Book Review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport:
This book makes an interesting contrast to The 4 Hour Workweek. Tim Ferris seems to believe that the purpose of work should be to make as much money as possible in the least amount of time and that meaning can then be pursued during your newly available free time. Tim gives you some productivity tips in the hope that it will make you valuable enough to negotiate flexibility in terms of how, when and where you complete your work, plus some dirty tricks as well.
Cal Newport’s book is similar in that it focuses on becoming valuable enough to negotiate a job that you’ll love and downplays the importance of pursuing your passions in your career. However, while Tim extolls the virtues of being a digital nomad, Cal Newport emphasises self-determination theory and autonomy, competence and relatedness. That is, the freedom to decide how you pursue your work, the satisfaction of doing a good job and the pleasure of working with people who you feel connected to. He argues that these traits are rare and valuable and so that if you want such a job you’ll need skills that rare and valuable to offer in return.
That’s the core of his argument against pre-existing passion; passions tend to cluster into a few fields such as music, arts or sports and only a very few people can ever make these the basis of their careers. Even for those who are interested in less insanely competitive pursuits such as becoming a yoga instructor or organic farmer, he cautions against pursuing the dream of just quitting your job one day. That would involve throwing away all of the career capital that you’ve accumulated and hence your negotiating power. Further, it can easily lead to restlessness, that is, jumping from career to career all the while searching for the “one” that meets an impossibly high bar.
Here are some examples of the kind of path he endorses:
Someone becoming an organic farmer after ten years of growing and selling food on the side, starting in high school. Lest this been seen as a confirmation of the passion hypothesis, this was initially just to make some money
A software tester making her way up to the head of testing to the point where she could demand that she reduce her hours to thirty per week and study philosophy
A marketer who gained such a strong reputation that he was able to form his own sub-agency within the bigger agency and then eventually form his own completely independent operation
Cal makes a very strong argument. When comparing pursuing a passion to more prosaic career paths, we often underestimate how fulfilling the later might eventually become if we work hard and use our accumulated career capital to negotiate the things that we truly want. This viewpoint resonates with me as I left software to study philosophy and psychology, without fully exploring options related to software. I now have a job that I really enjoy as it offers me a lot of freedom and flexibility.
One of the more compelling examples is Cal’s analysis of Steve Jobs. We tend to think of Job’s success as a prototypical case of following your passion, but his life shows otherwise. Jobs’ entry into technology (working for Atari) was based upon the promise of a quick buck. He’d been traversing around India and needed a real job. Jobs was then involved in a timesharing company, but he left for a commune without telling the others and was replaced by the time he made it back. So merely a year before he started Apple, he was hardly passionate about technology or entrepreneurship. This seems to have only occurred as he became more successful.
This is prototypical of Cal’s theory: instead of leveraging passion to become So Good They Can’t Ignore You (TM), he believes that if you become So Good They Can’t Ignore You (TM) that passion will follow. In evidence, Cal notes that people often passionate about many different things at different times, including things they definitely weren’t passionate about before. He suggests this is indicative of our ability to develop passions under the right circumstances.
Personally, I feel that the best approach will vary hugely depending on individual circumstance, but I suspect Cal is sadly right for most people. Nonetheless, Cal provides lists three exceptions. A job or career path is not suitable for his strategy if there aren’t opportunities to distinguish yourself, it is pointless or harmful to society or if it requires you to work with people you hate.
Towards the end of the book, Cal focuses on strategies for becoming good at what you do. While this section wasn’t bad, I didn’t find it particularly compelling either. I wish I’d just read the start of the book which covers his case against focusing on pre-existing passion, as that was by far the most insightful and original part of the book for me. Perhaps the most interesting aspect was how he found spending 14 hours of focused attention deconstructing a key paper in his field to have been a valuable use of time. I was surprised to hear that it paid off in terms of research opportunities, but I suppose it isn’t so implausible that such projects could pay off if you picked an especially important paper.
Further notes: - If you are going to only read this or Four Hour Workweek, I’d suggest this one to most people. I feel that this one is less likely to be harmful and is applicable to a broader range of people, many who won’t immediately have the career capital to follow Tim’s advice. On the other hand, Tim’s book might be more useful if, unlike me, you don’t need to be convinced of Cal’s thesis. - Cal points out that if you become valuable enough to negotiate more freedom, then you also become valuable enough that people will want to stop you. The challenge is figuring out whether you have sufficient career capital to overcome this resistance. Cal suggest not pursuing control without evidence people are willing to pay you either in money or with something else valuable; I find his position reductive and insufficiently justified. - Cal believes that it is important to have a mission for your career, but that it is hard to pick a mission without already being deep inside a field. He notes that discoveries are often made independently and theorises that this is because often a discovery isn’t likely or even possible until certain prerequisites are in place, such as ideas, technologies or social needs. It’s only when you are at the frontier that you have sufficient knowledge to see and understand the next logical developments
Book Review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport:
This book makes an interesting contrast to The 4 Hour Workweek. Tim Ferris seems to believe that the purpose of work should be to make as much money as possible in the least amount of time and that meaning can then be pursued during your newly available free time. Tim gives you some productivity tips in the hope that it will make you valuable enough to negotiate flexibility in terms of how, when and where you complete your work, plus some dirty tricks as well.
