This summary of So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love explains why Cal Newport thinks you shouldn’t try to “follow your passion”. Instead, he argues, you should focus on building career capital and then trade it in for greater control and autonomy.
Buy So Good They Can’t Ignore You at: Amazon | Kobo (affiliate links)
Key Takeaways from So Good They Can’t Ignore You
- Following your passion is bad advice:
- Most people’s “passions” are not readily converted into careers, and passions can change over time.
- The good news is you don’t need to follow your passion to be happy. Some of the top predictors of job satisfaction, such as autonomy, competence and relatedness, can be found in many jobs.
- Advice to follow your passion can even be dangerous as it may create unrealistic expectations and lead to constant dissatisfaction and job-hopping.
- Focus on building career capital instead:
- Adopt a craftsmanship mindset instead of a passion mindset.
- Engage in deliberate practice, which is practice that stretches your abilities past your comfort zone.
- Deliberate practice can apply to knowledge work too.
- Trade in that career capital for greater autonomy:
- Control and autonomy over your work is rare and valuable. To get such autonomy, you must be able to offer rare and valuable career capital in exchange.
- Before making a career move that will give you greater control, look for evidence that others will be willing to pay you for it. If you seek control prematurely, before you’ve built up career capital, your control will be unstable and precarious.
- But you’ll also encounter resistance even if you seek control after you’ve built up career capital, as control only benefits you and employers will be reluctant to give it up. So you do need some courage to get past that resistance.
- A unifying “mission” can be a source of great satisfaction:
- Missions are found near the cutting edge of any field, in the “adjacent possible”.
- To get to that cutting edge, you should take small steps and “little bets”, getting feedback along the way as to what works or not.
- Good mission-driven projects should be “remarkable” in that people will literally want to remark on it and there is a venue for them to do so.
Detailed Summary of So Good They Can’t Ignore You
Rule 1: Don’t Follow Your Passion
The passion “hypothesis” is that the key to job satisfaction is to figure out what you’re passionate about, then find a job that matches it.
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was a prominent proponent of the passion hypothesis. In his viral 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Jobs advised graduates to “keep looking and don’t settle” if they hadn’t yet found work that they “love”.
However, Jobs did not follow his own advice. While his friend and Apple’s co-founder, Steve Wozniak, was passionate about computers and electronics, Jobs was far more interested in Eastern spirituality when he was young. When Jobs initially helped out Wozniak with circuit boards, it was purely to make a buck. Although Jobs probably developed a passion for his work eventually, he certainly did not find a job that matched one of his pre-existing passion.
Passion-related work is rare
Most people’s pre-existing passions are very difficult to convert into careers. A 2002 survey by Robert J Vallerand found that 96% of the passions held by university students were hobbies like sports, art or reading.
Following a pre-existing passion can work for some individuals, particularly very gifted ones, like star athletes. But that doesn’t make it a reliable strategy for most. When Newport looked at a larger group of people passionate about their careers in researching his book, most (not all) told a more complex story than simply finding and then pursuing a pre-existing passion.
Passions can change and develop over time
It’s hard to predict in advance what you may eventually grow to love. Moreover, it takes time to get good at anything. To some extent, you have to force yourself through the hard parts before it gets better.
A study of college administrators by Amy Wrzesniewski found that they were roughly equally split between seeing their position as a “job”, “career” or “calling”. The strongest predictor of someone seeing their job as a calling was the number of years spent on the job. [This is highly vulnerable to survivorship bias. Someone who sees their work as a calling is more likely to stay compared to someone who sees it as merely a job. So the causal link may go in the opposite direction.]
Advice to “follow your passion” can be dangerous
Newport offers several reasons why the passion mindset can be dangerous:
- Unrealistic expectations. The passion mindset can make you think that, once you find the “right” job, everything will fall into place. But the fact is entry-level jobs tend to suck, and only get better once you get more senior.
- Focus on the negative. The passion mindset can make you overly aware of what you don’t like about your job, which leads to unhappiness.
- No clear answers. There are no clear answers to the questions that the passion mindset tends to trigger, such as “Who am I?” or “What do I truly love?”
All of this can lead to chronic job-hopping and self-doubt.
The Conference Board’s US job satisfaction survey finds that the number of Americans satisfied with their job has been steadily falling. When the survey first started, in 1987, 61% of Americans were satisfied with their jobs. In 2020, this had fallen to 45%. Moreover, young people are particularly unsatisfied — 64% said they were “actively unhappy” in their jobs, the highest level in the survey’s history.
[Worth noting that these results were shortly after the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). While Newport acknowledges that “other factors” play a role in declining workplace happiness, he doesn’t mention the GFC. Out of interest, I looked up the most recent survey publication and found that Newport wrote around the nadir of US job satisfaction. Since 2010, job satisfaction has been steadily climbing — even during the pandemic (possibly due to increases in flexibility and working from home). The 2022 result shows record high job satisfaction of 62%. I didn’t find anything about young people specifically, so they may have stopped surveying young people separately.]
Rule 2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Or, the Importance of Skill)
The title of this book comes from the actor and comedian, Steve Martin. In 2007, Newport saw an interview in which Martin is asked about his advice for aspiring performers. Martin responds:
Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear … What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’ … but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you’.
Newport advocates adopting a craftsmanship mindset. Unlike the passion mindset, which focuses on what your job can offer you, the craftsmanship mindset focuses on what value you have to offer.
Why be so good they can’t ignore you?
The traits that make people love their work are:
- Control;
- Creativity; and
- Impact.
The good news is that these traits are job-agnostic, in that you can find them in a wide variety of jobs. So you don’t have to match your work to a pre-existing passion.
[W]orking right trumps finding the right work.
The bad news is these traits are rare and valuable. Many people want jobs that offer them. Supply and demand therefore suggests that, to get a job with these traits, you must have rare and valuable skills to offer in return. That’s why you should focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you” — it gives you career capital that you can leverage.
When to leave your job
Newport clarifies that it’s not worth trying to build career capital in every job and sets out three disqualifiers:
- The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing rare and valuable skills.
- The job does something you think is useless or actively bad for the world.
- The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.
For example, Newport advises a tax consultant, John, to quit his job because John was concerned his work actively hurt people.
How to become so good they can’t ignore you?
Engage in deliberate practice
The quality of your practice matters just as much as (if not more than) the number of hours you practise.
Deliberate practice in chess
A 2005 study led by Neil Charness looked at chess players’ practice habits over several decades, trying to work out what distinguished grandmasters from merely intermediate players. They looked at players who had all played around the same number of total hours (i.e. around 10,000), but had spent that time differently. Some players focused on tournament play — playing under pressure in tight time limits. Others focused on serious study — reading books and using teachers to identify and work on weaknesses.
Contrary to what most participants believed, serious study turned out to dominate tournament play. Players who became grandmasters spent around 5x more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. This is because feedback is more immediate in serious study, and you can also adapt problems to a level that provides just the right amount of challenge.
Anders Ericsson, one of Charness’ colleagues, coined the term “deliberate practice” to describe this type of practice. Unlike other forms of practice, deliberate practice should stretch your abilities and feel uncomfortable. It should also come with (ideally immediate) feedback.
For example, Newport compares himself to the musician, Jordan Tice. Though they both started playing guitar at around the same age, and probably played around the same number of hours, Tice’s guitar ability far outstripped Newport’s. Tice engaged in deliberate practice, constantly stretching past his comfort zone. Newport, on the other hand, mostly stuck to songs he could play easily, and learned new ones only reluctantly.
When experts perform, it looks effortless, leading people to chalk up their success to natural talent. However, Ericsson claims that what sets experts apart is deliberate practice. Outside of some extreme examples (e.g. height in basketball), scientists have found little evidence to suggest natural abilities explain experts’ success. [I don’t think the position is as clear-cut as Newport suggests — there are definitely correlations between intelligence and success in various areas, and evidence to show that IQ has a large hereditary component.]
Deliberate practice applies to knowledge work, too
Many people already know how important deliberate practice is to fields like chess, music and sport, which are intensely competitive and tend to have clear, regimented training. Yet its application to knowledge work has so far been limited. So if you are a knowledge worker that uses deliberate practice, you can massively outperform your peers.
Newport describes how he engages in deliberate practice in his job by picking a widely-cited, but hard-to-follow paper in his research niche and forcing himself to understand it fully. His techniques included: mapping out proof dependencies, quizzing himself, and writing summaries in his own words. After around 15 hours of deliberate practice, he leveraged his understanding of the paper to prove a new result, which he published at a top conference.
Spurred by this success, Newport developed other routines to increase deliberate practice:
- Research Bible. Once a week, he summarises a paper he thinks might be relevant to his research and keeps it in his “bible” (which is just a document on his computer).
- Hour-tally. Newport keeps a visible tally of the number of hours he engages in deliberate practice each month, which motivates him.
- Theory-Notebook. He bought the most expensive notebook he could find in the bookstore and uses it to record the results of brainstorming sessions. Using an expensive notebook reminds him how important the work he’s supposed to be doing is.
