Interview: How to Get So Good They Can't Ignore You with Cal Newport

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Cal Newport, who, in addition to a ton of other things, wrote the great book so Good They Can't Ignore youe Subtitle why skills Trump passion is in the quest for work you love. Cal is an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms. My brain hurts even thinking about that, Cal. He previously earned his PhD from MIT and before that went to Dartmouth. Cal, I loved your book. I think you make so many important distinctions and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat.

Sure. Thank you, Brian.

All right, let's jump straight in. So let's just start with the title and your inspiration for that and what it means to you and all that good stuff. So good they can't ignore you.

That's a quote from Steve Martin. He actually said it during an interview with Charlie Rose. And he said to Charlie, people are always asking me for my advice, how can I succeed in the entertainment industry? And they never like the answer I give them. They're expecting that I'm going to tell them how to get an agent or how to get ahead. And instead I say, you just need to be so good they can't ignore you. I just think if you do that, good things will come. That phrase hit me at an important time in my life that helped reorient my energy and my efforts. I was happy to borrow it for the title of this book.

That's awesome. Can you shed a little light on that personal part of your journey and why it was so impactful?

Yeah, I encountered that interview clip maybe about halfway through my graduate school experience. I was on my way to getting my PhD with my eyes towards maybe a professor one day. I was coming at it from sort of a standard life hacker type approach. I'd always been involved in the community of life hacking and hacks and tricks and these types of things really that solidified for me that. Wait a second, for what you're doing, those type of things can be useful, but really you just have to be really, really good. Just do what you're doing. Really good. And it crystallized for me that, you know what? I think that's it. I think the really interesting stuff that happens to people, the interesting opportunities, the stuff you hear about that makes you envious, almost all of that comes from this foundation of there just being so good at something core, something so unambiguously valuable that they can't be ignored. And that really helped focus my energy from that point going forward.

That's so good. You talk about that in the book. And just a great kind of autobiographical sketch as you share some stories of friends and people you reached out to as you researched this and then you distilled it into four rules. And again, the kind of theme of the whole book is why skills trump passion. And you kind of juxtapose the two of them and say, look, if we need to pick one, pick skills every time, right? And I want to quickly look at the first two rules and then explore some of my other favorite ideas. But rule number one, don't follow your passion. Tell us about that.

Yeah, so I'm not a big fan of the advice to follow your passion. And I think it's important to nuance that because when people first hear me say don't follow your passion, they think I'm saying don't follow the goal of ending up passionate about what you do. And that's not at all what I'm actually trying to claim. In fact, my goal is to be passionate about my work. The goal of that book is to help people end up having work that they feel very passionate about. But I think the equation has it backwards. This idea that you start with a clear pre existing passion that you identify and then use as the foundation of your career choices, that idea is just not borne out by the evidence. If you actually study people who love what they do for a living, people with real passion, more often than not, the passion comes later. It's a side effect of everything else you have to do to build a really good and meaningful career. So I like to flip that around and see really the goal is not to follow your passion, it's to let passion follow you as you put in the hard work of constructing a really satisfying career.

So good. And I love the word epiphenomenon. It's the byproduct, the side effect of committing to something and just being as good as you can possibly be, as great as you can possibly be at it. And of course, your point is such a good one, right. That most of the time we're just chasing the passion and we forget the other side of the equation. There are some exceptions where people just happen to have this passion, then they became masters at it. But for most of us, as you articulate again and again in the book, it's at least a two way process. And the majority of the time focus on being so good and let that passion Be the byproduct. Obviously we can talk about that for a weekend, but what's talk about the mindsets that you articulate. And I love the distinctions you made between the passion mindset and the craftsman mindset. Which gets us to rule number two, which is be so good they can't ignore you. But can you kind of unpack that juxtaposition of mindsets?

