With the name Inspired by a Steve Martin quote, Cal Newport in this book mentions that the path to finding work that you truly love is through these 4 rules!

Rule #1 – Don’t follow your passion

  • Passion Hypothesis
    • The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion) is wrong.
  • Passion is rare
    • 2002 study Robert Vallerand in Canadian Universities found that though 84% had a passion, less than 4% of it had any relation to work of education while the remaining 96% was more of describing a hobby.
  • Passion takes time
    • Amy Wrzeniewski – Study published in Journal of Research in personality
      • Types of work
        • Job – a way to pay bills – focus on financial rewards, necessity rather than pleasure of fulfilment
        • Career – a path toward increasingly better work – Focus on advancement
        • Calling – work that’s a important part of your life and vital part of your identity. – Focus on enjoyment, fulfilment, social usefulness.
      • People doing the same work saw it differently between the above 3 types.
      • Strongest predictor of someone describing their work as calling is the number of years spent on the job
      • If you’ve been doing something longer – means you got good at it, built the required relationship for success
  • Passion is a side effect of Mastery
    • Daniel Pink – Puzzle of Motivation TED Talk
      • Autonomy
      • Master
      • Purpose
    • SDT (Self determination Theory) – why some pursuits get our engines going while others leave us cold?
      • Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivators
      • Nutrients for Intrinsic motivation
        • Autonomy – Feeling that you have control over your day and your actions are important
        • Competence – Feeling that you are good at what you do
        • Relatedness – Feeling of connection with other people
    • Competence and Autonomy can be achieved by most people in most fields assuming you are ready to put in the hard work required.
       
  • Passion is dangerous
    • Origin & importance of Passion Hypothesis – 1970 publication – What color is your parachute – Richard Bolles
      • Figure out what you like to do & then find a place that needs people like you
    • Jeffrey Arnett –
      • Young Adulthood – “Work isn’t just a job, but an adventure, a venue for self development and self expression and something that provides a satisfying fit with their assessment of their talents.
    • Work Dis-satisfaction numbers have risen rapidly – The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it

Rule #2 – Importance of Skill

  • Craftsman Mindset (Focuses on what you can offer the world. – offers clarity) VS Passion Mindset ( Focuses on what the world can offer you — Offers swamp of ambiguous & unanswerable questions.)
    • If you focus on what this work offers you, you are increasingly aware of what you don’t like about it and it causes unhappiness.
    • Also finding answers to questions like “Who am I”,  “What do I truly like doing” etc don’t have straight answers
  • Regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting a craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career.
  • Career Capital
    • Traits that define great work
      • Creativity – How can this be done in a way that’s completely out of box
      • Impact (Mission) – How does this work impact you and the society
      • Control – How much flexibility do you have in how you accomplish your work
    • Career Capital Theory
      • Traits that define great work are rare and valuable.
      • Supply & Demand says that if you want a job that has those traits, you need to have something rare and valuable to offer in return. – This is your career capital
      • Craftsman Mindset is well suited to acquire this career capital.
    • 3 disqualifiers where you can’t apply Craftsman Mindset
      • Job presents fewer opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing skills.
      • Job focusses on something you think is useless or perhaps even bad for the world.
      • Job forces you to work with people you really dislike.
  • How to build Career Capital
    • Deliberate Practice coined by Anders Ericsson – Activity designed, typically by a teacher for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individuals performance.
    • The 10,000 Hour Rule – Malcolm Gladwell
    • It’s a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that ends up explaining excellence.
    • Just the spending the time isn’t enough – if you show up and work hard – you’ll hit a performance plateau beyond which you can’t get any better – You need a combination of discipline, dedication & deliberate practice.
    • Craving for Critical Feedback – more direct, harsh feedback and faster feedback loops is important.
    • Taking up stuff that is beyond your comfort zone – Intentional allocation of time.
  • Five Habits of a Craftsman
    1. Decide What Capital Market You’re In
      • Winner takes all – There’s only one type of capital available and lots of people are competing for it. For e.g television writing.
      • Auction  – unstructured, where each individual can bring in their unique collection – for e.g Technology
    2. Identify your Capital Type
      • In Winner takes all Market, there’s only one capital type, so you got to have it.
      • In Auction market –  it’s useful to seek Open Gates – as in exploring opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. This will get your further faster than starting from scratch.
    3. Define Good – Geoff Colvin – What it takes to be great
      1. Come up with goals that would determine if you have acquired career capital
    4. Stretch & Destroy
      • 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…
    5. Be Patient
      1. Diligence – It’s less about paying attention to main pursuit and more about your willingness to ignore other shiny things that will come along the way to distract.

Rule #3 – Importance of Control

  • Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfilment.
    • Autonomy & Control – Daniel Pink
    • ROWE (Results only work environment) was highly successful at many places (BBY, Gap etc)
  • Control Traps
    • It’s dangerous to pursue more control before you’ve acquired enough career capital to offer in exchange
    • The point at which you’ve acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point you become very important your employer and they’ll prevent you from making the change.
    • The Key is to know when the time is right to become courageous in your career decisions
  • Avoiding Control Traps
    • 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
      • Definition of “willing to pay” varies. In some cases, it literally means customers paying you money for a product or a service. But it can also mean getting approved for a loan, receiving an outside investment, or, more commonly, convincing an employer to either hire you or keep writing you paychecks. Once you adopt this flexible definition of “pay for it,” this law starts popping up all over

Rule #4 – Importance of Mission (Think big act Small)

  • Multiples in science discoveries (for e.g Batteries, Oxygen Isolation, randomized linear encoding)
  • Adjacent Possible (reference – Steven Johnson – where good ideas come from)
    • The next big ideas in any field are found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combination of existing ideas
  • Understanding the adjacent possible and its role in innovation is the first link in a chain of argument that explains how to identify a good career mission
  • Little Bets
    • in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics:
    •  It’s a project small enough to be completed in less than a month.
    • It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didn’t exist before).
    • It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback.
  • Law of Remarkability
    • For a mission-driven 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

Quotes & References

“Working right trumps finding the right work”

“Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.”

Steve Martin – Be so good they can’t ignore you

Money is a neutral indicator of value, so by aiming to make money you are aiming to be valuable – Derek Sivers

You  are either remarkable or Invisible – The World is full of boring stuff – the brown cows – which is why few people pay attention, A Purple cow on the other had would stand out – Seth Godin, The Purple Cow.