1-Page Summary: So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

So Good They Can't Ignore YouThis is probably the best book I’ve read on how 20-somethings can build a meaningful career. Cal put his brilliant insights on the topic into a simple, useful framework. I’ve enjoyed his blog for many years and often bloggers-turned-authors disappoint (because good bloggers have lots of quick insights, while authors build on one very deep insight, kinda like the old adage “The fox knows many little things but the hedgehog knows one big thing”), but Cal delivers here. It’s clear that he cares and has been thinking deeply on this for many years. Books like these remind me why I love books.

Anything in blue is a direct quote from the book.

DON’T FOLLOW YOUR PASSION

“Follow your passion” is flawed, and can be harmful – leading to frequent job/career changes and anxiety/angst.

Career passions are rare – most “passions” are really hobbies (eg, sports)

The better you get at something, the more it becomes a “passion”

The passion movement started in the 1970s. The core illusion: that there is a magic job out there that’s right for you, and will solve all your problems. This illusion applies to relationships too :)

“found that only 45 percent of Americans describe themselves as satisfied with their jobs. This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61 percent recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey.”

BUILD RARE AND VALUABLE SKILLS

“She surveyed the assistants to figure out why they saw their work so differently, and discovered that the strongest predictor of an assistant seeing her work as a calling was the number of years spent on the job. In other words, the more experience an assistant had, the more likely she was to love her work.”

“It took Martin, by his own estimation, ten years for his new act to cohere, but when it did, he became a monster success. It’s clear in his telling that there was no real shortcut to his eventual fame. “[Eventually] you are so experienced [that] there’s a confidence that comes out,” Martin explained. “I think it’s something the audience smells.””

BECOME A CRAFTSMAN

Craftsman careers allow you to:
1. Develop skills that are rare and valuable
2. Do something useful and good for the world
3. Work with people you like

Cal is dismissive of the courage culture – the belief that the only thing stopping you from pursuing your dream job or career is a lack of courage (I couldn’t agree more)

“Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity.”

WHAT DO JOBS THAT PEOPLE LOVE HAVE IN COMMON?

1. Lots of control – but first, you need rare and valuable skills to increase your degree of control

“In one such study, mentioned in Pink’s book, researchers at Cornell followed over three hundred small businesses, half of which focused on giving control to their employees and half of which did not. The control-centric businesses grew at four times the rate of their counterparts.”

2. It’s financially viable – people will pay you for those rare and valuable skills

“Instead, as he explained: “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.” He also emphasized that hobbies are clearly exempt from this rule. “If I want to learn to scuba dive, for example, because I think it’s fun, and people won’t pay me to do that, I don’t care, I’m going to do it anyway,” he said.”

3. There’s a sense of mission, purpose

Usually, this involves mastering a field and getting to the edge of it

“Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a “big” action.”

MISCELLANY

“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.”

“Pausch captured this reality well when he quipped, “Junior faculty members used to come up to me and say, ‘Wow, you got tenure early; what’s your secret?’ I said, ‘It’s pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at ten o’clock and I’ll tell you.’ “”

Take little bets – projects that create new value, can be done in a short time (eg, one month), and produce concrete results for feedback and learning

That’s it, folks. Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoy Cal’s book! And, if you’re so inclined, you can purchase it through this Amazon link and I’ll get a little taste :)

Here’s a list of all 1-page cheatsheets, and a list of all books.

The genius of Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I tend to cycle through highly social and then highly solitary periods. From personal experience, the above quote couldn’t be more true.

I’m thoroughly enjoying Emerson’s Self-Reliance. I usually highlight 1 or 2 sentences per page of a typical Kindle book, but here it’s closer to 6 or 8. It’s a fast read, too (Kindle clocks it in at 88 pages).

33 Insights From Deepak Malhotra’s “How To Negotiate Your Job Offer” Lecture on YouTube

One of the best intro videos I’ve watched on the subject of negotiating. The advice is both strategic and practical, and it’s from a guy who literally wrote the (business school) book on negotiating.

Below are my notes; I’ve taken a lot of liberty in rewriting, but the insights are all Deepak’s.

P.S. I’ve been helping people negotiate their job offers recently, hence the somewhat new topic here on the blog. If this topic interests you (especially if you work in tech), email me.

General negotiating concepts:

1. Do your homework. He who is most prepared usually wins. I think Sun Tzu said something similar about war
2. People think it’s about convincing the other party, but nothing is more important than understanding the other party
3. What’s not negotiable today may be negotiable tomorrow
4. When someone says no in a negotiation, it often means “not right now”; for example if there’s an offer deadline two months from now, and they say they can’t extend it, they may be able to when you ask them 4 or 5 weeks later
6a. Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”, in response to: “How do you fight someone when you know they’ve prepared specifically to fight you?”
6b. Prepare for the tough questions; sometimes the other party will throw something at you that you don’t want brought up; they might ask “do you have other job offers?” or “did your summer internship turn into a full-time offer?”
7. If something is ambiguous, strange or unexpected, your goal is to investigate by asking good questions
8. Don’t forget: They’re not out to get you…they like you and want to continue liking you…but you’re not the only concern they have
9. Companies don’t negotiate, people negotiate; it depends heavily on their role; negotiating with the boss is different from with HR; the boss may be willing to go to bat for you, but annoying them is more dangerous than annoying HR
10. Don’t be in a mad rush to get the offer; it can backfire (for example, you might get less time to decide)
11. If you think about life happiness, job negotiation success is unimportant; what job you take, what career path, is MUCH more important
12. If they’re repeating themselves, it’s a bad sign
13. In small companies or with close relationships, the range of outcomes is higher – you could either get a lot less or a lot more; everything is more important – them liking you, you being more honest, you learning more about what they can or can’t do
14. It can be easier to ask for something in the future, like working from a different city, but you need to stay at the table to make sure they don’t forget it

Goals you should always try to achieve:

1. They need to like you and want to do it for you
2. They need to believe you deserve it
3. They need to be able to justify your requests within their company
4. They need to believe that they can get you; no one will go to bat for you if they think you’re gonna eventually turn them down
5. Shoot for an 11 out of 10; imagine that they’re going to leave the negotiation and they’re either going to give you what you ask for or not, and they’re also going to rate you 1 to 10 on how much they’re looking forward to working with you; you don’t want a 9, or even a 10, you want an 11
6. Understand where they have room to give – for example, startups may offer lower salaries but provide more equity and flexibility in your role
7. Always tell the truth; don’t get into habit of just saying and doing what you need to achieve your goal
8. Sometimes people undervalue you because they don’t know the value you bring; educate them on what you can do

Tactical advice during negotiations:

1. Don’t ask for something without explaining why – just like you’d never want them to say no without a reason
2. Try to be flexible on the currency you’re paid in – you should care most about the entire offer (location, salary, benefits, stock) and not become too fixated on one component. This includes being flexible on maybe not getting something today, but a tacit agreement to reward you down the line
3. Negotiate multiple interests simultaneously, don’t negotiate piecemeal; signal what is most important, what is less important; avoid “and one more thing…and one more thing…and one more thing…” (Mark Suster says this too)
4. Stay at the table and stay engaged; what they couldn’t share before they gave the offer, they can after they give it to you; what they can’t share before you accept the offer, they can after
5. When they ask a question like “if we give you an offer tomorrow, will you say yes?”, don’t get stuck on what they’re asking; figure out why they’re asking that; what they ask is less important than why
6. Avoid, ignore, downplay ultimatums of any kind; if someone makes an ultimatum, just ignore it – pretend it was never said and move on; if they really mean it, they’ll repeat it over and over again
7. Sometimes you need more time; it’s totally fine to take it, just be nice and considerate about asking
8. Learn what their process tends to be; great question: “What is your usual process here? What does your process tend to be for this situation?”
9. You never want negotiation to end with a no; you want to end with a yes, or a why not
10. “Imagine a world where that is possible, describe that world for me” – gives you a better idea of what’s causing that constraint; or, “can you give me examples of situations where you have done that?”

Ironically as I was writing these notes, Deepak published a similar article. But I didn’t want these notes to go to waste :)

Recent books: Niall Ferguson, Samuel Johnson, Tom Friedman and Marcus Aurelius

Here are books I finished in January and February. Heavier reading months.

The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson [Kindle] – a financial history of the world with a focus on the 19th and 20th century. Very data-focused, Euro-centric. Good early chapters on currency creation, asset securitization, and how economic history is inseparable from – and often the driver of – geopolitical history

Dune by Frank Herbert [Kindle] – a sci-fi classic. My second reading. Still waiting for a good movie adaptation!

