Key takeaways from So Good They Can't Ignore You

Follow your passion is a bad advice. While you should be passionate about the work you do, but passion comes later. You don’t start with it when you’re still finding the right work.

So what is it that makes some people really love their job, while others fail at it? The answer is not as straightforward as finding the right job. It’s more tied to the importance of ability. The problem is, jobs that are actually great, are rare and valuable. If you want them, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. You have to be so good that they can’t ignore you.

Adopting the craftsman mindset

There are two mindsets with which you look at your work:

Passion mindset: With this mindset, you focus on what your work offers to you.
Craftsman mindset: With this mindset, you focus on what you can offer to your work.

The problem with passion mindset is that, since no job is perfect, all you will focus on is the little things you don’t like about your work. The annoying tasks your assigned, or the frustations of corporate bureaucracy. In that way, you will never be satisfied with any job.

Instead, you need to adopt the craftsman mindset. No one owes you a great career. You have to earn it. Adopting this mindset will help you focus on improving your skills. This mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career.

Career capital

So what’s the first thing you can do to offer something rare and valuable? You start by building rare and valuable skills that you offer as your career capital. Whatever field you are in, you have to work on building your skills.

Deliberate practice

One of the strategy you can adopt to acquire valuable skills is via deliberate practice. With this strategy, you deliberately strech your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable. And there must be some way to receive ruthless feedback on your performance. The only thing is, it may not feel enjoyable. And that’s okay. That’s why most people won’t do it. If you’re not becoming uncomfortable at your work, then you’re probably stuck at an ‘acceptable level’, and you will plateau. You have to push yourself beyond that.

Control

One of the factors that make people love their work is by having control in their work. That means, they have control over what they do and how they do it. Before you try to opt for more control in your professional life, just be wary of two control traps:

It’s often dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital (skills) to offer in exchange.
Once you have enough career capital, you will become valuable enough for your employer that they will fight your efforts for making a change (for eg. they’ll try to keep you). Your friends will show resistance when you suggest something like doing something of your own. In this case, you have to show courage in making the changes that you want in your career.

Little bets

To find what will work and what won’t, you need to deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback. Different projects that can be completed in less than a month, that can gather feedback. You can apply these two laws that will help you decide whether to follow an appealing pursuit:

Law of financial viability: Seek evidence whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue, if not, move on.
Law of remarkability: Does your project compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others? You do need to launch it in a venue that supports such remarking.

Note that these laws apply for projects you are evaluating for professional or career decisions. You should still continue to pursue projects just for the joy of them, without thinking too much about these laws.

Conclusion

If you’re not in control of your career, it can chew you up and spit you out. But remember that it’s important to become good at something rare and valuable first. It takes time to get good at anything. The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come. Then, you invest your career capital into the types of traits that make a job great. Couple of things that make a job great are having more control, and being driven by a mission. Once you are so good that they can't ignore you, you go on to finding your mission and a work that offers you more control. And thus, you will build a remarkable career in a remarkable life.

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