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.

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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

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

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

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

Brad Feld

I have had an experience which might perhaps be described as being shot down. At the same time, I call shot down only when one falls down. Today I got into trouble but I escaped with a whole skin.

Manfred von Richthofen

I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.

J. M. G. Le Clezio

I believe the auto industry is a competition of human resources, competition of funding, competition of technology - and the competition is international.

Li Shufu

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Luigi Pirandello

If you say you want to automate cars and save people's lives, the skills you need for that aren't taught in any particular discipline. I know - I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.

Larry Page

The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel.

Steve Furtick

It's a new challenge to see how people can change your look. I like words like transformation, reinvention, and chameleon. Because one word I don't like is predictable.

Naomi Campbell

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

John le Carre

If they can't do it in California, it can't be done anywhere.

Taylor Caldwell

I think NATO is a Cold War product. I think NATO historically should have shut up shop in 1990 along with the Warsaw Pact; unfortunately, it didn't.

Jeremy Corbyn

Being nervous is not something you should be ashamed of. Nervous means you care, you really want to do well.

Paula Creamer

Fresh egg pasta is traditionally served in the north of Italy with butter, cream and rich meat sauces, whereas dried pasta is more at home with the tomato- and olive oil-based ones of the south.

Yotam Ottolenghi

The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper... no one cared what he believed about its origin.

William Robertson Smith

You come to realize that only one person can tell you what's expected of you, and that's you.

Jason Mraz

I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.

Elizabeth McCracken

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

Francis Bacon

I had a flight trainer who is one of the biggest and most famous helicopter pilots the world.

Izabella Scorupco

When I play, I feel like I'm in a theatre, why should I look ugly then, because I'm a tennis-player?

Anna Kournikova

Transparency is the antidote to hypocrisy.

Britt Merrick

If one looks at the map of the world, it's difficult to find Iraq, and one would think it rather easy to subdue such a small country.

Vladimir Putin

From the depth of need and despair, people can work together, can organize themselves to solve their own problems and fill their own needs with dignity and strength.

Cesar Chavez

Youre somewhat useful at work but irreplaceable at happy hour.

Anonymous