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.

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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.

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"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

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

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

ur beliefs on you. Its always you who in the last instance can permit a belief to be true for you or not

Marc Reklau

Think of war as a game of Russian roulette. It is a game of chance with your life as the grand prize.

Ramman Kenoun

The security and the future of Jordan is hand-in-hand with the future of the Palestinians and the Israelis.

Abdullah II of Jordan

The negative side of football. The negative side of our society. People sometimes go to football and bring to it the negative aspects of our society.

Jose Mourinho

The rock star stuff never came up for us. The Band was never attacked by groupies before, during or after any show that we ever played.

Levon Helm

The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.

Clement Greenberg

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

Jefferson Davis

In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it.

Timothy Noah

Exactly the same with dancing, you can't dance until you've learnt steps, the things your feet can do.

Ninette de Valois

For many terrorists, carrying out an attack allowed them to become the heroes of their own story.

Peter L. Bergen

The need for this clinic is clear to me, to the veterans who are currently forced to travel hours to receive care, and even to the Veterans Administration that itself identified creation of a clinic in this part of our state as a priority to be completed by 2006.

Doc Hastings

Growing up, I had a terrible pudding-bowl haircut. I used to cut it myself, and I'd sew my own clothing, too. I looked a little strange compared to the other kids. But the thing was, I felt I looked amazing, so what other people thought never bothered me.

Becki Newton

But beyond the hysteria of phantom death panels, where is the abomination? Show me the provisions that will hurt consumers, because if you think a $110 billion a year tax break for working-class Americans to buy private health insurance is a government takeover, I welcome the debate.

Jim McDermott

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Silence is a trick when it imposes. Pedants and scholars, churchmen and physicians, abound in silent pride.

John Zimmerman

I learned nothing while I was in school.

Lorraine Bracco

No one can have all he wants but a man can refrain from wanting what he has not and cheerfully make the best of a bird in the hand.

Seneca

Using language like jungle growth isn't the solution to telling a story.

John L'Heureux

The spirit of rock 'n' roll is alive and well. It kind of just needs to be cultivated a little bit.

Kid Rock

When I found out I was pregnant, my mother said, 'Don't separate your life, the life that you're going to make with this child, from the things that you are and what you want to do.'

Neneh Cherry

You have to have a work ethic, and you have to be educated in what you're doing. You have to take it seriously. It doesn't mean that everything you do has to be serious. But you've got to have the tools.

Jakob Dylan

Mornings are pure evil from the pits of hell which is why I dont do them anymore.

Rachel Caine

My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.

Richard Dawkins