I think the passion mindset is an important concept because it helps tells us that this advice that you should just follow your passion, that you know what you're meant to do, just have the courage to go do it, is not just an innocent sort of aspirational thinking. It can actually affect the way that you approach your work, such that you become less likely to end up passionate about your work. And that's because I think this general sense of you're meant to do something and once you identify it, you'll be happy. Puts people into what I call the passion mindset. And when you're in the passion mindset, you're constantly asking, okay, what is this job? What is this career doing for me? Do I love this? Is there something I might like better? Is this fulfilling? Do I really like that I have to go to these meetings? Is this really the right job for me? It's a very self focused mindset that causes quite a bit of angst and anxiety and uncertainty because nothing's really going to measure up to this sort of mythical idea we have of if this is your passion, you'll love it. I contrast it to sort of Steve Martin's craftsman mindset, where what you're asking is the opposite, okay, how much value am I producing? How useful am I to an outside observer? What am I producing that the world cares about and how much they care about it? How could I be creating more value? How could I be making more positive sort of additions to the world? So this sort of relentless focus on how do I make myself and my output more valuable, those are in direct opposition. If you adopt the craftsman mindset, you're almost. You're significantly more likely to end up being able to craft a career that's a huge source of passion. Ironically, if you have this passion mindset, you're really steering yourself away from a very meaningful, satisfying career and more likely steering you towards chronic job hopping, uncertainty and anxiety. So I'm a big advocate that the craftsman mindset is the foundation of building a very passionate career.

Well said and so good. And I just love that distinction of the passion mindset is essentially obsessed with kind of the Lifestyle side of things, of let me see what value I can get from whatever it is I'm doing vis a vis the craftsman mindset says, how can I create value? How do I give as much as I possibly can in whatever I'm doing and in the broader scope of my life? And in that, getting value versus creating value is just such a powerful distinction. You do a great job of articulating this in the context of a yoga teacher who decides that their passion is yoga. They go and get a basic certification and then tell us what you've seen happen and why. That's kind of a dangerous thing if we don't bring in the craftsman mindset.

This story was the classical example of what happens if you have the passion mindset. She gets this basic yoga certification, quits her job as an executive and say, I'm now going to be a full time yoga teacher because the passion mindset says, what's going to bring you the most value? And she thought, I think I would enjoy being a yoga teacher more than executive. And of course, where the story ends is it's not long after that that she's in line for essentially the equivalent of food stamps. Because just because she really wanted to be a yoga teacher didn't mean that anyone cared or that she was going to be able to make a living at it or that she'd be able to do it successfully. And that's sort of the trap of just focusing on what you want. But I want to throw in a little bit of geekishness here. So let me lay the foundation for why I think skills and a craftsman mindset actually makes you passionate about your work. And so I approach this, I'm a math guy, I approach this in a geeky way.

But your audience, distributed algorithm here. I like it.

Yeah, I'm going to start drawing distributed algorithm proofs on the boards here soon. It's OK if we do some calculus, right? But let me give you the foundation for essentially everything I'm going to say in this interview, which is the main thing I discovered when I went out there to study how do people end up loving what they do for a living, is that the traits that makes people's work great, the type of traits that make people really love their jobs and feel passionate about it, are themselves rare and valuable. They're hard to get in your career. No one is just handing them out because you want them in your career. They're rare and valuable. So if you want these traits in your career, you have to have something rare and valuable to offer in return. And I like to think about it like an economic exchange. As you build skills that the world finds unambiguously valuable, you get more of what I call career capital. And it's this career capital that you invest for the type of traits that really lead people to love their work. Traits like autonomy, a sense of impact, a sense of mastery, a sense of connection with other people. The better you are, the more of those things you can, in essence, barter for in your career. And so that's why I say getting good skills trump just trying to follow your passion. Because honestly, passion for your work comes from once you have those type of traits in your working life. And as far as I can tell in my research, the only way to get those is to have something to offer in return. So you really got to start by putting in the long yards. The better you get at things, the better things you can put into your working life, and the more you're going to like it.

