So Good They Can't Ignore You: The Advice I Wish I'd Had in College
Working right trumps finding the right work — it's a simple idea, but it's also incredibly subversive, as it overturns decades of folk career advice all focused on the mystical value of passion. It wrenches us away from our daydreams of an overnight transformation into instant job bliss and provides instead a more sober way toward fulfillment.
I keep recommending this book to college students because I wish someone had told me to read this book, and I wish I had taken the advice Cal Newport dispenses.
I had never been blessed as one of those people who knew what they wanted to do. Even in kindergarten, when everyone else wanted to be a firefighter or a nurse or whatever tangible occupation you could dress up as, I never really knew what I wanted to be. I guess I've always wanted to be a generalist. I just didn't know the term. I wrote my college essays about how I was a Jill-of-all-trades; throughout high school and even more, I was very focused on being a well-rounded individual.
The problem was that there wasn't an immediate fit for me when it came to the job market, and it didn't help that I had very little exposure to the corporate world and what types of jobs were out there. Heck, I didn't even know what engineering really was; now that I know I keep thinking I would have actually enjoyed studying it. So when it came to looking for jobs, I was really stumped.
I discovered consulting in my junior year, and it sounded like the generalist dream job that I had been looking for my entire life. (I then spent the subsequent eight years chasing down that “dream job”…) Had I had this book and been introduced to the core thesis Newport espouses, I think I would have approached my career very differently.
I think I would have gotten so much further in my career and been much happier along the way. Save yourself the angst and the strife I wrestled with throughout my First Ten Years, and consider building your career based on your strengths instead of your interests or passion.
Don't obsess over discovering your true calling. Instead, master rare and valuable skills. Once you build up the career capital that these skills generate, invest it wisely. Use it to acquire control over what you do and how you do it, and to identify and act on a life-changing mission. This philosophy is less sexy than the fantasy of dropping everything to go live among the monks in the mountains, but it's also a philosophy that has shown time and again to actually work.
Skills and Strengths
Even today, I struggle to articulate what my strengths are. Not only because I'm unfamiliar with doing so — I’ve been conditioned, both culturally and socially, not to brag — but also because I genuinely have not spent enough time examining my strengths and practicing how to articulate that self-understanding.
It’s not that I think I have no strengths. I know I’m awesome at a great number of things. I know I'm a fast learner. I know that I pick things up very easily, and I connect the dots much faster than other people. But when it comes to describing these traits, I struggle with the language. (Extra disconcerting for someone who is almost never at a loss for words!)
You can dismiss that as merely a marketing problem. But it’s a problem with significant negative impact: not only am I hampered by not knowing how to market myself, I don’t even know what to market to whom! Which are my skills are “rare and valuable” — and to which employers and in which industries? What are the roles that I could be seeking out where I could leverage these skills?
The more time I spend in the workplace and the more I look at the job search process, the more I appreciate how knowing your strengths and being able to articulate them well — in interviews, for example, both when citing examples from the past and when explaining how you can apply them to future scenarios — is really an invaluable skill.
The Career Capital Theory of Great Work
The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.
Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.
The craftsman's mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can't ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love.
Cal Newport puts forward his “Career Capital Theory of Great Work,” but he simply states that you need to develop “rare and valuable skills” to later leverage as career capital. I picked up the oh-so-sensible extension of this idea to leveraging your natural strengths from Madeline Mann, author of Reverse the Search, which is my first recommendation as a resource for job seekers. (And yes, it’s because I think her ideas will indeed turn job seekers into job shoppers!)
People often try to find an enjoyable career by looking at their interests, like an audiophile wanting to coordinate a massive music festival, a fitness buff eager to launch a big sports apparel campaign, or a reality TV fan interested in writing the contracts for the contestants on a hit television show.
But those things don't tend to be as fun as they look. They are work, and too often this is the quickest way for you to start hating your hobbies. Instead, if you're looking for fun, look to build mastery. Because you know what's really fun? Being great at something and making a lot of money for it.
— Madeline Mann, Reverse the Search (2025)
I think the combined insight of Newport and Mann provides a singular, powerful guidance for career development, especially for the First Ten Years (I consider the first decade out of undergrad the prime hustle years). By focusing on your natural strengths — things that come easily to you, but not so much to others — and excelling in any position that leverages those strengths, regardless of your interest or passion, you can climb the career ladder quickly, develop mastery (which in itself brings enjoyment and a sense of fulfillment and purpose), and likely bring yourself the career recognition and remuneration that gives you more freedom to pursue other passions and interests.
When you have a natural inclination for something, it gets more fun the better you get. But it's not just about having a good time; when you play to your strengths, you'll be promoted faster, make more money, and more often get into a flow state where you lose track of time because you're so focused.
— Madeline Mann, Reverse the Search (2025)
Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment. It's no wonder, then, that when you flip through your mental Rolodex of dream jobs, control is often at the core of their appeal. […] if your goal is to love what you do, your first step is to acquire career capital. Your next step is to invest this capital in the traits that define great work. Control is one of the most important targets you can choose for this investment.
A Paradigm Shift I Should Have Made Earlier
I recommend this book because I think it's an important paradigm shift that anyone who is at the beginning of their career or hasn't even quite started off in the workplace yet can really benefit from. It's never too early to start getting to know yourself and to start thinking about what your strengths are and how to capitalize on those strengths.
Way back when, at my first full-time job at the Fairmont Château Lake Louise, I was given the Gallup StrengthsFinder assessment and the accompanying book StrengthsFinder 2.0. The book’s core thesis was that instead of trying to improve upon your weaknesses, you should capitalize on your strengths. Now, it didn't lay things out quite as well as either Cal Newport or Madeline Mann in terms of how this would allow me to advance my career over time, so it wasn't quite as compelling. I remember discarding this concept outright — how silly! Of course I wanted to improve my weaknesses. (I had been so mentally invested in the idea of being a “well-rounded” person since probably before high school.) Who doesn’t want to sand off their rough edges and become as good as they can at everything?
I never realized underlying my thinking was the (foolish) assumption that I had to do everything by myself. (Spoiler alert: it’s actually not possible; or in today’s startup parlance, it’s not scalable.) Instead of thinking about how I could become a very strong player within a team and that I could look for team environments where people were strong in other complimentary areas, I was unconsciously obsessed with being independent and self-sufficient as if being a workplace Wonder Woman was the surest path to…whatever I thought of as success. (Pretty sure I also didn’t have a clear concept of what constituted success.)
Work is difficult and requires effort. Why make it more difficult by slaving away at something that doesn’t give you joy, doesn’t give you opportunities for advancement, and doesn’t contribute to your ability to improve your life? Developing the “rare and valuable skills” Newport emphasizes will take lots of work — but at least if you dedicate yourself to this effort, you’ll know what you’re doing it for. Along the way, you can work on figuring where you’d want to take those skills next.
If you show up and do what you're told, you will […] reach an “acceptable level” of ability before plateauing. The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little competition. The bad news is that the reason so a few people accomplished this feat is […]: Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
To summarize, I've presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman's mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions. […] there’s something liberating about the craftsman's 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.
[…] I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can't ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer.