So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport
This book bills itself as the antithesis of “What Color is Your Parachute.” It promotes the idea, as does Newport’s Studyhacks blog, that following your passion is bad advice. This is definitely a self-help book, and it’s structured so that it has four rules to follow if you want to have your perfect job.
I’m not a follower of Newport’s studyhacks blog, but I did find myself wishing that he were a few years older than me rather than a few years younger than me so that I could have used his studying and deliberate practice techniques back when I was in school.
I’m not going to summarize the whole book, but to summarize the most important part–you get better by doing what’s uncomfortable. That uncomfortable stress you get when trying to understand something that’s difficult is exactly the state you need to be in to progress to the next level of understanding. Runners understand this, I’m told. He talked about deliberate practice as it pertained to music, explaining that he used to just play the songs he always knew, whereas the musicians that got good did so by challenging themselves to learn new riffs and harder arrangements until they were at a level far past where he was. (I tried to apply this to my writing, agonizing whether I was improving or whether I was just spinning my wheels, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the analogy fit.)
The part I liked least were the examples held up as people who succeeded in their careers by following Newport’s rules. First of all, because I don’t really see close parallels. Secondly, because some of the people who succeeded did so by following their passions until they got good at it and found a way to get paid for it, which kind of negated his “following your passion is bad advice” mantra of the book.
I think that the advice in this book, primarily the latter half, is better suited for academics than corporate drones, because he talks about how to excel in your field by studying hard stuff. The first half of the book was almost inspirational. I say almost inspriational, because I get inspired by practical advice and crushingly discouraged by “success stories” of people who had fewer advantages than me and yet somehow succeeded beyond my dreams at ten years younger. I hate those stories.
