So Good They Can't Ignore You

Rachel Salaman: In your book you do acknowledge that following your passion does work for some people don't you, as long as it's combined with hard work and dedication, people who are successful musicians for example or athletes, so how can a person know if they could be one of those people who can make a success out of following their passion?

Cal Newport: If you're one of the rare lucky people who has a clear sense of, "this is what I want to do with my career" in an unshakeable sense, then you're probably not needing or looking for career advice anyway, it's simple for you and go for it, that's as good as any direction. But the key point is that's a very small percentage of people, and the problem with using follow your passion as a universal bit of career advice is that it gives us this wrong impression that most of us should have this passion waiting to be discovered and it's just not the case. I think the right way to think about it is passion is a by-product of an engaging and satisfying career, a career that's run in a smart direction, and that's a different way to think about it than we're used to, we're used to thinking of passion as a noun, something that you can identify and look at and say, "that's my passion and I can use that as the basis of career decisions," and what I'm saying is that's not the way that passion actually exists for most people, and we have to stop thinking about it as something that we identify and say, "there it is, let me use that," and instead see it as a goal. "If I'm running my career correctly I will have passion, so now let me turn my attention to, how do I run my career correctly?"

Rachel Salaman: In your book you talk about Apple founder Steve Jobs and his famous commencement speech at Stanford University where he told students to follow their dreams, it was played a lot after he died, but in the book you deftly show how Jobs himself did no such thing, can you talk us through that?

Cal Newport: That's right, people assume because they heard his famous commencement address that Jobs figured out at an early age, "I'm passionate about starting a technology company, I'm passionate about changing the world with technology," and then followed that passion, but when you go back into the biographical detail you find that's not what happened. His path into Apple Computers was much more haphazard, he stumbled into that opportunity as part of a small time scheme that him and Woz were hoping would make then maybe a thousand bucks by selling some circuit boards, he stumbled into this opportunity that became Apple Computers. Now in fairness, as soon as he saw that there was a big opportunity here, that there was perhaps a whole new industry about to be born, he went at it with intensity and he quickly built a career that he did feel passion about, but the key was his path into this passionate career was way more complicated than simply figuring out in advance, "this is what I'm meant to do, now let me go do it."

Rachel Salaman: You say in the book that the downside of the passion mind-set is that it strips away merit and you say this at the point where you're telling the story of a marketing professional who becomes a yoga teacher, can you explain what you mean by that statement?

Cal Newport: If you're in a passion mind-set which is the mind-set that you care mainly about what your job offers you, you're asking, "is this my passion or is this not my passion?" and that takes the necessity to get good at things and to build skill out of the equation because if your whole goal is to find which job is right for you, your focus is not on, "how do I get better, how do I build up skills?" and that's dangerous. So the particular story I told to exemplify that which you just mentioned was of a marketing executive who mid-career was feeling stuck, which is common, but her reaction was, "well maybe this is not my passion, so let me go, quit this and start up a yoga studio because maybe that's something I'm more passionate about." So that was the passion mind-set driving her, she was asking, "what does this job offer me, maybe the yoga instructor job would offer me more of what I'm looking for, maybe I'd be more passionate there." So that's the type of decision that passion mind-set leads you to, you need to do what you're passionate about, but it strips away the issue of how good are you, how much skills you have, what are you offering the marketplace, so when she went to be a new yoga teacher with just four weeks of training she did not have much skill or value in the yoga marketplace and the conclusion of that story was that she was struggling to make ends meet, was actually getting food stamps within a year of that decision. So that's the danger of just focusing on what you want to do and trying to get people to build the courage to go after what they think they might love more, it's that it strips out this notion of what you actually have skills at, what can you actually offer to the world and that's a much better mind-set to have, what can I offer the world than just focusing on what the world can offer you.

Rachel Salaman: Yes and that's one of the main messages in your book, you call this "career capital" and you advise people to build their skills and that becomes their career capital. Can you talk a bit more about that term?

