So Good They Can’t Ignore You
By Cal Newport.
Rule #1 DON”T FOLLOW YOUR PASSION
The passion hypothesis is not just wrong it’s also dangerous.
Rule #2 BE SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU (the importance of skill)
The craftsman mindset: a focus on what value you’re producing in your job. What you can offer the world.
The passion mindset: a focus on what value your job offers you. What the world can offer you.
”Most people adopt the passion mindset, but in this chapter I argue that the craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating works you love. “
Be so good they can’t ignore you.
”Stop focusing on these little details. Focus instead on becoming better.”
Focus on what your job can offer to the world. It offers clarity: focs on getting really damn good.
Focus toward becoming so good they can’t ignore you.
”That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer."
"The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come that’s the hardest phase” - Glass
”In other words, this is not the story of a prodigy who walked into a radio station after college and walked out with a show. The more you read about Glass, the more you encounter a young man who was DRIVEN to develop his skills until they were too valuable to be ignored.”
The Career Capital Theory of Great Work
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The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.
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Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.
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The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore ou,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love.
Three Disqualifiers For Applying The Craftsman Mindset
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The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable.
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The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world.
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The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.
Becoming a Craftsman
→ Stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle --- one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.
The 10 000-Hour Rule
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
Deliberate practice: “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance."
"if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.
⇒ deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you.
TO successfully adopt the craftsman mindset, therefore, we have to approach our jobs in the same way that Jordan approaches his guitar playing or Garry Kasparov his chess training—with a dedication to deliberate practice.
IMPORTANT to stretch our abilities and seek direct feedback!
”Spend time on what’s important, instead of what’s immediate.” ------- Try managing a spreadsheet and track how I spend every hour of every day. At the beginning of each week, figure out how much time I want to spend on different activities. Then track it so I can see how close I came to my targets. At the end of the week, print his numbers to see how well I achieved this goal, then use this feedback to guide myself in the week ahead.
The Five Habits of a Craftsman
Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You’re In
Winner take all market
Step 2: Identify Your Capital Type
It’s hard to start from scratch in a new field.
Computer programming, algorithm, data structure are skills to build.
Step 3: Define “Good”
Begin to draw from the research on deliberate practice.
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Need clear goals.
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Be the best/top 5 software engineer student in my cohort.
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Land a software engineering/developper position in a big tech company.
Step 4: Stretch and Destroy
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.
”The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau. The bad news is that the reason so few people accomplish this feat is exactly because of the trait Colvin warned us about: Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
”This stretch is the precondition to getting better.” - Cal Newport
”This is what you should experience in your own pursuit of “good”. If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.""
PUSHING PAST WHAT’S COMFORTABLE AND EMBRACE HONEST FEEDBACK
Step 5: Be Patient
Diligence.
Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.
Rule #3 TURN DOWN A PROMOTION (Or, the Importance of Control)
You have to get good before you can expect good work.
Autonomy or control turns out to be one of the most universally important traits that you can acquire with your career capital—something so powerful and so essential to the quest for work you love that I’ve taken to calling it the dream-job elixir.
ROWE: Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.
CONTROL TRAPS
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Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.
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The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over 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.
AVOIDING CONTROL TRAPS
Law of financial viability?: you should only pursue a bid for more control if you have evidence that it’s something that people are willing to pay for you.
The Law of Financial Viability
”Do what people are willing to pay for” — Derek
→ “Money is a neutral indicator of value. BY aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”
When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence f whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.
it can literally mean customers paying you money for a product or a service, can also mean getting approved for a loan, receiving an outside investment, or more commonly, convincing an employer to either hire you or keep writing you pay-checks.
Rule #4 THINK SMALL, ACT BIG (Or, the Importance of Mission)
The mission provides her a sense of purpose and energy. Her mission is the foundation on which she builds love for what she does, and therefore it’s a career strategy we need to better understand.
How do you make mission, a reality in your working life?
_information dissemination in networks—_using randomized linear network coding
The Capital-Driven Mission
A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field.
You must first get to the CUTTING EDGE = CAREER CAPITAL—the only place where these missions become visible. Which is hard— since it’s the type of hardness that most of us try to to avoid in our working lives.
Then seek a mission.
⇒ If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital.
BUT once you have the capital required to identify a mission, you MUST still figure out how to put the mission into practice.
Have a plan?
Strategies:
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Make little bets that gives you a good shot of succeeding in this mission.
ENTP: top Ruby programming firms
focus your attention on making quality contributions to open-source projects. This is where the people who matter look for talent. create remarkable open-source.