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"So Good They Can't Ignore You"

What it says?

It says passion, and thinking, focusing constantly on what you love to do, in your job can make you confused, unhappy and compel you to quit and hop from job to job.

But if you instead give some time to your work. Acquire rare, valuable skills, career capital and use that, leverage that to get to better place. Then you will end up loving what you do.

Passion mindset is dangerous. 

Instead craftsman mindset focusing and thinking in a way like what value they and their work is creating and providing. This mindset is on acquiring career capital aka skills valuable and rare in the market. 

This skills can differ from domain to domain. But mostly you need to identify market types out of two types. 

1 Winner take all market
2 Auction market

• Winner take all market - it is the market where only one main skill is valuable. For example, script writing for tv shows, movies and so on. Only skill, only capital that matter there is your ability to write better scripts. 

- This type of market focuses on one skill. Narrow. You get so good into that to win aka get a better place to work. 

- A guy wanting to get a job, work as a script writer in a known TV show was focused on one skill, quality of scripts he writes. 

• Auction market - it is the market which is way more flexible than the winner take all. In this market bunch of skills can be used as career capital. In simple words, there isn't one fix, main skill that you need to be so good only in that to have a chance for great place to work. 

You can have flexibility in having career capital, rare and valuable skills. 

- The example used was of a guy with outstanding job in clean tech VC. Now to get a job in VC, you don't need a one fix skill. 

You can have any one or few skills out of the bunch of skills that matter to a particular job.

This guy when acquiring career capital, didn't knew where he was going to use it. But he acquired rare, valuable skills and knowledge that he leveraged in the auction market.

Now there are detailed 5 steps to acquiring career capital. But the key thing is this.

To acquire career capital, you need deliberate practice. 

Deliberate practice is focused efforts on areas of a particular skill of an individual that requires improvement. 

As said in the book, simply showing up and doing the work is only going to improve anything only so much. So, you'll hit the plateau. And can't get any better than that. Deliberate practice is how you push beyond that.

Now what makes deliberate practice so hard and that's why rare is that it's not enjoyable. Instead, on the contrast, it's uncomfortable and hence, painful. But that's what makes you better.

Deliberate practice requires you do things beyond your comfort zone and seek out ruthless feedbacks on it, so that you can work on that and improve.

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