So Good They Can’t Ignore You – Cal Newport –

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Morning all,

It’s Monday 9.35am and I had something of a whirlwind this weekend in terms of reading…

I managed to get through the entire book by Cal Newport ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’.

I’m beginning to enjoy my walks in West Brompton cemetery that I’ll take in the morning.

I’ve actually yet to do one today and I’m half tempted to wander out of the door and get going with my reading.

A new habit is fast forming now that television has somewhat been left behind:

Looking back at my metrics it was on May 19th that I decided I would ‘give up tv’.

In actuality that hasn’t happened.

What has happened is 90% of the time I do watch television it’ll be with my partner Strawberry when we’re eating together.

If we’re not eating together – then I’m not watching television (almost anyway)

Now since then, I’ve watched:

The Call Of The Wild (1 hour 40 minutes)
The Blackout: Invasion Earth (2 hours 30 minutes)
Just Mercy (1 hour 46 mins of it – I didn’t finish)

I’ll add in some statistics:

In 21 days I’ve watched 5 hours 56 minutes of television outside of the 22-45 minutes per day I watch with Strawberry.

That’s around 17 minutes per day.

Also, ALL of my own watching has happened between Friday and Sunday, and it culminated in me NOT finishing Just Mercy, because I grew tired of the medium.

Each time I tried to search for a television show to quench my desire to ‘watch something’, there was the cost of trying to search and find something that satisfies my particular tastes.

And then, all three of the movies above weren’t really as world-changing or engaging as ‘Shoe Dog’ was – the memoir I read for enjoyment about the story of the founder of Nike.

I’m interested then to see what happens as I move into my fourth weekend this coming weekend and discover if I can manage a whole weekend without watching anything or not…

Typically outside of watching television (I use this term as an umbrella term for Netflix/Amazon Prime) with Strawberry, I’d probably watch 2 episodes of a television series each day so around 90 minutes.

90 minutes less 17 minutes is an additional 73 minutes of time I’m getting back per day.

Since the 14th May I did this:

Now this is all relevant to Mr Cal Newport because If I show you my reading trends:

From around May 15th I started reading and managed to bust my way through 30 hours of audio in 15 days at an average speed of 1.75x.

My aim for June was to hit 1 hour per day.

Currently, I’m on 10 hours across 7.25 days and my average speed has just hit 2.2x.

Here’s this mornings stats:

Furthermore, I decided to STOP reading a book I wasn’t enjoying (The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins – too much ranting and not relevant enough to my journey) which was a big thing for me.

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As I’ve said to Strawberry multiple times this weekend. I’m rediscovering the passion I had as a kid growing up for reading.

I used to spend all my time in books and it’s what gave me a communications advantage during my school years…and now I can tell my brain is beginning to rewire because…

I don’t miss TV. I do feel drawn to books..and I don’t read these books I reference for the most part…

I study them.

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So Good They Can’t Ignore You was an excellent book that focusses around the sentiment Newport has that you shouldn’t follow your passion as that’s actually bad advice.

The late Steve Jobs made it famous in his Stanford speech but that’s not what he did at all. And then Newport goes on to break down Job’s involvement in a computer project just by virtue of his friend Wozniak who hated the business side of development.

Newport dives into the need to build competence in a discipline, and that you must engage in deliberate practice before you can even truly engage in something at a level you enjoy.

I’ll again share with you the notes I made from the book in a bid to share some value with you and also remind myself what I must implement from this book:

So I particularly like the following:

Place 2 small bets a month –

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This month I’m focussing upon trying to crack sending mass b2c email by going through the pain of spending money with various providers to see what works.

The other bet I’m making is to try and move into the B2B high ticket appointment setting space by using Facebook as well as Instagram

Chasing deliberate practice is something I’m trying to do at least 1x per day now – work on something that pushes me to my edge (which these small bets are)

Building Agency Skills I may have referenced yesterday with the Agency course I now want to chug through before the end of this month from a 7-figure agency owner.

Here’s the 2nd set of the note:

Offering interns great value I’ve tried to expand upon by writing a welcome blog and digging out some old testimonials from interns that worked with me over 8 years ago to fuse them into our programme to keep building up the value.

And by doing this I’m beginning to build more of a craftsman mindset for my business and treat it like a craft – and as a consequence passion will follow.

The biggest realisation that happened for me I think is realising that one year back I used to hate my agency life – and that was simply because it was stressful.

I’ve just realised I’m repeating myself from yesterday haha so do look back to this blog for more on that.

But yes. I’m definitely headed in a powerful direction and can literally feel my brain changing.

I think somehow I’m also accepting of the reality that I don’t ‘take on’ 100% of the advice given by any book.

Here you can see an overview of the wider points of this Newport book (and I love the way they’re structured – I genuinely am looking forward to putting a book together when I can compose my own thoughts)

As long as I take away a couple of important points from each of these books I read I’ll feel that I’m firmly striding forward in the direction of success.

And this morning I continue with the 2-new books I have: