Why do some people end up loving what they do, while so many others fail at this goal? (xvi)

Cal Newport’s 2012 manifesto on career satisfaction “So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love” is Cal’s personal answer, developed at a critical turning point in his own career decision-making, to the dogged question of how to achieve a career you truly love. It is the first of his career-oriented publications and lays the groundwork for the philosophy he has continued to develop over subsequent books. This base comes down to one very simple but powerful idea:

Working right trumps finding the right work. (228)

Essentially, Cal makes the argument that career happiness comes not from finding your perfect match with some pre-existent passion, but crafting valuable skills to exchange for what really matters — autonomy and mission. He formalises this exchange of skills for good work with the concept of “Career Capital” and lays out a guide for how to accrue it, and how to spend it. The book is short, accessible, and fundamentally oriented towards usability. While, as with all of Cal’s work, I feel “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” frustratingly waffles (my goodness the biographical waffle goes on and on) around the sides of a brilliant idea, there is more than a kernel of truth in his thinking and Cal brings us close enough to a solution that the reader can grasp it for themselves.

I really like Cal. We have similar ambitions, and our brains work in similar ways. Though I may disagree with him frequently, from what I know about him, I would consider him very successful in the most holistic sense of the word, and I both look up to and feel kindred in his quest to answer the important questions I am also chasing clarity on. As far as books go, this one was kind of average, but the ideas were original and interesting and so I highly recommend it nevertheless. Besides, there is certainly something to be gained from thinking through his perspective, even if only to cast our own thoughts into brighter relief.

Why I Spend So Much Time Thinking About How To Think About Work

My first corporate role was so under-stimulating I felt like a zoo animal pacing at the walls of my enclosure. When I expressed that this caged boredom (rather than a reprieve and reward as my coworkers saw it) was degrading my soul, my direct manager looked at me lovingly and helpfully offered that I could try picking up some more weekend hobbies and caring less about work…

To facetiously overly literalise it, the argument for “work-life” balance seems to hinge on a broader cultural undercurrent encouraging a mental severance of work from what we consider our real life. While it’s not entirely bad advice, and in the situation where you have no choice over what you do for work, it may reasonably be your only option. But for those of us with the fortune and ability to choose what we make of our days, I cannot come to peace with it.

I do not believe it is possible to separate work from life because ‘life’ is not something that can be put on hold. Life is the breath you’re presently inhaling, the four mindless hours per day on social media, the sunrise you didn’t notice, the meals you ate but didn’t taste; life is all of it, not some of it, and thus, every minute we spend at work is as much our real life as the cumulative weeks sitting on the toilet or on holiday or with friends and family. To be unhappy at work is to be unhappy in life, and has every right to be considered equally unfortunate as a fight with a loved one, or sport-ending injury. Besides, even were those hours at work somehow just a fake-life, do we really believe that we could silo those feelings and leave them at the key-carded door with none of that malaise and frustration bleeding out from the office, down the elevator, into our car, and all the way home with us to our real life anyway? The average person will spend over 80,000 hours across their various jobs. If we minus out the time spent sleeping and showering and eating, etc., work accounts for the single most intensive pursuit of our days. The proportion of our being, time, thoughts, energy, and mission we give to our jobs is not to be trivialised.

Indeed, I suspect that the trivialisation of what we do at work and this idea that it should be minimised in mind and spirit, is a subtle con of capitalism; convincing us to accept any amount of dissatisfaction under the guise that it’s just a small thing we must bear in exchange for being happy some other time. I do not want to be happy some other time. I do not want to exchange 80,000 hours of discontent for 4 weeks annual vacation and volleyball in the evenings; I care directly about my 80,000 hours too. Besides, if I’m going to do something for 80,000 hours, may I not as well make it the best it can be?

It was at this exact opportune moment, struggling over how to manage my feelings of discontent in my corporate job, I was finally convinced to read Cal Newport and in him found a philosophy that has subsequently guided much of my subsequent thinking and decision making.

Rule 1: Don’t Follow Your Passion

The ‘passion hypothesis’ is popular culture’s prevailing theory for how one should organise a fulfilling career. It essentially boils down to all the cliches we are raised on: “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”, “follow your dreams”, and most importantly, “follow your passion”. Cal uses the first chapter of his book to deconstruct why this “may be terrible advice” (6). His argument largely boils down to the following 3 factors: 1) Passion is rare, 2) Passion takes time, 3) Passion is a side-effect of mastery.