Daily Rituals by Mason Currey [Kindle] – the daily routines of history’s most famous writers, painters, musicians and general creatives. Historical productivity pron. I try to read one or two profiles every day

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson [Kindle] – one of Tim O’Reilly’s favorites (here’s his list). The story is an entertaining canvas for Johnson to paint his philosophy of what makes a good life

That Used To Be Us by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum [Kindle] – like Race Against The Machine, describes how America has fallen behind and how its formula for success should be re-imagined for the 21st century. About 100 pages too long, but with Friedman’s reliable supply of anecdotes, catchphrases and plainspoken advice

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (audiobook) [Audible] – if Aurelius were alive today, he would be Warren Buffett. This is a collection of his accumulated wisdom. I didn’t understand at least 30% of it

A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin [Kindle] – I stopped enjoying the story (or stories, emphatically plural) midway through Book 4. But when (if?) Book 6 comes out, I will probably read it…

The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness by Timothy Keller [Kindle] – in short (and it is quite short), stop thinking about yourself and you will feel better. Recommended by a respected friend. Plus, it’s only $1.62!

Here’s a list of what I’ve read and written about.

1-Page Summary: Race Against The Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

Race Against The MachineI’ve been reading a lot about our economy and in particular, the tumultuous marriage between jobs and technology. If you believe in punctuated equilibrium, then certainly the microprocessor and the internets and the iPhones have forced a jump upward in socioeconomic development; some people jump higher than others.

Race Against the Machine [Kindle] is one of the better books I’ve read on the subject: it’s short, well-written and from experts who have a balanced point-of-view. And it’s got the usual eye-widening assortment of data and anecdotes.

So, I hope the below is informative and not boring. If the topic interests you, I’d love to hear from you. I can loan the Kindle version.

– – – – –

Employment is taking longer and longer to recover from a recession

Recessions always increase joblessness, of course, but between May 2007 and October 2009 unemployment jumped by more than 5.7 percentage points, the largest increase in the postwar period.

Just look at this chart:

Unemployment recovery

A lot of people have quit the workforce…one of several reasons why I discount unemployment rates

And the workforce participation rate…fell below 64%—a level not seen since 1983 when women had not yet entered the labor force in large numbers.

Franklin D. Roosevelt put this most eloquently: No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.

Just look at food stamp rolls, which have increased from 21M to 47M Americans in the last 5 years!

But people can’t stop, won’t stop investing in tech

And by 2010, investment in equipment and software returned to 95% of its historical peak, the fastest recovery of equipment investment in a generation.

Why has unemployment stayed high? According to the authors…

#1 cyclicality (shit happens)

Paul Krugman is one of the prime advocates of this explanation. As he writes, “All the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand—full stop.”

#2 stagnation (we’re not innovating)

Stagnation in this context means a long-term decline in America’s ability to innovate and increase productivity. – Economist Tyler Cowen

A variant on this explanation is not that America has stagnated, but that other nations such as India and China have begun to catch up.

In particular, labor productivity can be measured as output per worker or output per hour worked. In the long run, productivity growth is almost the only thing that matters for ensuring rising living standards. Robert Solow earned his Nobel Prize for showing that economic growth does not come from people working harder but rather from working smarter.

Economists Menzie Chinn and Robert Gordon, in separate analyses, find that the venerable relationship between output and employment known as Okun’s Law has been amended. Historically, increased output meant increased employment, but the recent recovery created much less employment than predicted; GDP rebounded but jobs didn’t.

#3 “end of work” (robots are replacing us)

In it, Rifkin laid out a bold and disturbing hypothesis: that “we are entering a new phase in world history—one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.”

“the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.”

What a quote!

The authors believe it’s #3: we’re losing “the race against the machine”

The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession, or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring.

Such versatility is a key feature of general purpose technologies (GPTs), a term economists assign to a small group of technological innovations so powerful that they interrupt and accelerate the normal march of economic progress. Steam power, electricity, and the internal combustion engine are examples of previous GPTs.

Vending machines now sell iPods, bathing suits, gold coins, sunglasses and razors; some will even dispense prescription drugs and medical marijuana to consumers willing to submit to a fingerprint scan.

In 1995, for example, 2.08 people were employed in “sales and related” occupations for every $1 million of real GDP generated that year. By 2002 (the last year for which consistent data are available), that number had fallen to 1.79, a decline of nearly 14 percent.

