45 Inspiring quotes from So good that they cannot ignore you by Carl Newport
If
you want to excel in your field of work, this book will teach you how
Here
are the quotes that I love:
''You
need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.''
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
''Don’t
follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in
your quest to become,
so good that they can’t ignore you.''
― Cal Newport, So Good
They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
''It
takes time to get good at anything. The key thing is to force yourself through
the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase.''
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
''Compelling careers often have complex
origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your
passion.''
''In Wrzesniewski’s research, the
happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion
into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become
good at what they do.''
''The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also
dangerous. Telling someone to ‘follow their passion’
is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a
career riddled with confusion and angst.''
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
''The
traits that define great work require that you have something rare and valuable
to offer in return—skills I call career capital.The craftsman mindset, with its
relentless focus on what you produce, is exactly the
mindset you would adopt if your goal was to acquire as much career capital as
possible. Ultimately, this is why I promote the craftsman mindset over the
passion mindset.''
''Television
writing is attractive because it has the three traits that make people love
their work: impact, creativity, and control.''
''What
makes television a hard industry to crack is the fact that it’s a winner-take
all market. There’s only one type of career capital here, the quality of your writing,
and there are thousands of hopefuls trying to gain enough of this capital to
impress a very small group of buyers.''
''If
you’re a guitar player or a comedian, what you produce is basically all that
matters. If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not you’ve found
your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself
out of work.''
''TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREAT WORK
Creativity:
Ira Glass, for example, is pushing the boundaries of radio, and winning armfuls
of awards in the process.
Impact:
From the Apple II to the iPhone, Steve Jobs has changed the way we live our
lives in the digital age.
Control:
No one tells Al Merrick when to wake up or what to wear. He’s not expected in
an office from nine to five.''
''Most
jobs don’t offer their employees great creativity, impact, or control over what
they do and how they do it. If you’re a recent college graduate in an entry-level
job, for example, you’re much more likely to hear
‘go change the water cooler’ than you are ‘go change the world.’ ''
''You
need to get good in order to get good things in your working life, and the
craftsman mindset is focused on achieving exactly this goal.''
''Great
work doesn’t just require great courage, but also skills of great and real
value.''
''Three traits that disqualify a job as providing a good foundation
for building work you love:
1. The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by
developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable.
2. The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps
even actively bad for the world.
3. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike.
A job with any combination of these disqualifying traits can
thwart your
attempts to build and invest career capital [rare
and valuable skills].''
''The idea that excellence at performing a complex
task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again
in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on
what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand
hours.''
''What
interests me about Charness’s study, however, is that it moves beyond the 10,000-hour
rule by asking not just how long people
worked, but also what type of
work they did. In more detail, they studied players who had all spent roughly
the same amount of time—around 10,000 hours—playing chess. Some of these
players had become grand masters while others remained at an intermediate
level. Both groups had practiced the same amount of time, so the difference in
their ability must depend on how they used these hours.''
''Hours
spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in
predicting chess skill, it dominated the
other factors. The
researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five
times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who
plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated
around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate
players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity.''
''Deliberate practice,[is] an approach to work where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then
receive ruthless feedback on your performance. Musicians, athletes, and chess
players know all about deliberate practice. Knowledge workers, however, do not.
This is great news for knowledge workers: If you can introduce this strategy
into your working life you can vault past your peers.''
''Deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse
array of fields, among which are chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, sports, typing,
juggling, dance, and music. If you want to understand the source of professional athletes’
talent, for example, look to their practice schedules—almost without exception
they have been systematically stretching their athletic abilities, with the
guidance of expert coaches, since they were children.''
''If
you show up and do what you’re told, you will, reach an ‘acceptable level’ of
ability before plateauing. The good news about deliberate practice is that it
will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little
competition. The bad news is that the reason so few people accomplish this feat
is … because.. Deliberate practice is often the
opposite of enjoyable.''
'' When experts exhibit their
superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute
it to special talents…However, when scientists began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers… no general superiority was found. In other words, outside a handful of extreme examples—such as the height of professional basketball players and the girth of football linemen—scientists
have failed to find much evidence of natural abilities explaining experts’
successes. It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and
again ends up explaining excellence.''
''If
you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an ‘acceptable level.’Pushing
past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate practice
story; the other part is embracing honest feedback—even if it destroys what you
thought was good….You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was
flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts. It’s so tempting to just assume
what you’ve done is good enough and check it off your to-do list, but it’s in
honest, sometimes harsh feedback that you learn where to retrain your focus in
order to continue to make progress.''
''Decades of scientific research have identified this trait
[Control] as one of the most important you can pursue in the quest for a happier,
more successful, and more meaningful life… more control leads to better grades,
better sports performance, better productivity, and more happiness.''
''Giving people more control over what
they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement,
and sense of fulfillment. It’s no wonder, then, that
when you flip through your mental Rolodex of dream jobs, control is often at
the core of their appeal.''
''If your goal is to love what you do, your first step is to acquire career capital [rare and valuable skills]. Your next step is to
invest this capital in the traits that define great work. Control is one of the
most important targets you can choose for this investment.''
''Some
top blogs…have notoriously clunky designs, but they all accomplish the same
baseline goal: They inspire their readers. When you correctly understand the
market where blogging exists, you stop calculating your bounce rate and start focusing
instead on saying something people really care about—which is where your energy
should be if you want to succeed.''
''If you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, then it’s hard to
take effective action. Deliberate practice requires good goals.''
''How
career capital is actually acquired: You stretch yourself, day after day, month
after month, before finally looking up and realizing, ‘Hey, I’ve become pretty
good, and people are starting to notice.’ ''
''The passion hypothesis, says that the key to loving your work is to match a job to a
pre-existing passion, is bad advice.There’s little evidence that most people
have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered, and believing that there’s a magical right job lurking out there can often
lead to chronic unhappiness and confusion when the reality of the working world
fails to match this dream.''
''It’s important to adopt the craftsman mindset, where
you focus relentlessly on what value
you’re offering the world. This stands in stark contrast to the much more
common passion mindset, which has you focus only on what value the world is offering
you.''
''I
follow a rule with my life that if something is scary, do it.''
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
''Money
is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be
valuable.''
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
''Do what people are willing to pay for,''
''Scientific
breakthroughs, require that you first get to the cutting edge of your field.
Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative
ideas are almost always discovered.''
''If
you’re not in control of your career, it can chew you up and spit you out.''
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