DON’T Follow Your Passion

One of the most typical pieces of advice you’re likely to get for how to find a job that will bring you success and that you will find enjoyable and meaningful is to “follow your passion.”

If your goal is to do work that you are passionate about, then it seems obvious that the way to get there is to first figure out what you are passionate about, then go do that.

Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University and author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, a book that debunks the belief that “follow your passion” is good advice.

He traces the origin of the modern movement to the 1970 book What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles, whose premise is, “[figure] out what you like to do… and then find a place that needs people like you.”

Cal Newport: “Follow Your Passion” Is Bad Advice

Advice like this presupposes that “your passion” is something that already exists and that if you match your passion to your job, you would automatically enjoy that job.

The truth is that you might not know what your passion is. Even if you do know, can you make a living from it? Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs put it perfectly:

Newport says that one common misconception people have about his message is that they think he doesn’t believe that you should have a goal of being passionate about your work. In fact, he does believe that is a great goal, but that the process of getting there looks different from what people think.

What are the different ways of relating to work?

In my post last week, I introduced the research of Amy Wrzesniewski, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management. She found that people generally had one of three attitudes towards their work: job, career, or calling.

Job

People with a job mindset are working to make money. They are generally the least satisfied and find little meaning in what they do. A person might take a job in order to support a family or to pay for school. These are noble purposes, and that person may derive deep meaning from their family or their studies, but the job in this case isn’t treated like something meaningful itself, just a means of support.

Career

People with a career mindset see their work as a means towards wealth, status and prestige. While these people can be more satisfied than the job mindset people, their level of satisfaction is strongly tied with whether they feel they are advancing at the pace (or getting the recognition) they feel they deserve.

You sometimes hear about people who are trapped in a career mindset, like the person who made a million dollars but is unhappy because someone else made ten million dollars. The typical image is of someone in business, finance, entertainment or politics.

Not so typical is Emanuel Derman, professor at Columbia University and director of their financial engineering program. In his memoir, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, he writes about how he initially sought a career as a physicist, but ended up leaving physics and making his mark on quantitative finance.

Physics was his passion from childhood. Initially it seemed obvious that becoming a physicist would be the best path to a successful fulfilling career. The problem was that while he had a passion for physics, he couldn’t really enjoy pursuing it because he was not able to make a living from it, and he also had a frustrated ambition for status and recognition.

“...as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition’s degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T. D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France.”

? Emanuel Derman, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

He changed careers by force of circumstance. He wanted to work, had to work, so he took a chance. It turned out that he got a lot of satisfaction out if it. He found the field interesting and perhaps even broader than physics. And yes, there was the success, eventually.

By making the change, Derman was able to continue to do work that he enjoyed and was good at, but also earn a living, and in the end, also achieve some of the success that would have gratified his earlier ambition. Even if he couldn’t be the T. D. Lee of physics, he could still be the T. D. Lee of quantitative finance.

Calling

People with the calling mindset see their work as a positive end in itself. They tend to put more of themselves and their work and get more out of it.

To me, a calling means the reason you were born. It’s that thing you were meant to do.

? Jeff Goins, The Art of Work

Having a calling sounds like a wonderful thing. Great! Where do I get one?

Source: Why Following Your Passion is Bad Career Advice

Wrzesniewski, Newport and Rowe all contend that the place to start is not by trying to figure out what your passions are. Rather, you should start with what your competencies are. Figure out what skills you have, and work on improving them.

The next step is to figure out what it is that you have to offer the world. Where can your skills be made useful? How can you provide value? Newport says to look for where you can make an impact. As Steve Jobs famously put it, “We’re here to put a dent in the universe.”

While you are improving your skills, and finding the opportunities to best apply them, use the techniques of Wrzesniewski’s job crafting to customize the boundaries of your job to make the best use of your skills and to make the activities most meaningful to you.

This is a cyclical process. Newport says that passion is not something that is discovered. It’s something that is cultivated. It’s an ongoing process that starts with your developing your skills and figuring out the best opportunities to apply them. The passion naturally follows from having done that well.

Mike Rowe advises a slightly different strategy. In his role as host of Dirty Jobs, he’s come to the conclusion that a person’s happiness on the job has little to do with the work itself.

Mike Rowe: Don't Follow Your Passion

He reports hearing the same basic story from welders, plumbers, electricians, and hundreds of other skilled tradesmen who really love their work, but very few of them dreamed of having the career they ultimately chose.

They got their start by following opportunity, not passion. Then they got good at their jobs. Then they found a way to love it. As one owner of a successful septic tank cleaning company put it, “One day I realized that I was passionate about other people’s crap.”

The recommendations of Amy Wrzesniewski, Cal Newport, and Mike Rowe are overlapping, but not identical. Wrzesniewski directs you to customize your job to better suit your strengths and interests. Newport  asks you to focus on developing your skills and seeing how you can use them to make a difference in the world. Rowe suggests to focus on finding opportunities that are best-suited to your abilities, and then improving your skills to meet that opportunity.

Passion is too important to be without, but too fickle to be guided by.

? Mike Rowe

One way to put them all into the same framework is to borrow this variant of David Hamil’s Ideal Job Venn Diagram. Your current job puts you somewhere in this space. The approaches advocated by Wrzesniewski, Newport and Rowe are all variations on how to take incremental action to improve your situation.

What action you choose to take is very specific to you. Wherever you are now, there is almost always an action you can take that improves your situation a little bit. Often there's more than one direction you could choose to go in. It’s like a hill climbing optimization technique.

For one person, that means finding more things to love about what you get paid to do. For another person, that might mean finding a new job that affords more opportunities to gain skills.

Or, you might decide that doing what you love or doing what the world needs is so important to you that it overrides any consideration of whether you can get paid to do it. The world is full of people who’ve chosen to have the work that they love and the job that they get paid for be separate things.

How did you find your calling?

• Have you put into practice any of the techniques mentioned in this post? How did they work for you?
• Do you have a job that you are passionate about, but wasn’t something you initially thought would interest you? How did you get involved? What made you grow to love it?
• Did you ever follow your passion, but it didn’t work out the way you expected?
• Has having a job you are passionate about made you happier? Has it made you more successful?

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