So Good They Can't Ignore You | Cal Newport
Rule #1 Don’t Follow Your Passion
- The “Passion” of Steve Jobs
- Passion Is Rare
- Passion Is Dangerous
Rule #2 Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
- The Clarity of the Craftsman
- The Power of Career Capital
- The Career Capitalists
- Becoming a Craftsman
5 steps to start becoming a craftsman who accumulates career capital with deliberate practice:
- Decide what capital market you're in. I'm in academia. To win good positions, the only capital is good publications. Therefore, this is a winner-take-all marker.
- Identify your capital type. Good publication is the major capital in the academic market. To gain this kind of capital, critical skills to master include grand vision of the field (e.g. keeping tracking of up-to-date papers), ability to hunt down important-impactful-manageable problems, theoretical and practical skills (e.g. math and programming), and good writing & presentation skills.
- Define "good". The gold standard of good is the ranking of the journal or conference. For senior positions, citation number also matters.
- Stretch and destroy. For the stretch part, to accumulate career capital, I have been polishing my skills via learning intensely and in balance. However, the time devotion for developing practical skills and pushing real research projects towards publications is insufficient. This is the first drawback I need to tackle. For the destroy part, in academia, feedbacks mainly come from team meetings and peer review. To facilitate my ability for problem hunt, I might need to try to actively seeking advice from my peers.
- Be patient. Sure I will be patient. At least my RA job can offer my daily expenses and keep me in the academic world where I can keep accumulating my career capital. Just stay deep!
Rule #3 Turn Down a Promotion
After developing the concept of career capital, and traits that can be bought with career capital to make good job good, Cal moves to two specific traits: control and mission.
Ordinary 9-5 works don't provide a lot of control. To jump out of this situation, you need career capital, which needs to be validated by financial validation, i.e. you still get enough money after getting the control you want, no matter via which form. For academic job, everybody seems to has a full-load of control; yet in reality, when in tenure track, you got to stick to the most secured research direction and the most grinding work-schedule if you are not one of the top-tier stars. That's an important message for me.
- The Dream-Job Elixir
- The First Control Trap
- The Second Control Trap
- Avoiding the Control Traps
Rule #4 Think Small, Act Big
For mission, Cal argues that only those who has acquired a through understanding can find a really compelling mission (adjacent possibility), and only these people can practically tracing them and derive remarkable works. Therefore, career capital is vital for a good mission. In tracing the mission, little bets is a good strategy; whereas in making them remarkable, the remark-ability (why people care & spread it) and the venue for marketing are crucial.
- The Meaningful Life of Pardis Sabeti
- Missions Require Capital
- Missions Require Little Bets
- Missions Require Marketing