Why 'Follow Your Passion' Is the World's Worst Career Advice
inc.com
inc.com
http://www.kevinrandom.com/1-page-summary-so-good-they-cant-...
Quote: "The passion movement started in the 1970s. The core illusion: that there is a magic job out there that’s right for you, and will solve all your problems. This illusion applies to relationships too :) "
Following your passion will make those problems worth the cost.
The problem is most people don't understand what "passion" is. Passion is what you can't not do (not to be confused with a warm fuzzy answer to "what is your passion?" which you're not really going to ever follow thru on even if handed every resource to).
ETA: as far as I can tell, few people actually have passions. If you don't have one, don't pretend to follow it. A career based on lying to yourself is indeed following horrible advice.
When I was young I was exposed to adults and activities from many different backgrounds outside of school. More than helping me determine what I liked doing it helped me find out what I did not want to do. Things I thought I wanted to be based on what I had seen in books and movies turned out to be further from reality.
If you can gain these experiences it is a luxury. If everything matches up it is fortunate.
My suggestion is the larger problem is many workplaces are negative environments and leadership is lacking. The one real job I had was in maintenance. I did shit like mopping floors and bagging garbage. My boss was great. The people I worked with were happy. I was very happy. Once I started my own business it took me many, many years to be that happy again.
The number one piece of career advice for men should be not to get married or have kids. With enough money you can get a young trophy wife and have children at 55 no problem.
Everywhere you turn there are things that could be improved, fixed, wrongs righted, dictators toppled, famine, poverty, racism, sexism, classism, problems that need solving, things to be understood, things to be simplified; things that make everyone's lives safer, more bearable, more comfortable, happier.
If you take a hard look at the world around you and look at ways to apply what you enjoy doing to making people's lives around you better, your passion will come alive.
Why seek to control anything? Why not exploit it to make everyone's lives better?
For example, seeing your neighbor's abandoned, dilapidated house as a chance to start a farm or garden, is not something most people would think of when viewing the housing situation in Detroit. Grace Lee Boggs saw it that way but most do not.
The thing about control is about letting go of perfectionism. If you have an inclination to improve things, you can be overwhelmed by the number of things which could be improved, and it can be demoralizing to see the breadth of it all, and recognizing how little overall impact you, as one person, can have. So you limit your scope. You can't do it all.
That's the thing I've never understood about following your passion. If you "can't not do" it, once people figure that out they will stop paying you, secure in the knowledge that you will keep doing it anyway.
Perhaps the secret to wealth is that your passion has to be money?
Or the passion is limited unique items (artworks) in which case they will buy it - if you become popular and supply is limited this can be self reinforcing like fine-art as investment.
Or they want the passionate person to work for them, so Google hire a passionate programmer so they can patent their work - knowing that the passionate programmer will improve in their off-time.
Or game companies who hire the young and passionate as they know they are invested in the end product and are less likely to bail if times are tough or they get a better offer (this can be exploitative and is closer to what you suggested).
Quite often things that become valuable are because people perceive qualities such as passion as 'honesty' in art and work this has value.
If people perceive someone is just in it for the money then they may less inclined to invest in their development as they could stop at any time and somehow the end-product seems less honest, a passionate person will do the best they possible can, some-one in it for the money will do just enough to get paid (hyperbole but it can be a perception).
True passion can be a very valuable quality - but it can also as you suggest be a crippling impediment to success, some are too passionate and unwilling to compromise so die poor ( e.g. Vincent van Gogh).
There's many things that make me who I am, things I can't not do, but if you're not going to pay me to do them, I will do them for myself and sell them to someone who will pay for them, or I will go do those things for someone who will pay for them.
I don't disagree with the secret to wealth being (or at least partly being) money though... those that don't care about the money are more likely not to be destined to have more than they need to provide what is important to them.
But it's still dependent on "your passion" being in demand in that sense, which is a fragile thing. There's a lot of demand for some musicians, and almost none for most of them.
For instance: I can't not draw comics. I just finished spending four and a half years on a graphic novel. I like to draw them and I seem to be pretty decent at them if the reactions I've been getting are any guide.
But I have to pay rent. And power, and internet. And pay for my subscription to Adobe's Creative Suite, and upgrade my computer now and then.
If nobody's paying me to draw my comics, I'm going to need to find a way to pay those bills anyway. If I'm not lucky enough to have someone else pay them for me, then I need to get a job.
