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

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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

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

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

I'm more of a guy's girl. I like having a beer in a bar, and I don't bicker or sit down and do my nails. But I have two sisters and a mother, and we're Latin, so we gossip.

Zoe Saldana

My uncle was a hero, Lewis Roundtree. He was not even related to me really, but he was always called my uncle. He was like a father to me. I was closer to him than I was my father.

Ed Bradley

As someone with a deep faith in competition and the market, I also know that markets only work with tough enforcement of the rules that guarantee competition and fair play - and that the pressure to break those rules only gets stronger as the amount of money involved gets larger.

Eliot Spitzer

If you love your dad its tough when he dies. If you dont like your dad its tough when he dies. Because you lose that guy. Whatever you didnt get you miss. And what you did get you miss.

Jimmy Iovine

Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide.

Henry Louis Gates

Honestly, I just go to restaurants to eat so I won't die. If there was a pill I could take in January and then I wouldn't have to eat again for the rest of the year, I would take it. Of course, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my chocolate cake and ice cream.

Steven Wright

There were no strategic mistakes that could affect Russia's history and it further development. No, there were no such mistakes. Tactical errors were made in some less significant options, problems and so on. But, on the whole, Russia embarked on a correct path and it changed.

Boris Yeltsin

And I hate to see artists who are real safe. I love to see artists swing for the fences sometimes.

Lee Ann Womack

Teamwork is a well blended peculiarities.

Jose B. Cabajar

All my heroes wore coats and ties to work. What happened to men wearing hats? Maybe I should bring back hats.

Aaron Sorkin

Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.

Tom Clancy

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth We are happy when we are growing.

William Butler Yeats

It is time for Congress to provide relief for tobacco farmers. Since the 1930's tobacco production has been regulated by a quota system, which required farmers to purchase quota in order to grow tobacco.

Allen Boyd

It doesn't matter what medium I perform, I just love to perform in general, if it's good work.

Heather Matarazzo

I always wished I had a song like that George Strait song, 'The Chair', 'cause it's basically just a guy trying to pick up a girl at a bar.

Blake Shelton

We get attached to people, a job, material things and a certain state of being. And, when something around us changes we suffer.Release the need to control people, release the believe there is only one job you can do, release the need to accumulate material things, welcome the unknown and set yourself free.

Ana Ortega

Nowadays, I could not care less about making other people like me. I'm a good person, I don't need to do that anymore.

Beverley Mitchell

I also became close to nature, and am now able to appreciate the beauty with which this world is endowed.

James Dean

I have a background and an understanding of what's happened in the Middle East that a lot of people don't have, because there's been no interest.

Helen Thomas

The style I have in judo is very unique... One big advantage a judo player has is they have very good posture and - like, wrestlers, they show when they're about to do a take-down... which judo players don't, and so I kind of incorporate the boxing style with a judo grip and finishing that way.

Ronda Rousey

I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.

Alan Furst

Hollywood is throwing action movies at me.

Liam Neeson

The devil, darkness, and death may swagger and boast, the pangs of life will sting for a while longer, but don't worry; the forces of evil are breathing their last. Not to worry. He's risen!

Charles R Swindoll