But, you know, computers still can’t manage a team or paint a Picasso…

Computers so far have proved to be great pattern recognizers but lousy general problem solvers; IBM’s supercomputers, for example, couldn’t take what they’d learned about chess and apply it to Jeopardy!

And for all their power and speed, today’s digital machines have shown little creative ability. They can’t compose very good songs, write great novels, or generate good ideas for new businesses.

David Ricardo, who initially thought that advances in technology would benefit all, developed an abstract model that showed the possibility of technological unemployment. The basic idea was that at some point, the equilibrium wages for workers might fall below the level needed for subsistence. A rational human would see no point in taking a job at a wage that low, so the worker would go unemployed and the work would be done by a machine instead.

Not everyone is losing the race; 3 types of runners are going to win (but they were in the lead to begin with)

In fact, economist Ed Wolff found that over 100% of all the wealth increase in America between 1983 and 2009 accrued to the top 20% of households. The other four-fifths of the population saw a net decrease in wealth over nearly 30 years.

Instead, the stagnation of median incomes primarily reflects a fundamental change in how the economy apportions income and wealth. The median worker is losing the race against the machine.

Runner #1: High-skilled workers

Over the past 40 years, weekly wages for those with a high school degree have fallen and wages for those with a high school degree and some college have stagnated. On the other hand, college-educated workers have seen significant gains, with the biggest gains going to those who have completed graduate training

Even the low wages earned by factory workers in China have not insulated them from being undercut by new machinery and the complementary organizational and institutional changes. For instance, Terry Gou, the founder and chairman of the electronics manufacturer Foxconn, announced this year a plan to purchase 1 million robots over the next three years to replace much of his workforce. The robots will take over routine jobs like spraying paint, welding, and basic assembly. Foxconn currently has 10,000 robots, with 300,000 expected to be in place by next year.

Runner #2: Superstars

Income has grown faster for the top 1% than the rest of the top decile. In turn, the top 0.1% and top 0.01% have seen their income grow even faster. This is not run-of-the-mill skill-biased technical change but rather reflects the unique rewards of superstardom. Sherwin Rosen, himself a superstar economist, laid out the economics of superstars in a seminal 1981 article. In many markets, consumers are willing to pay a premium for the very best. If technology exists for a single seller to cheaply replicate his or her services, then the top-quality provider can capture most—or all—of the market.

Um, that’s the internet. Bits and bytes.

Runner #3: Capital(ists)

In particular, if technology replaces labor, you might expect that the shares of income earned by equipment owners would rise relative to laborers—the classic bargaining battle between capital and labor.

Similarly, corporate profits as a share of GDP are at 50-year highs. Meanwhile, compensation to labor in all forms, including wages and benefits, is at a 50-year low.

But if humans and machines work together, everyone wins!

As Kasparov writes, it instead consisted of a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. … Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

Technology enables more and more opportunities for what Google chief economist Hal Varian calls “micromultinationals”—businesses with less than a dozen employees that sell to customers worldwide and often draw on worldwide supplier and partner networks.

wonderful study by economist Robert Jensen found, for example, that as soon as mobile telephones became available in the fishing regions of Kerala, India, the price of sardines dropped and stabilized, yet fishermen’s profits actually went up.

We need to incentivize better teachers…

Start by simply paying teachers more so that more of the best and the brightest sign up for this profession, as they do in many other nations. American teachers make 40% less than the average college graduate.

…and encourage immigration…

Increase the ratio of skilled workers in the United States by encouraging skilled immigrants.

…and support entrepreneurs! :P

Foster a broader class of mid-tech, middle-class entrepreneurs by training them in the fundamentals of business creation and management.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, as each successive wave of automation eliminated jobs in some sectors and occupations, entrepreneurs identified new opportunities where labor could be redeployed and workers learned the necessary skills to succeed. Millions of people left agriculture, but an even larger number found employment in manufacturing and services.

Trivia: productivity is hard to measure

Compounding this measurement problem is the fact that free digital goods like Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube are essentially invisible to productivity statistics.

Reminds me of Tim O’Reilly and the clothesline paradox.

Health care productivity is poorly measured and often assumed to be stagnant, yet Americans live on average about 10 years longer today than they did in 1960.

That’s it, folks! Thank you for reading. I plan to do Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You next. It’s the best career advice book for 20-somethings that I’ve read. The irony is not lost on me as 30 is right around the bend…

Here’s a list of all 1-page cheatsheets, and a list of all books!