Why following your passion might not be the best career choice
Follow your passion.
This is one of the most said career advice. And yes, it sounds plausible!
Why shouldn’t you do what you’re passionate about in your job? After all, we spend around a third of our lives working!
And yet “follow your passion” might not be the best career advice. In this article, I’ll discuss why.
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| Photo by Warrren on Unsplash |
What is a dream job anyway?
This is different for everybody. Even the “follow-your-passion-mentality” says that everybody has a different description of what a dream job is.
I’d subdivide a job / a professional activity into three types:
- Job: This is a way to pay bills.
- Career: A path toward getting better at your job.
- Calling: Work that is an important part of life and a component of identity.
A dream job must certainly be of the third category - something that is an important part of our lives, something we are proud of, and an actual part of our identity.
Furthermore, a “good” job has some must-have traits:
- Autonomy: if we are in control (at least partly) this makes a job much better, compared to feeling stuck on a treadmill doing the work of someone else.
- Competence: Having and applying skills in our work makes it better.
- Relatedness: The feeling of connection with others is (for most of us) also important in a good job.
What is passion?
This one is similarly difficult to define.
Many courses, books, and other sources on the subject of finding a career always talk about passion. You should look for a job that matches your passion.
The problem with this, however, is that most people don’t (or don’t yet) know what their passion is. It’s only when we (really - like through deliberate practice) try things out that we realize what we enjoy and what we don’t.
Having a “passion mindset” might make people switch jobs often because if they don’t find parts of their job fulfilling, they’re quick to move on without trying to improve.
However, sometimes it’s necessary to push through challenges to develop the skills needed for a truly satisfying career and to build up passion.
So, yes: passion needs to be built.
“Most people adopt the Passion Mindset, but […] the Craftsman Mindset [building skill] is the foundation for creating work you love.” - Cal Newport
Skill is more important than passion
Strategies to build skill
Perseverance
Perseverance is more important than talent when it comes to building skills. If you are talented in a certain domain but do not put in enough effort, someone who does will become better than you quickly.
Angela Ducksworth describes this as “grit” - a combination of perseverance and passion. With passion, she doesn’t mean the inherent feeling I’ve described above. She means something more like having a “mission”.
Perseverance and grit are something you can improve either from the inside out or from the outside in. In this article, I’ve summarized how you can improve your grit.
Deliberate practice
Deliberate practice is one of the most effective strategies in skill development, even though it can be tiring.
“Regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career.” - Cal Newport
Deliberate Practice takes more effort than it does fun. The fun part starts once you acquire a certain skill level and can use it: if you like what you’re doing and you’re doing well, you’ll likely get into a “flow” state — a state of effortless attention when the challenge matches your abilities.
Rules for deliberate practice are:
- Skill or Skillset: Analyze if it is a single-specific skill you need to develop or a set of skills.
- Define what “good” is: set goals.
- Stretch and destroy: the actual deliberate practicing.
- Be patient: Skill isn’t built overnight. It takes effort and time.
Don’t follow your passion, build it
Passion and skill are highly correlated. In his book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, Cal Newport describes four rules that are essential to building skill:
- Rule #1, Don’t Follow Your Passion: we’ve already elaborated on why this is important.
- Rule #2, Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You: You need to build valuable skills to build your career capital. Later on, you can exchange career capital with traits of a dream job.
- Rule #3, Turn Down a Promotion: A promotion can trap you if the new position lacks autonomy. To avoid this, it’s important to build career capital by improving skills, and then exchange it for control or more freedom.
- Rule #4: Think Small, Act Big: This is about your mission.
Mission
A “mission” is one of the best things you can buy with your career capital.
To find a good mission, there is no single “leap”. Rather, it is a series of small things that converge in a good mission. This is what companies such as Pixar or Apple do. Small bets have the potential to develop into something big.
You also have to market your mission - Cal Newport summarizes this with the Law of Remarkability.
- You have to do/create something that is “remarkable” (a Purple Cow).
- You have to market it in an environment that recognizes it and can serve as a multiplier. In the context of programming, for example, this is the open-source community or, in the world of science, peer-reviewed publications.
Prototype
Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, authors of the bestseller “Designing Your Life”, emphasize the importance of prototyping. They argue, that you should start right where you are and build your dream career.
Their strategy can be summarized in a 6-step guide:
- Create a Work/Play/Love/Health Dashboard
- Write a Workview and a Lifeview
- Do Good Time Journaling
- Draw a mind map
- Create your Odyssey Plans
- Do Prototyping
Conclusion
If you’ve already found out what your true passion is and how you can make a living from it, congrats to you!
But if you didn’t, don’t be discouraged. Passion is nothing inherently living within us. To find your passion, you need to (really) try out different things and build skills that are valuable to society.
When your special skills meet what society is looking for, that’s when you’ll find your passion!
Thank you for reading until the end! I hope you’ve enjoyed my article and learned something.
For this article, I’ve used the books (1) “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport, (2) “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, and (3) “Grit” by Angela Ducksworth as resources. I can highly recommend reading the books. Please support your local library and buy from them.