| title | So Good They Can't Ignore You | |||
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| date | 2025-06-05 | |||
| lastmod | 2025-06-05 | |||
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| draft | false | |||
| summary | Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love | |||
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| canonicalUrl | https://www.joshhaines.com/blog/book-shelf/so-good-they-cant-ignore-you | |||
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This is the second book by Cal Newport that I've read. The advertisements and cover of this book had tempted me for awhile, and I grabbed it on an impulse one day.
Note
I typically spend about 2.5-3 hours on the lawn mower each week through the summer. During those times I make a lot of audiobook progress, and sometimes I finish a book in the middle of a mowing session.
It's those times when I'm most susceptible to just grabbing the next interesting looking book in the line-up rather than picking from my carefully curated wish-list / to-read list.
The core of this book is about a relatively simple concept: the conventional wisdom that you should follow your passion is incorrect. You should work hard to get good at something and it will turn into your passion.
I like this concept and feel it's something I had always felt, but never realized how to put it so clearly.
I graduated college with a degree in Materials Engineering, and started working in that field as a start to my career. Soon after, I got a Masters in Engineering in nearly the same field, although my masters was slightly more generalized around aerospace engineering. I had planned to keep my career headed in this direction, although I never felt passionate about it. I was excited to be done each day and focus on my hobby which was software, websites, working on computers, etc.
I ended up starting a side business building websites and working on computers. I made a little money at it, but never much more than enough to keep my computer upgraded with the newest parts. My career and my hobby were always separate in my mind.
The whole time during my first job (Honeywell Aerospace) I was doing my work as well as fiddling around with various digital projects ranging from fancy excel files, internal websites, and the like. At my second main job (Johns Manville) I worked as a Materials Engineer and Chief Reliability Engineer for most of my time while also building internal websites, and even a big machine learning classification system that would help operate and predict quality on a huge production line.
Finally, at Rolls-Royce I started as a materials engineer and eventually switched full time to start the Software Factory (a story I've told before). It wasn't until roughly 5 years after that point that the concept in this book became clear.
I was improving and getting better at the software side of things over the years. I didn't have a passion for it initially, I stuck with it because I enjoyed that the field moved quickly and I always had more to learn.
It's only now, looking backward, that I love it and am passionate about it because I've become good at it. I think the Chicken or the Egg question still remains, but I think there is merit to what the author is saying and I'm in general agreement.