The ONLY Career Book You Need to Read
How to find direction in your career when “follow your passion” doesn’t work
Career Direction
After following my passion for hockey for 25 years, I graduated college, entered into the professional world, and was abruptly confronted with the daunting question of “so…now what?” Not knowing where to start, my first instinct was to read as many books as I could about career paths, in hopes that they would provide me with the answers and direction that I was seeking.
I found out pretty quickly that most career books are telling you to “follow your passion” and “do what you love” or “find out what you love, and pursue a career in that field.” My response was, “Okay, great. So what is my passion?”
After 4 years in the workforce, I was still struggling to find answers to what my “passion” was and what I wanted to do. Fortunately, this past year I stumbled upon the book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport. It has completely changed the way that I think about my passion and my career and helped give me the direction that so many young professionals are in search of.
I would highly recommend this book for anyone that is looking for guidance in their professional career and wants to find a job/work that will make you happy and successful. Save yourself some time with other career books and start with this one!
Note — the overview and summary sheets are directly taken from the book and I do not take credit for any of the content.
Overview of the main points that resonated with me:
Don’t follow your Passion
- Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.
- Career Passions are Rare: Survey of college students about their “passion”: In fact less than 4% of the total identified passions had any relation to work or education, with the remaining 96% describing hobby-style interests such as sports and arts. How can we follow our passions if we don’t have any relevant passions to follow?
- Passion Takes Time: The happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.
Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
- In most jobs, as you become better at what you do, not only do you get the sense of accomplishment that comes from being good, but you’re typically also rewarded with more control over your responsibilities.
- Career Capital: The traits that make a great job great are rare and valuable, and therefore, if you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuable skills.
- Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your Career Capital.
- The Craftsman Mindset — focuses on what you can offer the world
- It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is “just right”, and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it — and the process won’t be easy.
- The Craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love.
- Traits That Define Good Work: Creativity, Impact, Control
Three Disqualifiers For Applying The Craftsman Mindset
If one you find that your job displays one of these three things its time to look for new opportunities:
- The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable.
- The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world.
- The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.
Here are two summary sheets that I created to help me remember the key lessons from the book:
Conclusion
Confronting what you want to do with your career is extremely difficult and can be very uncomfortable. Unfortunately, “follow your passion” is not as helpful as we all would like it to be and there is no silver bullet (that I am aware of) to solve this problem. Figure out your Career Capital (your skills) and find a job/career path that will help you develop them so you are “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”!
Hopefully this post provided you with some direction, and I would highly recommend reading the book in its entirety to get the full impact.
Check out my website for more book recommendations!
