The book tells you about the importance of build rare and valuable skills to get something rare and valuable in return. This is a contradictory statement that goes against the passion hypothesis where you try to find a job that matches your current expectations and skills.
The passion mindset focuses on the value that the world is offering to you, and this leads to many examples of the disappointment and stress that carry the constant search of a fulfillment job without enough knowledge and time involved in the field.
Instead of the passion mindset, Cal Newport suggests the craftsman mindset that is mainly focused on the value that you offer to the world. To build up career capital and create the work that you love, you have to gain skills that are rare and valuable as supply and demand states.
To build up a good amount of career capital is necessary to dedicate the time that will act as cash to exchange for the work with the traits that you want, in the book, the author mentions the 10.000-hour rule, described as the amount of time required to master a skill, but time per see is not enough you have to practice and invest your time wisely. The book introduces the concept of deliberate practice, which consists of a series of tasks and exercises specifically designed to improve your current capabilities, seek out areas of weakness and challenge yourself. Deliberate practice is structured and methodical, requires dedication measurement and feedback, rest and recovery, maybe a coach, and a lot of intrinsic motivation and focus. (it’s a deep topic). Musicians, chess masters, and athletes know how to apply deliberate practice, but knowledge workers, in general, don’t have any idea of how to invest the time and properly develop their skills, and that’s something to take advantage of.
Control is the dream job elixir, nothing more enjoy fully than have control over who, when, what, and where to work with.
You have two be aware of control traps like getting some much control without enough career capital that on occasions and otherwise the control trap two is about having enough career capital that your employer tries to prevent you from making changes, taking risks, and get out of the comfort zone.
The importance of having a mission is to work with a unified goal for your career and maybe respond to the question of: what should I do with my life?
To find our mission you have to learn a lot of your field to go beyond the current cutting edge, advance with little bets and get feedback and finally try to make something remarkable.
In my opinion, this is a terrific book and change my perspective of sometimes blaming the world for the consequences and results that I got for my decisions in my career and occasions my life, and instead try to be a better person, programmer, improve my decisions making skills, build up career capital and contribute to the world to get the things that I want.
Deliberate practice is an amazing concept to put into practice! As a knowledge worker and as someone to try to read and improve in the computer science field, sometimes I feel overwhelmed and a little bit stagnated, but that kind of focus and the understanding of what and how to improve is just what I need.
Links
https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124