So Good They Can't Ignore You Summary
Rough notes
Unlike most of my book notes, this will just be a quick summary of some of my favorite notes instead of a fully fleshed article.
Rule 1:
Passion is fake. Bouncing around in search of your one true “passion” is stupid and won’t lead you anywhere. There aren’t pre-existing passions that you find. You develop a passion for the things you care about.
Rule 2:
Career capital: many variables that make up having a good job, and you need to build the necessary skills over time to get there. To do this, it's important to adopt a Craftsman's mindset.
The way to become a craftsman is through stretching to what's difficult and receiving immediate feedback so that you know what to work on and improve
The craftsman's approach to deliberate practice isn't present in most fields outside of things like sports and music, so if you can be one of the few ppl doing it, you'll blow by others.
Steps to becoming a craftsman
Decide what capital market you're in (either a winner-take-all market where there's only one major skill that's in high demand or an auction where multiple skill combos can exist)
If you're in an auction market, identify the capital types that are important and try to build capital in open opportunities
Define "good". what is your goal?
Stretch and Destroy: practice should feel uncomfortable
Be patient
Rule 3:
- An important aspect of work satisfaction is gaining control over what you do. However there's two traps you can fall into when you’re trying to gain autonomy.
1. It's dangerous to try to gain more control without enough capital to back it up
2. Other people who benefit from your capital will try to keep you one a more traditional path.
Rule 4:
It's important to find a mission (but don't try to have one right away because then you fall into similar traps as the passion people.)
Finding a mission takes getting to the edge and looking into the "adjacent possible"
Validate your interesting mission ideas thru little bets abt whetever seems to be a promising direction. Don't start out w/ a full plan in mind.
The above three bullet points match up a lot with Paul Graham’s advice on doing great work
Do what's remarkable if you want to stand out. Remarkable = something that people want to remark about.
1. You have to build remarkable things to spread ideas.
2. Build these things and show them to off to a community that would remark about it.
Conclusion
Stop being productivity-centric. This will cause you to sidestep deliberate practice types of tasks because they are harder and take longer to do. Become craft-centric and try to optimize for # of deliberate practice hours.