Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” starts out debunking a common piece of advice: do what you’re passionate about.  He does a pretty good job showing that this is terrible advice.  Then he follows it up with another question: if you can’t trust passion to provide guidance when trying to select a career, what DO you use?

The subtitle gives it away: skills.  His advice is to find something you’re good at, and then continue to build those skills to create the job that you want using a theory he calls “Career Capital.”  Career Capital theory is, to me, the most interesting part of the book, so I want to dig into it a little.

What is Career Capital Theory?

When introducing career capital theory, Newport first defines traits of good jobs.  These include creativity, impact (feeling like you’re doing something worthwhile) and control.  He posits that people don’t just give those traits away, you have to earn them.  Or, better put, you have to provide something of value to get them.

The valuable things you provide are skills — things you’re good at.  And, just like any good, the value of something is related both to its general utility, as well as rarity.  A doctor can demand more money than, well, most people, because medical skills are difficult to attain and, correspondingly, rare.  Even within the medical field, a heart surgeon makes more money than an optometrist because the ability to perform heart surgery is a rare and valuable skill.

We’re used to thinking of skills in terms of how much money we can get for them, but Newport makes the point that you can also trade non-financial things for valuable skills.  Remember how creativity, impact and control were the traits that make a job great?  If you offer a valuable skill you don’t have to just earn more money, you could ask for additional control or creativity.  These things could make your life better by making your job (where you spend most of your non-sleeping time) better.

So how do you attain career capital?  That’s a big part of the book, but the point I want to highlight is that you need to be deliberate about it from a very early age.  When looking at the options before you, it’s helpful to ask yourself “Which of these options will provide for me the most career capital?  Which will open doors down the line?”

A quick example from my life

When I was sixteen, I got a job working at a little computer repair store in my home town.  It was literally just the owner and me.  He’d go make house-calls and work at businesses, I’d stay at the shop answering questions for people dropping in and putting computers together.  Honestly, a fantastic job.  It didn’t pay particularly well, but I learned a lot about computers, he let me take old computer home to play around with, and he had fantastic internet so I could watch music videos all day.

I decided to do serve an LDS mission after high school.  Most missionaries pay their own way (or their parents pay), so I needed to save up a lot of money.  There just wasn’t enough work for me to expand my hours to full-time when I graduated high school so, for the year before I left on my mission, I worked at a machine shop where I made a lot more money.  The machine shop worked four tens, which meant I had every Friday off so … I kept working at the little computer store too, most Fridays and some Saturdays.

The machine shop paid better for sure, but when I got back from my two year mission I didn’t get a job working at another machine shop — I got an internship at a steel mill working in their IT department.  And when I went to college I got a job working at a helpdesk.  And then … well, one IT job led to another and here I am, working in Cyber Security.

The point is, short term the machine shop looked like the better job.  I got a lot more money for it, and I got three day weekends every week.  That’s pretty good for an 18 year old!

But the computer repair job opened doors for me.  Put at another way, I collected career capital at the computer repair job learning the basics of computers and network.  At the machine shop job I got more REAL capital, but I didn’t really get any career capital, because that’s not something I wanted to do long term.  The capital I gained there didn’t have any value for me.

The Weakness of the Book

I really liked the book, and wished I’d read it in college, but there was one weakness, which most books of this type tend to have.  All of his examples were pretty out-there.  I mean, obviously he talked about Steve Jobs (OBVIOUSLY), but he also talked about a doctor who took a two year sabbatical to build his own company, a venture capital manager who took a month off to live at his Canadian cabin with no internet, a musician who was touring with bluegrass bands at the age of 16.  Even the more relatable stories still end up centering around people like a “ruby rock star” (the programming language, not the precious gems).  

These stories are aspirational, but not particularly relatable.  The doctor who took two years off, for example … I mean, there was a lot more going on there.  Not every doctor can just take two years off in the middle of their residency to build a company.  That’s fancy even for a doctor.

So I want to expand on my own story just a little bit and look at the applications of it.  I work in IT, and I have gained a lot of experience through jobs that I’ve had starting with that one lucky break at the repair shop in my tiny home town.  At every place I’ve worked I’ve more or less done the same thing: tried to find something that wasn’t getting done (either because no one wanted to or because no one knew how) and get good at that.  At the helpdesk I worked at during college I learned a lot of documentation skills, and I also became pretty good with one product most people didn’t like: Sharepoint.

That Sharepoint knowledge would turn into my first real job, as a Sharepoint Engineer.  I got really good at that (spoke at some local Sharepoint Conferences, created some more documentation and scripts and whatnot that were pretty useful), and then used that to get my next job where I started as a SharePoint Engineer, but expanded into more systems as I learned more things.

Eventually I was put in charge of an IT department for an organization that was undergoing a PCI audit, and we didn’t have any Cyber Security engineers so … I got my CISSP.  Later that CISSP (and CISM, and a degree in InfoSec) would turn into my current role, working in Cyber Security.

Of course, when you lay it all out like that I come off like some kind of super genius who went from one career success to the next.  But uh … that’s not true either.

My FIRST time through college I didn’t study IT.  I studied Sociology.  Which I love and still read a lot of sociology books, but it didn’t necessarily provide “career capital.”  In college I worked at a rehab center, which also didn’t provide a ton of career capital, although it did help me build some soft skills that I think have been important in my career.  I spent a bunch of time recording an album which … well, this isn’t JOSH THE ROCKSTAR THE BLOG so you can guess where that went.  I wrote a couple of books.

I do think all those experiences were valuable for me.  They expanded who I am, they gave me skills that I would use later in unrelated ways (I imagine writing a couple books has improved my documentation skills, which come in really handy in cyber security!).  They made me a better, more rounded person.

So I would soften Cal Newport’s advice a little.  The book basically says “find something you’re good at, and then build out from there, moving from skill to skill until you have enough capital to create the career that you want.”

That’s good advice, but I would also add that there are other types of capital.  What I would say is make sure that, whatever you’re doing, you’re learning and growing.  Around you career be deliberate, and even around school I think it pays to be more deliberate (although I think school is the best time to try a bunch of different things to find out what you’re good at).  But outside of that I think look at your activities and ask yourself “Which of these things I do cost capital or have no benefit, and which bring in some form of capital, whatever it may be.”

OH YEAH!  And yes, I recommend the book.  I only touched on basically two chapters, and most of it has value, though the two chapter I mentioned feel the most valuable to me.  Read it and decide for yourself.