The key ideas

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

Cal Newport, 2012

You've heard it a hundred times: do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Cal Newport tested this advice on people who truly love their work and found they got there a different way. You'll learn why passion usually comes after mastery, not before it, what to trade your skills for, and how to find work worth getting up for in the morning.

Who it is for

For anyone who can't find their calling and worries that something is wrong with them. And for anyone who has worked for years but never came to love what they do.

Working right trumps finding the right work.

The monk who felt nothing

Thomas is standing in an oak forest near a Zen monastery in the Catskill Mountains, in the southeast of New York State. He has just passed the first big milestone of his training: he has solved his first koan, a riddle that logic can't crack. It took him years to get here. He studied philosophy and religion, and dropped one path after another because each felt wrong. Now he is finally doing what he dreamed of. And to his surprise, he realizes that nothing inside him has changed.

This is the scene Cal Newport opens his book with. Newport is a computer scientist. He wrote the book while finishing his doctorate at MIT, afraid of choosing the wrong path. He asked a simple question: how do people actually end up loving their work? Then he went and talked to people who do: musicians, farmers, screenwriters, programmers and scientists.

The answer was uncomfortable. The most popular career advice, “follow your passion”, barely describes how these people got where they are. More often they first became very good at what they did, and the love came later.

In twenty-five minutes you'll learn Newport's four rules, see what to trade your skills for, and find out how to avoid the traps on the way to freedom. And we'll come back to Thomas to find out where he found what the monastery couldn't give him.

Jobs didn't follow his own advice

In 2005 Steve Jobs spoke to the graduating class at Stanford. He told them: find what you love, and don't settle. Millions of people watched that speech, and it became the best-known symbol of an idea Newport calls the passion hypothesis. Here is what it says: first figure out what you love, then find a job that matches it.

But Newport looks at how Jobs actually lived before Apple. As a young man he was drawn to Western history, dance and Eastern mysticism, and he spent time living on a commune. Technology was not his great passion. Electronics was mostly a way to make money.

Apple started as a small side project for cash: building circuit boards and selling them to hobbyists. The project took off unexpectedly. The love for his work that he later told students about appeared only once the company had grown and Jobs had become truly good at what he did.

Jobs was describing where he ended up, not how he got there. Newport doesn't call him a liar. People who love their work simply feel it was always that way. But if the young Jobs had followed his own advice, Newport says, he might well have become a popular teacher at the local Zen center instead of the founder of Apple.

Read in Livria

About the author

Cal Newport is an American computer scientist, a professor at Georgetown University and the author of books about work and attention. He wrote this book while deciding how to build his own career after his doctorate at MIT.

All books by this author: Cal Newport

Terms from the book

  • Stanford
  • Jackson
  • Johnson
  • Jobs
  • Wrzesniewski
  • Sivers
  • Ericsson
  • Zen
  • Young
  • Thomas
  • Catskill
  • adjacent possible
  • Calling
  • Deliberate practice
  • Koan: A short paradoxical riddle in Zen Buddhism. Logic can't solve it. Its purpose is to shake loose your usual way of thinking.
  • MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world's leading technical universities.
  • Passion hypothesis: Newport's phrase, not a scientific term: the belief that to be happy at work you must first figure out what you love, then find a job that matches it.
  • Vallerand: Robert Vallerand, a Canadian psychologist who studies passion and motivation.
  • Career capital: Newport's term: rare and valuable skills you can trade for the traits that make work great, such as freedom, impact or creative challenges.
  • Tice: Jordan Tice, an American guitarist who plays bluegrass and related acoustic music.
  • Bluegrass: A style of American acoustic music that grew out of folk. It is played on guitar, banjo, mandolin and fiddle.
  • Craftsman mindset: Newport's term: an approach to work that focuses on what value you produce and how well, not on what the work gives you.
  • Berger: Alex Berger, an American television writer and one of the people in the book.
  • Carbon credits: Permits to emit a set amount of carbon dioxide. They are traded on special markets.
  • Venture: A venture fund invests in young, high-risk companies, betting on a large return if a company grows.
  • Clean technology: Technology that reduces harm to nature: renewable energy, saving resources, cutting emissions.
  • Charness: Neil Charness, an American psychologist who studies expertise, including in chess players.
  • Martin: Steve Martin, an American comedian, actor and musician. His advice to be so good they can't ignore you gave the book its title.
  • Voiland: Ryan Voiland, a Massachusetts farmer who owns the organic farm Red Fire Farm.
  • Organic: An organic farm grows food without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides.
  • Control trap: Newport's term: a situation where the pursuit of freedom at work backfires, either because you lack the capital or because the people around you push back.
  • CD Baby: An online store for independent music that Derek Sivers founded in the late 1990s.
  • Law of financial viability: A rule Newport borrows from Sivers: before you change your work for the sake of freedom, check whether people are willing to pay for what you plan to do.
  • Sabeti: Pardis Sabeti, a geneticist at Harvard University. She uses computational genetics to study ancient diseases such as Lassa fever and malaria.
  • Lassa fever: A serious viral disease common in West Africa. It is carried by rodents.
  • Computational genetics: A field of science that studies genes and genomes with computer methods and large-scale data analysis.
  • Little bets: A phrase from the writer Peter Sims: small projects you can finish quickly and that give you clear feedback.
  • French: Kirk French, an American archaeologist at Penn State University and co-host of the TV show American Treasures.
  • American Treasures: An American TV show in which archaeologists examine old objects from ordinary people's homes.
  • Law of remarkability: Newport's term: a mission-driven project succeeds when it makes people want to tell others about it, and when it is launched where such stories spread easily.
  • Bowkett: Giles Bowkett, a programmer who wrote Archaeopteryx, a program that composes electronic music.

All terms

Similar books