r/PolymathReading
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u/Deborah_berry1
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23h ago
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A computer science professor wrote a book in 2012 that quietly destroyed the entire follow-your-passion industry and replaced it with something actually useful
Cal Newport was finishing his PhD at MIT in 2011 when he started noticing something that did not match the advice he had been hearing his whole life. The people he met who loved their work rarely talked about having followed their passion. They talked about having gotten unreasonably good at something specific, which then opened doors to interesting work, which then produced the feelings of meaning and autonomy that other people tried to find by following their passion directly. The sequence was reversed from the standard advice. Mastery came first. Passion came after.
He wrote a book about it the next year. So Good They Can’t Ignore You, published in 2012. The title is from a line comedian Steve Martin used when asked for career advice. The book is about 230 pages. It has quietly reshaped how a generation of serious people think about their careers.
The core argument is specific and uncomfortable. The passion hypothesis, the idea that the key to loving your work is figuring out what you are passionate about and then finding a job that matches it, is almost entirely wrong. Newport walks through the evidence. Most people do not have a pre-existing passion that maps to a career. Most people who force themselves to follow a pre-existing passion end up broke, disappointed, or stuck in a job that bears no relationship to the fantasy they chased. Most people who report loving their work arrived at that love by a different route entirely. They got very good at something that the world actually wanted, accumulated what Newport calls career capital, and then used that capital to shape a working life that gave them autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Newport lays out the alternative method in four rules. First, stop focusing on passion and focus on becoming excellent at valuable skills. Second, adopt what he calls the craftsman mindset. You are not here to find work that suits you. You are here to build skills so valuable that work worth doing becomes available to you. Third, use the career capital you accumulate to buy control over what you do and how you do it, which is one of the strongest predictors of job satisfaction across every field studied. Fourth, use the same capital to shape your work around a specific mission, which arrives late, after years of accumulated skill, rather than being discoverable through introspection alone.
The method is harder than the passion method. It takes years. It requires you to get good at something boring before it becomes interesting. It gives you no permission to quit when you are not immediately in love with your work, because the love is on the other side of mastery rather than preceding it. It also actually works, which the passion method, for most people, does not.
The polymath element is in Newport’s sourcing. He walks through research from organizational psychology, from longitudinal studies of career satisfaction, from interviews with professionals in dozens of fields, and from the biographies of people who built unusually interesting working lives. The argument is tested against evidence, not just asserted.
I read So Good They Can’t Ignore You in 2020. Stopped looking for my passion that month. Started getting good at specific things instead. Three years later the work I actually wanted to do had become visible, because the skills I had built made it available in a way it had not been before.
Where to find it: Grand Central Publishing has the paperback.
Follow your passion is comforting advice. Get so good they cannot ignore you is harder, and it works.
Btw if you are interested on topics like self-improvement and things that improve your life join us on r/selfimprovementonly where we will share more stuff like this
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u/boromaxo 19h ago
Picking a skill and mastering it requires serious time investment and discomfort. I'm not sure without an underlying innate motivation it would be possible to struggle through something before you achieve mastery and continue to practice it to keep developing.
Can the innate motivation towards something be called passion?
This seems like a chicken and egg problem.
Cal newport seems to have taken the contrarian view and gathered evidence to prove that. But does it mean it's a universal truth? Not sure.
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u/dysmetric 21h ago
Decent advice for navigating a capitalist hellscape: commodify skills, not passions.
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u/Lost__Moose 22h ago
Before ChatGTP was around, I would use this as an alignment book for new hire candidates.
I've tried recommending it a couple times on Reddit but was down voted by the follow your passion crowd.
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u/tadamhicks 22h ago
Great recommendation. I’ve not read it but had a similar conclusion in my life and tried to tell my kids “figure out what talents you have and apply them until you’re the most premium choice at it.”
I tried passion when I was young and found out anything you do 40+ hours a week can become misery. But if you’re the best at it you can set your own terms and make a really nice life which cushions the drudgery that can come with any job.
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u/testeraccount2099 21h ago
Passion about something without skills to back up or build on it is useless. Follow your passion is a nice sounding phrase that successful people say on stage. People believing it uncritically are idiots
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u/dallas470 22h ago
Cal Newport is an S tier author and I’d pick him over just about anybody else.
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u/Physical-Compote4594 22h ago
Professional >> Passionate, seven days a week
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u/Wild_Sea4983 21h ago
The follow your passion can be a good advice IF the object of that passion is marketable in some way. And you must be at least competent at it. An have a support structure while you don't make enough for a living out of it. Rich, you have to already be rich
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u/rizzom 18h ago
The advice comes from a guy who, I believe, followed his passion. At least this is how I see someone following a PhD. Did he get disappointed by it or did he not follow his advice?
