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.

16

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

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

"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

I am a wife-made man.

Danny Kaye

Dead people don't really die. They live on within you.

Nate Lowman

There were two things going on: 1) I had already established in my own mind where I wanted to go with the next series, and having James around as a Grey Eminence would have complicated matters. He had had an amazing life and it was time to bid him good-bye.

Raymond E. Feist

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

T. S. Eliot

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs did not start out wealthy, and actually added to income inequality, but we all benefit from their creative effort.

Foster Friess

At least 50 times. I've jumped off a building, jumped off a cliff in a car. I've been in bedrooms when women came in with knives and guns.

Dennis Rodman

I think you can move to everything, but with some music, you just want to sit still. That's me, anyway.

Chet Faker

I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it.

Keith Jarrett

Shore Leave is the one who evolved the most - because he started as a one-off joke because we were gagging on how the G.I. Joe vocationally specific-themed characters reminded us of the Village People. We made a sassy Village People kind of guy, and then we brought him back.

Christopher McCulloch

We interviewed many, many men and women from the NYPD and the NYPD Intelligence Division, specifically, and they're really good, dedicated people who want to keep the city safe.

Matt Apuzzo

For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.

Greg Mottola

I grew up in a rural area, I was from kind of a poor family and my parents weren't showbiz people. But going back was strange, and perhaps stranger for the other students.

Henry Thomas

Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.

Hannah Arendt

The guys who walk on Mars are going to be historic.

Buzz Aldrin

May every sunrise hold more promise and every sunset hold more peace...

Umair Siddiqui

The biggest problem with dyslexic kids is not the perceptual problem it is their perception of themselves.That was my biggest problem.

Bruce Jenner

Usually in a Smosh sketch, we get 60 shots, 12 hours to shoot - we're just going 'bam, bam, bam.'

Ian Hecox

In Canada you grow up - we're next to the United States. We're watching whatever you're watching. We're following your news. It's obvious that we are inundated with American cultural information and political information. Whereas the opposite is not true.

Rick Mercer

I say the one thing about luck is you can't really count on it.

Ron Livingston

The right to protect the health and well-being of every person, of those we love, is a basic human right.

Elizabeth Holmes

My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college.

James Earl Jones

I very much admired Lancaster. George Clooney reminds me of him today. Not all the macho, swinging around that Burt used to do, but the courage. You know where you stand with men like that.

Norman Lloyd

When I arrived on the planet, there were only two billion. Wildlife was more abundant, we were less so; now the situation is reversed.

Sylvia Earle