Cal Newport: Yes, so this is the alternative strategy, so if follow your passion is a bad strategy to end up loving your work, what's the right strategy? So the framework I lay out in the book is this career capital theory which says you start by becoming good at rare and valuable skills, keeping in mind that the process of building up these skills can be hard and especially at first not a lot of fun, especially when you're at the entry level. Once you're good at skills that are rare and valuable you are now valuable to the work marketplace, so the analogy I use is you can imagine that you have built up career capital, or you have capital in your career. The next thing you need to do is invest that capital to being in your working life the types of general traits that are important to you, so you might build up this capital of becoming really good at a skill and not so you really value autonomy, well you can cash in this capital to gain a lot of autonomy in your job. Let's say you really value having an impact on the world, well once you have this capital you can invest it and move your job towards something where you can really be directly impacting important issues, but the key point is you have to build the capital first and that's why my book is called "So Good They Can't Ignore You," because the effort to become so good you can't be ignored is almost always, at least in my research, the first step towards building a career that's very engaging and very satisfying.

Rachel Salaman: I'm thinking that a lot of knowledge workers who might be listening to this might be wondering to themselves well how can I actually work on my skills to build up that career capital.

Cal Newport: That's a very important point because continuing to build up rare and valuable skills is not natural and actually very few knowledge workers actually do this, they very quickly hit a plateau after a few years in the job where they no longer make big strides in their ability and that's because we know from performance psychology that continuing to build a valuable skill requires deliberate practice, and this is the type of practice where you systematically stretch yourself in a particular skill, beyond where you're comfortable doing the work, so it's hard, it's uncomfortable, you're stretching yourself and you need to do this systematically to continue to get better. Most knowledge workers don't, they avoid discomfort, if something becomes difficult you check your email, you take a break from it and you certainly avoid trying to use a new type of skill or write something in a level that you're not quite there because that's uncomfortable. I turn it on its head and say if you want to build a career you love, the thing you should do different to everyone else is look at key skills in your job like an athlete or a musician and train them the same way that an athlete or a musician trains themselves.

Rachel Salaman: Let's take a knowledge worker skill like, for example, writing emails, so how would you apply the training principle to that?

Cal Newport: Right so there's a couple of key points to deliberate practice that hold whether you're trying to become a chess grand master or a good email writer, there's a couple of general principles that hold, so what you need is to identify what "good" means for the skill you're trying to do, so if you're writing emails you need to have some sort of goal, "I'm trying to improve this about my emails, terseness, ease of reply, lack of ambiguity," you have some particular thing you're trying to do, and then when you write your emails you stretch yourself to gain that property as well as possible, so you‘re really trying to write the best email, paying a lot of attention to stretching yourself there. And then finally you need feedback, so you actually need to see what happens, and in this case what happens with these emails, ask people, "was this clear?", you need some sort of feedback that tells you how much you've succeeded and where you've failed, and then you have to wrap that back into your next time around, and now when you have your image of what would be good here, what you're trying to do, you have a more sophisticated model. So there's figure out what good is, stretch yourself to get to that definition as far as is possible for you, and then get feedback on how you did and wrap that back into your definition. That cycle, applied again and again and again, time after time is what gets you better.

Rachel Salaman: Is this what in the book you call the "craftsman" mind-set?

Cal Newport: Right, so this whole approach, you could call it the craftsman mind-set which is a direct counterpoint to the passion mind-set, so if the passion mind-set says you should always worry about what your job is offering you, the craftsman mind-set says you should always worry about what you are offering your job, how valuable are you, are you applying deliberate practice like we just talked about to get more valuable? And the reason the craftsman mind-set is more likely to lead you towards a career you love is because it's what builds career capital, and once you have the career capital like we talked about, you then have control over your career, and it's really once you have that capital that you can start pivoting your work into those realms where it's full of passion and engaging, so that's why that mind-set is so important.

Rachel Salaman: It's easy to understand what you say about practice and that practice makes you better and builds your skills, but where does natural aptitude come into the equation, because it's not as if for example I could win Wimbledon just if I practiced enough and in the right way.

