Review: So Good They Can't Ignore You, by Cal Newport

[Russ Allbery]

So Good They Can't Ignore You
by Cal Newport

Publisher: Grand Central
Copyright: September 2012
ISBN:      1-4555-0910-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     237

The problem area of task management, mental focus, and prioritization
is vast and sprawling, full of techniques that work only in some
situations, in some moods, for some people, or with some types of
tasks. Time and attention management books therefore work best if the
peculiar focus of that book happens to align with a set of problems the
reader currently has. I occasionally survey the field for something
that speaks to whatever corner of the problem I'm currently working on,
and then chase that thread for as long as it seems useful.

Cal Newport is my latest thread. I encountered Deep Work while feeling
frazzled and pulled in too many directions to do a good job at any one
thing. It laid out a helpful approach to problems of focus and
multitasking (enough so that I read it twice), so I started reading
backwards through Newport's blog and picked up this earlier book. It's
not his first, but before So Good They Can't Ignore You, Newport
focused on practical study tips for high school and college students. I
may read those someday as curiosities, but I doubt they'll be as
interesting to me now, more than twenty years out of college.

Going backwards through an author's writing like this is a bit of a
risk, since it's relatively common in this genre of non-fiction for an
author to have only one book I find interesting. For example, David
Allen's Getting Things Done is worthwhile reading for anyone interested
in time management systems as long as you don't focus exclusively on
that one system, but it's safe to skip everything else he's written.
Thankfully, Newport appears to be an exception. His blog is full of
interesting tidbits and is worth an archive trawl, and So Good They
Can't Ignore You is a broader survey of what it means to have a good
career and how to get there. I think it's worth reading alongside the
more focused advice of Deep Work.

One caveat in all that follows: Newport is a computer science professor
and is writing primarily for people with similar resources, so this
book is a bit relentlessly upper-middle class. The audience of this
book is primarily white-collar knowledge workers with college degrees,
and its framework becomes increasingly dubious outside of that social
class.

The core argument of So Good They Can't Ignore You is that "follow your
passion" is awful career advice that you should ignore. More
specifically, Newport argues that it is far more common to enjoy
something because you're good at it than to be good at something
because you enjoy it. Initial passion is therefore a risky and
incomplete guide. This doesn't imply that you need to do work that you
hate; in fact, if you dig deep enough you may find that you hate that
work because you're not good at some less obvious but still essential
part of it. It does imply that every career is going to have bits that
you don't enjoy, that learning something new has inherently
uncomfortable parts and is therefore not always something you'll feel
passionate about, and that passion is more often a reward at the end of
a journey than a signpost at the start. Therefore, rather than looking
for work that immediately excites you, look for work that interests you
(a lower bar) and that you are capable of learning how to do well.

On the surface, it's odd that I got as much out of this book as I did,
given that I'm the poster child for following one's passion into a
career. I'm working in the field I decided I wanted to pursue when I
was around eight years old, with essentially no wobbles along the way.
But, digging a little deeper, I've accidentally followed Newport's
approach in my choices of career focus. I never set out to work in
computer security, for example; I just did enough of it, first by
happenstance and later by choice, that I became good at it.

The drawback of the unreliability of passion is that most people will
not experience a sudden emotional epiphany that guides them into their
ideal career, or may find that such epiphanies point them the wrong
direction. The advantage Newport points out, and backs up with numerous
anecdotal examples, is that choosing a career is less fraught than the
passion approach would lead one to believe, and that your initial
emotional reactions are less critical than you might fear. There is not
one and only one career waiting for you that you must discover. While
the possibilities are not completely unbounded, there are numerous
careers at which you could succeed with sufficient practice, and any of
them can lead to a happy and rewarding work life. Rather than searching
for that one career that sets off a special spark, find a career that
you can become good at and that people will pay you for, and then put
in the work to build your skills. This will give you the resources to
shape your work into something you're passionate about.

Newport's writing has a bit of "eat your vegetables" practicality:
learning something will be uncomfortable at times, you have to put in
the work before you'll get the rewards, and (specifically for careers)
you have to test your goals against some measure of external value. But
Newport also has a disarming and thoughtful way of talking about the
overall arc of a career that avoids making this sound dreary and
emphasizes the rewards along the way. His delight in the inherent
merits of work done well shines through, as does his focus on a career
as a process of taking control over one's own work.

That concept of autonomy as a career goal was the part of So Good They
Can't Ignore You that most caught my attention. Newport's argument here
is that how you do your work has as much impact on career satisfaction
and overall happiness as what you work on. Autonomy, flexibility, and
choice in one's work often translates into joy and passion for the
work. But there are two control traps you have to avoid: trying to take
control with insufficient career capital to back it up, and being
prevented by others from spending your career capital on more control.

The first trap is the more obvious one: you need some external
validation that you're good enough to start setting some of the terms
of your own work. Newport recommends financial rewards as a feedback
mechanism: if you ask people to pay you for your work, in money or
other things of obvious value (increased vacation, for instance),
you're likely to get a more honest (and therefore more actionable)
measure of how good you are at your craft. The anti-capitalist in me
wanted to argue with the financial focus, but Newport is very good at
keeping his argument narrow. People may have a lot of social motives
for praising your work uncritically. To improve, you need a feedback
cycle that's more objective and is willing to tell you when you're not
yet good enough to take the next career step. In our current society,
one good way to force that feedback cycle is to ask for money, in one
form or another.

The second trap is more subtle and very useful for where I'm at
personally. Once you are good enough to have accumulated the career
capital to start taking more control over your work, you're also good
enough that your employer will want to prevent you from doing this.
They instead will want to maximize your benefit to them, or give you
the kind of control that comes with more responsibility rather than
more freedom. (Newport titles this section of the book "Turn Down a
Promotion.") You may have to force matters and make your employer
somewhat unhappy to win the type of autonomy that brings more personal
happiness.

Newport's own summary of So Good They Can't Ignore You is:

  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.

No one model of careers will capture all the nuance that goes into
work, but I'm particularly fond of this one. It combines a cautious
practicality with a clear-eyed vision of the end game that doesn't
confuse the journey with the destination. The point is not to have rare
and valuable skills; the point is to have a satisfying and compelling
career, and the skills are a tool. Deep Work was focused on how to
build a certain class of skills that are valuable in some types of
work. So Good They Can't Ignore You is about the bigger picture: what
are you using those skills to achieve, and why?

Those are big questions without any one universal answer, but Newport
is thinking about them from an angle that shed some light on some
things I'm mulling over. If the same is true of you, I think you'll
find this book worth reading.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-09-02

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>