After having few of Newport’s books on the reading list for a long time, finally, last year (2023) I read So good they cant ignore you. I got the feeling that anyone who practices any kind of craft, either professionally or an amateur level, might benefit from reading this book. The book helped me to shape up some thoughts I have had about my professional career, and that of other people around me.

I had been mulling over these thoughts for few weeks now and wanted to further work on them, therefore here I share some of the notes I took while reading the book. I will put examples from my work as a developer and one of my hobbies, painting.

Disclaimer: these are not necessarily Newport points of views, but rather my interpretations.

Follow your passion is a bad advice

This is the opening premise of the book. I have heard time and time again work on what you like and you will not have to work. Coming from a country with a reduced number of opportunities for young people I have many times witnessed how people failed chasing their passions, not because of a lack of passion or skills but rather due to a lack of opportunities. Most of my friends (including myself) had to take the opportunities which we had, most of the times without aligning to our passions. It wasnt until few years later that we aligned our careers to our passions, by either growing new passions or rearranging careers.

When talking to young people who is trying to decided what degree to study I always tell them:

Study what you like dont expect to make your life out of it.

What Newport proposes is that people feels better about their work when their good at what they do, which usually means spending time at your craft.

Motivation at work

Newport defends the idea that to be motivated at work, the employee needs:

• Autonomy
• Competence
• Relatedness

Although I did not feel the given description was the most suitable to my experience, I do feel that these 3 points are very important. Below I try describe how I see these 3 points.

Autonomy

For me been able to work without depending on anyone (or anything) is very valuable. This does not mean working as a lone wolf, rather not having to ask permissions for every little task or change. When there is no dependence I can better schedule myself. It is easier to make the most of the focus time. Also it is easier to prioritize blockers and remove them earlier.

It is also very annoying when depending on unreliable hardware or software, this is basically taking your autonomy away.

Looking from a painters perspective, it is quite annoying not been able to use my tools, for example that pencil which I have used for years and I know exactly how its tip is bent and I relay on that bent to pain any edge. It is also rather unpleasant having to wait for a coat to dry until I can paint the next layer.

This autonomy improves with time. At work, people over you will know you better and give you more freedom. You will know better your tools, know their limits and how to use them (pycharm I am looking at you ¬¬). You will also know how to schedule yourself better, ie dont work on a single piece which you have to wait minutes for a coat to dry, rather have a bunch of pieces so you can iterate and reduce downtime.

Competence

Challenging tasks are always the best. Finding that weird and unreproducible bug, or coming up with a neat solution to a complex task is an incredible feeling. And this is how I measure competence, working on an environment which matches your skills, having challenges paired to your level. This is rather hard to match from the beginning and it also evolves, as you improve your skills you will need different challenges.

This is exactly the same for painting. When I started, having to use two different tones of the same colour was unthinkable, using any other technique aside from layers was a challenge. Nowadays, I feel less than three tones do not provide enough depth, and I have at least 3 different techniques which I apply to every single piece.

Time has taught me that it is better to take challenges one at a time, and usually dont take challenges in which everything is an unknown. For example, having done different rest apis with python, a nice challenge might be to do one with java. But dont try to jump into creating a new chatgpt with rust if both AI and rust are unknowns to you. Back to painting, unless you dont feel miserable by ruining a center piece, approach new techniques or colours on small parts, not the main focus of the piece.

Relatedness

Knowing how your job contributes to the big picture (be it a project, a vision, a goal …). It is easier to relate to the job of others, feel appreciated and useful.

At work this can be achieved by having an overview of the business stream and seen how every department work is put together. Seen how sales is using that newly developed feature, or how marketing is using the users aggregated data.

Here I dont have any good hobby examples. I guess creating many pieces which combine into a single job could be an example.

Deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is working on improving your skill just for getting better.

Newport helped me putting a name into this and highlighting how important is this at a professional level.

I have always chased deliberated practice not because I wanted to get better per se, but mainly due to two points:

• There was something I did not understand. I cant live with black boxes, eventually I need to understand how things work.
• My tool box was depleted and I was in need of a new trick.
• Fear of been stack inside my comfort zone.

I have done this by getting into projects which used a tech stack which I am unfamiliar with, or by using unknown techniques (such as the black magic of meta programming). I have always tried to tackle difficult project at work, but this relays on the work environment been able to provide such challenges. This is not always a given, and I have used (and still use) my personal time to play with pet projects, do courses, read or watch videos.

This is quite common among the developers I know. I assume it is a combination of understanding the job market my generation has had to deal with and tech trends, adapt or die.

Summary

I wanted to post about these ideas as a reminder and a commitment to work on and improve them.