So Good They Can't Ignore You

Introduction

Follow your passion is a bad advice, the rest of the chapter states rules on how to build a successful career. It focuses on the importance of ability.

Career capital is the proficiency we gain over time in a career path we choose.

One of the best quotes — “Don’t follow your passion, rather let it follow you in your quest to become.”

Rule 1 — Don’t Follow Your Passion

Passion is rare — the more examples we try to find of people who made successful careers following their passion, it is very rare and the sample size is small. People who succeed have a considerable career capital built in the field to succeed.

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase — after this you gain confidence and build a successful career.

“People are in a rush to start their lives, and it’s sad”, “I set goals for myself at being the best I could be at whatever I did” — Al Merrick

Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.

Conclusions from this rule:

1. Career passions are rare
2. Passion takes time
3. Passion is a side effect of mastery — self determination theory. Three basic psychological needs to feel motivated at work:
   • Autonomy — feeling that you have control over your day, that your actions are important
   • Competence — feeling that you are good at what you do
   • Relatedness — feeling of connection to other people

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

The craftsman mindset — if you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. Craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer to the world, and passion mindset focuses on what the world can offer you.

One should emulate the craftsman mindset. If you want to love what you do, abandon passion mindset and instead adopt craftsman mindset.

Career capital — Traits that define great work are creativity, impact and control. Career capital theory for great work:

• Traits that define great work are rare and valuable
• Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. These skills are career capital
• The craftsman mindset with relentless focus on becoming better will help us build the career capital. This trumps a passion mindset, to create work you love

When craftsmanship fails:

1. The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable
2. The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps actively bad for the world
3. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike

Career capitalist — To gain mastery over something (like a grand master), you need to put in 10 years, also called the 10,000 hour rule. Deliberate practice is the key to improving. This kind of learning is not done in isolation — you need to be constantly soliciting feedback from colleagues and professionals.

Five habits of a craftsman — steps for deliberate practice:

1. Decide what capital market you’re in (e.g. Computer engineering)
2. Identify your capital type (e.g. Backend engineering)
3. Define “good” (what are the goals of deliberate practice)
4. Stretch and Destroy — work really hard and get feedback from environment. Honest feedback may sometimes destroy what you thought was good, and this is necessary for deliberate practice
5. Be patient — without the 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 (Importance of Control)

Dream job elixir — Control is the dream job elixir. Control turns out to be one of the most universally important traits that you can acquire with career capital.

When we give people control over what they do and how they do it, it increases their happiness, engagement and sense of fulfilment.

First control trap — Control that is acquired without career capital is not sustainable. Finding yourself stuck in a boring job is exactly the point where breaking away to pave your own non-conformist path becomes tempting.

Second control trap — The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your 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. You need to know when to become courageous in your career decisions when there is resistance.

Avoiding the control traps — Law of financial viability: when deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. Otherwise, move on.

Rule 4 — Think Small, Act Big (Importance of Mission)

Happiness comes from building a career with a clear and compelling mission.

Missions require capital — The ideas we inherit and build upon are adjacent possibles. Scientific breakthroughs require you first to get to the cutting edge of your field. Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond — the space where innovative ideas are almost always discovered.

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.

Mission requires little bets — People who excel in their field 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.

Mission requires marketing — Law of remarkability: for a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.

Conclusion

Applying Rule 1 — Don’t follow your passion without thinking about career capital. Don’t directly jump ships.

Applying Rule 2 — To combat resistance towards the work you do, two structures help:

• Time structure — “I am going to work on this for one hour. I don’t care if I faint from the effort or make no progress, for the next hour this is my whole world.” Time boxing and hour-tally routines.
• Information structure — Capturing results of hard focus in useful form. The author maintains a research bible.

For ideating, the author maintains a theory notebook.

Applying Rule 3 — With more career capital and credibility, control is bound to come.

Applying Rule 4 — True mission requires two things:

1. Career capital, which requires patience
2. Ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in the field, looking for the next big idea

There can be multiple levels to defining a mission:

• Top level — Tentative research mission: rough guideline for work you’re interested in
• Bottom level — Background research: expose yourself to something new about the field of interest
• Middle level — Exploratory projects

“Working right triumphs finding the right work.”