There are only so many hours in a day. A job will take up a lot of them. And I'll have to wedge tiny bits of making comics in the edges of what's left. I'll need to deal with a commute, and with spending all my energy at work, and just wanting to come home and sleep instead of draw.
So I draw my comics, put them out for free, and put a tip jar out with them. If enough people start throwing money in that tip jar on a regular basis, I can start cutting back on my day job. Eventually I can get to a point where I'm able to pay all my bills from comics, and don't need to worry about taking time from them to keep a roof over my head. I can spend my entire workday thinking about making my comics and drawing them, and get a lot more pages out a lot faster.
A lot of my fans are taking advantage of the fact that I'll draw comics anyway. But a subset of my fans have enough money to throw a few bucks my way and help ensure that I can make a lot more of the comics they like.
Does that make sense?
Passion is what you care about. If getting a job done right keeps you up at night and you go the extra mile to do, then you have passion. If you can let it go then you don't.
I think better advice is: if you have a passion, then try to find a way to make it profitable if it's not and get into a position that you can act on your passion so it's not a detriment.
Having passion in an environment where it is not wanted is an awful experience and get a person fired really quick in an employment situation.
When a passion is profitable and works with others then it builds a fire that feeds itself and can be very fulfilling.
This is where it falls down for me... jobs are by design a cog in an existing machine where you either fit or you don't... or can make yourself fit for a while, but if you don't fit perfectly, it wears you down, emotionally, physically, mentally etc.
The funny thing about passion is that invariably, there is no magic job, because if you're passionate about something, you're probably not cut out for a J.O.B., you probably want to be carving your own niche...
So the illusion isn't that there's no magic job, it's that you're falling into this industrial revolution way of thinking that someone else needs to provide you with the job instead of you making your own job.
Since Covey discusses passion and probably falls under Newport's so-called passion movement, does that mean all his advice (based on years of research by a team of people) is wrong?
Newport denounces the word passion, misrepresents the movement by saying it merely promises a "magic job", then goes on to write about the same things promoted by that movement in his own book. I see bait and switch here.
Will the "find your passion" career advice work for everyone? No. Is there worse career advice than this? Absolutely. The title and theme of this post are overblown.
Some folks are defining passion as a sort of dreamy thing, and that dreams are bad. That is vastly over-simplifying it. Finding passion is an intangible goal and is intentionally positive-sounding in order to encourage people to learn more about the smaller steps to achieving their goals. It is a sound byte.
I understand that finding passion is not going to work for everyone. But this notion that it is "terrible career advice" is going too far. Why so much hate?
For those who can find their passion, society benefits greatly. These folks will not hesitate to work harder for something in which they believe. Does it suck for a company to lose a few people who are trying to find their passion? Yes. That's the nature of well paying fields such as IT.
It is better to get accustomed to losing a few good employees than to continue rallying against something that isn't really under your control. After all, from what I understand, during an interview with YC, they are looking more at the people than the ideas. I'm not an applicant but I do respect their selection process. The brick wall breakers they seek are first and foremost passionate.
I firmly believe that if you're passionate at something, it's extremely easy to become extremely knowledgeable and/or highly skilled at it to a point that it's valuable to the world. Then it's just a case of applying your ingenuity to figuring out how to make your passion relevant. Once you make it relevant in today's ever changing market, it's then just a case of positioning it effectively to make it profitable.
I refuse to believe otherwise... every passion is worth something and makes a difference. If it didn't, then why are we genetically predisposed to them? What would be the purpose in this? Why aren't we all just worker bees, all genetically predisposed to doing the same few tasks?
Of course, the article is just one person's opinion and I suppose in many ways as relevant and valid as my own...
As you find your "passion", and that might just be a set of skills you care about, or a process, means, method, value, etc... you maximize it, sell it, trade on it, share it, build it and keep moving from there.
Things link together. And seeing those links and where the value is can really pay off and over a number of years doing this you can look back and know you made a difference and probably got paid well doing it.
Rather than expect to find that perfect job, you do the job, and find out a little of who you are and what you really care about. The minute you know, max that out and don't look back.
And when you do another job? Maybe that connects with what you did before. Bonus points for making sure that is true. Again, you find out a little of who you are and what you really care about.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
A good alternative might be to look at where the demand is and where your interests lie, and try to find the best intersection of the two.
