Book Thoughts: So Good They Can’t Ignore You

My Three Most Significant Takeaways

(1) Invest in deliberate practice.

(2) Be more concerned about the quality of your work than the quantity and make it worthy of "remark."

(3) What you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.

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My Five Favorite Quotes

(1) "The narratives in this book are bound by a common thread: the importance of ability. The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job" (page xix).

(2) "[My] argument flips conventional wisdom. It relegates passion to the sidelines, claiming that this feeling is an epiphenomenon of a working life well lived. Don't follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become, in the words of my favorite Steve Martin quote, 'so good that they can't ignore'" (page xx).

(3) "Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that's both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return––this is Supply and Demand 101. It follows that if you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return" (page 44).

(4) "What's interesting is that Martin redefines the word [diligence] so that it's less about paying attention to your main pursuit, and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you. The final step for applying deliberate practice  to your working life is to adopt this style of diligence" (page 99).

(5) "The Law of Remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking" (page 193).

My Rating

Overall, I rank So Good They Can’t Ignore You a 4.5 out of 5. I think Newport could have reduced his pages and provided less summary throughout.