At the core of the passion hypothesis is the assumption that we all have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered. (14)

The deep questions driving the passion mindset — “Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?” — are essentially impossible to condor. … In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused. (38)

Cal’s first idea is that while most of us have rich inner passions, these, and particularly the immature interests and passions of young people (i.e., dance, sport, reading, etc.), will be largely unhelpful pointers for a realistic career. Indeed, learning from the careers of interesting, happy, and successful mature individuals, it is a rare case when one of them actually ends up having fulfilled their childhood dream — the exception being, for example, athletes. Instead, for us average proletariats, passion in a meaningful career is something more likely tortuously built, not spontaneously discovered. Organisational psychologists have consistently determined that motivation for work is largely associated with non-passion-based traits such as autonomy, competence, and connectedness to others — the former two being traits earned with time and effort. Young people these days have been misled by the passion hypothesis into expecting the “right job” to click like love-at-first-sight, but just as with its love counterpart, this is largely a myth. Young people expecting work to be easy and fun and meaningful straight after graduation are thus more likely to be disaffected by the mundane reality without the patience, drive, or discipline to create the skills to earn this kind of good work. Cal concludes that the passion hypothesis is both wrong, and actively harmful.

Unfortunately, while there may be broad swathes of truth in it, I’m not a fan of the specifics as presented in the chapter.

The main piece of evidence cited to prove that passion is a side effect of mastery is a study on career satisfaction in college administrators. The way we think about work can be sorted into three main categories: job (way to pay the bills), career (path to increasingly better jobs), and a calling (work that is an important part of your life and vital part of your identity) (15). A study found that college administrators, though they all had the same job, were roughly equally split between seeing the work as a job, career, or calling, and that those who stayed in the job the longest reported higher identification with their work as a calling. Cal concluded that sticking around in the same job (to develop competence and earn autonomy) generated passion for the work.

The happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do. On reflection, this makes sense.

Perhaps one reason that more experienced college administrators enjoyed their work was because it takes time to build the competence and autonomy that generates this enjoyment. (19)

Come on Cal. You can’t be serious. While this could potentially be true, there is insufficient evidence to differentiate it from the exact inverse conclusion: people who identified this profession as their calling were more likely to stick around. He also implies — but provides no evidence for — the claim that, across professions, there is no correlation between the intrinsic passion-drive of a career (e.g., little kids dream of being doctors, few dream of being an insurance claims adjuster) and self-identifying your work as a ‘calling’. I remain highly skeptical.

I also disagree that it’s a bad thing that the passion hypothesis leads to young people not settling for unhappy jobs.

This young generation has “high expectations for work” … “They expect work to be not just a job but an adventure[,] … a venue for self-development and self-expression.” ~ paraphrased from Jeffery Arnett, psychologist (21)

The last several decades are marked by an increasing commitment to [the passion hypothesis]. And yet, for all of this increased focus on following our passion and holding out for work we love, we aren’t getting any happier. (22)

As a proud Gen-Z, I know that my ‘entitled’ attitude to work was a startling and largely unwelcome addition to my particular corporate office when I arrived hot-off-the-press searching for fulfillment, unwilling to first spend a decade crushed by the boot above me. I most certainly reported unhappiness whereas, had I never known it was possible to reach for more, I may have come to tolerate it. Is Cal seriously suggesting that would have been better? That I should have persisted in frustration for a decade to earn my way to autonomy when a quick side-step brought me directly into the joy of a PhD? (Though I suppose I got lucky, and could have just as easily side-stepped into other problems, and then would have joined the job-hopping epidemic he refers to.) Hmm. Inconclusive.

Later he did address the fact that not all careers are equally suited to craftsmanship, and provided some examples of when you’re allowed to quit (56):

Rule 2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You

No one owes you a great career… you need to earn it — and the process won’t be easy. (39)

You have to get good before you can get good work. (110)

The point of this titular chapter is very clear, elegant, and pleasing. It can be summarised with simple concision:

A great career can be defined by creativity, impact, and control. These traits are rare, and thus, basic economics dictates, in high demand. To obtain one of these rare, high-demand jobs, you need to compete for it. The best way to compete for these positions is to be “so good they can’t ignore you”. Being this good can be achieved using a craftsman mindset to develop and hone specific skills through intensive, deliberate practice. These skills can be referred to as your “career capital”.