Such an important point. Now I'm excited to unpack both the career capital. And then you just articulated the three primary elements of the self determination theory, which I want to hear you describe some more. And it's funny because this just this morning, I traded some tweets with women who said, you know, I really admire what you do. You're so consistent. And I'm all about this. Like, I'm all ins. This is all I. I do is get as good as I can, master my craft, and I work hard and I strive to produce a lot of and to acquire that career capital and be able to do more and more things. Anyway, she said, you know, this is great. You inspire me, but do you ever have off days? And I replied in the tweet and said, well, of course, you know, but when you're rocking your fundamentals and you're doing this work, it's hard to have that bad of a day. Then she tweeted back and said, well, that's great, but, you know, I would just wish for you, and I'm inspired, but I'd wish for you to have at least one day a week where you just do, you know, something that just kind of brings you joy in that mindset of the presupposition that putting in the work, not only to acquire the traits, but just doing the work is in itself so liberating. It's one big game when we play it with the mindset that you talk about of the deliberate practice. And so I jokingly replied that, well, that presupposes I'm not doing that seven days a week. Right. So I think there's this bizarre myth that in. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about this a lot in his work on flow, of course, where there's a. He calls it the paradox of work, where we actually feel best when we're engaged in work that's challenging and meaningful and worst when we're in leisure activities. Yet all we want is leisure activity. So I think that's part of the cultural phenomenon that's going on that is making the passion vis a vis craftsman such a challenging thing for people to get right.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely what's happening. It's kind of a weird cultural moment we've been in in the last maybe three or four decades where we've constructed this notion that there's these deeply passionate activities that our soul is wired for and we all have them and when we're doing them, we're really happy. And otherwise we're doing stuff that we're not happy. And it really doesn't match the psychology of what actually gives people a sense of motivation and satisfaction, which is when you're actually working at a craft, actually you're good at something, you're exhibiting mastery, you're applying a craft in a way that's sort of publicly rewarding that feeling, the feeling of flow, the feeling of mastery, the sort of feeling autonomy over your world embodiment in a physical world where you're creating things that are valuable. Those are the deepest levers of sort of passion and meaning that we have. People have recognized this all the way back to the ancient Greek philosophers. There's nothing new about it. What's new is this idea that rose out of the 60s and 70s that no, no, no, that stuff isn't important. You need to be walking through the woods while doing poetry, while whatever the scenario is that there's this big separation and it didn't used to be that way. Craftsmanship was the height of sort of human flourishing and fulfillment. And so that's what you're tapping into when you take the skills oriented focus. If you're looking around for some magic activity that every time you do it makes you feel blissful and you're never unhappy. You're going to be looking for a long time. The reality of passion is, I think, a lot more interesting, but it's also more nuanced than just that feeling of sort of simplistic bliss that people are looking for.

Yeah. And then of course there's. They're not even looking for it usually in the context of work, even work that would be passionate. Of course, you're absolutely right that it's not always going to be something we're excited about. But they think that the joy is going to come oftentimes. And I am part of the they group at times, of course, that it's in leisure that we're actually going to find the joy. Right. So moving through that to the work and then the true craftsman mindset is so good and to bring it back to the yoga teacher. So the yoga teacher, if we were going to offer some perspective, and you do in the book of. Okay, so you, you're excited about the possibility of yoga. How would you counsel that individual who's the executive in thinking about yoga if you were talking to them right now?

Right. So here's the analysis I went through in the book. I'm a big believer in career capital. The more capital you have, you can invest it for better things. I don't care so much about the specifics of the activity. I think we way over emphasize the match between the specifics of the work and yourself. I think really is what traits do I have? Those traits can be in lots of different jobs. So the analysis I did was here is this advertising executive who had a lot of career capital in sort of the fields of marketing or copywriting or whatever it was specifically she was in. She has zero career capital in yoga. In order to build a career that has mastery, autonomy, impact and connections and yoga, she has a long road ahead of her. She'd have to gather up from scratch a lot of career capital which she has no head start on. So instead I would say, if I was in her situation, I would say, well, how can I take this capital I already have from being successful in marketing and advertising and invest it to get the type of traits that I like about the yoga, maybe I need to acquire a little bit more. I need to add to the stash. But I would start from what I already had. I contrasted her to another marketing executive that I found who had done exactly that. He thought maybe he'd wanted to be an artist and he was building capital as doing illustrations for marketing purposes, but was having the same thoughts around the same time as this woman who went on to become a yoga instructor. But instead what he did was he just found places within marketing where he could build his capital and invest it. And he ended up creating this sort of very creative marketing business of his own, which became very successful and gave him a lot of autonomy and allowed him to work on things he liked. And I wrote about this compound they built by the lakes in Wisconsin where his family get together. Anyways, he built a very passionate life out of a same moment of indecision. Because he said, well, what capital do I have? How can I get more and how can I help? Invested. Whereas this other person was saying, what's the right job for me? What's the right match? If I could just find the job that's the right match for me, I'd be happier. Ignoring career capital, ignoring the need to have career capital to get fulfilling traits in your work. And she really paid the price for it.

That's awesome. I'm seeing the calculus equation forming on your board. Accumulate career capital. So obviously check out the book for more on that. So we've hinted around the idea of self determination theory. Can you tell us about that why it's such an important concept?

