Engineering leadership · Book notes
So Good They Can't Ignore You and the passion that shows up later
Newport says skill before passion, but his final rule, mission, sounds a lot like passion that waited its turn.
Passion comes from being really good at something. And you only get really good at something by practicing it a lot and investing in it.
This is the core idea in So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, published in 2012. In that book, Newport argues that “follow your passion” is bad career advice. Instead, he says it’s better to build rare and valuable skills (or “career capital”), because passion tends to follow the acquisition of skills.
So let’s say you’re an accountant, and you’ve spent years hating every minute of staring at spreadsheets. You finally decide to quit for good, sell all your possessions and go to start a farm.
It’s most likely going to be disastrous. You’re not really prepared. You don’t know how hard it is. You’re falling in love with this sort of fantasy of what an authentic existence is, and that it really can throw you off into sort of a spiral of unhappiness trying to find your passion.
The fundamental error you’re making here is that you’re assuming that there’s an ideal life out there for you, just waiting. But as Newport points out in a 2018 post, most people don’t have a clear existing passion to discover.
Most people don’t become exceptional at something because you actually have to do uncomfortable things on a very regular basis over a long period of time.
That’s the whole trick. You can’t avoid being uncomfortable. It’s valuable to be able to do it because most people will quit when practice gets hard before they ever get to the payoff.
It’s okay for you to not absolutely love your job. And it’s okay for you to figure out how to be as valuable as possible within the constraints. Paying your rent and having autonomy and living on your own, I would say are more important than having the dream job when you’re 22 years old.
I think this is the kindest line in the whole argument. It speaks to people early in their career and says it’s okay to take a job that pays the rent and get good at that first.
It almost feels like he’s gone full circle, where he’s relabeling passion for mission.
Mission is the final rule of the book, and one that Newport says we only earn after years of building career capital. But is mission really that different from passion, or is it just passion that waited its turn?