[Day 130] (Book review #5) So Good They Can't Ignore you by Cal Newport

"Whoa, another Cal Newport book!", Or something along those lines, was my reaction when I got my hands on this piece of literature. The author himself says it's more like a manifesto than a book and he is sort of right. The book itself is about 230 pages long but contains a rather large font and a lot of spacing plus frequent repetition of the main concepts the author is presenting which resulted in me being able to read it from cover to cover in 2 days (most books usually take me 5-8 days to read). From an outsiders point of view, one could say that the book was not worth the money (its price was about 15 bucks) and I wouldn't blame him for that assertion because the length and outside appearance of the book is often correlated with an amount of information it provides (unless a 500-page book is a complete word salad, it will contain much more information than a 200 page one) however some books provide a lot of information and do not provide much valuable information - let's call it noise (parts of the book you flick through) to signal (consisting of golden nugget you are likely to recall even a couple months after having finished the book) ratio. In the regard of "noise to signal ratio" this book is fantastic - its information value is right on par with some other lengthier books, I've read so far (such as Spark and Habit). Anyways, the book contains just a 4 major getaways, so let's cut to the chase and see what it has to offer.

  Rule #1 - Don't Follow Your Passion

• In this section, Newport argues that relying on the "passion hypothesis" (he formulated the hypothesis like this: The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you are passionate about) is not a feasible strategy for finding an engaging job which helps you develop a satisfactory career further down the line - in his eyes it's quite the contrary: dangerous pursuit with an abysmal chance of success. Why? Here are some of his reasons:

• The process of finding a compelling job has complex origins and depends on many variables - This one is rather obvious, but a lot of people don't seem to realise it. Your success does not depend on how passionate you are about the job as much as it does on many other factors - current state of the job market, your competence in the field, personal circumstances etc. If you know how complex is the nature of reality, then you are much less likely to assert that working passionately on something = having a high chance of succeeding in it. The most of the time passion is just not gonna cut it.

• Not many people have pre-existing passions that are relevant to starting a successful career - If you are in your mid 20's and your passions are snooker, skydiving and poetry than there is very little chance that you will succeed in a job that consists of something you are already passionate about. For most people, their passions are more like hobbies - refreshing as free time activities but not exactly feasible to serve as a starting point for a successful career.

• Passion takes time - The author presented a couple of studies that suggest that people are more likely to be passionate about something that they are engaged in for a quite some time. This seems logical because at first, very few people enjoy their jobs - they work on some entry-level position and they are burdened/plagued by a variety of boring, tedious and unimaginative tasks. As they gain experience and competence, only then they earn a right to participate on more interesting projects - that's how most of the companies function, however, it's not limited to companies - if you want to start a business, for instance, you also need to start with unenjoyable tasks before getting to the "good stuff" which brings me to the next point Newport raised.

• Passion is a side-effect of mastery - This one is heavily intertwined with the point above. The level of one's passion almost always correlates with the level of one's competence. The more adept you get in something, the better you feel about yourself, and you are, therefore, bound to enjoy the activity more. Almost nobody has pre-existing passions which coincide with feasible job position, therefore the best way to become passionate about something as attain mastery in it.

• Passion is dangerous - The last crucial point Newport made in this section is heavily related to the first point he raised. The nature of reality is complex, therefore believing that it's plausible to find a job that matches your pre-existing passion is a dangerous idea that can easily lead you astray - you focus on finding your true passion instead of focusing on attaining valuable skills that will facilitate you becoming passionate about your work in the long run.

Rule #2 - Be So Good They Can't Ignore You

• In the second section of the book, Newport presents the idea of a Craftsman Mindset as opposed to Passion Mindset. To sum it up: Passion Mindset revolves around an idea - What can the world offer me? - while Craftsman Mindset turns it upside down and asks - What can I offer the word?

• According to Newport, adopting Craftsman Mindset is crucial in regards to attaining sufficient Carrier Capital to be successful in any field. To put it simply: your Carrier capital is the amount of competence/valuable skills - that are relevant to the field you want to succeed in - you possess. The central idea of Craftsman Mindset is to engage in the art of deliberate practice as much as possible. Deliberate practice means working systematically to achieve your goals while constantly pushing yourself - operating in the realm of intensity/difficulty/challenge that is barely out of your reach competence-wise. Most people don't regularly engage in deliberate practice because it's really hard and ambiguous.

• Things to keep in mind before making proper use of deliberate practice:
• a) Identify you capital career type - you don't want to waste tons of time and energy only to find out that you've been working on a skill that has no real value for you.
• b) Define good - set concrete goal of how good you want to become in a certain skill.
• c) Be patient - building up career capital takes time, and things don't go as planned most of the time so suck it up and struggle towards your goal with 30% efficiency instead of your desired 110% one.

