Book Review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

The Basics

• Category: Personal Development
• Originally Published: 2012
• Pages: 256

Book Summary / What This Book Is About

This book is about building the types of skills that allow you to be a person of value that can thrive in this world.

It is based on four basic rules:

1. Don’t Follow Your Passion
2. Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Or, the Importance of Skill)
3. Turn Down a Promotion (Or, the Importance of Control)
4. Think Small, Act Big (Or, the Importance of Mission)

Taking these four rules and turning it into single a paragraph to summarize the book would look like this: instead of blindly following your passion as many people will tell you to do, try this path instead: construct work you love by building career capital. Build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills. Master rare and valuable skills through the process of serious study / deliberate practice (same thing, different name). Once you have built career capital, use it to gain more control over what you do and how you do it. Then; find your mission by getting into the adjacent possible, which is the region just beyond the current cutting edge in your field. Once you’ve found a general mission, work on projects that make it succeed. Do this by taking small steps called little bets that generate feedback. Continue moving forward in your mission using the law of remarkability, which is making your projects so good that people take notice and literally make remarks about them. In other words, be so good they can’t ignore you.

Main Takeaway / The First Thing I Think About When I Think About This Book

The main thing I took from this book was inspiration to improve how I approach learning new skills. The section on deliberate practice / serious study showed me how to improve the limited minutes I have in my day to learn new skills and gain new understandings. I’m inspired to create a better structure for how I learn new skills. There was a part in the section on Rule 2 that talked about the mental discomfort one temporarily feels when engaged in serious study. Instead of avoiding it, push through it for a good 10-15 minutes and then take a break. Come back the next day and keep at it consistently. This section got me thinking back to my college days when I got serious about playing piano and I unknowingly engaged in deliberate practice, consistently and painfully pushing through mental discomfort, trying to solve musical problems. The problem was back then, I was more obsessive and didn’t know when to stop and rest. I became a decent piano player, although I often pushed too hard, like a runner refusing to quit for the day despite dehydration and growing shin splints. Fast forward to today; there are a few skills I want to build (speaking and writing being two of them) and I will use deliberate practice / serious study to improve.

Final Thoughts

This was a really great book and very timely for me. I feel like I’ve been providentially reading a lot of books lately that have helped me out exactly the way I need to be helped out. I’ve been thinking of expanding my offerings to this world beyond my insurance agency and Cal Newport gives great advice on how to get started. I really resonate with his concept of little bets and how it’s a better alternative to the too-often-given advice on following your passion, which too-often leads people to make big sudden moves, fueled by a big mission, in a new direction, that don’t work out because they lack the skills to stand out. When the venture fails, they’re put in a worse position than when they started, often demoralized and buried in debt. Don’t take that route – read So Good They Can’t Ignore You first!