Book Summary of “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”

Why You Should Develop Valuable Skills, but Not Follow Your Passion

Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion

1. The Passion Hypothesis is the biggest myth in occupational happiness. It says “ The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you are passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion”.
2. Steve Jobs who was well-known for “follow your passions”, didn’t start off loving computers, instead, he only saw it as an opportunity to earn quick cash. There was no doubt his love for Apple computers in the later stages of his life, but he surely didn’t start off because he had a passion for the computer.
3. Career passions are rare. Most passions (like reading) cannot be translated into a career.

Rule #2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Or, the importance of skills)

1. Adopt the craftsman mindset, a focus on what value you’re producing in your job (/to the world), instead of the passion mindset, a focus on what value your job (/the world) offers you.
2. The passion mindset makes you hyper-aware of what you don’t like about your job, and creates confusion on constantly questioning whether this is the right job- “Is this who I really am?” or “Do I love this?”. And you might irrationally jump into a field where you don’t have any skills to leverage, but you think that you have passion in (e.g. Yoga).
3. The craftsman mindset focuses on becoming better and improving the quality of what you produce. It focuses on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, regardless of what you do for a living. You approach your work as a true performer on a daily basis. You simply do whatever you are doing really well.
4. Adopt the craftsman mindset first, and then the passion follows. If you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuation skills (AKA career capital) to offer in return. When you have developed skills that are too valuable to be ignored, then you get to choose a great job- one that is rich with creativity, impact, and control. So, your goal is to acquire as much career capital as possible, then more opportunities would come.
5. When should you leave your job? If a job has any combination of the following disqualifying traits, then you should consider it. First, the job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. Second, the job focused on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world. Lastly, the job forces you to work with people you really dislike.
6. Deliberate practice is the key to acquiring career capital. You need to be constantly stretching your abilities beyond what was comfortable, and soliciting immediate feedback from colleagues and professionals. Deliberate practice means that “an activity is designed for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.” It includes working on your weakness over and over again. It requires an obsession with improving and constant learning process.
7. A great practice in the book is Mike Jackson’s time-tracking spreadsheet- where he tracks how he spends every hour of every day. He ensures that he spends time on what’s important, instead of what’s immediate. At the end of every week, he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved his goals, and use this feedback to guide himself in the week ahead.
8. 5 Steps on applying the deliberate practice in your work:

Step 1: Decide What Type of Capital Market You’re Competing In. Is it a winner-take-all market or an auction market? In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available (e.g. for a blogger, you don’t need skills like SEO, format, etc, the only skill that matters is writing good and compelling posts). Whereas in the auction market, there are a variety of relevant skills that could have led to a job in this field. (e.g. As a Clean-tech VC, you may need expertise in renewable energy and entrepreneurship, plus other relevant skills)

Step 2: Identify Your Capital Type. What relevant skills do you need in order to be great at your job? For an auction market, as we have more flexibility, a useful heuristic is to seek open gates- opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. And work your way up, based on the valuable capital that you have accumulated.

Step 3: Define “Good”. Once you’ve identified exactly what skill to build, you can start having clear goals on where you want to be and how you can achieve it through deliberate practice. e.g. For a scriptwriter, his goal might be having a good-enough script to land him an agent.

Step 4: Stretch and Destroy. Deliberate practice is often not enjoyable. Pushing past what’s uncomfortable, even if it destroys what you thought was good. Get instant feedback on what was working and what was not.

Step 5: Patience. Acquiring capital takes time. Have the patience and willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, and put all your effort into acquiring the capital you need. You stretch yourself, day after day, month, and month, before finally looking up and realizing you’re too good to be ignored.

Rule #3: Turn Down a Promotion (Or, the importance of control)

1. After you acquire career capital, the next step is to invest this capital in the traits that define great work. Control is one of the most important targets you can choose for this investment. Gaining control over what you do and how you do it, has been shown up so often in the lives of people who love what they do.
2. Gaining more control is the next step, not before you acquire sufficient career capital, otherwise, you may easily run out of money to sustain your autonomy lifestyle if your passion fails you.
3. The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your work 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. If you treasure control over the work that you do, then you have to fight against this resistance to pursue your dream job.
4. The Law of Financial Viability: When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuits 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. If not, move on. Money is simply an indicator that you’re being valuable to someone else.

Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big (Or, the importance of Mission)

1. Build your career on a clear and compelling mission. It gives meaning to your work and provides energy to go through tough times. It focuses your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world- a crucial factor in loving what you do.
2. 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. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge (acquiring sufficient capital)- the only place where these missions become visible. “Think small” by focusing patiently on a narrow niche, but then “acting big” once you acquire enough capital to identify a mission.
3. To maximize your chances of success and finding your mission, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback. These small bets allow you to tentatively explore the specific avenues surrounding your general mission. For a screenwriter, such a bet might include producing sample footage for a documentary and seeing if it attracts funding.
4. Great missions are transformed into great successes as a result of finding projects that satisfy the law of remarkability, which requires that an idea inspires people to remark about it, and is launched in a venue where such remarking is made easy.
5. For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different 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.

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Cheers,

Jason Kwan