Self determination theory is one of several different relatively well validated and relatively old at this point. Frameworks within psychology for understanding what creates senses of motivation and satisfaction in individuals. Dan Pink's book Drive, for example, really dives deep into self determination theory. It's basically a book about how to apply self determination theory as a manager. So it's something that's been around for a while, but basically it says there's a few things that really give people a deep sense of motivation satisfaction, and they include a sense of mastery, it includes a sense of autonomy, and it includes a sense of connection to other people. If you have these things, you're going to feel more motivated, you're going to feel more satisfied with your work. And the key thing I point out about these traits is that none of them have to do with matching a specific job to some sort of specific intrinsic trait of yours. You can have autonomy, you can have mastery, you can have a sense of connection in any number of different fields. So I think that's important because it says you should stop spending so much time worrying about what's the exact right job for me and putting all of your emphasis on the match. If I find the right job for me, then I'll be happy and instead say, how do I get more autonomy? How do I get more mastery? How do I get more connections? I throw sense of impact in there for various other reasons. How do I get those traits into my life? And almost always the right answer is going to be to start with the career capital you already have and then figure out how to keep acquiring more as fast as possible.

So good. Another wonderful phrase that I appreciate from your book is Seeking Right Work versus Working Right. And obviously the emphasis on let's work right, let's accumulate career capital by finding ways to increase our competence and mastery, which then leads to higher levels of autonomy, more connections, and that intrinsic self determination theory embodiment that leads to the true passion and happiness. Right?

Yeah. There's any number of different sort of theories out there that are pretty well validated about what makes people happy, satisfied and motivated. And the striking thing is that none of them that I could find have as their foundation. Every human being is hardwired for a very particular type of job. And if they can just find that the match between some magical intrinsic passion and the job is the key to their happiness. And people have been studying those questions for decades. That never comes up as the answer. The answer is always things that's relatively agnostic to the specifics of the work. And of course there's bad jobs and there's things that you're really not going to like to do. I mean, I'm not suggesting that you can throw a dart at a job listing and whatever it is you'll be happy with, but I am trying to really reduce the pressure on making the choice of what you do. Anything that seems like it's reasonable and interesting and could lead you to interesting places is as good as any other such option, is what I'm trying to argue. The choice of your work is not meaningless, but it's also not as meaningful as people like to think.

Well said. And you just reminded me of Barry Schwartz's paradox of choice. The other thing that's happened over the last 30 to 40 years is this enormity of infinite choice which beyond a very small point becomes paralyzing. Right?

Yeah. And when you have these micro industries and remote work and so many different options, it's no longer just you can either go to college and become the professional class or work at, at the factory in town. We're suddenly overwhelmed with all these choices. We shouldn't be surprised that my generation in particular is becoming more paralyzed with I don't know what to do, what should I do? Is this the right job? We didn't have this issue 40 years ago and I think that's a big part of it.

That's awesome. So letting that go and just doing again, it's not a dart, but being willing to find that reasonable and then make the decision. I think there's a courage in saying, look, I'm going to commit my life force into this and I'm going to do the best I possibly can and accumulate that career capital, et cetera. You talk about one of the ways to become a craftsman and a master of our craft, deliberate practice. And you share some really cool ideas on that. Can you walk us through some?

Yeah. So deliberate practice has become more mainstream since when I first started writing, when I first started writing about it. This was before, say, Malcolm Gladwell's book. And so it was a little bit more underground now, people more likely to have heard of it. And deliberate practice is basically the answer to the question of how do people get better at hard things? And there's different possible answers to that question, but it turns out that the right answer is deliberate practice, which is to say they actually have. They set up specific practice exercises to do that are designed to actually stretch their skills where their skills need to be stretched. That's how people get better. It's not enough to simply repeat or do something a bunch of times. You have to actually deliberately try to improve your skills. So people know this in sports, we know it in music, we know it in things like professional chess. And I've been making that argument that you should bring the same mindset to knowledge work, getting better at your career in other types of fields.

Well, and you say, and I'm looking at my notes on your book and you say this, this generates an exciting implication because most of the time deliberate practice is applied to things that are kind of obvious, right, like sports and chess, etc. Where there's a kind of pre existing game plan of what you need to do to improve your skills. But for us knowledge workers, most people aren't doing that. So the exciting implication is when we take the time to figure out how we're going to deliberately practice, it gives us an opportunity to accelerate the rate at which we become so good they can't ignore us. Right?

