"Follow your passion" is the all-time stupidest advice.
Most people don't have one, but when pressed they'll name something they sorta like.
"Follow a career you don't hate" is more realistic.
Most people don't have one, but when pressed they'll name something they sorta like.
"Follow a career you don't hate" is more realistic.
I think it's fair to say that most engineers have a passion for coding/engineering. Without it spending most of one's waking hours coding would be absolutely unsustainable. Finding passion in this context is about finding the right niche for your work, not switching your career to something else you would (potentially) enjoy, like playing video games. We need to acknowledge that not every hobby or interest is that mythical passion we should view as a career opportunity.
Being an engineer doesn't define one's work: spending 2 years of your life on building a new ads format at Meta is technically the same profession as e.g. developing better models for predicting climate change, but the passion factor will be different for different people.
Actually having a passion for it -- well, that's a would-be-nice. Not a gotta-have.
A career you don't hate, sure. But also a job that's not so toxic that you are exhausted at the end of the day. That's the theory of the day job: in many disciplines it's tough to get to the point where your discipline will comfortably support you. In the meantime there is nothing wrong with a day job. Just, a day job that's not toxic. So you can pursue your discipline the rest of the time.
In a world of memes and twits, this is a problem.
and more importantly help them to develop a purpose.
for myself i believe that the very purpose of life is to contribute to the advancement of civilization. iaw: do something useful for the world. no matter how small. developing a passion from that is much easier
this also solves the problem of ruining a passion if it is turned into work because do something useful is a higher order value.