Maybe following your passion isn’t the answer
I listened to an audio summary of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, not the full book.
The main idea is a challenge to something we’ve all heard a thousand times: find your passion, make it your job, and you’ll be happy doing it.
It sounds like good advice. But the summary made me think about how passions and interests change over time. Even if you start with something you love, that alone doesn’t guarantee you’ll still enjoy the work years later.
What matters might be less about finding the perfect job and more about becoming good enough at what you do to make that job better.
Three things that make work satisfying
The summary described three qualities of good work that stood out to me:
- Control — How much say you have in what you work on, and how and when you get it done.
- Creativity — The freedom to bring your own ideas into the work instead of just following instructions.
- Impact — Being able to see that what you do actually makes a difference to other people or the world around you.
As a software engineer, I can relate to this.
When you reach a more senior level, you usually gain a certain amount of control over your work and more room to be creative. Flexible working hours can add to that feeling too, depending on the company.
But the impact part is a little harder.
When you’re one of a thousand employees working on a big product or system, the difference you personally make isn’t always immediately visible. You might be doing valuable work without ever really feeling that you’ve made much of an impact.
That was probably the part I related to most.
How do you get there?
The answer the summary kept coming back to was to develop rare and valuable skills. Become so good at something that people start to value your judgement and give you more freedom to do your work.
Three practical ideas stayed with me:
1. Replace the passion mindset with a craftsman mindset.
Instead of constantly asking whether the job is your passion, concentrate on doing your current work as well as you can. Passions can change, and depending on them for motivation isn’t always reliable. Getting better at something, on the other hand, gives you something to build on.
2. Take on difficult work that other people avoid.
Not just extra work for the sake of being busy, but projects that challenge you and push you beyond the usual routine. They can make the job more interesting, help you see your own contribution, and gradually make you someone with a skill set that isn’t easy to replace.
3. Practise deliberately.
Doing the same thing every day isn’t necessarily enough. The idea is to keep working on the parts you’re not yet good at, push yourself a little beyond your comfort zone, and learn from feedback.
Keep doing that long enough and you get better at things that once felt difficult.
And eventually, you become so good they can’t ignore you.
Worth keeping?
Yes. I liked the overall message, particularly how the ideas were organised into a convincing argument.
I didn’t finish the summary feeling that I needed to go and read the entire book, though. For me, the summary covered enough of what I wanted to take away.
Still, it’s one of those ideas that’s useful to remember when thinking about career growth: maybe the freedom and satisfaction you want from a job come after you build the skills to earn them, not before.
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