Yeah, that's absolutely right. You see, there's a lot of pushback right now against deliberate practice. But essentially what this pushback is saying is that, well, wait a second, natural skills also matter. When you look at things like elite athletes or this or that. This was the same pushback that I got at first from actually the editor, my editor on this book because he had played professional baseball and he told me, look, we all knew how to do deliberate practice. We were all putting in the same really hard hours. And there's just clearly some people were Bryce Harper and some people were not. But the point is, yeah, that might be true if you're talking about becoming an MVP in Major League Baseball. But in knowledge work no one's doing any deliberate practice. So the potential benefit of actually deliberately trying to stretch your skills, in my opinion, can swamp any sort of natural differences or abilities when it comes to the type of work we see in knowledge work. It'd be like going to a basketball league where, you know, everyone was still throwing underhand. You don't have to be Michael Jordan to dominate there. If you can just learn how to do a jump shot, you know. So I think that's what's going on.

So this is really powerful. And the takeaway here is figure out what your delivered practice is. Can you give us a really quick insight? We're running up against a hard stop for Cal. He's actually got office hours at Georgetown for his computer science students, which I think is awesome. But can you give us a really quick glance into what you do to deliberate practice?

Yeah. So there's a lot of different elements to go into deliberate practice, but the key is that you have a particular exercise that's designed to stretch your ability. So I have to do this all the time as somebody who does math proofs for a living, essentially. So I'm constantly having to carefully give myself challenges. So maybe I'm working on an idea. I need to learn a new technique. I become very good at calibrating. Okay, I need to learn this technique to this level and get this result, having carefully chose that, such that I don't really know how to do that. But if I stretch and think and work at it hard enough, probably in a couple days, I can figure it out. And by doing that, I've stretched my brain, I've stretched my ability. And so I structure all of my life into looking at these sort of exercises that are tractable for me, but a little bit beyond my current capability. Because the more I do that, the better I get. I mean, the key thing about deliberate practice is that just doing something you already know how to do is not deliberate practice. And this is the massive trap for knowledge work that after an initial stage of learning the skill for the first time, people just do what they already know how to do again and again. That doesn't make you better if you're not stretching, if it's not hard, if it doesn't hurt your head, you're not actually getting better. So you kind of want to feel that strain on a regular basis.

Right on. And you've inspired me to really drill into it. I think that's an important insight that you make just that exciting implications. So that's a huge takeaway from our Chat if you're listening and inspired to get so good they can't ignore you, figure out how you deliberately stretch yourself right outside your comfort zone. Don't go nuts, but incrementally improve on a consistent basis and watch your skills and your career capital grow. Cal, I really appreciate you. Thanks for taking the time. Where can people learn more about you and what you're up to?

Well, you can@calnewport.com I'll tell you, that's kind of the only place you can, because I'll throw one more coda on here before I run to my students. The trade off for having a working life where you're doing deliberate practice, you're straining yourself, is that you can't have as much else going on. It's sort of a simpler but harder. So for example, you can't find me on Facebook, you can't find me on Instagram, you can't find me on Twitter because I've never had accounts on any of these social media services. Because this is sort of the trade off of the craftsman lifestyle. It's incredibly fulfilling to take something you think is important and to work on it and to strain yourself and take pride in it. But it's somewhat incompatible if your whole day, you're also just sort of fragmented and running around and doing all these other sorts of things. So I actually have a new book coming out in January called Deep Work that is going to try to make this argument that this type of focused, deliberate effort is incredibly fulfilling and it's also the foundation for a very sort of successful and interesting career and trimming away the excess in your life and putting more time on a small number of things really can be the foundation for becoming so good they can't ignore you. So that's all a way of saying is this is why I'm a little bit hard to find, is because I'm probably deliberately practicing somewhere.

Right on. Well, I can't wait to check out Deep Work and maybe connect again on one of these chats. And quick note before we send you off to your students, reminds me of Steven Pressfield, War of Art, who said the amateur tweets, the professional works. And then I just interviewed Gabrielle Oettingen, who's sure you know, one of the leading thinkers on effective goal setting. She doesn't even have a Twitter account. I was joking with her about it. I'm like, that is so great.

It is. Well, I'll tell you the goal. The goal. Here's the thing. Your goal should be to have people tweeting about you, people telling their friends about you on Facebook. That's how you take advantage of social media in a lot of these fields, not you yourself being on there. Of course, exceptions abound. If you're actually a media figure or trying to grow a media brand or run a podcast or something, that's different. But if you're not in media, I'm kind of a hardliner on it. Do something that people will tweet about. Don't spend your time tweeting instead of that.

Right on. Well said. All right. Thank you, sir.

All right. Thank you, Brian.

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