Cal Newport: We care too much about natural aptitude, in fact performance psychologists would even tell you, "well you could win Wimbledon," there are very few genes that are relevant to tennis that we've somehow evolved, what matters for Wimbledon is whether or not you're getting the right sort of intense deliberate practice at a very young age or not. In other words they would say, "there's probably nothing genetic about Andre Agassi, but it certainly was important that his dad had him out there at an incredibly young age forcing him to hit balls." This is doubly true for knowledge work, we care too much about natural aptitude, there's probably not a gene shaped by natural selection for one type of knowledge work versus another, skills are built due to deliberate practice, so you don't want to spend too much time trying to figure out what I'm good at, if you've already built up some skills maybe because you were a maths major in college, so you already have some maths skills, well that's a good place to start because you've already begun to accumulate some capital, but if you get too caught up in thinking, "what am I naturally good at?" you might fall into the trap of basically thinking about passion and just calling it aptitude instead. Whenever you're looking for what's intrinsic, "what am I meant to do?", that's dangerous territory.

Rachel Salaman: Most people do want to progress in their careers but from what you're saying you're suggesting they spend some time building up this career capital, how do they know at what point they should move from one role to another, or they should stay and focus on building their career capital?

Cal Newport: This is a key question and it's one I really was curious about when I wrote this book because I think this is a key skill in building the type of really passionate careers that I'm interested in, there is this notion of you know when you have enough capital to actually make some big moves, and I actually found an interesting answer from a well-known entrepreneur and writer named Derek Sivers, who made several major shifts in his career throughout his life, he went from a desk job to being a full time musician to being a full time entrepreneur very successfully. So he made big shifts and so I asked him, "how did you know when to shift from one thing or the other?", and he had a very simple rule which was when people are willing to pay you for something, then that is valuable, you have a valuable skill there. And this is not about seek money above all else, keep in mind Derek Sivers, when he sold his company, gave away all the money to a charitable trust, so he doesn't care about money for the sake of money, but he calls it a great neutral indicator of value, people don't like to give up their money unless they're really getting value for it in exchange. So if people are buying your product then it's valuable enough perhaps to start a business, if people are offering you book contracts or job offers in a particular field then you're valuable enough to make a go in that field, and if they're not then you probably don't have enough skill or value.

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Rachel Salaman: Your book is structured around four rules and we've talked about the first two which are don't follow your passion and be so good they can't ignore you. The third one is turn down a promotion or the importance of control, what are your main points here?

Cal Newport: So if we have the general framework that you start by building up career capital and then you invest that capital to take control of your career, the natural follow up question is, "what should you invest that capital in?" So this rule turn down a promotion is exploring a particular trait that you can invest your capital in that seems to generate a lot of satisfaction in people's working life and that trait is control or autonomy over your career, so this comes up time and time again in these stories, as well as in scientific research. Having a lot of autonomy in your working life can be a real source of passion, but it requires that you have career capital offered in exchange, you have to be good before you can take good control over your career, your hours, your schedule, so the title of that rule, "turn down your promotion," came from the story of a computer programmer who really valued having control over her schedule so when she got really good she turned down a promotion that would put her into a time consuming management position and instead went to more of a freelance style set up where she could travel months out of the year.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose another way of looking at turn down a promotion goes back to what you were saying about focusing on developing career capital.

Cal Newport: I think that's true and the real danger, so people recognize just intuitively that autonomy is good, to have more control over your life and your working life is good, but there is a real trap there and I talk about this in the book, that a lot of people, and especially young people of my generation, try to make this shift to autonomy before they have the career capital to back it up, and that can be a recipe for disaster, so I talked about a young woman who dropped out of college to start a non-profit with some vague notion of it would help people live better lives. She was being driven by this image of running your own company and living your own life, which is all great things, but she had no particular skills to trade for that autonomy, she had no career capital, nothing of value to the marketplace to trade for that autonomy, so of course that was a disaster, the thing never got off the ground, she never made any money, she didn't have a college degree so she was having a hard time getting other jobs. So that's a real trap, gaining control is a fantastic thing if you want to love what you do, but you have to have career capital first to trade in exchange for that.

Rachel Salaman: It's the old idea of work hard and be patient.

Cal Newport: Yes, that's right and that's why the core of those first two rules is "don't get caught up in what am I passionate about," but then "become so good you can't be ignored," really everything good comes off that foundation of being excellent at valuable things, have in store some career capital, that really is the foundation time and again of people who build these fantastic working lives.

Rachel Salaman: The fourth rule is think small, act big or the importance of mission. Now mission sounds a little bit like passion, not just the word sounding similar, but in order to have a mission you would need to be passionate about something, so what are the differences between passion and mission in your view?