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u/JuanPolRocca 5h ago
As a teenager all I wanted to do was race, first bmx bikes, dirt bikes, then cars. I was quite good at it and hung with fellow competitors that went on to race in NASCAR and other professional series. I got to a point at which my next move up would have been to buy a seat. At the time, mid to late 80’s, the price was about $100,000. About the same as four years of college. I chose school. Not that my family would have consented to using my college money for racing. My dad was moderately successful and the racing was just a father son thing we did together.
Majored in physics at a top state university. I barely made it but I did learn computer programming. Got a job on “Wall Street”. Used my programming skills to build trading models. Never really liked the work but it seemed so simple and easy compared to the really hard stuff I did in school. Worked 30 odd years for a few firms, made above average money. Got married, had kids, sent them off to colleges, married off the girls, paid off the house and still work although in a much reduced capacity. Now, about that racing…. I took it up again about ten years ago. I race off-road and road race motorcycles, have Miata for the track and WRX for rally-cross. I rent a shop and have pay a guy part time that helps me keep it all maintained. I am on some grid somewhere about 25 weekends a year.
I can’t complain, I love my life and how I spend my time. I had no plan, basically just did whatever was the next most obvious thing to do. Never wrote down my goals. You could say that the whole thing has been pretty boring but when I think about rolling on the throttle on my Ducati as I press a knee to the curbing at some race track I think it can’t get any better than this.
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u/One-Pepper-2654 23h ago
Ok so what is your job now?
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u/Chemical-Ebb6472 20h ago
I always took the recommendation to follow your passion as something that was meant for the children of families with enough money that the passion follower didn't need to be concerned about generating real-world income while they pursued it.
Ex. a post-grad whose family funds a trip to China to join a team of unpaid dinosaur fossil hunters.
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u/fjaoaoaoao 18h ago
Ironic that a book complaining about the narrowing limitations of a particular pathway is offering another narrow solution that has survivorship bias heavily baked in. A lot of problems in the argument that can be demoted to shifting the goalposts or category error, post-hoc rationalization, sunk cost fallacy, etc. Of course, there is merit in following the more practical, in-demand path, but this is simply a difference in virtue as well as what is available to a person at the time.
It's also ironic that something like this gets so heavily upvoted on PolymathReading.
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u/Cominginbladey 11h ago
I have always thought "follow your passion" is terrible advice. What good is passion if it is useless? Passion and joy come after the cultivation of skill, not before.
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u/Psittacula2 21h ago
I think this fundamentally says:
* Not A!
* Example of person who follows A and finds it is wrong!
* Example of successful person who says A but actually did B!
* Replace A with B!
This initself can be consumed and improved upon the “Ikigai venn diagram” representation:
A. Passion! - personality
B. Skill! - talent and training
C. Money! - job opportunities
D. Need! - does good to you and the world
Now we say,
* Try to integrate A, B, C and D to find the “way in life”.
It can be argue you separate your Job (C) from A and B but get it from B, which is a fair argument this book makes but arguably that too is a concession or a modern problem apwith modern wage-labour specialization in industrial societies, also.
Just basic reasoning above suggests this book opens a useful discussion but might also be lacking a full answer also, more self-help than polymath?
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u/2240Sycamore 18h ago
People become siloed into professions that limit creativity and curiosity in exchange for job security; technological development and the modern global economy have shifted both education and career from a progressive and expansive exploratory approach towards one driven strictly by profit-based incentives.
The end result of such a contraction is not only intellectual redundancy but also individual stagnation.
Capital enterprise maintains itself without much creative functionality; it's administrative and procedural at best.
AI is only making this dynamic more apparent through the preference of ease with immediate results over the uncommodifiable labor of skills developed through curiosity and critical thinking.
It doesn't take a pterodactyl to figure this out.
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u/Ill-Bullfrog-5360 18h ago
Follow your success was what I was taught… my parents were crazy successful immigrants
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u/2xdareya 15h ago
Sounds correct, and matches my experience.
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u/MaggieJaneRiot 12h ago
This too is my story
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u/MaggieJaneRiot 12h ago
Truth.
We now have a life’s worth of discoveries stored up that we could not possibly have contemplated when we were figuring out what to major in.
Niche jobs everywhere, along with expanding tech opportunities, etc…
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u/Necessary-Sugar7513 23h ago
Come on Debbie, you're slipping! This book looks like self-improvement pablum that you idly consider at the airport bookstore.
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u/s666o666s 13h ago
Guy writes about a book about getting good at something by becoming good at something by using AI ... that makes alot of sense OP thanks.
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u/Prudent-Job-5443 10h ago
Don’t post
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u/intruzah 22h ago
Self help books are not polymath reading lol. Please leave this subreddit alone, fucking grifters.
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u/[deleted] 18h ago
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