So Good They Can't Ignore You - kylecoberly/knowledge GitHub Wiki

Rule 1: Don't Follow Your Passion

The "passion mindset" is trying to figure out what the world can give you. Compelling careers have complex origins that rarely originate from passion, though. Career passions are rare, take time, and are actually a side effect of mastery. Blinding chasing a passion is likely to just make you unhappy.

Rule 2: Be So Good They Can't Ignore You

The things that make work great and rare and valuable, so you need to have something rare and valuable to offer in return for them. This is called "career capital." You develop career capital with the "craftsman mindset" (what you can offer the world). The 5 Habits of Craftsmen:

  1. Decide which capital market you're in (winner-take-all or auction)
  2. Identify your capital type (what opportunities are already open to you?)
  3. Define "Good"
  4. Stretch to your limits and destroy them
  5. Be patient

To develop your career capital, you need deliberate practice, not just experience.

Disqualifiers for applying the craftsman mindset:

  1. The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing skills that are rare and valuable
  2. The job focuses you on something that you think is useless or even actively bad for the world
  3. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike

Rule 3: Turn Down A Promotion

Don't pursue control of your working life until you have something valuable to offer in exchange.

  1. Control that's acquired without career capital is not sustainable. It's not enough to have enough courage to chase something, you also need to have something valuable to offer.
  2. Once you have something valuable to offer, employers will try to keep you in your place because your increased autonomy doesn't benefit them.

The Law Of Financial Viability: When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that offers you more control, consider whether there's any evidence people will pay for it. If not, move on.

Rule 4: Think Small, Act Big

You need a mission, but you discover it. You can't clearly define it without lots of career capital first. The best ideas for missions are in the "adjacent possible", which is only visible from the cutting edge of a field (and you can only get to the cutting edge by developing career capital).

Once you have a mission, test it with small bets to generate feedback. Then, apply the law of remarkability: You mission must literally compel people to remark about it, and it must be launched in a venue where it is convenient for people to do so.

This book was rad!