So Good They Can't Ignore You Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

Cal Newport, I don't know if you know Cal Newport's work, but you guys are very symbiotic in your messages with he's a professor of computer science at Georgetown.

Yes, at Georgetown and wrote a book some years ago really ahead of its time called So Good They Can't Ignore You, which is about not meditating or doing much work to try and figure out what one's passion is by thinking.

Rather go out and acquire skills and get develop a sense of passion for something by your experience of hard work and getting better and feedback.

I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of deep work by Cal Newport yeah it's like the work that you do that's the mo that takes the most focus that's the most valuable right and so it's great to make time for that

So good they can't ignore you so the the premise of that book is I went back to try to understand how do people end up loving their work and the idea that you should follow your passion is really prevalent out there but it doesn't really match the research literature or my own research on how people end up in jobs that they really love.

The formula I ended up talking about in that book the formula that came up often when I study people who love what they do is that they usually started by building up rare valuable skills they get good at something that's unobliguously valuable.

You know, a decade ago when I was first entering the job market out of grad school, entering the academic job market, I wrote a book all about this because I really cared about this question of how do you engineer the right career?

So I wrote this book called So Good They Can't Ignore You.

And it was all about this idea, building up what I called career capital.

Some of my favorite books that he's written are So Good They Can't Ignore You, Deep Work, and his latest is called Slow Productivity.

We revisit Cal's classic 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, and why it's even more relevant today.

Cal Newport's books, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

So good they can't ignore you true story about so good they can't ignore you by the way when I pitched that to my publisher the title was don't follow your passion oh and the publisher said yeah I will never publish a book with that title and we left I was at random house but we left them with the hash yet but after we left we swapped the name from don't follow your passion to be so good they can't ignore you to the positive and then the book went to auction huh like a lot of people want to buy it

author of many amazing books, including So Good They Can't Ignore You,

Cal's books are the kind of books that I see CEOs and founders passing around to their key team members and each other.

by the way there's a book called so good they can't ignore you by my friend cal newport who is awesome you should grab that as well we'll link to that in the show notes

it's about becoming so good at your craft that later on when it is time to market it's an easy product to sell because what you're selling isn't please pay attention to me what you're selling is i can't believe you don't know about this right

I would used to go out there...and say something provocative like pay millennials social media is not going to get you a job actually...how dare you take a time if you take that time using social media maybe work on building up a new skill and probably be better...your employers aren't really looking at your Instagram follower accounts to see if they should hire you...

by the way there's a book called so good they can't ignore you by my friend cal newport who is awesome you should grab that as well we'll link to that in the show notes it's about becoming so good at your craft that later on when it is time to market it's an easy product to sell because what you're selling isn't please pay attention to me what you're selling is i can't believe you don't know about this right

author of many amazing books, including So Good They Can't Ignore You, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work, all of which kind of rock the world of productivity and focus and all that, if there is a world of productivity.

by the way there's a book called so good they can't ignore you by my friend cal newport who is awesome you should grab that as well we'll link to that in the show notes

it's about becoming so good at your craft that later on when it is time to market it's an easy product to sell because what you're selling isn't please pay attention to me what you're selling is i can't believe you don't know about this right

there's a great you know there's a great chapter in cow newport's book which we I know we talked about them last time but you know I was just talking about this and his book so good you can't ignore they can't ignore you it talks about like I think it's a woman who is really unhappy with her job and her passion was yoga so she quits her job in a sort of a way that she's not going to be able to do it.

Read his book, Digital Minimalism. Definitely read Deep Work. Definitely read So Good They Can't Ignore You.

Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of that and it's going to be an issue that the pressure got really intense to do some sort of deep reset, which is the term I like to use. But as I talk about, so good they can't ignore you, we're bad at that. At least our instincts of that are bad.

Yeah, I think suddenly that book is way more relevant than it's been recently because everyone is thinking about these type of transitions.

And most recently, Digital Minimalism and his new planner, the Time Block Planner, a daily method for deep work in a distracted world.

And of course, if you haven't read Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, we're so good they can't ignore you. You are definitely missing out.