Part of our Book Summary series where we share notes from our favorite books.
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This is my favorite career advice book for actuaries. Especially in a time where “follow your passion” is the predominate message, this book offers a compelling alternative to find a meaningful career.
This book was especially influential for my entry-level actuarial work.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You — Highlights
The path to happiness—at least as it concerns what you do for a living—is more complicated than simply answering the classic question “What should I do with my life?”
When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.
Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion
The Passion Hypothesis: The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion.
I question the validity of the passion hypothesis, which says that the key to occupational happiness is to match your job to a pre-existing passion.
Passion Is Rare. I argue that the more you seek examples of the passion hypothesis, the more you recognize its rarity.
“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass tells them. “But I don’t believe that. Things happen in stages.”
“The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” he says.
“I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That’s your tragic mistake.”
Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.
Conclusion #1: Career Passions Are Rare
Conclusion #2: Passion Takes Time
The strongest predictor of an assistant seeing her work as a calling was the number of years spent on the job. In other words, the more experience an assistant had, the more likely she was to love her work.
Conclusion #3: Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) tells us that motivation, in the workplace or elsewhere, requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs:
- Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important
- Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do
- Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people
In other words, working right trumps finding the right work.
I argue that subscribing to the passion hypothesis can make you less happy.
Rule #2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
I introduce two different approaches to thinking about work: the craftsman mindset, a focus on what value you’re producing in your job, and the passion mindset, a focus on what value your job offers you.
Most people adopt the passion mindset, but I argue that the craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating work you love.
“Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,” Martin said. “What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’… but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’
An obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music.
Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love.
Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you.
There are two reasons why I dislike the passion mindset.
First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later.
Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindset—“Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?”—are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?” rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses.
The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.
There’s something liberating about the craftsman mindset: 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.
Regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career.
The Power of Career Capital – I justify the importance of the craftsman mindset by arguing that 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—which I call career capital—to offer in return.
TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREAT WORK
- Creativity
- Impact
- Control
“All of us who do creative work… you get into this thing, and there’s like a ‘gap.’ What you’re making isn’t so good, okay?… It’s trying to be good but… it’s just not that great,” he explained in an interview about his career. “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase”
THE CAREER CAPITAL THEORY OF GREAT WORK: The traits that define great work are rare and valuable. 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, 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.
Part of what makes the craftsman mindset thrilling is its agnosticism toward the type of work you do. The traits that define great work are bought with career capital, the theory argues; they don’t come from matching your work to your innate passion. Because of this, you don’t have to sweat whether you’ve found your calling—most any work can become the foundation for a compelling career.
On reflection, it became clear to me that certain jobs are better suited for applying career capital theory than others. I ended up devising a list of three traits that disqualify a job as providing a good foundation for building work you love:
- 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.
A job with any combination of these disqualifying traits can thwart your attempts to build and invest career capital.
If it satisfies the first trait, skill growth isn’t possible. If it satisfies the second two traits, then even though you could build up reserves of career capital, you’ll have a hard time sticking around long enough to accomplish this goal.
Becoming a Craftsman – I introduce deliberate practice, the key strategy for acquiring career capital, and show how to integrate it into your own working life.
“Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.”
If you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.
Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You’re In
There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it. Television writing is a winner-take-all market because all that matters is your ability to write good scripts. That is, the only capital type is your script-writing capability.
An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection.
Step 2: Identify Your Capital Type
A useful heuristic in this situation is to seek open gates—opportunities to build capital that are already open to you.
It helps to think about skill acquisition like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy.
Step 3: Define “Good”
Step 4: Stretch and Destroy
Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.
Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
Pushing past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback—even if it destroys what you thought was good.
Step 5: Be Patient
Rule #3: Turn Down a Promotion
I argue that control over what you do, and how you do it, is one of the most powerful traits you can acquire when creating work you love.
You have to get good before you can expect good work.
Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.
To summarize, if your goal is to love what you do, your first step is to acquire career capital. Your next step is to invest this capital in the traits that define great work. Control is one of the most important targets you can choose for this investment.
I introduce the first control trap, which warns that it’s dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.
I introduce the second control trap, which warns that once you have enough career capital to acquire more control in your working life, you have become valuable enough to your employer that they will fight your efforts to gain more autonomy.
This is the irony of control. When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably don’t have enough career capital to do anything interesting. But once you do have this capital, you’ve become valuable enough that your employer will resist your efforts.
The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.
“Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”
The Law of Financial Viability: When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.
Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big
I argue that a unifying mission to your working life can be a source of great satisfaction.
People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work.
I argue that a mission chosen before you have relevant career capital is not likely to be sustainable.
A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field.
If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only place where these missions become visible.
This insight explains Sarah’s struggles: She was trying to find a mission before she got to the cutting edge (she was still in her first two years as a graduate student when she began to panic about her lack of focus).
“It’s just that we don’t know what that passion is. If you ask someone, they’ll tell you what they think they’re passionate about, but they probably have it wrong.” In other words, she believes that having passion for your work is vital, but she also believes that it’s a fool’s errand to try to figure out in advance what work will lead to this passion.
Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a “big” action.
The art of mission, we can conclude, asks us to suppress the most grandiose of our work instincts and instead adopt the patience required to get this ordering correct.
Missions Require Little Bets – I argue that great missions are transformed into great successes as the result of using small and achievable projects—little bets—to explore the concrete possibilities surrounding a compelling idea.
“Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins.” This rapid and frequent feedback, Sims argues, “allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.”
To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback. For Chris Rock, such a bet might include telling a joke to an audience and seeing if they laugh, whereas for Kirk, it might mean producing sample footage for a documentary and seeing if it attracts funding.
Missions Require Marketing – I argue that great missions are transformed into great successes as the result of finding projects that satisfy the law of remarkability
The Law of Remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.
Working right trumps finding the right work.