Cal Newport: It's a good distinction because when I'm talking about mission I am talking about an organizing goal for your working life which is also for a lot of people a big source of passion, so I studied people who had these missions in their lives and I said, "where did they come from?", and the big discovery I made is that they too require career capital before they can be identified, that if you're not excellent, have a lot of expertise in a field, it's very difficult to actually identify a mission that's actually going to have an impact and actually be successful, and that's the difference between the mission and the type of pre-existing passion that people talk about when they say, "follow your passion," because these missions can't be identified until after you've put in the hard work of gaining expertise. So that's why I say, "think small, act big." Think small, I mean you have to put your focus on a very small number of things, a narrow focus building up real expertise, once you have expertise you can identify real missions and once you find a mission, act big and go all in, and that's the right way to think about it, not I'm going to walk out of college in the first few months, come up with a great mission idea that I can base my whole life and career around, it doesn't work that way, you need expertise in order to find good mission. So yes, they are a huge source of passion but as all the other things that I find in this book they require that career capital first, they require that skill before they can become a part of your life.

Rachel Salaman: You do talk about the importance of mission, why is it important?

Cal Newport: It's just a trait that's common among people who love what they do, so there's different models here, when you study people who love what they do there's different models. One model is that the person has a huge amount of control and autonomy over their life and the other model are these people that are driven by a mission, their whole life is centered on one thing. So I talk about this young Harvard professor for example who is using advanced techniques to solve and cure a particular class of deadly diseases, her whole working life is oriented towards this and is a big source of passion. So there are different models here of how you might end up loving what you do, so mission can be a very important way to do this, really focusing on autonomy can be another really important way to do this, but the key point is that neither of these have to do with figuring out in advance a passion, and they both have a lot to do with first building up a lot of rare and valuable skills. So there's different ways of building a career you love, but they all seem to be built upon a foundation of skill and career capital, not some sort of pre-identification of what you're supposed to be doing with your life.

Rachel Salaman: What can someone do if they don't feel they have a mission in their work?

Cal Newport: I would say that mission is a particular way that you could end up loving what you do, so if the idea of having a mission for your work is very motivating to you, that seems like that would be good, then what you need to do to get there is build up a narrow and valuable expertise. In the book there's this notion of the "adjacent possible" which is sort of a concept that's used in studying where innovations come from and it basically says there's this space that's right beyond the current cutting edge in a field and real innovations in a field come from this space, and the point is you have to be at the cutting edge before you can see into this space, and see "here are the new opportunities, here is where we're going to make the next big breakthrough." So if you want a mission in your life which is a great goal to have, but by no means necessary for passion, you have to get to that edge so you can see into the adjacent possible, to see what the next big opportunities are in your field, and getting to the cutting edge means you have to build expertise which means you have to work hard to build up that rare and valuable skill.

Rachel Salaman: In your view do you think that entrepreneurs should follow the same advice as employees about not following their passion?

Cal Newport: I do, I think there's a couple of relevant points here. First of all people who are jumping into entrepreneurship should not jump into it with the mind-set of "I like this thing and if I make a business around this thing then I'll feel passionate," they need to keep in mind real passion for people's work comes from these types of things like autonomy and impact and missions, and they require rare and valuable skills. So simply because you're starting a business around something doesn't mean that you're going to love it, you still can't avoid the building up career capital and invest in it phase. The other warning is a lot of entrepreneurs will build the career capital, they'll build up a very valuable skill, expertise or service, but they won't do the "invest it to make your life better" piece, and that's a big trap that entrepreneurs fall into, they become workaholics, it's very easy to get here where you're just pushing more and more hours, more and more sales, growth for the sake of growth, and they skip that step where you step back and say I'm valuable to the marketplace now, what do I want to do with that, maybe I don't need to grow my sales this year, maybe I need to fire these time consuming clients, streamline so I can have more flexibility in my schedule, or maybe I need to steer my product line towards something that's going to be more impactful or whatever. So that's the other warning for entrepreneurs, that they are typically, once they get going, good at the "building career capital" part, but bad at the "investing it to make your life better" part, whereas employees tend to be bad at the "building career capital" part but put a lot of thought into the "how do I make my life better" piece, so we get different issues from the same framework.

Rachel Salaman: So why did you write this book now?

