Don't Follow Your Passions.
A Book Review of Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You (2012)
If So Good They Can’t Ignore You were about romance, it’d successfully persuade you to get an arranged marriage. Newport wrote this book to answer a cloud of questions he had when starting grad school: what should he do with his career? Why do people love what they do? The first third of the book delves into what’s wrong with pursuing your passion, the second third delves into the alternative of getting good at your craft. The last third delves into what to do once you are so good at your craft that they can’t ignore you. In this article is a summary of the book’s core arguments and then some of my thoughts.
The passion hypothesis argues that you should pursue your passions to find success and happiness. This would be what Steve Jobs advises - you won’t work a day in your life doing what you love. Newport then shreds this hypothesis. If Jobs had followed his passions, he would have become a meditation teacher at a California retreat center.
Passions leads to poverty. There are a million poor musicians for every one success. Passions change. And most interestingly, those who are passionate about their careers don’t start with the passion. Newport’s review of the management literature found that people who pursue passion and turn it into a career are extremely rare. Much more common is people discovering later on that they are passionate about their work.
Motivation for work comes from three factors:
Autonomy: the control you have over your time and the sense that your work matters.
Competence: your ability to do the job well.
Connection: your relationships with others.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, passion is a product of your time at a job. With time, you gain more autonomy, competence, and relationships. Note however that pursuing one’s passion was not a motivator for work. Thus, there’s scant proof that pursuing your passion leads to job satisfaction.
The next third of the book delves into how one can get a job with autonomy, competence, and connections. Jobs with these things are rare, so you in turn must bring something rare to the table: valuable skills. He calls this career capital. When you accumulate career capital, better jobs and options to pivot open up. To develop career capital, you don’t pursue your passion. You adopt the mindset of a craftsman and become good.
The passion mindset leads you to ask questions like “what does your work offer you? What don’t you like about it?” But the craftsman mindset leads you to ask questions like “what can you offer the world? How can you get incrementally better?” Adopt a craftsman mindset.
The craftsman perfects his craft through deliberate practice. You keep trying to do the thing you want to do until you make a mistake. Then you slow down and try to fix the mistake. Once it’s fixed, you speed things up again.
Something similar goes for your work. You do your best at work until you find things to improve. Then you think of how to improve. Then you improve. Then you put in perfect reps. Seek out feedback, optimize, then repeat. Track the time you spend and efforts you make, then optimize. This is how to become good.
He does note that there are three situations where it’s not worthwhile applying the craftsman mindset:
1. When the opportunity to distinguish yourself by developing rare, valuable and relevant skills at work are few and far between.
2. When the job’s focus is on something that you think is useless or harmful.
3. When the job forces you to work with people you deeply dislike.
Newport’s humor tempers his realism. He profiles tragic people who pursued passion too. They were stuck in a career they didn’t like, so they quit their jobs to “teach yoga” or whatever. Three months later, they have no students, are taking an online course, and live on foodstamps. This happens because they throw away their career capital and start from scratch, where there’s maximum competition. Chances are that if you’re making no money and are taking courses, you’re starting from scratch.
If you feel constrained in your job, then acquire the rare and valuable skills that let you pivot instead of starting from scratch. Use deliberate practice to build those skills. And don’t waste your career capital by pivoting to something you know nothing about.
Things get different once you earn those skills. You now have options! How then should you use them? This is what the last third of the book is for.
Newport starts off by introducing two types of labor markets: auction and winner-take-all. Winner-take-all markets are those where only one skill matters and the person who’s best gets all the opportunities. Take screenwriting. All that matters is how well you write. Auction markets, on the other hand are those where there are many paths to your career destination. Take venture capital. Some get to venture capital after being in sales. Others, after being developers. There are no “venture capital” pre-requisites. Figure out the market you’re in asap.
A common mistake is to assume you’re in an auction market. Don’t. Once you know the market type, figure out what skill(s) to build. Winner-take-all is easy because with only one skill to master, you can spend all your effort on it. Auction is harder. It’s best to instead take whatever opportunities to build skill you see. This lets you build capital quickly.
Once you know the market and start building skills, get “so good that they can’t ignore you!” Use concrete goals for this. Figure out metrics to use for yourself, then achieve. From there, use deliberate practice and feedback to improve. Be patient! Diligence is more about dismissing distractions than staying focused.
The last third of the book is for those with career capital. Now it’s time to get control. Control is your ability to define what you want.
Control without capital is chaos. This is the woman who quits her job to start a travel blog but ends up homeless. Control with capital lets you push for the things you want. But friends, family, employers, etc will all push back. This is where you spend your career capital. If your friend, family, or employer does not care when you try to get the things you want, it’s a sign that you don’t have enough career capital, because you won’t make a big difference.
How do you know if your pursuit is worthwhile? Do what people will pay you for. Is there a demand for the supply you offer? If not, you don’t have a good reason to take the leap to spend your career capital.
Newport also suggests adopting a mission-centered career. It’s more meaningful, it focuses your career, and it spans multiple jobs. Your mission is what answers the question of “what should I do with my life?” Missions are themselves extremely rare and valuable, so you need career capital for this too. You discover it after reaching the cutting edge of your field, letting you discover something new yourself. It’s also why separate people in the same field discover the same thing concurrently.
The section on mission was the part in the book that I didn’t understand the most, in part because he doesn’t define it. For me, a mission is synonymous with “purpose” - the idea that you’re aiming to do something particular with your life that guides your interests and desires, and that motivates you. It seems strange then that missions for Newport are something that you can only discover once you have career capital and can see the field’s potential. What’s stopping someone from having a mission when they don’t have any career capital? Why can’t a future doctor “want to help people” as a mission, just like a skilled surgeon? Furthermore, what are the alternatives to a mission-driven career? I don’t understand what else could sustainably drive a career.
The last part was the best part of the book. Newport takes the rules he mentioned and shares how he applies them in his own life! He used deliberate practice to read through the leading (and difficult) papers in his field of computer science. To combat his internal protestations, he set a timer for an hour to wrestle with the paper and also wrote out a map of what he could see. The strain then became doable. He also tracked how many hours a month he used deliberate practice.
Another thing that struck me was how Newport prioritized being craft-centric instead of being productive. When you prioritize productivity, deliberate practice-inducing tasks are sidestepped because completion is ambiguous and there’s mental strain. After all, it feels good to do something else that guarantees results at the end.
I’ll end this review by noting that the profile I found most interesting was not in the last part of the book! Every person who was profiled got a blurb at the end except for Thomas. Thomas, who joined a zen monastery after a string of unfulfilling jobs and degrees in philosophy and comparative religion, then left the monastery to return to his boring banking job once he realized that pursuing your passion won’t make you happy.
Overall a helpful book.