But you have to prioritise it
Newport notes that there’s a tension between deliberate practice and a “productivity-centric” mindset that focuses on getting things done. When you adopt the latter, you’ll prioritise easy tasks over deliberate practice.
Rule 3: Turn Down a Promotion (Or, the Importance of Control)
Having control over what you do and how you do it tends to increase job satisfaction. Decades of research show that control is one of the most important traits if you want a happier and more meaningful life. Newport
When to seek control
To get control, you have to invest some of the career capital you’ve built up under Rule 2 (Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You). The tricky part is knowing exactly when to seek greater control.
First Control Trap
If you go for control too early, before you’ve built up enough career capital, whatever control you gain will be precarious.
Example: Lisa Feuer, yoga instructor
At the age of 38, Lisa quit her advertising and marketing job to become a yoga instructor. [Newport implies that Lisa founded Karma Kids Yoga, but this seems to be incorrect — I think she just worked there.] By doing so, she discarded all the career capital she’d acquired in the marketing industry and transitioned into a field where she had virtually no capital (she had a yoga certification that cost $4,000 and took 200 hours of training).
When the GFC hit, her business struggled. Soon, Lisa found herself queuing for food stamps.
Second Control Trap
But once you’ve built up career capital, you’ll still face resistance in your efforts to gain greater control. This is because control is something that benefits you, but not your employer. Most employers will try to convince you to invest your career capital back in their company in exchange for more money and prestige, instead of greater control. [While I agree with Newport’s point, I think the world has changed since 2012 and more people and employers are accommodating of requests for greater control now. I also suspect the resistance he describes is stronger in the US than in, say, Europe or Australia.]
Example: Lulu Young, software engineer
After Lulu was promoted to senior QA engineer, she demanded a 30-hour week schedule so she could pursue a philosophy degree part-time.
Later in her career, she turned down an opportunity to manage the QA group for a large company (which would have been a promotion for her) to work for a small start-up founded by someone she knew. When this start-up subsequently got bought out, she chafed at the new owner’s rules and culture. She leveraged her career capital to demand three months’ leave and, before her leave ended, she resigned to become a freelance developer. By then, Lulu’s skills were so valuable she had no issue finding clients.
Each time Lulu tried to gain more control over her work, she faced resistance. Resistance came not only from her employer, but also from family and friends (when she declined the large company offer to join a start-up).
Avoid the control traps by looking for evidence of financial viability
The key is working out which of the control traps you might be facing. To do that, Newport recommends following Derek Sivers’ advice: “Do what people are willing to pay for”.
Before making a career move that will give you greater control, look for evidence that others will be willing to pay you for it. For example, Sivers didn’t quit his day job to become a professional musician until he was making more money with his music at night and on weekends. When he founded CD Baby (a company he later sold for $22 million), he didn’t focus on it full-time until he’d built up a profitable client base.
Newport clarifies that “willing to pay” doesn’t have to mean making sales. It could also mean getting a loan or equity investment, or simply convincing an employer to keep hiring you.
Rule 4: Think Small, Act Big (Or, the Importance of Mission)
Missions can be very satisfying
Finding a “unifying mission” to your working life can be a source of great satisfaction. A mission can span multiple positions, giving your career a unifying focus. [Newport insists a “mission” is different from a “passion”, but he never clearly explains how. As far as I can discern, the key difference seems to be that a “passion” (as Newport uses the term) is pre-existing while a “mission” comes later.]
Missions require career capital and small steps
Newport argues that a career mission is like a scientific breakthrough, and scientific breakthroughs only occur at the cutting edge of that field, in the “adjacent possible”. [Personally, I find this reasoning very strained.]
Getting to the cutting edge requires a series of “small” acts where you have to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once there, you may discover a mission in the adjacent possible. You must then pursue it with a “big” action. If you reverse this order, by thinking big before you’ve built up the career capital, you won’t succeed. So you need career capital in order to find a sustainable mission.
Example: Pardis Sabeti, evolutionary biologist
Pardis developed an algorithm that finds recently evolved disease-resistant genes. Her mission “to rid the world of its most ancient and deadly diseases” gives her a sense of purpose and energy.
This mission was not a passion Pardis held from the outset. Rather, she tried several different fields, building career capital along the way: first math, then biology (at MIT), genetics and infectious disease (at Oxford), and later medicine (at Harvard). Newport observes that she found her mission relatively late, after she published a major paper in Nature (she was 27 at the time).
Example: Kirk French, host of TV show American Treasures
Kirk is an anthropology professor and host of the TV show American Treasures. His mission is to popularise archaeology.
