Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

18

26

So Good They Can't Ignore You

In this eye-opening account, Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that “follow your passion” is good advice. Not only is the cliché flawed—preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work— but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping.

Get

Explore more quotes

"Follow your passion" might just be terrible advice.

Daniel Campos

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.

Daniel Campos

Self-Determination Theory tells us that motivation requires that you fulfill 3 basic psychological needs: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important; Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do; Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people.

Daniel Campos

Working right trumps finding the right work.

Daniel Campos

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.

Daniel Campos

I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

Daniel Campos

The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.

Daniel Campos

Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.

Daniel Campos

The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming "so good they can’t ignore you", is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital.

Daniel Campos

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration.

Daniel Campos

If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an "acceptable level."

Daniel Campos

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.

Daniel Campos

To summarize, if your goal is to love what you do, your first step is to acquire career capital. 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.

Daniel Campos

Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

Daniel Campos

The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.

Daniel Campos

"If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea."

Daniel Campos

Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.

Daniel Campos

A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field.

Daniel Campos

Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a "big" action.

Daniel Campos

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.

Daniel Campos

If career capital makes it possible to identify a compelling mission, then it’s a strategy of little bets that gives you a good shot of succeeding in this mission.

Daniel Campos

The Law of Remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.

Daniel Campos

The core idea of this book is simple: To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers. Mission is one of those traits.

Daniel Campos

I argued that the best ideas for missions are found in the adjacent possible—the region just beyond the current cutting edge.

Daniel Campos

Rule #1: Don't follow your passion. Rule #2: Be so good they can't ignore you by acquiring enough career capital with rare and valuable skills. Rule #3: Cash in your career capital by gaining Control and other traits that make great work. Rule #4: Think small, act big - the importance of missions.

Daniel Campos

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

Norman Mailer

With a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world-no middle man, no big brother. I guess this changes everything.

Matt Drudge

I don't even attempt to sing.

Joe Mauer

I don't like losing anyways.

Usain Bolt

When you lose, there is a whole bunch of room for negativity and I don't feed into this stuff and I do not do any talking. I don't run my mouth.

Allen Iverson

I would like to say to people, open your eyes and find beauty where you normally don't expect it.

Jean Paul Gaultier

I'm feeling very lucky to be on 'GH.' It's kind of cool to be part of the fight to keep the show on the air. I hope I can help contribute to that.

Michael Easton

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Robert Heinlein

The French Revolution had many turning points but the oath of the clergy was if not the greatest unquestionably one of the. It was certainly the Constituent Assemblys most serious mistake. For the first time it forced fellow citizens to choose declare themselves publicly for or against the new order.

William Doyle

I wake up in the morning thinking about food.

Guy Fieri

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

Thomas McGuane

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As it becomes longer at No. 1, I feel more and more pressure. Everybody is trying to grab every piece of me.

Yani Tseng

I was a late bloomer. I was 38 when my first book was out and 43 when my first crime novel was out. I had a story that could only be told as a crime story. I think the genre is good; it deals with the fundamental questions of life and death. The problem is there are too many bad crime stories.

Hakan Nesser

I'm just not very interested in decoration.

Phoebe Philo

To fill the shoes of rock 'n' roll, because of the family I have, is a really hard thing.

Kelly Osbourne

Actually, I am a golfer. That is my real occupation. I never was an actor. Ask anybody, particularly the critics.

Victor Mature

Liberal democratic states can't remain globally competitive.

Viktor Orban

Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can't retire his experience. He must use it. Experience achieves more with less energy and time.

Bernard Baruch

Overcoming the obstacle of my diabetes diagnosis was something that forced me tackle the challenge head-on and, with an amazing support system, eventually come out stronger.

Charlie Kimball

'Cinema Paradiso' is a fantastic film, I love that.

Freddie Highmore

My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.

Maurice Ravel

The fact is that great musical pieces take and hold the stage because they provide great emotional experiences.

Sarah Caldwell