So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Newport

4.5 out of 5
Goodreads

Notes to remember from So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Use deliberate practice. The hard stuff. Practice things that strain you, push beyond your limits, not just what your good at. Try to get as much feedback as possible as well. The more expert feedback the better. Remember the Grand Master chess players or the guitarist who toured around the country at just 16.

Have enough career capital to justify taking more control. If you’ve never been a yoga instructor before, you probably can’t try and start a business as one. If you’ve never done professional work designing websites or writing blogs, it’s probably difficult to as people to pay you enough to do those things. It can help to get an entry level job or assistant ship and learn as much as you can. Learn as much as you can to gain career capital and that can help you switch to something better. Think of the farmer who did farming for 10 years before moving out to start his own farm on his own. He already had customers before he started his own business.

You can always turn down promotions. Remember the computer programmer who started at a nothing job and learned as much as she could. She wanted control in her life. She became good enough at her job that she was able to request control over what she wanted. 30 hour work week etc. When she tried to leave companies she was at they pushed back because she was so good they wanted her to stay. They could use this as leverage to get what she wanted.

I don’t have enough career capital to be highly valuable. I used to be on the cutting edge in school but as I progressed I moved away from that edge and need to get back to it. I need to conduct more exploratory projects. These take 30 days or less and are a complete product that provides value. (ie. Recreating a simple board game, getting more likes on social media posts, creating a completed project in Java or Python). Also, try to create a purple cow sometimes. A video that goes viral in the right Reddit community.