My Notes from 'So Good They Can't Ignore You' by Cal Newport

Obsessive improvement at an in-demand skill set beats "finding your passion"

Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You is a fantastic 50 page book stretching out to fill 300 pages. To be fair, most of the advice genre has this 80/20 ratio of value/content (including The 80/20 Principle itself), and I think Cal Newport would even agree. He'd want you to get on to more important work once you've bought the argument.

This post is my attempt to distill So Good They Can't Ignore You so that when I tell people "you should obsessively improve at an in-demand skill set in a legible way" I can point them here. If anyone has told you to develop "career capital" this is also the book that popularized the term.

In short, passion is overrated for developing an enjoyable and impactful career, but thinking like a craftsman who gains valuable skills and assets is underrated. As you become "so good they can't ignore you" you can leverage the career capital you develop to do more impactful work, gain autonomy, work on creative projects, etc. Passion will follow.

This is not a full review of the book, just notes from what I found useful. This post (and everything on my blog) is a reflection of my personal views, not those of my employer. While Cal Newport is interested in how to have a career you enjoy, I think these principles strongly apply for using your career to maximize social impact, which you should do.

"Follow Your Passion" is Bad Career Advice

The things that make a job fulfilling or impactful are rare and valuable. If you want them in your life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. You need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.

This might sound obvious, but Newport shows that even you, smart reader of books, are probably overestimating passion and underestimating expertise. It’s everywhere in our culture. Steve Jobs' "follow your passion" Stanford commencement address has 45 million views, yet if Steve Jobs had followed his passion as a young man, he would've been a Zen teacher in Los Altos. Instead, he noticed that he had something valuable to offer the consumer electronics industry and made a series of bets to capitalize on that skill. He got really good, and passion followed from the many other benefits of that decision.

A big part of this problem is that it’s really hard to know a priori what types of work you would enjoy. It’s even harder to predict what you will excel at and how success will improve your enjoyment of the work before you try. We just aren't exposed to a very big sample size of "passions" early in life compared to the vast range of valuable skills we could offer the world. And for supply and demand reasons, the easy-to-find-passion skills aren’t likely to overlap with the rare and valuable skills.

Lastly, your mental model of passion may just have causality backwards. I loved performing live comedy when I was in high school, but if I’m honest with myself, the feedback loop was much more like “Skill → Passion” than “Passion → Skill.” It’s always going to be a mix of both, but we tend to underrate the former, and to underrate passion’s elasticity in general. 

Thankfully, there are many rare, in-demand skill sets with positive feedback loops in the labor market.

A Tale of Two Marketing Executives

Newport fills the book with anecdotes and stories to pad out each chapter. These might help some readers learn from examples, but I think only one encapsulates his worldview enough to warrant including in detail here.

One marketing executive, Lisa Feuer, hates the corporate grind but is passionate about yoga in her free time. She quits her job to take a one month yoga teaching program. Loving it, she re-mortgages her house to open her own yoga studio and live her entrepreneurial dream. Her yoga studio fails and the story ends with her waiting in line for food stamps.

Another marketing executive, Joe Duffy, hates the corporate grind but has been told he's pretty good at making logos for clients. Responding to this feedback, he works hard to improve and build relationships, doing more direct illustrations for corporate clients. He becomes obsessive about his work, landing clients like Coca Cola and Sony, and gets known as one of the best in the industry. Because he is so valuable, he’s able to extract more free time, autonomy, and creative control to work on projects he enjoys. He eventually launches his own firm, whose success allows him to purchase a hundred-acre cross country ski resort at 45 years old and pursue a passion for skiing in his now-abundant leisure time.

If he was passionate about yoga, I’m sure he could have done that as well.

Of course, one anecdote isn't proof of Newport's worldview. It could have gone differently for Feuer or Duffy, and there's no way of knowing whether Lisa would have found success or fulfillment staying in marketing. Joe’s path was also quite difficult, involving sacrifices along the way.

