Sarah's notes on So Good They Can't Ignore You

When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.

Move your focus away from finding the right work and toward working right, and eventually build, for the first time in your life, a love for what you do. This is the happiness that you, too, should demand.

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase. I feel like your problem is that you're trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That's your tragic mistake.

The more experience someone had, the more likely she was to love her work. The happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it -and the process won't be easy.

The traits that make a great job great are rare and valuable, and therefore, if you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuable skills-which I call career capital -to offer in return.

Regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset (what can I offer the world?) will be the foundation on which you'll build a compelling career.

TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREAT WORK: Creativity, Impact, Control

If you want something that's both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return -this is Supply and Demand 101. It follows that if you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.

Tracks every hour of your day, down to quarter-hour increments, on a spreadsheet. Ensure that your attention is focused on the activities that matter.

In Outliers, Gladwell pointed to this rule as evidence that great accomplishment is not about natural talent, but instead about being in the right place at the right time to accumulate such a massive amount of practice.

If you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that's exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands... Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

Control over what you do, and how you do it, is one of the most powerful traits you can acquire when creating work you love.

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.

Working right trumps finding the right work. You don’t need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness-you need instead a better approach to the work already available to you.

The more rare and valuable skills you have to offer, the more interesting opportunities will become available.