So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love Kindle Edition

I read this book twice and love it. I hope that my younger family members will all read it but at the same time not be discouraged if they feel like they have a passion to pursue. This book is not an argument against passion but an argument against pursuing unidentified passion. My impression is that the author would advise against dropping everything in pursuit of passion and to make sure that it is financially viable first. Also, I strongly disagree with some of the other comments I've read here regarding the book being poorly written. The author has main points that he is trying to get across and has written the book in a style to prove his theory. Almost as if he is presenting a case in court he systematically describes this theory, why he believes it, supporting examples, and then counterpoints to objections that he anticipates. The book is another perspective on how to approach your work life in the modern world. It may be different than what a lot of American's have read or been told recently but if you have any "blue-collar" or immigrant family members it's not that unfamiliar.

At the end there is also an outline of the steps he has taken to implement these strategies in his own career. This provides a practical example of his arguments you just read so I'd recommend not skipping this section. Maybe you will have some ideas on how to do the same for your own career.

Book Notes:

Rule #1 Don't Follow Your Passion
Argument against the Passion Hypothesis. Most people do not seem to have a pre-existing passion waiting to be discovered and therefore believing that there is a magical right job awaiting you is a mistake.

Rule #2 Be So Good They Can't Ignore You
Argument for building career capital which is the acquisition of rare and valuable skills. These skills are used in order to get a great job which is also rare and valuable.

Great work allows you to be creative, have impact, and control.

How you do this:
A) Craftsmen mindset - focus on what value you are bringing to the world around you as opposed to the passion mindset which is focusing on the value the world is offering you.

Three disqualifiers to craftsmen mindset:
1) The job presents few opportunities to develop rare and valuable skills.
2) The job focuses on something you think is useless or bad for the world.
3)The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.

B) Deliberate practice - deliberately stretching beyond your comfort zone in work and receive feedback on your performance. Similar to how athletes and musicians train. This is deep work where you focus on improvement.

Rule #3 Turn Down a Promotion
Once you have career capital how do you invest it? Gaining more control over your career...not necessarily promotions or more responsibility.

Control Traps:
1) Do not try to gain more control too early. Need to make sure you are valuable enough to your employer before making moves for autonomy.
2) Once you are skilled enough to make moves for more control your employer will resist because of the value you bring to them. They will push you toward promotions and roles requiring more responsibility.

If you are pursuing more control in your career but are encountering resistance you can test the reason by using the law of Financial Viability. This simply means doing what people are willing to pay for. This is an indicator of whether or not you have enough career capital to do what it is you are pursuing.

Rule #4 Think Small, Act Big
Having a guiding Mission is a trait to pursue if you want a compelling career. You must first develop career capital to increase your chances of having a successful mission. You must have this career capital in order to see what the opportunities are in your field.

Adjacent possible is the area just beyond cutting edge in your field. In order to see this you must be skilled enough in an area which requires developing career capital.

Once you have a mission or an idea of a mission it is best to use Little Bets which are small specific projects launched at pursuing this overall mission. These little bets allow you to get feedback to see if you are on the right track or if you need to make adjustments to your ideas.

It also helps to pursue remarkable projects. That is 1) compels people to spread it and 2) launched in a venue that is conducive to spreading. An example of this is open source platforms or academic journals.

There is a lot of talk around about following your passion. In fact I've read many books on the subject. However I've never been sure how to make this real. My own interests and passions are unlikely to generate an income but the focus on so much talk on the subject has resulted in some angst on this topic. This book however takes the opposite approach. It says do something and learn to do it well. Things become passions when you truly understand them.

As it happens this has actually been my approach to work. I just got stuck in and tried to excel at something I thought would deliver a long term career. It's worked for me but I've always had an eye for these passions. I found this useful because it allowed me to look at my work and career in a new light and it's given me a renewed focus.

I think this should ne mandatory reading for young people at school. If I had read it back the I would have had a different approach to career selection.

This short, structured book profiles a series of successful professionals to lay out four rules for finding a fulfilling career.

Rule #1: Don't Follow Your Passion
Rule #2: Be So Good They Can't Ignore You
Rule #3: Turn Down a Promotion (Or, the Importance of Control)
Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big (Or, the Importance of Mission)

The central thesis of the book is that the best way to find a fulfilling career is to build career capital and leverage that capital into a job with autonomy and mission. The author asks what makes a job great? His answer: creativity, impact, control. But since great jobs are rare and valuable, how do you get one? Answer: become rare and valuable yourself, by building career capital (accumulating useful skills/experience).

Here are some nuggets I'll try to remember:

*According to the forty-year-old Self-Determination Theory of psychology, motivation requires three psychological needs: Autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

*Asking what makes you happy doesn't necessarily lead to happiness: "There are two reasons why I dislike the passion mindset.... First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness."

*Deliberate practice (straining yourself and receiving feedback) is underemployed by knowledge workers: "Musicians, athletes, and chess players know all about deliberate practice. Knowledge workers, however, do not. This is great news for knowledge workers: If you can introduce this strategy into your working life you can vault past your peers in your acquisition of career capital."

*A study of chess players who had played chess for about ~10,000 hours found that the proportion of time spent studying chess versus playing in chess tournaments was the dominant predictor of success. Grandmasters spent about 5,000/10,000 hours studying, while intermediate players spent about 1,000/10,000 hours studying. (Rings very true.) The moral is that showing up is not enough; to excel, you must strain yourself.