Cal Newport’s book is similar in that it focuses on becoming valuable enough to negotiate a job that you’ll love and downplays the importance of pursuing your passions in your career. However, while Tim extolls the virtues of being a digital nomad, Cal Newport emphasises self-determination theory and autonomy, competence and relatedness. That is, the freedom to decide how you pursue your work, the satisfaction of doing a good job and the pleasure of working with people who you feel connected to. He argues that these traits are rare and valuable and so that if you want such a job you’ll need skills that rare and valuable to offer in return.
That’s the core of his argument against pre-existing passion; passions tend to cluster into a few fields such as music, arts or sports and only a very few people can ever make these the basis of their careers. Even for those who are interested in less insanely competitive pursuits such as becoming a yoga instructor or organic farmer, he cautions against pursuing the dream of just quitting your job one day. That would involve throwing away all of the career capital that you’ve accumulated and hence your negotiating power. Further, it can easily lead to restlessness, that is, jumping from career to career all the while searching for the “one” that meets an impossibly high bar.
Here are some examples of the kind of path he endorses:
Someone becoming an organic farmer after ten years of growing and selling food on the side, starting in high school. Lest this been seen as a confirmation of the passion hypothesis, this was initially just to make some money
A software tester making her way up to the head of testing to the point where she could demand that she reduce her hours to thirty per week and study philosophy
A marketer who gained such a strong reputation that he was able to form his own sub-agency within the bigger agency and then eventually form his own completely independent operation
Cal makes a very strong argument. When comparing pursuing a passion to more prosaic career paths, we often underestimate how fulfilling the later might eventually become if we work hard and use our accumulated career capital to negotiate the things that we truly want. This viewpoint resonates with me as I left software to study philosophy and psychology, without fully exploring options related to software. I now have a job that I really enjoy as it offers me a lot of freedom and flexibility.
One of the more compelling examples is Cal’s analysis of Steve Jobs. We tend to think of Job’s success as a prototypical case of following your passion, but his life shows otherwise. Jobs’ entry into technology (working for Atari) was based upon the promise of a quick buck. He’d been traversing around India and needed a real job. Jobs was then involved in a timesharing company, but he left for a commune without telling the others and was replaced by the time he made it back. So merely a year before he started Apple, he was hardly passionate about technology or entrepreneurship. This seems to have only occurred as he became more successful.
This is prototypical of Cal’s theory: instead of leveraging passion to become So Good They Can’t Ignore You (TM), he believes that if you become So Good They Can’t Ignore You (TM) that passion will follow. In evidence, Cal notes that people often passionate about many different things at different times, including things they definitely weren’t passionate about before. He suggests this is indicative of our ability to develop passions under the right circumstances.
Personally, I feel that the best approach will vary hugely depending on individual circumstance, but I suspect Cal is sadly right for most people. Nonetheless, Cal provides lists three exceptions. A job or career path is not suitable for his strategy if there aren’t opportunities to distinguish yourself, it is pointless or harmful to society or if it requires you to work with people you hate.
Towards the end of the book, Cal focuses on strategies for becoming good at what you do. While this section wasn’t bad, I didn’t find it particularly compelling either. I wish I’d just read the start of the book which covers his case against focusing on pre-existing passion, as that was by far the most insightful and original part of the book for me. Perhaps the most interesting aspect was how he found spending 14 hours of focused attention deconstructing a key paper in his field to have been a valuable use of time. I was surprised to hear that it paid off in terms of research opportunities, but I suppose it isn’t so implausible that such projects could pay off if you picked an especially important paper.
Further notes:
- If you are going to only read this or Four Hour Workweek, I’d suggest this one to most people. I feel that this one is less likely to be harmful and is applicable to a broader range of people, many who won’t immediately have the career capital to follow Tim’s advice. On the other hand, Tim’s book might be more useful if, unlike me, you don’t need to be convinced of Cal’s thesis.
- Cal points out that if you become valuable enough to negotiate more freedom, then you also become valuable enough that people will want to stop you. The challenge is figuring out whether you have sufficient career capital to overcome this resistance. Cal suggest not pursuing control without evidence people are willing to pay you either in money or with something else valuable; I find his position reductive and insufficiently justified.
- Cal believes that it is important to have a mission for your career, but that it is hard to pick a mission without already being deep inside a field. He notes that discoveries are often made independently and theorises that this is because often a discovery isn’t likely or even possible until certain prerequisites are in place, such as ideas, technologies or social needs. It’s only when you are at the frontier that you have sufficient knowledge to see and understand the next logical developments
FWIW I think this and maybe some of the other book review shortforms you’ve done would make fine top level posts.
Thanks, I’ll think about it. I invested more effort in this one, but for some of the others I was optimising for speed
+1 for book-distillation, probably the most underappreciated and important type of post.