Rule #3 - Turn down a promotion

• There are three traits that usually define a great work: Creativity, Impact and Control - giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement and sense of accomplishment. It goes without saying that attaining promotion or starting one's own thing gives the person a sense of control over their actions (because they gain greater autonomy) and that's why almost everyone desires career advance - they want a greater sense of control over their working life, however, trying to attain as much control as possible is, at times, a very slippery close. According to Newport, there are two "control traps" that people fall into when they desire more control without thinking it through or earning the right to gain more control.

• The First Control Trap - Control that is acquired without enough career capital is unsustainable. Consider employee A for instance - he lacks sufficient career capital, but he wants to desperately attain control as fast as possible. In that case, he can a) ask a company for a promotion - which is not gonna work out because he is not competent enough or b) leave the company to start something on his own - which is still most likely not gonna work out due to his lack of competence. The obvious right answer is to work on your career capital, so you have a valuable and rare skillset to offer when asking the company for promotion or when planning to start a business on your own (in both cases attaining more control but at the price of increased responsibility).

• The Second Control Trap - In case you already, in theory, have enough career capital to acquire control, you will encounter a lot of resistance trying to obtain it in practice. The resistance problem mainly stems from the fact that: 
• a) to effectively gain more career capital you will need to make bold decisions that will alter your lifestyle drastically (moving for better opportunities, leaving people are do not offer any real value and deprive you of energy behind etc.) 
• b) the moment you gain enough career capital pursue more viable work opportunity, you became so valuable to your current employer that they are reluctant to let you go. From the point of view of an employer, you attaining enough career capital and leaving for a better job is an absolute disaster - they would like to keep you around so you can accomplish tons of work due to abilities you possess. In that regard, it's important to keep in mind that you don't primarily work for a company, you work for yourself - to become experienced and adept at something - through the means of company you are currently working in, therefore, you have no real obligation to stay there is a much better opportunity presents itself.

• To avoid The Control Traps, one thing to keep in mind is The Law of Financial Viability - to put it simply when deciding whenever to stay in your current work position or pursue another position ask which is these two options realistically generate more value in regards to your career progression. Advance only, when the total sum of value you gain from the new job is greater than the total sum of value you lose due to you leaving a current job. To account for all the liabilities concerning changing work environments, I would say that the new job/project shouldn't be only marginally valuable but a lot more valuable (>20% more or so).

Rule #4 - Think small, act big

• At last but not least, here we have a rule, in which Newport clearly states that the ultimate goal of anyone's career is to find a mission that is both useful and intrinsically fulfilling. Everyone will benefit greatly from having found a mission they can engage it, using their potential to its limit but finding the "right" mission is not an easy feat. To tackle this issue, Newport presented 3 heuristics that will most likely simplify the process.

• Missions require capital - it's been repeated so many times throughout this review so, at this point, its a no-brainer. When we look at terms job, career and mission we can clearly spot that "mission" sound much more serious and deep that "job" therefore its preferred to have a "mission" instead of a "job". However, everything has its order. One must first obtain experiences in a couple jobs to decide on one's suitable career and only after that one can successfully follow his career until he finds what can be described as his "mission". This raises an interesting question: How far and in what direction one needs to go in his career to discover his mission? The author's experience indicates that mission is, more often than not, found when one gets to the cutting edge of his field. Only after one gets to the cutting edge, one gets to see, through knowledge and competence one accumulated, the array of possibilities which he can take part in and which will have merit of some sort. Newport calls this array of possibilities adjacent possible - it essentially consists of all the things, concepts, ideas that are, realistically, able to be discovered, and therefore waiting to be discovered, by the individuals that are the most competent in their respective field.

• Missions require little bets - a road to the cutting edge can be vastly accelerated by using little bets to guide you. Little bets are essentially small projects which, upon their completion, offer you an immediate feedback on if you are headed in the right direction and how fast you are approaching the cutting edge. They serve as a benchmark for your current competence and overall performance - with their help you can reiterate the way you approach gathering career capital. It's much better to fail at a smaller task than not to notice that you are continuously failing on a big task for quite some time until it's too late to correct the course resulting in you inevitably heading towards extremely undesirable and unpleasant future.

• Mission require marketing - this point is pretty simple, you need to know how to sell yourself. You can be a freaking genius, but if the world does not know about your existence, you won't accomplish much.

  That would be it for today's post. It was a little lengthier than I expected it to be, but I am experiencing with new forms of writing book review so in case this form is not optimal, I'll look for a more feasible way to write book reviews. Hope you are having a great day.

  Cheers

(almost 100 days of Self-Improvement project yay)