(While this is no doubt very obvious to adults, I first read this at 22 and found it to be a genuinely new way of thinking about work. This revelation is what has stuck with me for years and the main reason I value this book so highly.)

I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus towards becoming so good they can’t ignore you. (39)

… regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career. (41)

The (straw-man) passion hypothesis suggests that passion is sufficient for career happiness. With this in mind, you launch out into the world chasing your dreams. But you don’t necessarily have the skills, you don’t necessarily have the background. So your small business, even though you’re really passionate about it, is probably going to fail. If you instead approach it as a craft, as something you have to grow and build towards, at great effort and in incremental steps, you’ll build the skills and background and connections to earn your way to launching this business, and it is much more likely to succeed.

In recent years the New York Times, for example, has made great sport of telling the story of ex-bankers who head off to Vermont to start farms (stories that usually end with the banker slinking home, mud-stained hat in hand). (106)

[Ryan] didn’t just decide one day that he was passionate about produce and then courageously head off into the countryside to start farming. Instead, by the time he made the plunge into full-time farming … he had been painstakingly acquiring relevant career capital for close to a decade. (109)

How to accrue said “career capital” then becomes the mission of the ambitious early career individual. The general strategy is to identify something that, if you were good at it, would make you highly valuable, and then commit 10,000 hours of work to mastering it, with, specifically, some 5,000 of those hours being highly technical, highly focused, serious and challenging “deliberate practice” that pushes you to ever higher performance.

… great accomplishment is not about natural talent, but instead being in the right place at the right time to accumulate such a massive amount of practice. (81)

If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. (85)

Cal suggests some steps (91 - 101):

  1. Decide what capital market you’re in. This can either be a winner-takes-all market where there is only one valuable skill (writers need to write compellingly) or an auction style where there are multiple valuable skillsets and different paths to the final destination.
  2. Identify your capital type. Defining the specific skill that you’re now going to learn is easy for the winner-takes-all market style where there will only be one obvious skill worth accruing. In the auction setting however, where there are more options, it is easiest to pursue an open gate strategy where you pursue the available options first.
  3. Define good. Define very clear goals about what you’re aiming for.
  4. Stretch and destroy. Deliberate practice is definitionally uncomfortable and should require you to operate outside of your comfort zone. Pushing yourself against this boundary is how you grow.
  5. Be patient. You can’t be great at something overnight, but if you start now, in 40 years, you’ll have been doing it for 40 years, and you’ll be great at it by then.

Rule 3: Turn Down a Promotion

The dream of leaving the rat race to start a farm, or otherwise live in harmony with the land, is the perennial fantasy of the cubicle-bound. (106)

Having now established the principle that career capital of carefully trained skills can be traded for good work, Cal begins defining what good work looks like. The first trait is ‘control’ over how you work. He cites a few studies that show autonomy as a primary predictor of happiness and success at work, but I imagine we need little convincing that the human spirit chafes at the constraint of being told when and where and how to be. And thus, stuck in soulless offices manufacturing soulless busy-work on soulless tasks, the soulful office-worker peers out the window glimpsed in their boss’ corner office and dreams of running away from it all to start a farm where no one will be able to tell them what to do. Optimising for control however, is insufficient, and there are several traps. These traps can be summarised in two main points (117- 133):

  1. Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable. Optimising for pure autonomy leads to half-baked schemes like quitting your job to become a lifestyle influencer on instagram. But, as pleasant of a daydream that may be, without career capital in this new domain, you have nothing to exchange and thus, no leverage, and the ‘control’ is indistinguishable from unemployment.

Just because you’re committed to a certain lifestyle doesn’t mean you’ll find people who are committed to supporting you. (116)

Enthusiasm alone is not rare and valuable and is therefore not worth much in terms of career capital. (120)

  1. Your bid for control will be resisted by those who benefit from your captivity. Upon becoming so good they couldn’t ignore you, you’re going to rapidly rise up the ranks. The more skills you have, however, the more your boss will want you to turn those skills to the benefit of the company (as opposed to benefit for you). You need to stay vigilant to the trappings of money and prestige, and ensure you remain optimising for skills and autonomy.