As a software engineer growing up in England, you make bugger all. The software market is incredibly um... well, let's just say the pay for a software engineer in the UK sucks... but I enjoy software engineering, so I did a whole bunch of research to figure out where it was most lucrative, did some shit jobs to save up for a plane ticket and get my visa and flew to where software engineers had a higher quality of life. I could've stuck it out in the UK and limited my horizons but honestly, that's just not who I am.
If my passion had been something else, I would've figured out where/how to make a market viable enough to make it lucrative and I'd have gone there and done that.
I was raised to believe that if you have a passion for something, the only thing standing in your way is you. You were gifted with a brain, a brain to figure shit out. If you don't understand how to leverage that, then I posit that you didn't pay enough attention to those teaching you along the way, showing you how to use your brain to hop from one stepping stone to the next to make your passions lucrative.
Admittedly sometimes you have to think outside the box and sometimes it takes a few tries of looking at things from different perspectives before you can put together a viable solution, but you have a passion for a reason - it's just up to you to monetize it.
I've found that as I've gotten a little older, my tolerance for unnecessary complexity, unnecessary time demands, and doing pointless things, has plunged. I have also found that I'm much happier and more productive after stripping away as much of that as possible. There are various costs to doing so, but it has been worth it so far. When I was 20, I felt like I could juggle anything and everything (and no doubt reducing how effective I was in the process).
I think it's OK to allow yourself a break. You don't have to be achieving, or particularly productive (from your own perspective). Sometimes I imagine a life where I wake up, dawdle around and make breakfast, wander into work and do my 9-5 with my colleagues and then wander home to cook dinner and enjoy some mindless movie on TV. You can think of it as "passionless", but I think of it as "vacation".
It's a nice idea. You don't strive for anything, or fight for anything. You don't argue with your colleagues, or push to "get it right" or to "be successful". You just hang out and enjoy everyone's company and the small challenges that your job provides for you every day.
This is much better than dropping everything because when you drop everything, it's easy to drop into depression. It's easy to see everything that you've given up and see this temporary lack of energy as a "failure". It's much better to give yourself permission to enjoy merely existing and doing the simple things that get by. This is not "working without passion", this is just spending your time enjoyably with your colleagues. Like, I said, it's 100x better than locking yourself up and playing video games all day, or drinking yourself into oblivion, or even travelling the world to "find yourself".
For people who are really driven by passion, it's not like you will end up staying in that simple world. Slowly your passion will well up and take over again. Take your time and learn to enjoy it.
The issue is not taking passion for granted and ending up being bipolar, ability to actually enjoy mundane casual work is good. But it's also tough to balance with marketplace demands, sometimes you can't have unproductive days even if you're out of attraction (say a large contract badly built on fragile tech with no design and no care). Your paycheck depends on it.
But if you think back, how many times did people thank you (before the end of the project) for doing what was necessary to get the project back on track? How many times did you use super human effort to claw a monstrocity from the brink of disaster and have half the dev team pissed off at you because of it.
I don't want to get into a large discourse, but your posting stood out a bit, in a "I know that pain" kind of way. I don't know you so this may be totally wrong, but my experience has been that there are many roads to success. Even that word "success" is arbitrary (as we have seen so frequently when managers redefine it after the fact). You are allowed to choose your definition.
Sometimes you just aren't up for the gunslinging heroics that are required save the project. But you might be up for spending some quality time with the other developers and helping them improve themselves. The project may tank, but everybody might end up thanking you because of it. Even better, you may inspire someone else to do the necessary heroics now that they have someone to cheer them on.
The one (somewhat disturbing) reality that I have learned in this job is that neither my pay check, nor the way people feel about me seems particularly related to the success of any particular project. Sometimes giving people what they should value (success) over what they actually value (support) is a form of hubris in itself.
Anyway, I hope that is interesting even if it doesn't seem useful ;-)
"I am a big advocate for the pursuit of curiosity. You've maybe heard me talk about this before? We are constantly being told to pursue our passions in life, but there are times when passion is a TALL ORDER, and really hard to reach. In seasons of confusion, of loss, of boredom, of insecurity, of distraction, the idea of "passion" can feel completely inaccessible and impossible. In such times, you are lucky to be able to get your laundry done (that sometimes feels as high as you can aim) and when someone tells you to follow your passion, you want to give them the middle finger. (Go ahead and do it, by the way. But wait till their back is turned, out of civility.)
But curiosity, I have found, is always within reach.