Cal Newport: My books tend to come out of issues I'm facing in my own life, so I wrote books before this about how to have a successful good life as a student, I wrote those when I was a student. This book I wrote when I was making the first big career decisions in my life, so I'm young, this book chronicles my quest to get an answer to the question how do you build a working life you love. I went out there to find an answer to the question because I was making big career decisions and I wanted to have some guidance. So I make that clear that the book is not me giving my expert wisdom, I don't have any expert wisdom, it's me trying to find expert wisdom so I would know what I was doing with my own career and the book chronicles everything I found, and then at the end of the book I actually go into detail about how I'm applying it in my own life.

Rachel Salaman: I was going to ask you about that actually, perhaps you could just briefly tell us how you've followed some of these rules in your own career?

Cal Newport: Yes, one thing that was important in my own career path was I didn't sweat the notion that there was a right job for me, which really makes things easy. So if you don't believe in pre-existing passion as being a common thing and you believe instead in career capital for you, then it means you're not going to get too caught up in your choice of what job you do. So I had different options coming out of college, different types of work that were pretty different from each other and that mind-set allowed me not to get too stressed about that I choose to write one or the wrong one. The other thing that helped me is that it allowed me when I began to be a grad student I approached things more from this career capital point of view, which was I need to build up skill, not "do I love this every day," and that's fortunate because grad school for example is very hard at first, and if you go into it with the mind-set of, "if I don't love this every day, it's not my passion," you're likely to drop out, but if you go at it from the point of view of, "once I get good, I'll get more control," and then you'll persist like I did and then it gave me more capital, more control over my career. So that was also useful, so these principles helped me avoid a lot of anxiety in my early career and they also helped me now get to a point where I really do love what I do.

Rachel Salaman: It seems like what you're talking about in the book and also in this interview is the need to take a long view of your career, and it's quite hard I think for young people to take a long view. Would you say that that was true?

Cal Newport: I think it's absolutely true because it can take a long time and if you take stories of people who do love what they do and find out their actual career paths, that's a pretty common element, they're long and complicated paths, it's not clear cut from the beginning. My hope is that this career capital metaphor framework makes it easier to take the long view because it gives you something to focus on, how much capital do I have in my building capital. If you're doing those things you can have some confidence that you're going in the right direction, you can get some positive feedback along the way.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose for mid-career people it's the same thing, if they haven't had a long view of their career thus far and are unsatisfied with it, they might want to consider taking a long view, even if they're say forty and mid-management already?

Cal Newport: I think that's right, it seems what happens is if you're not explicitly trying to maximize your career capital and then invest it, your career trajectory can be somewhat out of your control and it can lead you to a place where it's fine but you're not exactly thrilled, because it's actually hard, to build a career that you really love it tends to require some pretty aggressive investments of your career capital, it's not going to happen naturally just because you showed up early, stayed late and did hard work, it really takes some systematic thinking. So I think even mid-career it's not too late to adopt this mind-set where you say what skills do I have, how can I make them more valuable, how can I systematically invest that career capital once I have it to take control. Whenever you're doing it, it's still valuable to do.

Rachel Salaman: We've covered a lot of ground here, what do you think are the most important takeaway points for professionals listening to this?

Cal Newport: There is no pre-existing passion buried down within you waiting to be uncovered like Spanish pirate treasure, so turn your attention away from passion as this noun, something that you can discover and use as the basis of career decisions, and see it instead as a by-product of a career well run. This allows your mind to ask the more sophisticated question of, "well how do I construct and run a good career?" I think this is a more adult nuanced way of thinking about this important topic, so we put aside the simplistic slogans and embrace these sorts of more sophisticated understandings of how people actually cultivate over time a passionate career. Once you make that mind-set shift, you'll find the right strategies, you might get some from my book, you might get some from just observing people in your career, but I think the key, the one thing I'd want people to take away from it is this mind-set shift, you're not destined to do anything, passion needs to be cultivated, you need to think about this as a nuanced sophisticated process and start looking for advice with that mind-set on.

Rachel Salaman: Cal Newport, thanks very much for joining us.

Cal Newport: Thank you for having me, I enjoyed it.

The name of Cal's book again is "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love." You can find out more about him and his work at www.calnewport.com.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.