So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

Book Review: 2/5 Impact On Me (Cal Newport)

Read more about the book here.

This book had a 2 out of 5 impact on me. The impact rating is how I perceived it and where it did or did not fill gaps for me, not a judgment of the book’s overall quality.

The challenge for me was that I did not agree with a lot in the book, especially the premise that it is only about becoming awesome and then making money because you are awesome. I see two sides to success: 1. Being good at what you do 2. Finding opportunities to make money for that. In other words, the intersection of your skills and jobs that pay well.

Concepts like "first develop an interest, then go and do it" are backwards. When you do task X (say, play tennis), you like it more. Then you get the motivation to do it more, so it becomes a virtuous cycle that starts with you trying to do something. This made me think about picky eating in kids and whether the solution is to somehow make them eat the foods they normally avoid.

Author talks about career changes and turning down promotions, but I am not convinced that turning down a promotion is a good idea, because it can also limit your growth.

The example where someone had a passion and kept trying to work towards it but did not succeed made sense to me. The example where someone built skills in one domain and then used them in another domain, like charity work, also made sense.

Some of the examples in the book feel biased. If you take 100 people who all did the same actions, not every one of them would become so good that people cannot ignore them.

It also suggests what Steve Jobs says, that you cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. That also connects to Nassim Taleb’s idea that humans are very bad at predicting.

I had already read many of these ideas in other books, which is probably why this book did not have a big impact on me.