This is the irony of control. When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably don’t have enough career capital to do anything interesting. But once you do have this capital, … you’ve become valuable enough that your employer will resist your efforts. (130)

When you begin a new bid for control, you’re likely to encounter friction from one of these two domains. Distinguishing whether this resistance stems from control trap 1 or 2 can be resolved by the “law of financial viability” or — less jargonly — doing what people are willing to pay for. Following the money is a short-cut “…mental algorithm that prevents the lawyer, who has had this successful career for twenty years, from suddenly saying, ‘You know, I love massages, I’m going to become a masseuse’” (Derek Sivers, 137). Essentially, don’t quit your day job until your side-hustle has made enough money for you to be certain that it’s going to be able to support you in the day job’s stead.

Similarly, don’t follow the constructs of capitalism into prestige and cash, saddling yourself with pressure, over-filled schedules, busy-work, and no time at all to do the things you actually love. You don’t have to climb the corporate ladder… there is more than one way to be successful.

Rule 4: Think Small, Act Big

To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. It’s more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question, What should I do with my life? (152)

In place of passion, Cal substitutes the word “mission” and sells the passion hypothesis right back to us. I joke. Mission, according to Cal, is different from passion in several very reasonable and sensible sounding ways.

  1. Mission can only be identified when you’re on the cutting edge of your field, already significantly advanced into your career with a good understanding of your field.
  2. Rather than going all in on a passion in a single move, a mission-oriented career takes ‘little bets’ about what might be successful, moving a few steps in each direction, assessing, and then stepping tangentially closer based on your learnings.

Cal then very helpfully guides us to Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’ method of success — i.e., be remarkable, market your remarkableness is places where it is likely to get remarks (sorry, without actually having read Godin’s book I shouldn’t be so dismissive… but it does sound a bit tautological or, at least, unhelpful. “Oh yes! I will just simply become remarkable and gain attention for this! Why didn’t I think of that?”). He then offers no further tips or advice.

[Doing important but unsexy projects is] solid, quality, useful work. But it’s not the type of achievement that would compel [people] to write [their] friends and tell them, “You have to see this!” (191)

To be fair to Cal, he wrote this book while still early career himself (only 5 years older than I currently am myself) and his “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” insights on mission lack the maturity and depth that I’ve heard him express more recently. Thus, I read this section as more of a seed of his future thinking.

Conclusion

[Pulling this all off is hard, but that’s good.] 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 confidently take action. (154)

To strip away the waffle, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” can be succinctly summarised in the following quote from the final page:

Don’t obsess over discovering your true calling. Instead, master rare and valuable skills. Once you build up the career capital that those skills generate, invest it 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. (230)

He still doesn’t address how to decide the very first step though. Aside from preternaturally talented guitarists and chess savants, most of us are generally good at a range of things but not particularly good at any of them. When selecting which degree to go into at university, we are essentially spinning a wheel and gambling that it will work out, and what else should we guide that wheel-spin on if not passion? Cal attempts to address this in text a few times but somewhat seems to repeatedly miss the point. He first counters the “argument from pre-existing passion” (40) by saying that many people in supposedly passion-driven pursuits (citing guitarists and comedians) often have existential dread (totally irrelevant), and that it doesn’t matter how they got to the craftsman mindset anyway as long as they lock in once they’re there (Huh! Cal you were the one who set it up as a dichotomy in the first place??)…

Furthermore, Cal near-obstinately refuses to acknowledge that his own career is a result of passion. He denies that computer science is a passion of his (it was, in his own words, just a way to make money) or that writing is his calling (“the motivation to write my first book was an idle dare leveled by an entrepreneur I admired… this seemed as good a reason as any for me to proceed” (206)). But he started a moderately successful web design business in high-school, began an advice blog in college, and wrote his first book while still in grad school — are these not the hall-marks of a life-long passion for these crafts? Sure, the particular steps to success he took were founded in a craftsmanship-style thinking about career capital, but it is frankly absurd to posit that he didn’t begin these pursuits from a passion for programming and writing. Cal, be serious.

Thus, I conclude that while I disagree with the false dichotomy “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” creates between passion and craftsmanship, I also understand that he had to do it from a marketing click-bait perspective (which he admits to directly) and the remainder of the thinking and advice throughout the book is insightful and helpful for young people like myself considering how to design a career we love.