Finished reading: February 5, 2023

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So Good They Cant Ignore You by Cal Newport

Highlighted sections

Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion

theoretical framework known as Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is arguably the best understanding science currently has for why some pursuits get our engines running while others leave us cold.

“nutriments” required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work:

Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important
Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do
Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

Google’s Ngram Viewer.

Rule #2 Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Or, the Importance of Skill)

The craftsman mindset, a focus on what value you’re producing in your job

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you.

The deep questions driving the passion mindset—“Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?”—are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?” rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses.

Traits that define great work

Creativity
Impact
Control

Traits that define “bad” work

The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable.
The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world.
The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.

Deliberate practice: an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.”

Not only did Jordan’s early practice require him to constantly stretch himself beyond what was comfortable, but it was also accompanied by instant feedback.

“The harder I work, the more relaxed I can play, and the better it sounds.”

Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors.

The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.

the idea of learning complicated lead parts by ear would have been way past my threshold of mental strain and patience.

The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity.

“Most individuals who start as active professionals … change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work … is a poor predictor of attained performance.” Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

The Five Habits of a Craftsman

Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You’re In.

In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it.

An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection.

Step 2: Identify Your Capital Type

If you’re in a winner-take-all market, this is trivial: By definition, there’s only one type of capital that matters.

For an auction market, however, you have flexibility. A useful heuristic in this situation is to seek open gates—opportunities to build capital that are already open to you.

Step 3: Define “Good”

If you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, then it’s hard to take effective action.

Step 4: Stretch and 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.

I like the term “stretch” for describing what deliberate practice feels like.

Pushing past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback—even if it destroys what you thought was good.

Step 5: Be Patient

Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.

How career capital is actually acquired: You stretch yourself, day after day, month after month, before finally looking up and realizing, “Hey, I’ve become pretty good, and people are starting to notice.”

Traps of Control

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. Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.

Trap 1

If you embrace control without capital, you’re likely to end up like Jane, Lisa, or our poor frustrated lifestyle designer—enjoying all the autonomy you can handle but unable to afford your next meal.

The 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.

Trap 2

The more I met people who successfully deployed control in their career, the more I heard similar tales of resistance from their employers, friends, and families.

The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.

Creating a mission

Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.

The next big ideas in any field are found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. The reason important discoveries often happen multiple times, therefore, is that they only become possible once they enter the adjacent possible¹, at which point anyone surveying this space—that is, those who are the current cutting edge—will notice the same innovations waiting to happen.

If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only place where these missions become visible.

Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a “big” action.

“deliberate practice”

“activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.”

“Most individuals who start as active professionals … change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work … is a poor predictor of attained performance.” Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

The Five Habits of a Craftsman — location: 1190 ^ref-17414

Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You’re In — location: 1195 ^ref-19090

In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it. — location: 1198 ^ref-20523

An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection. — location: 1201 ^ref-47220

Step 2: Identify Your Capital Type — location: 1229 ^ref-29087

If you’re in a winner-take-all market, this is trivial: By definition, there’s only one type of capital that matters. — location: 1230 ^ref-64501

For an auction market, however, you have flexibility. A useful heuristic in this situation is to seek open gates—opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. — location: 1231 ^ref-25875

Step 3: Define “Good” — location: 1242 ^ref-28068

If you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, then it’s hard to take effective action. — location: 1244 ^ref-10839

Step 4: Stretch and Destroy — location: 1253 ^ref-51181

I like the term “stretch” for describing what deliberate practice feels like, — location: 1262 ^ref-34769

Pushing past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback—even if it destroys what you thought was good. — location: 1268 ^ref-49006

Step 5: Be Patient — location: 1278 ^ref-35405

Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need. — location: 1289 ^ref-16379

how career capital is actually acquired: You stretch yourself, day after day, month after month, before finally looking up and realizing, “Hey, I’ve become pretty good, and people are starting to notice.” — location: 1291 ^ref-20150

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. — location: 1315 ^ref-60356

if I could isolate the underlying traits that attracted me to this lifestyle, I reasoned, I could perhaps then integrate some of these traits into my own life in the city. — location: 1338 ^ref-15557

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.

The more I met people who successfully deployed control in their career, the more I heard similar tales of resistance from their employers, friends, and families.

The 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.

The next big ideas in any field are found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. The reason important discoveries often happen multiple times, therefore, is that they only become possible once they enter the adjacent possible, at which point anyone surveying this space—that is, those who are the current cutting edge—will notice the same innovations waiting to happen.

If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only place where these missions become visible.

Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a “big” action.

If career capital makes it possible to identify a compelling mission, then it’s a strategy of little bets that gives you a good shot of succeeding in this mission.

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.

Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dweller’s obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that’s more mentally demanding?

Getting things done was my priority. When you adopt a productivity mindset, however, deliberate practice-inducing tasks are often sidestepped, as the ambiguous path toward their completion, when combined with the discomfort of the mental strain they require, makes them an unpopular choice in scheduling decisions.

Researching Rule #2, however, changed this state of affairs by making me much more “craft-centric.” Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice.

the law of financial viability, and described it as follows: “When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.”

I combined into a mission-development system. This system is best understood as a three-level pyramid.

My system is guided, at the top level of the pyramid, by a tentative research mission—a sort of rough guideline for the type of work I’m interested in doing. Right now, my mission reads, “To apply distributed algorithm theory to interesting new places with the goal of producing interesting new results.”

We now dive from the top level of the pyramid to the bottom level, where we find my dedication to background research. Here’s my rule: Every week, I expose myself to something new about my field. I can read a paper, attend a talk, or schedule a meeting. To ensure that I really understand the new idea, I require myself to add a summary, in my own words, to my growing “research bible”

I also try to carve out one walk each day for free-form thinking about the ideas turned up by this background research

a little bet, 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.

I use little bets to explore the most promising ideas turned up by the processes described by the bottom level of my pyramid. I try to keep only two or three bets active at a time so that they can receive intense attention.

Working right trumps finding the right work.

the law of financial viability (introduced in Rule #3): A simple law that can be deployed to help sidestep the two control traps when trying to introduce more control into your working life. It suggests that when deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, you should ask yourself whether people are willing to pay for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.

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.

Deci and Ryan, “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior,” Psychological Inquiry 11 (2000): 227–68.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html

From Stuart A. Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe, 1996 ↩