Screw Your Passions | Monday Book Reviews
I just finished reading “so good they can’t ignore you.”
The book starts boldly by declaring that “follow your passion” is bad career advice. Meaning that you have preexisting passion and you just follow it and everything will turn out to be okay. The author spends the first part of the book explaining that this myth can be harmful.
When you hearing this, the first reaction is to say “wait a minute, what about all these stories of people who followed their passions and changed the world, like Steve Jobs.” The author responds by showing these stories are actually rare. And that you should follow what Steve Jobs did, not what he said at his famous commencement speech about following you passion.
Steve Jobs, did not have a direct path to starting apple. He wondered around (barefoot) from thing to thing and going to India and other places (you can read about that in his biographies). Only after he saw an opportunity, namely that personal computers will be big did he start apple. If you look at other great career you will find a similar wandering, not a straight line. Interview in http://roadtripnation.com/ are given as examples for this wandering.
I think the reason why there is truth in this statement is because of this law of nature: “The world is very complex and you don’t really understand it, and you don’t understand yourself”. This is especially if you’re young. So you can’t find a mission and a passion and will be valuable to the world. On top of that you won’t even like it when you get there. Because when you say “I like basketball, I want to something with basketball”. You don’t even know what you will be doing to say that you will like it, you might be managing a team or an assistant who has to deal with spreadsheets. What you say you love is not what you will be doing.
The alternative is in the title of the book: You should be so good they can’t ignore you. The key message in the book is that great jobs have traits that are rare. These traits include having control of how you do things, creativity and impact. Economics tells you that to get a rare resource, you need to have an equally rare and valuable asset to exchange it with. So to get the rare good jobs you need to have rare valuable skills.
So your first step to getting great jobs. Is to realize in what kind of career you in and start stretching your abilities to obtain these valuable skills. Then from there you can start to build “career capital” which you can invest into making your career something that you love.
The full review will be up on my YouTube channel on Monday.