So Good They Can't Ignore You, a review
“So Good They Can't Ignore You” by Cal Newport, follows an attempt by the author to figure out what makes a career satisfying.
Core argument, around which everything else builds, is that one should not follow one’s passion (since having spontaneous passion is rare), but should instead acquire “career capital”, that is “git gud”. From that career capital all the good things will follow: satisfaction through mastery, control through being valuable, and mission through extreme specialisation.
How does one choose what to get good at? I think this question is not answered by the book. Don’t you need to have some predisposition to a thing you want to get good at? Doesn’t sticking to deliberate practice require at least some passion? There are some examples in the book where people acquire a trade by chance, but one has to wonder if these people would have worked on getting good with any trade or if they had a predisposition to this particular trade and they got a chance to practice it.
That said, I’ve actually enjoyed the book, it very much describes my early career trajectory:
Get a random job offer for something I am curious about
Work hard at getting good
Use career capital to gain more control
At some point I stopped actively working on getting good, this book serves as a reminder to not get complacent, and to spend time regularly on “deliberate practice”. After all, good things do seem to follow from gaining career capital.