Passion is a tower of flame, but curiosity is a tiny tap on the shoulder — a little whisper in the ear that says, "Hey, that's kind of interesting…"
Passion is rare; curiosity is everyday.
Curiosity is therefore a lot easier to reach at at times than full-on passion — and the stakes are lower, easier to manage.
The trick is to just follow your small moments of curiosity. It doesn't take a massive effort. Just turn your head an inch. Pause for a instant. Respond to what has caught your attention. Look into it a bit. Is there something there for you? A piece of information?
For me, a lifetime devoted to creativity is nothing but a scavenger hunt — where each successive clue is another tiny little hit of curiosity. Pick each one up, unfold it, see where it leads you next.
Small steps.
Keep doing that, and I promise you: The curiosity will eventually lead you to the passion.
And that'll be the end of boredom." [1]
[1] http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/one-of-the-greatest-quotes-o...
Surely not the worst possible advice.
E.g. it is much better than "work with the intent to cause as much harm as possible to yourself and those around you"
If you become a programmer for any reason other than passion, you are either very naive or very courageous.
But that's not as catchy.
The badness of advice is surely also a function of how likely people are to actually follow it. Nobody's going to follow your shitty advice, but a lot of people really do follow their unrealistic passions all the way to a minimum-wage gig while they wait for their music/painting/acting/whatever career to take off.
a) Something I liked to do (writing) b) Something that people were willing to pay me for (writing) c) Something that I was good at (writing)"
My only problem with the authors solution is that if you break down "passion" into those 3 buckets then her answer is still a general answer of "writing".
I would've enjoyed the author to dig deeper into why the writing she does and the 3 points led her to find the thing she is passionate about.
I obtained a degree in one of my passions and I do it as a hobby, I would hate doing it for a living because of numerous reasons even though I'm good at it and people would pay. Instead I found something that I am not passionate about but enjoy greatly that has a better working dynamic for my personality.
It's my opinion that the concept of 'passion' should only play into career goals in so much as determining if the field you're interested in actually aligns with what you enjoy about the concept of that field.
There is probably little chance that you'll be good enough at something, to use that skill to acquire vast amounts of money if you are not passionate about that skill. But the chance that what you love is something that is In demand enough to make you rich, is also pretty slim.
Storeve : "I don’t pretend to be a great painter,” he says early on, “but I have something. I sell.”
Yet he recognizes Strickland’s (Stroeve's friend) work as genius.
He tells the dealer, “Remember Monet, who could not get anyone to buy his pictures for a hundred francs. What are they worth now?” The dealer questions this logic. “There were a hundred as good painters as Monet who couldn’t sell their pictures at that time, and their pictures are worth nothing still. How can one tell? Is merit enough to bring success?”
Stroeve is infuriated. “How, then, will you recognize merit?” he asks.
“There is only one way—by success,” the dealer replies. “Think of all the great artists of the past—Raphael, Michael Angelo, Ingres, Delacroix—they were all successful.”
(1) - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/05/31/the-great-and-t...
Happiness != success.
Career != life.
Work != career.
Life is not one-dimensional, and luck is a huge factor in all of these.
What they fail to see is that it wasn't lucky at all. It may have been luck that that particular door opened when it did, but realistically, from the inside, it was leveraging the best opportunity available at the time. If that door hadn't opened, you'd have taken another route to your objective. There is little luck involved. The only lucky thing I suppose is the probability of taking the route you did.
When you climb a mountain your goal is the summit. The climber who decides "Ah shit, I couldn't do it because there was bad weather, you were so lucky that you hit the mountain when you did and had that window to summit." There was no luck involved... you would've summited anyway, you'd have just taken a different route or persevered longer to get there. That's the difference between those who make it and those who say "If only I'd had their luck."
I guess you could say it took some luck for Edison to make the light bulb... but I daresay if you'd suggested such a thing to Edison, he'd have taken your head off. But that's the difference between seeing failure and seeing the thousands of incremental changes that led from something that wasn't satisfactory, to something that provides lights for the entire world...
Edison may have been lucky to get free training as a telegraph operator in return for saving a three-year-old from being hit by a runaway train[0] (stranger than fiction!) He was lucky not to die then, an unremarkable boy (see fictional[1].) He was lucky to arrive on the scene of ~70 years of experimentation on the general idea of a filament in an enclosure[2]. He was lucky that a chemist overseas invented a pump which became a "key tool" to his bulb[3]. He's lucky to have lived in a time when he could hear about innovations on another continent and not have to pay too much (anything?) in patent royalties. He's lucky that somebody else didn't beat him to the punch and use the pump in the 14 years between its discovery and Edison's use, given that carbon filaments had already been tried but failed due to air in the bulb. He's lucky that a judge ruled in his favor instead of Sawyer's[2].
