Book Review — So Good They Can’t Ignore You By Carl Newport

By far, one of my favorite books.

Written over a decade ago, this book challenges the popular and prevalent notion that “passion is the most important factor for succeeding at work. In it, Carl Newport outrightly condemns the conventional wisdom for careers in today’s world which says “Follow your passion” or “Do what you love.” According to him, this advice is terribly wrong and it has caused many people to be afflicted by career confusion. All through the book he re-emphasizes that the passion hypothesis is purely bad advice.

The lessons in this book completely changed my perspective on work and opened my mind to the different possibilities that come with excellent craftsmanship in this day and age.

If you’re about to start your career or are already underway, then I strongly recommend that you read this book.

The 4 Rules for Career Fulfillment :

Carl Newport laid the foundation of the main idea of this book with one statement “ Instead of finding the right work, you should do work right.” Working right trumps the “right” work. He introduces us to a concept called career capital which refers to rare and valuable skills that you have to build in order to get a great job that offers you impact, flexibility, and control.

He breaks down the main idea of the book into 4 simple rules.

Rule 1. Don’t follow your passion

This section starts with a reference to Steve Job’s 2005 Standford Commencement Speech, where Jobs said: “You´ve got to find what you love… The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven´t found it yet, keep looking, and don´t settle”.

This makes great work look so simple and easily attainable. However, Newport explains that Job’s words misdirect people to believe that following your passion is the main key to career fulfillment. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth even in the life of Steve Jobs. He didn’t find his purpose or follow his passion when he started building Apple. Apple was born from a lucky break; Jobs didn’t start off with a passion for computers, instead, he just saw it as an opportunity to earn quick cash. It was after a lot of hard work and consistency that he developed a love for Apple computers. His rocky journey is more of the rule than the exception.

People with interesting careers show that passion rarely ever leads to great heights. The things that happen from mountains of deep work and intensity are usually the causes of the extraordinary. Compelling careers often have complex origins that defy the rule of following your passion. We assume we have pre-existing passions that will be actualized in the dream jobs we find. Most times, the more experience a person has at their job, the more likely they are to be passionate about their job because they’ve had enough time to master it and build a feeling of efficacy.

The summary of this chapter is:

• The passion mindset is a false premise. Don’t follow your passion, let your passion follow you.
• Passion itself is rare. Things happen in stages. You need to work and grow into a stage where your work becomes very enjoyable “seemingly passion”. You need to force yourself to work, get better and master your craft.
• Passion takes time. It is a side effect of mastery

Rule 2 — Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You (The importance of skills)

This rule emphasizes building up rare and valuable skills that will generate great work. These skills are known as career capital. Here Newport says “If you are so good, you can fulfill the three basic psychological needs to feel motivated at work: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.”

He promotes the craftsman’s mindset which focuses on the value you create in your work. It’s what you can offer the world. It’s the foundation for creating work you love as opposed to the passion mindset which focuses on what value your job offers you. The craftsman’s mindset is characterized by an obsessive focus on the quality you produce. It enables you to create something meaningful that you can present to the world. You adopt the craftsman’s mindset first, then you can develop a passion for your job. As your abilities grow, so do your options.

Your career capital can buy you more autonomy in your career. But to get career capital you must adopt deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means that “an activity is designed for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance,” says Newport. He then provided 5 steps on how to apply deliberate practice in your work, which I wouldn’t provide in this review (check out the book for those details.)

Interestingly, Newport noted that there not every occupation is enabling of the craftsman’s mindset. So he provided

3 Disqualifiers/ job traits that resist the application of the craftsman’s mindset:

1. The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable (the job affects skill growth.)

2. The job focuses on something you feel is useless or bad for the world (you’ll have a hard time sticking long enough to achieve your goals)

3. The job forces you to work with people you really hate or dislike ( you’ll have a hard time sticking long enough to achieve your goals.)

A job with any combination of these 3 traits, will definitely impede your ability to accomplish great things and harness the craftsman’s mindset.

The summary of this chapter is:

• The passion mindset fuels flawed decisions. It encourages you to trade comfort for passion.
• The passion mindset strips away merit by giving you a false sense of accomplishment. Great work doesn’t only require great courage, it also requires skills of great competence and value.
• Deliberate practice is the key to acquiring career capital. You need to be constantly stretching your abilities beyond what was comfortable, and soliciting immediate feedback from colleagues and professionals.
• Embrace the hard work required to develop skills. Force yourself through the early and middle phases of developing your skills when things aren’t smooth.

Rule 3- The importance of Control (Turn down a promotion)

“I argue that control over what you do, and how you do it, is one of the most powerful traits you can acquire when creating work you love,” says Newport.

The road to career capital is tough, rough, and annoying but upon gaining it. It provides you with autonomy. Gaining control of what you do and how you do it, has been shown up so often in the lives of people who love what they do.

Control improves people’s lives. It improves results. Companies and schools that enable employee autonomy experience amazing result improvement. Companies now build results-only environments. No results no work. Control is a good aim to purchase with career capital.

However, acquiring control can be tricky and difficult as there are control traps.

The first control trap

It’s dangerous to demand for control as an employee when you haven’t built the requisite career capital. That kind of control is unsustainable. Control requires capital

The second control trap

Control generates resistance. Even after having the capital to get control, there will still be difficulties. At this point people will recognize your value and want to keep you entrenched in less autonomous paths, You’ll encounter resistance when pushing to use your career capital to obtain control. It’ll take nerve to do unconventional things especially as people will think you’re crazy.

Rule 4: Think small. act big (The importance of mission)

Mission is one of the desired traits to be acquired with career capital. Meaning you must first have career capital before you craft a mission. Missions require capital. Anyone surveying a space can eventually see the gaps and possibilities that exist. Big ideas are almost discovered in an adjacent possible. In history, there were almost always simultaneous discoveries of big ideas by different people.

“Unifying mission to your working life can be a source of great satisfaction. Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this, in turn, maximizes your impact on your world -a crucial factor in loving what you do.”

But career capital is not enough to create a mission. Newport provided some tips for finding your mission.

Tactics to move from searching for a good mission idea to successfully pursuing it:

1. Systematically experimenting with various mission options to seek a worthy direction to pursue.

2. Deploy a marketing mindset in search of your focus. — missions are hard, they require careful mixing to make them a reality. This is why many people lack a mission in their careers. They are not easy to actualize. sometimes you need to understand, live, know, and try a lot of things before finding that mission.

Great missions are transformed into great successes as the result of using small and achievable projects — little bets — to explore the concrete possibilities surrounding a compelling idea (the law of remarkability,)

In Conclusion

“Don´t obsess over discovering your true calling. Instead, master rare and valuable skills. Once you build up the career capital that these skills generate, invest wisely. Use it to acquire control over what you do and how you do it, and to identify and act on a life-changing mission. This philosophy is less sexy than the fantasy of dropping everything to go live among the monks in the mountains, but it´s also a philosophy that has been shown time and again to actually work.”

Book Recommendations

In the course of this book, Newport recommended these other books:

• “Where good ideas come from” by Steven Johnson.
• “Drive” by Daniel Pink (one of my favorite authors.)