PNTV: So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport (#245)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, another great book. So good they can't ignore you. So good they can't ignore you by Cal Newport Subtitle why skills trump passion in the quest for work you love. Why skills trump passion is why in the quest for work you love. Really provocative, compelling book. First rule is don't follow your passion. To put it in perspective. Philosopher's Note Bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorite ones here. Cal Newport, brilliant guy. MIT PhD in computer science. He's now a professor at Georgetown. He's already published four books. Young guy, done a lot of extraordinary things so far and this book is one of them. The book is named after some famous advice from comedian Steve Martin. So people would ask Steve Martin, hey, how do I succeed? And he'd tell them, well, it's very straightforward. You need to be so good they can't ignore you. And he said, look, no one ever wanted to listen to that advice. They wanted to know how to get an agent and how to do this and how to do that. And his whole point was get so good that they can't ignore you. He was a master craftsman, Steve Martin was, which we're going to talk about in this session today. And that's the basic idea of the book is we want to adopt a mindset of a craftsman and get so good that people can't ignore us. First big idea on that front is self determination theory. SDT self determination theory has three aspects we want to look at really quickly. 1. Autonomy. This basically captures the notion that you want to have control over your work environment. These are three qualities of creating work that you love, right? 1. Autonomy. You want to have a bit of control or a lot of control over what you do and you want to feel that it matters. 2. You want to have competence. This is what researchers have found important. You want to feel good at what you do. You're talented, you're good at what you do. Competence. Three, you want relatedness in your work. You want to like the people with whom you work, right? Autonomy, competence, relatedness. Those are the three aspects of intrinsic motivation that researchers have discovered via self determination theory leads to a high level of fulfillment in our work. Now Cal makes the point that you want to notice what's not on that list. Nowhere on that list has science said you need to discover a pre existing passion and build your life around it. If you want happiness in your work, you've got to discover your passion first and then build your life around it. That's not what it says, it says you need this autonomy, competence, relatedness. And Cal says that's good news because you can create that even if you don't have a sense of what your most passionate about and how to make that come to life in your world, you can bring these three things more into your life. He talks a lot more about it in the book. We talk about it a bit more in the note. But think about that as we move through these other ideas. Next big idea is mindset. Mindset P vs. C. Passion vs. Craftsman. This is the book right here. Most people operate with a passion mindset. He says we need to operate with a craftsman mindset. The passion mindset is always asking, what's in it for me? How do I design the perfect lifestyle where I'm living on a beach somewhere, working a few hours a week and I get to do whatever I want, whenever I want. What's in it for me? I. What will my work do for me? The craftsman, on the other hand, flips it around and says, how do I create extraordinary value and serve as profoundly as I can? That's the craftsman versus the passion mindset. He says, if you want to get so good they can't ignore you so that you can create more autonomy, more competence and more relatedness and create your ideal job, you need to focus on what you can do to create an astonishing level of value. My word, astonishing level of value in your work. Passion versus craftsman. How do you do that? Well, one way you become a craftsman is you deliberately practice. We talk about this a lot. The 10,000 hour rule. Cal quotes Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. We're going to feature that soon. Basically, research has shown that truly world class, sustainable, consistent performance requires a ton of effort. 10,000 hours is the number they peg, right? But not just any effort, deliberate practice. And Cal makes a really cool point here. He says, look, that's kind of straightforward, right? For athletes, they need to practice in a certain way. For rock stars or for chess masters, even for radiologists and other people with specialties, you need to put in a ton of deliberate practice. He says. For most of us though, knowledge workers in the 21st century, it's a little more ambiguous what deliberate practice looks like. There's good news and bad news with that. Bad news is there's not a preformed plan, right? We've got to figure it out on our own. The good news is when you do, when you slow down and figure out what you need to do so you can deliberately practice and get a little bit Better every single day. Cal tracks the number of hours that he invests in deliberate practice every month to make sure that he's investing the right amount of time, stretching himself out of his comfort zone and getting incrementally better day in and day out, week in and week out. And when we do that, in a world of knowledge workers where so few people actually do that, he says, you quickly differentiate yourself from everybody else. Right? And you get so good they can't ignore you by adopting the craftsman mindset and going and putting in your deliberate practice week in and week out, month in and month out and beyond. We're going to talk more about that. That's the third big idea. The fourth big idea is a really cool one as well. Career capital. Career capital is the phrase that he uses to describe rare and valuable skills. So you need rare and valuable skills if you want to create this. If you want autonomy, competence and relatedness, you need to work hard for a long time to create rare and valuable skills. Then you cash in your career capital to create your ideal job. People get it backwards though, he says. He says with the passion mindset, you may decide, for example, and he shares a story of a yoga teacher who courageously jumped out of her marketing job. I think she had and became a yoga teacher after doing a 200 hour certification course. And he says, whole nother conversation on courage and the proper use of courage, right? But when you follow the passion mindset, without the craftsman mindset and without a proper amount of career capital, you may not succeed. And you likely won't succeed because there are a lot of people who have basic training, whether it's a 200 hour certificate in yoga or a basic coaching certification that's not rare and valuable. You haven't accumulated enough career capital to confidently create a sustainable job where you can have these things that are so important to self determination theory. You need to put in the work again and again and again via our deliberate practice, such that you become so good that they can't ignore you. And again, a lot of people get in trouble with this. And I think it's one of the most important distinctions that he makes is that it's easy to think that passion is enough. And look, I was in Finding Joe all about Joseph Campbell and discovering your hero's journey and following your bliss is a major theme of his work. But whenever I talked to audiences when that movie came out years ago, I always said, yeah, Joseph Campbell talked about follow your bliss. And he had a Sanskrit word for that that inspired the whole concept, which we talk about in other episodes. But he also said, follow your grunt. Follow your bliss. Follow your grunt. Cal would say start with your grunt. Work hard. And Cal describes passion as an epiphenomenon. It's a byproduct of working hard, not the thing that precedes the working hard. Now it's a whole other discussion. I think it's a little bit more yes and than either or. Or the epiphenomenon. I think it can work both ways. But if you don't have a clear sense of your passion, start with the craftsman. Even if you do have a clear sense of your passion, you need to know that it's the craftsman mindset that that's going to allow you to actually get paid doing what you love to do. Huge idea. Fifth big idea sums it all up. He says look. And he says this throughout the book in different ways. You need to differentiate between finding the right work, which is the passion mindset, and working right, which is the craftsman mindset. We want to focus on working right, showing up diligently, patiently, persistently over the long run so we can accumulate the career capital via our deliberate practice while honoring the craftsman mindset and constantly thinking about obsessing about how we can make people's lives better, how we can create more value and spend way more time thinking about that than thinking about, well, what can I get out of what I do? Of course that's awesome, but let that be the byproduct of you serving as profoundly as you can. In the process, you'll be able to create your ideal job and that meets these three parameters of self determination, theory, autonomy, competence, relatedness. Obviously a ton more we can talk about here. Highly recommend the book. Like I said, if you're looking to discover how to create work of meaning, I think this is worth checking out. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube, so so I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff, so here's a quick look. 10 bucks a month Join the Optimal Living Membership Program. You get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes on some of the best Optimal Living books out there. Old school classics, positive psychology, modern stuff, mindfulness, peak performance, purpose neuroscience, wealth, et cetera, and what you may not know is that in addition to the PNTV episodes, I create PDFs on all these great books. So six page PDFs. Let's take a look at one of them. 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