"Working right trumps finding the right work."
In "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport
After having finished "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", I wanted to read this one to work as a counterpoint. I'm glad I did.
When I was younger, I watched Jurassic Park one and two, and I
wanted to be Steven Spielberg! Doing well in my dance classes made me want to
be a professional tap dancer. Watching Top Hat and West Side Story made me want
to combine both aspirations to become a director of musicals, both film and
theatre! By the time I was in secondary school, the arts were not viewed as a
viable career option, and out of law, engineering, and other traditional
subjects, I choose to become a Computer Scientist. I was in my final year at
university studying Computer science, and I'd happily have remained a gentleman-in-waiting for
several more years to save up and see the world! (I didn't have a career goal
that I was passionate about).
A more honest job description I’d have gladly
apply for: “applicant must be willing to perform multiple jobs, cheerfully and
deferentially: selling books to rich peeps who read to "better
themselves;" babysitting the rich peeps' kids; writing a
"creative" blog that conforms to someone else's tastes and dictates; "circulating"
among the rich peeps, perhaps by carrying the cheese platters; teaching
creative writing courses to rich peeps who read to better themselves; and
serving as a promotional prop, the "creative intellectual " rich
peeps will speak of amusingly after they jet home. But maybe that would be not
so good.
My books-related experience with an A-lister in
Lisbon many eons ago too place with Bryan Adams (for those of you who don’t
know, Bryan lived many years in Lisbon when he was a teenager; I was running
into him all the time in Cascais, our Portuguese Cannes):
Bryan Adams walked into the Bertrand bookstore,
my favourite bookstore at the time, accompanied by a tall blonde who was
presumably his girlfriend, and a guy with a working-class English accent, who I
guessed was his agent or some other sort of factotum. The blonde headed
straight for the Romance novels, while the agent asked one of the clerks to show him the
Self-help section. Mr. Adams, apparently not a reader, stood just inside the
doorway. Most people will at least aimlessly browse if they're not book lovers.
Not Mr. Adams. He stood fidgeting, not giving the shelves of books a glance. After
a few minutes, his patience exhausted, Adams put fingers to lips and whistled.
The blonde dutifully scampered to his side. The agent brought a couple
self-help books to the counter and paid for them while Adams fumed. I looked
around but everyone pretended not to be paying attention (yes, we Portuguese are
very polite and friendly).
My dream job and I can safely say I’d be
exceedingly good at it: Writing a blog about my experiences at an exclusive
resort in the Canary Islands would be an irresistible opportunity for satire. But
it seems satirists in the Canary Islands get stabbed to death. So maybe I'd
take a pass in the end. I think I'd probably wind up so exhausted by the whole
business of doing navel-gazing, scuba diving, reading, and other worthwhile
activities, that any blogging I managed to do at the end of it all would be a
retail rant-only-journal. Possibly entertaining for people who are interested
in stories of how many different ways of doing fuckall on an island can be
wrong (and oh, boy, are there a lot of them), but probably not the sort of
light and frothy lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-shameless-come-envy-them-and-come-over-too
(why the Canary Islands? Because I’ve booked a cruise to go there come next
April 2019 ROTFL!)
Sounded to me pretty much like Viktor Frankl‘s
ideas put in modern day wording. But nevertheless, I agree with the most of
Newport’s ideas, but I’m not sure about them. I know what is the point...Cal is
right about so many things, but saying that "don't follow your passion, it
will make you poor and frustrated" isn't a good advice either. It sounds
to me more like "love your job by force, then you will become so good that
you will feel passion for what you do". Happy times will come in the
FUTURE, the same history over and over again. Yeah, you will be passionate
because of your comfort zone and your financial situation, but I think that's
not the only path for a human being's life to succeed. For me, following your
passion is still a good advice. Look at Steve Vai, he became one of the best
musicians of the planet just by following his passion.... he said: "I
never worked a day in my life, I had a lot of challenges but I made my career
with ZERO EFFORT, because playing the guitar was my juice, I just couldn't stop
doing it". There is a mistake about the follow or don't follow your
passion debate, because we always concentrate on DOING things... you know, if
you do this you will be rich, if you do that you will be poor... but is not
about on what you DO but on what you THINK... It's all about of the way we
think, so you can take any job you want and turn that experience in a positive
way, learning as much as possible, but don't get stuck if it’s not your
passion: PASSION IS SOMETHING NATURAL WITHIN YOU, IT CAN'T BE BUILT, you can
develop your skills, but you can't develop your passion.
In my opinion, you have to notice that the
world isn't the same anymore... Maybe this book is useful, but soon words like
career, college, grades, jobs and bosses with be part of the past, so my
personal advice is to follow your passion AND build up your skills as much as
you can on whatever you're doing right now, so you will be so good they can't
ignore you anyway :)
NB: I just wish Newport could write proper
English. I’m just a bloody foreigner and even I can spot the bad grammar.
