Austin Moninger

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So Good They Can't Ignore You
February 02, 2019

Title:So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
Author(s):Cal Newport
Book Link:Amazon

Advice on how to think about the role of work in your life. I occasionally found Newport's writing pompous but I really liked the underlying message: that mastery and commitment precede passion.

Highlights

  • Why do some people end up loving what they do, while so many others fail at this goal?
  • 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.
  • … the strongest predictor of an assistant seeing her work as a calling was the number of years spent on the job. In other words, the more experience an assistant had, the more likely she was to love her work.
  • 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.
  • … for most people, “follow your passion” is bad advice.
  • “[The tape] trumps your appearance, your equipment, your personality, and your connections,” [Mark Casstevens] explained. “Studio musicians have this adage: ‘The tape doesn’t lie.’
  • I’ll call this output-centric approach to work the craftsman mindset.
  • … adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows.
  • By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.
  • Instead he carefully and persistently gathered career capital, confident that valuable skills would translate into valuable opportunities.
  • Here's what struck me as important about deliberate practice: It’s not obvious.
  • … to most knowledge workers who simply put in the hours: We all hit plateaus.
  • It helps to think about skill acquisition like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy.
  • “Do what people are willing to pay for.”
  • … 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.
  • Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world.
  • I looked on with curiosity, once I arrived at college, when my classmates began to wring their hands about the question of what they wanted to do with their lives. For them, something as basic as choosing a major became weighted with cosmic significance. I thought this was nonsense. To me, the world was filled with opportunities like Princeton Web Solutions waiting to be exploited to make your life more interesting—opportunities that had nothing to do with identifying predestined dispositions.
  • When it later came time for me to decide what to do after college, I had two offers in hand, one from Microsoft and the other from MIT. This is the type of decision that would paralyze my classmates. I, however, didn’t see any reason to worry. Both paths, I was sure, would yield numerous opportunities that could be leveraged into a remarkable life.
  • Strain, I now accepted, was good.


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