So Good They Can't Ignore You

This is a summary of the main points in Cal Newport's book So Good They Can't Ignore You.

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Summary

1. "Follow your passion" is bad career advice. Many people don't have pre-existing passions and their path to finding work they loved was complicated.
2. Great work is rare and valuable so you, in return, need something rare and valuable to offer in return: career capital. This is basically high proficiency in something useful. You have to be So Good They Can't Ignore You (Steve Martin quote and the book's title). 
• To develop yourself to the point of being so good you can't be ignored, you need deliberate practice. This is practice where you intentionally force yourself to practice increasingly difficult tasks because overcoming/learning them will make you better. This part sucks, but it's how you develop skills instead of plateauing like most of us do. 
• It's easy to see this applied to athletes and musicians, but we don't tend to hold this mindset for everyone else. That is a big mistake.
3. Control over what you do and how you do it is super important. Cal calls control the "Dream-Job Elixir." This could mean leaving your job and starting a similar but more independent role or many other things. There are two traps to fall into with control, however. 
• The First Control Trap: it's dangerous to try and gain more control (leave you work, do something radical) if you don't have enough career capital to back it up.
• The Second Control Trap: once you have a lot of career capital, employers won't want to lose you and will fight to keep you on your traditional path.
• Use the Law of Financial Viability (do you have clear evidence that people are willing to pay you for your capital) to discern how much career capital you have and which control area you may be in.
4. To build work you love you cash in career capital for valuable traits like control and mission, a bigger reason or calling for your work.  
• The best ideas for mission are found at the adjacent possible (where you're at the cutting edge of your field and so you can understand things about your field that most others can't). 
• Once you have a mission you have to make it succeed, so generate small steps that produce feedback. Cal calls these little bets. 
• Finally, adopt the mindset of a marketer to make your work known. This is the Law of Remarkability: it must (1) literally compel people to remark about it, and (2) launched in a venue conducive to sharing and remarking.

One last thing I should mention: Cal argues that for most jobs it doesn't matter what you're doing specifically because you can become good at it and ultimately love doing it. However he does list three job attributes that would each prevent workers from developing following Cal's ideas.

1. Few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing rare and valuable skills
2. Job focuses on something you believe is useless or harmful to the world
3. Job forces you to work with people you dislike

Thoughts

1. If many people don't have pre-existing passions, that means they were developed from...something. So could we potentially alter our existing passions and create new ones with some cognitive framing? I think the answer is yes. Also, we haven't experienced everything we ultimately will, so the scale we use to judge how much we like something could change drastically as we find out new awesome things we didn't know existed. 
• however, I think it's a little quick to throw out the idea of passion altogether. Obviously as people find work they love they become passionate about it, and passion also seems to describe mission. So perhaps it'd be more beneficial to think about passion after you have career capital and control rather than before or never.
2. This part I totally agree with, especially deliberate practice. It's humbling to think about how many skills of mine alone have plateaued: piano, beatboxing, singing, smash, YouTube (maybe?), and I'm sure many other that aren't coming to mind. Deliberate practice is just how you get better and we often don't do it because it's difficult...I want to focus a lot on this in my personal life, and that will be discussed more later on in this post. 
3. Control, autonomy, has come up in literature time and time again as being important to people. While reading this I tended to think of freelance-type work as one of few paths with more control, but more control could simply mean a different role in one's organization. 
• As for the second control trap, I think to the movie Get Smart with Steve Carrel. Because Steve is the company's best analyst, he's turned down for a promotion because they feel like they can't afford to lose him in his job. If Steve had read this book, he would have known that he had a lot of leverage at that point.
4. This section really loses me. I think Cal is stretching his examples to fit this category. One guy for instance is an archaeology grad who loves communicating and eventually gets a show on the discovery channel. I don't know if he needed a mission for that, he was just good at communicating and happened to come across the right people and loved doing what he did. The "little bets" were a side-result of his fervor. I think gaining enough capital to experience the adjacent possible is really important, though I don't think you need to be in the AP to experience a passion or mission. I think experiencing the AP is more reflctive of how much career capital you have rather than connected to mission. Now I do think the law of remarkability is actually quite legitimate, but I feel like it accounts more for people recognizing you for your career capital, not building a mission. 

Plans Moving Forward 

[I'll probably come back and edit this section later, just posting initial thoughts here right now]

The biggest things I took from this book are (1) that it's absolutely worthwhile to get very good at things and (2) we achieve a high level of skill only through deliberate practice. With that in mind, I want to take a more intentional approach towards completing the tasks and developing the skills I want. Specifically, applying for internships and increasing my proficiency in graphic design, coding and YouTube.

I think I should put these tasks to a schedule, doing each on certain days so I can focus exclusively on one per day. Until I apply for a fair amount of internships the internships will carry a disproportionate amount of weight. Here's the schedule:

Minimum 30 min per day on each subject:
M–Internship Application
T–YouTube
W–Internship Application
R–Photoshop Tutorial
F–Coding
Weekend–YouTube

For the Internships, I will mostly just be applying to places I've found and looking up potential opportunities. Not much deliberate practice as I see it, more of just completing a task.

For photoshop and coding I'm still learning the basics, so I'll be continuing tutorials online. That qualifies as deliberate practice because I'm learning new things that will naturally be difficult and different.

For Youtube, I had to spend more time thinking of how I can deliberately practice being "better" at what I'm doing there. For that purpose I'm going to make a list of traits I think described good YT-ers. [I'm almost finished but I have to post this at 8, sooooo I'll be coming back to it later]

1. Engaging speaker, passionate about topic
2. 
   

YouTube section:
I think I need to differentiate first whether I want to just improve my skill or also try intentionally to grow (because while connected, those are two different things). I'll talk about just improving for now.

Here's a short list of the qualities I think make YouTubers great
-they have fun with their own style.




 layout a schedule and plan to help me work on the skills I want to develop. At this moment in time, those are coding, photoshop, getting an internship (not a skill, but whatevs) and YouTube. importantly, (2) that deliberate practice is critical to becoming better at what you do.

1. I'm coming back to this.

What are the things that, right now, I want to be better at. 

photoshop, coding, youtube. 

going ham on YouTube? and i guess internship...resume.


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Mid-way through writing this I came across this post by my friend Serena. I had read it before and bookmarked it, and now because of its title I read it again. http://serenafulton.com/2015/05/05/why-following-your-passion-is-bad-career-advice/