So Good They Can’t Ignore You
I started this book while I was riding my bike about 2 months ago, and I hit a deer. It was about 10 days later before I could pick the book up and by that time, the book was returned back to the library. A few short weeks later, and the book was available again and I finished it.
The gist of the book is that you cannot depend on passion to get you through life. Passion in and of itself is good to get you interested in something, but at the end of the day, passion for something rarely pays off in that what you are passionate about might not be what employers are actually interested in paying you for. This ties in nicely with the whole “go study what you want and not necessarily what will give you a job” motto of a lot of Western Educated parents, which to a lot of (East & South) Asians always sounded insane. What good will studying History or Literature do? Who would actually pay for that unless you want to become an author or its just a stepping stone to your Political or Law career? And this is partly one reason why the student loan crisis hit so hard (the other HUGE reason is that states by and large have cut funding to upper level education because constituents keep voting against funding public education).
This book is very short and its central points are clear. The path to becoming relatively happy in life is to pick something that can make you money and that you can become good at through a lot of practice. You have to be gritty about it, because skills will hit a plateau before you get good enough, but once you are good enough, you should be able to write your own paycheck. People pay for results, not for passion, and unless your passion dovetails supremely nicely with a job that other people will pay for, its always best to go pick something that you can become good at.
It takes time to become good at something, so reskilling is also a major risk. The best path is to pick something that is relatively timeless and that it takes quite a bit of time to get good at (say, 5 to 10 years) so there is some moat.
In many ways, this is a bit of an MBA thesis for the PERSON instead of the company. It makes quite a bit of sense, even if the message is a bit ugly (better be good for something, coz no one will pay you to be good at nothing or good at the one skill that’s not in demand), but by and large, resonates with real life.
The other lesson is that your life DOES become more satisfying once you achieve the “good at something” part even if its not exactly your passion. This is mostly becuase humans like achievements, and being recognized at a skill you might not be passionate for, but are very good at is STILL a good feeling.
Highly recommend everyone to read this short but “makes good sense” book.