Booked Morning Podcast
Booked Morning Podcast
Kristoffer John Cardona
Episode 19 - Review and Summary of So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport
12 minutes Posted May 18, 2017 at 7:43 am.
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Starting in the 1940s the idea of Find your passion came about and started to really become prominent in the 80s..Where we were told that to be happy we have to find our passion and match it to our work. We find out from Cal that this mindset is juxtaposed by the fact that starting in the 1980s, job satisfaction started to drop as this idea of Happiness comes from finding your passion took up. And in a recent US Job board survey, we find that 20 — 30-year-olds have the lowest job satisfaction recorded. The conventional wisdom on career success - follow your passion - is seriously flawed.
But that does not tell us that we shouldn’t find our passion. It's to be aware that happiness does not only come from finding our passion but from other factors that play a major role in this and our success in life. And that is what this book discusses.
The author says
If "follow your passion" is bad advice, what should I do instead?
Passion is a by-product of well lived working life. We shouldn't just follow your passion, instead, let our passion follow us in our quest to become so good they can't ignore us.
The author tells us to clear our path from finding the right work, to working excellently and build a love for what we do.
He tells a story about Steve jobs, how he loved western history and dance and was on a path to become a Zen expert, which was his passion when he was younger, before the Apple days. He references to a 2005 Speech by Steve Jobs at Stanford, wherein he advised graduates to follow their passion, he argues that if Jobs followed his own advice, and only pursued worked he loves, he would have become a Zen Master.
But in the end, he did not follow this advice, Apple computer was not born out of passion, it was a result of a small-time scheme that turned into a massive payoff.
Allow me to leave you with this.
Instead of searching for that perfect job, business or life. We should be aware that a foundation to a remarkable life is finding something interesting to us that gives us interesting options, we then put in the time to build career capital or experience through deliberate deep practice by demanding a craftsman mindset instead of a passion mindset, and in the end, this will result in a life of value and happiness that we can truly be passionate about.