Books · Work & Focus
Book summary and verdict
So Good They Can't Ignore You
Newport says stop hunting for your calling and get useful enough to buy freedom, because passion usually shows up after competence. It works, unless your job rewards competence by giving you Darren’s work too. Then mastery is just unpaid Darren.
Should you read it?
Read it if you are starting out, itching to quit, or waiting for passion to descend through the ceiling and assign you a career. The useful idea is to build a valuable skill, then trade it for control. If your boss rewards competence with everyone else’s work, you have become the office donkey. Leave before they find a saddle.
L.Cal Newport would like us to stop waiting for a calling and become so useful we can negotiate for freedom, which is how I became indispensable to a manager who kept saying “quick favor.” I got good enough to be irreplaceable. They celebrated by making me available for everything.
The ideas
I · Passion
Usually, passion shows up after you stop sucking.
Newport is not saying you should choose a job you hate and quietly die in the chair. He is saying that “follow your passion” is terrible advice at the beginning, because most people do not have a fully formed passion. They have rent, three things they are sort of good at, and one compliment from a teacher in 2009 that they have been trying to turn into a career ever since.
People begin enjoying activities once those activities stop humiliating them. Nobody loves playing guitar when every chord sounds like furniture falling down a staircase. Nobody feels called to programming while spending four hours discovering that the problem was a missing comma. Competence changes the entire emotional experience.
You try something twice, it feels awful, and immediately you decide the universe has rejected your calling. No, the universe is fine with it. You just played piano for six minutes and expected the neighbors to gather outside with candles.
L.Beginners are allowed to make noise. The neighbors are allowed to learn your schedule.
II · Leverage
Get useful enough that your resignation makes the boss discover prayer.
The rest of this idea is in the app.
III · Freedom
Workplace freedom begins when replacing you is more annoying than letting you work from a canoe.
The rest of this idea is in the app.
IV · Mission
Choosing a life's mission before building a skill is how a man ends up with a personal logo and nothing to put under it.
The rest of this idea is in the app.
What to actually do
Write down three skills people in your field are actually rewarded for. Circle the one that would give you better choices.
Smaller: Choose something you can demonstrate, measure, or improve.
L.If you wrote “leadership,” name what you actually do. Otherwise it means standing next to competent people and saying “we.”
Choose one kind of practice that makes you slightly uncomfortable. Put ninety minutes on this week’s calendar.
Smaller: Try a harder problem, show someone the ugly draft, make the difficult call, or work just beyond what feels easy.
L.Define what done looks like, because otherwise ninety minutes of practice becomes eighty minutes of dread and ten minutes of changing the title.
Send one piece of work to somebody competent and ask, “What is the weakest part?”
Smaller: Do not ask, “Any thoughts?” That gets you “Looks great!” from people who want to return to lunch.
L.Specific criticism ruins lunch. It also improves the work.
Ask whether your current job is helping you build a skill somebody else will value. If not, choose one you can build outside it.
Smaller: Write down the first small step: a course, a project, a conversation, or an application.
L.Do not resign tonight. Your rent did not attend this breakthrough. It still wants money.
Still in the app
- What happened when people tried them
- Bullshit?
- Where readers disagree
- The one thing worth remembering
The rest of this book is in the app.
Skip the Book reads the self-help books so you don't have to: what each one argues, what happened when real people tried it, which claims are exaggerated, and what to do tonight. 108 books and counting, new ones most days.
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