I realize I am mostly critiquing just one possible form of just one invention of Edison's, but it's perhaps his most famous achievement since you alluded to it (he's lucky that pop history has chosen to remember him.) And, I don't find it plausible if you were to respond "He definitely would have still found another way" if the conveniences above were removed. There is only room for so many opportunities, ideas, coincidences, that can happen in one person's life. A favorable alignment of those to produce a notable outcome is "luck."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison#Telegrapher [1] fictional http://www.changingthetimes.net/samples/preww1/young_hero_di... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Histor... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprengel_pump
What was luck was for the rest of us - we got a light bulb out of the deal. Imagine if he'd had a passion for pottery. We'd have the most amazing dishes right now, but we'd only be able to see them by candlelight...
How about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Ore-Milling_Company "I'm going to do something now so different and so much bigger than anything I've ever done before people will forget that my name ever was connected with anything electrical." When it failed, he said "it's all gone, but we had a hell of a good time spending it." So how does this reconcile with his "passion for doing stuff until the goal is reached" and "his ingenuity [and] dedication to achieving his objective"? I guess if only he'd tried the 1001st way to mill iron ore, he surely would have succeeded!
I almost feel like I've knocked down a strawman by showing somebody wasn't perfect or 100% successful, yet that's another way to phrase my point that you are disagreeing with. There is no way to guarantee success at just any given goal. Sometimes the opportunity to have a good goal fall into your lap, or things to line up in support of the goal you chose, is just luck. If nothing else, there's an element of luck in whether your heart continues beating (even if your goal is within reasonable constraints of life expectancy and health.) Sure, if you care about something, work as hard as you can to find out whether you have that luck. But if you care about other things, maybe be ready to re-prioritize if the luck isn't coming.
There are many many examples of people who have done what society said couldn't be done because of who they are, what race they are, what sex they are, what circumstances they are shackled by... by many accounts the honey bee shouldn't be able to fly.
Imagine where you could be if you said "Fuck that, I'll define my own destiny thanks."
Sometimes you'd be better off. Sometimes you'd be dead. Is society better off because of a person who stood up for his or her beliefs and paid a price for that? I'd say yes. Is that person better off for it? Debatable.
I may have said "this dog has 4 legs" but I certainly didn't say "everything with 4 legs is a dog".
The climber who declares "I couldn't do it because there was bad weather" and doesn't persist: are they lucky to be alive to try again later? Or are they a deluded shirker expressing sour-grapes at someone else's success? These are not mutually exclusive. Equally, they could both be false.
I don't deny determination and incremental (or paradigmatic) progress. Luck (or chance) is a factor that the successful (and their worshippers) seem only to eager to dismiss.
i.e. I started up long ago & in the process learned how to code & design. A few years after I landed my first coding gig. I'm still coding for a living, while also still pursuing my startup/inventor goals.
Again, I didnt read the article, but I can't see anything negative in following your passion in our industry (tech), unless you you just waste money having others build your dreams and not gaining new skills yourself.
Your approach is relative to your current situation.
IF people realized this we'd:
- have 50% less questions on Quora and Yahoo answers
- better google matches for the things we need
- a faster internet (or maybe not, more room for porn bandwidth?)
how can it be the worst if it makes 1/3 of the advertised formula?
Also hardly anyone sucks at their passion (and admits it to himself, which would be crucial for the calculation, too). That makes it at least 1/2 of the formula...
Anecdotally, I know far too many people who have devoted years to areas they have little to no aptitude in (in the arts, and in business). They have no natural talent and are getting nowhere (by any metric, not just financial), but they do love their field.
Passion and pleasure are being conflated a lot here.
Same way that "keep your face in the water and breathe every fourth stroke" is good swimming advice but if you leave out the last bit it becomes terrible advice.
If that's too silly an analogy, then just remember that shooting for a random point on the "stuff you love" portion of the Venn diagram is unlikely to land you in the region you want to be in, and the part of the Venn diagram where you're doing stuff you like but which nobody is willing to pay you for is a really terrible place to get stuck.