Still, the story is illustrative of Newport’s thesis. Rather than quitting the industry and burning  his existing career capital, Duffy developed and strategically invested it. Teaching yoga is a less rare and in-demand skill, it’s harder for new entrants to break into, and Feuer had almost 0 experience to leverage as a comparative advantage. It's really difficult to find a rare and valuable job without rare and valuable assets to offer in return.

Maybe you find this story a little mean-spirited or stuck up. You might think Joe just became a stuffy corporate shill, bootlicking to the free market or whatever. Cal Newport doesn't care that you think that. He's interested in what makes people’s careers happy and impactful, and Joe’s career exceeded Lisa’s in that regard. Joe was able to carve out ownership, autonomy, and creative control by getting really good.

Plus, even if you don't value traditional metrics of success, being really good at something allows you to negotiate for whatever you value. Better work life balance to practice yoga in your free time? High-impact charity work? Once you can demonstrate that you have rare and valuable skills, you can leverage them for a range of outcomes. What would it mean in your field if you were among the best in the world at what you do? You should be more ambitious about this.

How to Get Really Good and Make People Notice

Once you agree with the book’s framework, the rest is mostly standard career self-help and positive psychology stuff. I'm going to include the examples or concepts I did find personally helpful, but I expect we've covered 50% of the value of the book already.

If you don't already have them, you should mentally download a few examples of successful people close to your field who worked really hard, compounded that effort, and achieved world-class results. Newport offers a few that I liked.

Ira Glass, host of This American Life, obsessively focused on improving his skills in an industry where "the tape doesn't lie." That is, radio producers have a finished product to present that relies on a specific set of measurable skills. Obviously Newport and myself are not asserting that radio or any other field is a perfect meritocracy, but it's useful to focus on what you can control. Ira Glass spent many years on prosaic skills like tape cutting and interviewing to position himself as someone useful at a junior level on an NPR show, then worked up.

When Ira Glass gives career advice, he emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to get interesting options. “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” he says. Work is hard, so suck it up.

Glass says that “in the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream, but I don’t believe that. Things happen in stages.” When a young person pushed him for more concrete plans, he pushed back: “I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That’s your tragic mistake.” It's hard to know a priori what we will be good at or enjoy.

The comedian Steve Martin used a similar approach. The phrase "So Good They Can't Ignore You" comes from his approach to succeeding in comedy. Martin says nobody wants his career advice, because they'll ask how to get an agent or how to promote themselves, and he'll tell them to go work on their set.

By his own estimation, Martin spent ten years refining his act. At a time when standup was almost entirely cliche setup and punchlines, Martin asked “What if there were no punchlines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax?” He worked in clubs for little pay or acclaim for years, seeking tons of feedback to iterate on a genuinely rare and valuable skill.

So you need to practice, but how? Newport uses the term "deliberate practice" to describe the combination of strain and feedback that allows excellent performers to improve quickly. The number of hours you practice is important, but if you aren't practicing at the edge of your comfort zone— if it doesn't feel like hard work— you aren't going to improve very quickly. The best musicians obsessively play the same riffs over and over. And, if you don't have built in feedback loops— mentors, readers, regimented test materials, whatever— you won't know when you've gone astray and wasted an hour of practice.

Deliberate practice will be specific to your field, but you should think hard about how to develop the habit. As Tyler Cowen often asks, "What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?" Even knowledge workers should have an answer to this question. Here is Tyler's. What is yours? If you’re a writer, you should be sharing drafts with people often, looking for comments on blog posts or forums, and inviting harsh feedback from mentors. If you’re a coder, you should have an impressive GitHub, contribute to open-source projects, and use your job to learn a bunch of new stuff. Consider this an invitation to shake off your complacency.

It's also important to tailor your career capital to your specific field. Not all fields are "winner take all" skill markets like stand up comedy. Newport uses this term to mean fields where a single skill dominates all others, such as writing. He says many other fields are "auction markets," such as investing or consulting, where the combination of several skills and networks combine to form career capital. I'd encourage making a list of the skills you respect from high profile peers or mentors, and asking which are mission-critical. Assets like a social network are part of career capital, but are still downstream of skills like sociability. You can get better at parties.

A Bunch of Important Caveats:

• Personal fit for a job still matters a lot, and passion can be part of that. If there is something that you love to do that other people find to be exhausting work, that's an amazing signal for a rare high value skill. Just don't expect to know this entirely ahead of time - take a series of small bets to try stuff out.

• Working hard and practicing deliberately should include avoiding burnout. If you work yourself sick and quit at something after a month, you're not actually developing long-term career capital. Take care of yourself.

• Similarly, beating yourself up because you're not in the top 1% of performers is probably counterproductive. Comparisons should be time-bounded (what was x person doing at my age/experience level) and action-relevant (don’t ask "what if I was an entirely different person?")

• Some jobs don't actually have opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing and showcasing skills. It’s possible you work somewhere with 0 interest in your career capital. Talk to lots of people to determine whether this is the case, but if it is, look for the exit. This is not somewhere you want to stay.

• Similarly, if your job forces you to work with people you actively dislike, or to do something you think is evil, you should leave.

• Deliberate practice can take place in your free time, but ideally it should also be through your 9-5. You spend a huge chunk of your time there and it’s likely the main way you can demonstrate these skills. You should aim for internships, fellowships, education, or jobs that have a lot of feedback from mentors and opportunities to actually improve at important skills.

• Luck is a big factor in people's careers, such as meeting the right person at the right time, but you can increase your "luck surface area" by putting yourself out there more. Let everyone in your field know that you work hard and want to contribute. Go to conferences. Start a blog. Send cold emails to people whose work you respect.

Leverage Your Career Capital to Make the World a Better Place and Enjoy the Ride

Career capital will come with many benefits. You’ll be offered more opportunities, better financial compensation, and cushy rewards to try to keep you on. But it's important not to fall into the trap of merely following conventional "success." Once you are a valuable asset, you should negotiate for what is actually important. It's not enough to just have skills, you need to leverage them effectively.

Newport makes a convincing case that you'll be happier if you push for creative control and autonomy in your field, even if it means turning down a promotion or having difficult conversations with your boss. Once you are valuable enough that they don't want to lose you, you can push for more impactful work, more exciting projects, or you can walk away to build your own thing, all of which Joe Duffy did. I’m a pretty agreeable person by nature, but this is an important place to be willing to be disagreeable and advocate for yourself. The path that is best for your career won’t be the path that is best for your employer forever.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You ends with a meandering section about how your career should be a "mission" so that your life has a meaningful purpose. It's all super vague. Newport's best example is of a TV show personality whose show was canceled right after the book came out, and he admits that he personally doesn't even have a career mission yet. I imagine the publisher wanted this in the book, or Newport knew he needed a big picture note to end on.

The self-help and career genre has little to offer here. These are big questions. What is this all for? What obligations do we have toward the suffering of others, and how can my vocation contribute in a way that feels personally meaningful? These are better suited to philosophers than to career advice bloggers.

Thankfully, a lot of really smart philosophers have thought about this problem. I find the answers that formed the effective altruism movement quite convincing. Not everyone is lucky enough to be in the position you are now. The global poor, unfathomable numbers of suffering animals, and future generations are crying out for your help. Now that you have rare and useful skills, you can use them to make the world a better place. This is really exciting! I expect it will feel really good, and you should try it out to see for yourself.

Many jobs that are rewarded by the market don’t contribute to solving the world's most important problems and maximizing social impact. But there are resources to think about which ones do. I'd encourage you to consider how your skills can contribute to the career paths that best contribute to reducing harm, improving wellbeing, and saving lives at the margin. I recommend 80,000 Hours' career guide as a great place to start.