So Good They Can't Ignore You
Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
by Cal Newport, Diego Pereda Sancho · first published 2012
69% recommend26% neutral5% critical
Why HN recommends it
Argues that building rare, valuable skills (career capital) beats following your passion. Recommended for anyone facing burnout, a career change, or a stalled career who wants a practical long-term plan.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
In this eye-opening account, Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice. Not only is the cliché flawed-preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work-but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great sa
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For those that are interested in this concept, Cal Newport wrote a fantastic book about this concept of developing a passion rather than "finding" it in his book "So Good They Can't Ignore You". Very highly recommend.
on “Instead of ‘finding your passion,’ try developing it, Stanford scholars say” ↗…Deep Learning, etc.) * Active Portfolio Management - Kahn, Grinold * Thinking, fast and slow - Kahneman * Protein Power (the Eades') / Why we get fat (Taubes) * Why we sleep (Walker) * Deep Work / So Good They Can't Ignore You (Newport) * Flowers for Algernon (Keyes) * Getting to Yes (Fisher)
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?” ↗Well, I'm no Bill Gates, but here are the best books I read in 2013: * So Good They Can't Ignore You (Newport). If you've ever daydreamed about how much better your life would be if you were only working at that cool company, you should seriously read this book. By not focusing on just getting a cool…
on “The Best Books I Read in 2013” ↗…divides your working day into chunks that you can work on in 30-minute intervals. I use http://focuslist.co/ to set my agenda for the day early on, then work through the list. 4. Read “Deep Work” and “So Good They Can't Ignore You” by Cal Newport. 5. Reduce social media. I dropped Facebook and removed all twitter apps from my phone. This is a good guide: http://humanetech.com/take-control/ 6. Exercise for 20 minutes every morning.…
on “Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?” ↗There's an entire book about why you're right and the OP's approach is generally the wrong one, called So Good They Can't Ignore You. The OP is exhibiting the classic "passion mindset" - you search your soul for your passions and if you plumb deep enough, you'll magically unlock some cheat code in the world and people will start paying…
on “I quit my job, and I'm excited about a more independent life” ↗I'm surprised that none of the top comments mentioned "So good they can't ignore you" (Cal Newport). It's an enlightening book. Long story short: "follow your passion" is crappy advice, you start enjoying what you do once you become very good at it (the author calls it "accumulating career…
on “Ask HN: How do you deal with loss of motivation?” ↗Cal Newport has a book that discusses this this called So Good They Can't Ignore You, which I found really interesting. His thesis is basically that the people who are most satisfied with their work are those who stuck with something until they got really good at it, regardless of whether…
on “How to increase your luck surface area (2010)” ↗I hate the self-help industry with passion. But I liked Cal Newport's book So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love [0] exactly for this reason. He debunked the "passion hypothesis" and gave practical advices along with the stories of several successful people…
on “The problem with ‘follow your dream’” ↗English: Do you consider having a new layer in your thinking process "life changing"? Then, I would say- 1. Deep Work and So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport. He goes against famous ideas such as "follow your passion" and provides you with alternative actionable advice. 2. Black Swan by N. Nicholas Taleb. It makes you aware of unhinged "platonistic…
on “Ask HN: Life Changing Books?” ↗This resonates with me, and I recently read (yet another) Cal Newport book that helped me codify the feeling into words. “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” makes a lot of good points, but IMO chief among them is building up career capital that you can use to leverage to work on things you’d rather be doing. In this example, you earned so much capital with…
on “Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?” ↗…way, and always, for entrepreneurs, seems to come last." - Vinod Khosla, cofounder, SUN Microsystems Just a couple of feel good books disguised as pop science to quickly read through .. * Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You on the value of skills over passion and identifying what makes you valuable to others (instead of what you think), he defines "competence" as "feeling that you are good at what you do." It's a good overview…
on “Ask HN: How to find what I am really good at?” ↗I honestly would give zero fs about what he thinks is best, except for the fact that Cal Newport is the author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work, two books that changed how I view things and I believe made me understand better what's really going on in the world. Though I didn't become the Taylor Swift of coding, I think that I…
on “Cal Newport: Overstimulation Is Ruining Your Life” ↗I highly recommend Cal Newport's (e)book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which tackles the issue that passion is not always enough to succeed. I think it would help you make your mark.
on “Dear hn, today i resign & risk it all to follow my heart. wish me luck.” ↗I have to REALLY disagree here -- maybe it's because I just read Cal Newport's "So Good They Can't Ignore You," but I have to believe that you have significant career capital that others generally don't have. Sure, it's easy to cash that in for a sweet job if you're a very hard worker (note: not necessarily…
on “College was my biggest mistake (2012)” ↗I've recently been appreciating Cal Newport's latest book "So Good They Can't Ignore You". Wish I was able to read it when I was younger, but like most I was caught up with the "find your passion" hypothesis. The book deconstructs this passion hypothesis for a fallacy, and prescribes a craftsman…
on “Don’t Waste Your Twenties” ↗