So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

Author: Newport, Cal

• When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.

• In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.

• A job, in Wrzesniewski’s formulation, is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.

• In other words, the more experience an assistant had, the more likely she was to love her work.

• In Wrzesniewski’s research, 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.

• In other words, working right trumps finding the right work.

• 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.

• Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

• “Here’s a case where someone successfully followed their passion,” they say, “therefore ‘follow your passion’ must be good advice.” This is faulty logic. Observing a few instances of a strategy working does not make it universally effective.

• “Studio musicians have this adage: ‘The tape doesn’t lie.’

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

• First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later.

• If you’re a guitar player or a comedian, what you produce is basically all that matters. If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not you’ve found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself out of work.

• 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.

• Most jobs don’t offer their employees great creativity, impact, or control over what they do and how they do it. If you’re a recent college graduate in an entry-level job, for example, you’re much more likely to hear “go change the water cooler” than you are “go change the world.”

• The passion mindset is not just ineffective for creating work you love; in many cases it can actively work against this goal, sometimes with devastating consequences.

• The biggest obstacle between you and work you love is a lack of courage—the courage required to step away from “other people’s definition of success” and to follow your dream.

• Duffy started his own company with enough career capital to immediately thrive—he was one of the world’s best logo men and had a waiting list of clients.

• Duffy started his own company with enough career capital to immediately thrive—he was one of the world’s best logo men and had a waiting list of clients. Feuer started her company with only two hundred hours of training and an abundance of courage.

• The traits that define great work are bought with career capital, the theory argues; they don’t come from matching your work to your innate passion.

• Working right, therefore, still trumps finding the right work.

• The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level.

• The Norwegian chess phenom Magnus Carlsen, for example, paid Garry Kasparov over $700,000 a year to add polish to his otherwise intuitive playing style.

• When I first encountered the work of Ericsson and Charness, this insight startled me. It told me that in most types of work—that is, work that doesn’t have a clear training philosophy—most people are stuck.

• 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. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

• “I have a never-ending thirst to get better,” he said. “It’s like a sport, you have to practice and you have to study.”

• Mistaking a winner-take-all for an auction market is common.

• Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands….

• you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.”

• If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.”

• In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.

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

• To summarize, if your goal is to love what you do, your first step is to acquire career capital.

• Jane had discovered a hard truth of the real world: It’s really hard to convince people to give you money.

• The more I studied examples of control, the more I encountered people who had made these same mistakes. Jane’s story, for example, is just

• It doesn’t take an economist to point out there’s not much real value lurking there. Or, put into our terminology, enthusiasm alone is not rare and valuable and is therefore not worth much in terms of career capital. This lifestyle designer was investing in a valuable trait but didn’t have the means to pay for

• It doesn’t take an economist to point out there’s not much real value lurking there. Or, put into our terminology, enthusiasm alone is not rare and valuable and is therefore not worth much in terms of career capital. This lifestyle designer was investing in a valuable trait but didn’t have the means to pay for it.

• This story provides another clear example of the first control trap: 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 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.

• however, it’s possible that you have plenty of career capital, and this resistance is being generated exactly because you’re so valuable. That is, you’ve fallen into the second control trap. In this case, you should ignore the resistance and pursue the idea.

• have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules,” he said. “Do what people

• “I have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules,” he said. “Do what people are willing to pay for.”

• “If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea.”

• (One of the classic examples of recent human evolution is lactose tolerance—the ability to digest milk into adulthood—a trait that didn’t start spreading through the human population until we domesticated milk-producing animals.)

• To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career.

• Where Good Ideas Come From,

• Big ideas, Johnson explained, are almost always discovered in the “adjacent possible,” a term borrowed from the complex-system biologist Stuart Kauffman, who used it to describe the spontaneous formation of complex chemical structures from simpler structures.

• “We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape,”

• This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard—the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives.

• If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital. If you skip this step, you might end up like Sarah and Jane: with lots of enthusiasm but very little to show for it.

• having passion for your work is vital, but she also believes that it’s a fool’s errand to try to figure out in advance what work will lead to this passion.

• “Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins”

• It’s much easier to redesign your graduate-student Web page than it is to grapple with a mind-melting proof.