So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love 读书笔记

Lessons learned from this book:

1. Passion is a vague thing and can lead you astray if your passion is not backed up by your career capital.

2. Master valuable skills that people are willing to pay you for. This is the foundation from which a career and mission can be built on.

3. There is no dream job waiting for us to discover. We have to work hard to create those jobs that we wish to engage in.

书摘：

Glass emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to the point where he had interesting options. “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” he says.

Glass continues: “I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That’s your tragic mistake.”

It’s hard to predict in advance what you’ll eventually grow to love.

“You’ll never be sure. You don’t want to be sure.”

Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.

As I concluded after meeting Jordan Tice, there’s something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is “just right,” and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy.

“The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,”

You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

You stretch yourself, day after day, month after month, before finally looking up and realizing, “Hey, I’ve become pretty good, and people are starting to notice.”

Even with the craftsman mindset, however, becoming “so good they can’t ignore you” is not trivial. To help these efforts I introduced the well-studied concept of deliberate practice, an approach to work where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance. Musicians, athletes, and chess players know all about deliberate practice. Knowledge workers, however, do not. This is great news for knowledge workers: If you can introduce this strategy into your working life you can vault past your peers in your acquisition of career capital.

You have to get good before you can expect good work.

In most jobs you should expect your employer to resist your move toward more control; they have every incentive to try to convince you to reinvest your career capital back into your career at their company, obtaining more money and prestige instead of more control, and this can be a hard argument to resist.

“Do what people are willing to pay for.” “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.” --Derek Sivers