But he didn’t decide out of nowhere that he wanted to host a TV show. Instead, he got there through a series of small, tentative steps — or “little bets“. These bets allowed him to feel out paths that appeared promising, receiving plenty of feedback along the way.
A good mission should be remarkable
Newport argues that a good mission-driven project must be “remarkable” in two ways:
- First, it should inspire people to literally remark on it.
- Second, you need a venue that spreads and supports remarks.
For example, Giles Bowkett made “remarkable” software that could write music using algorithms and he made it open-source, a venue where remarkable projects are shared widely. Similarly, Pardis Sabeti did remarkable work, and published in a top academic journal, which other academics read and cite.
Other Interesting Points
- What Color is Your Parachute?, published in 1970, was aimed at church ministers at imminent risk of losing their jobs. This wildly successful book introduced the passion hypothesis to the baby boomers. Then passed that message down to their millennial children.
- Lactose tolerance did not spread through the human population until we domesticated milk-producing animals.
My Thoughts
Newport explains he always doubted the advice to “follow your passion” due to his experience starting a business with his friend during high school. They didn’t do this out of any “passion” — they were bored teenagers. But the business nevertheless opened up many doors for them, and was enjoyable and rewarding.
Likewise, I’d become sceptical of the “follow your passion” advice during high school, but via a different route. I decided to take an elective class on graphic design, because I’d enjoyed dabbling with it in my free time. But I quickly saw how the pressure to create in the face of deadlines sucked the fun out of it. (This is also a key reason why I don’t try very hard to grow or monetise this blog.)
Today, people commonly denounce “follow your passion” as being terrible advice. But when So Good They Can’t Ignore You was published in September 2012, advice to “follow your passion” was widespread. So bear that in mind.
The book is generally well-written and is incredibly easy to read. Although Newport repeats himself a fair bit more than I thought necessary, it wasn’t too egregious. His structure is extremely clear—this is one of the rare summaries where I’ve followed the author’s structure closely. At the start of each chapter, Newport explains what his argument in that chapter will be. Straight after reading The Most Human Human, this felt incredibly refreshing! Newport’s language and writing style are also straightforward—one could even accuse it of being plain or dull. But I didn’t mind. Overall, his writing style seemed rather similar to mine.
However, while I generally agree with Newport’s key messages, I had a few major reservations about the book. I explain these in Criticisms of So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
Buy So Good They Can’t Ignore You at: Amazon | Kobo <– These are affiliate links, which means I’ll earn a small commission if you make a purchase through these links. I’d be grateful if you considered supporting the site in this way! 🙂
What did you think of the arguments in So Good They Can’t Ignore You? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
If you liked this summary of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, you may also enjoy:
4 thoughts on “Book Summary: So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport”
I remember talking with a mentor about the idea of a “dream job”. I argued for following one’s passion, spouting the age-old adage that “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life”.
She disagreed, arguing that the very nature of work (with its inherent responsibilities, time constraints, and administrative duties) means that it’s impossible for that adage to hold true.
This is somewhat tangential to the book’s contents, but reading your summary, and especially the graphic design example, made me think back to that conversation. Do you share my mentor’s sentiments?
I generally do. I think there are exceptions, and I’m sure there are people who love what they do so strongly that they truly feel they never have to “work”. But I think those are the lucky few. They do tend to be very visible (e.g. entrepreneurs, actors, artists, athletes), which can make us overestimate the chances of successfully following a passion.
I’ve been in my current job for 5 years, and it was actually my dream job about 10 years ago. I still really like it for the most part but, like your mentor said, there are inherent constraints and duties that make parts of it un-fun. (This week, for example – I’ve had to travel and work while sick thanks to some crazy external deadlines!)
And my personal journey mirrors Newport’s advice reasonably well, except I didn’t do deliberate practice or anything that intense. I built up career capital, and then leveraged that to slowly cut back my working hours and gain increased flexibility over where and when I work. I may enjoy my job now, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it 40 hours a week every week. Plus, there’s always a possibility that my job stops being fun – I like my job less than when I first started when it was much more exciting and new. And some uncontrollable events like staffing or management changes can also ruin what used to be a “dream job”.
I can resonate with that.
I do wonder why Newport didn’t mention financial independence as a goal state to attain. To me, it logically follows that if you greatly emphasize autonomy/control, you’d pursue a pathway that would grant you financial independence, which is, in my mind, the ultimate state of autonomy, as you can free yourself of the inherent constraints that come with work.
Yes, I completely agree with that.