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. After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers. Matching your job to a preexisting passion does not matter, he reveals. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you," Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory
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What you might want to know about So Good They Can't Ignore You
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Computer scientist Cal Newport pushes back on follow-your-passion career advice and argues that real love for work comes after building rare and valuable skills, what he calls career capital.
Cal Newport's 2012 book argues that the follow-your-passion advice common in career writing is wrong. He proposes the craftsman mindset: build rare and valuable skills first, and passion will follow.
So Good They Can't Ignore You came before Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, A World Without Email, and Slow Productivity. Each builds on themes from the earlier books.
So Good They Can't Ignore You was written by Cal Newport, published in 2021 by Business Plus.
So Good They Can't Ignore You is 272 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, So Good They Can't Ignore You takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
So Good They Can't Ignore You is a standalone novel by Cal Newport, not part of a series.
So Good They Can't Ignore You is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.