"Follow Your Passion" and Other Terrible Career Advice

It's graduation season, which means it's time to Follow Your Passion. At least that's what the commencement speakers and Instagram posters and career pundits will tell you. There's one problem: It's terrible advice.

Early Passions

When I was a kid, I had had several passions-- Atari, baseball, and basketball topped the list. Since no one would ever pay to watch someone play video games (what did I know?), I was determined to suit up as shortstop for the Philadelphia Phillies, and equally committed to being a pass-first point guard for the Sixers. Hell, if Bo Jackson could play two sports, why not me? Bo knows, right?

If Bo had seen me play, he would have known. I was cut from my 8th grade team, which should have ended my basketball career, but I had a lot of passion. I practiced more, determined to show the haters. It ended when I was cut from my 9th grade team. Turns out passion doesn't compensate for short stature, a lack of speed, and the ability to barely clear the yellow pages with my vertical leap. They have a name for 98-pound kids with that unique combination of attributes: Wrestlers.

My baseball career started out more promising and lasted through my junior year of high school, but if I'm being honest, it peaked when I made the all-star team as an 8-year-old little-league pitcher and shortstop. Go Yankees! (That's the first and last time I'll ever write that phrase.) No number of swings at the Johnny Bench Batter-Up was going to make me a star... or even a Division III utility infielder who could lay down a bunt with the best of them.

Good thing I had other follow-worthy passions. I loved to write stories, which led me to get a Creative Writing degree. I even won a short story contest and published a handful of fiction pieces in literary magazines. In total, I made $50 and received 12 contributor's copies to the magazines. Not bad, but it turns out landlords don't accept The Crescent Review as rent payment.

The Alternative

For some people, passion aligns with something they're great at and that someone will pay them to do. That's awesome. Beyonce, Tom Hanks, and JK Rowling followed their passion. But there's a survivorship bias when you look at megastars. Just because Larry Bowa and Maurice Cheeks had made the big time didn't mean I would ever play for the Phillies or Sixers.

Maybe you're passionate about the law or about surgery or entrepreneurship or HVAC repair, and you can get paid to do what you love. If so, have at it. For most of us, that's not how the world works. If you don't know what you want to do or you realize you're not going to make it through the American Idol gauntlet, you're in good company.

Good news. There's an alternative road that has proven more fruitful.

People who are fulfilled find purpose rather than follow passion. That's an important distinction. It's actually two important distinctions. Purpose over Passion and Find over Follow.

Said another way, don't sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. Your muse isn't coming.

You might have to do different jobs, work for different organizations, and experience different leaders. Some of those jobs will be miserable. Those are called learning experiences. Learning experiences become funny stories as soon as they're in the rear view mirror.

When you find something that clicks, though, there's nothing better. Your work matters, and you feel like you're contributing something bigger than you. You stop looking at the clock, and you stop worrying about what car your brother-in-law just bought. You've found purpose. And here's more good news: purpose often leads to passion.

I didn't start out with passion for the staffing industry. I didn't wake up one day and think, I was born to model processes or facilitate a strategy session about the risks Amazon poses to our retail business. I didn't ever think, when I grow up, I'm going to talk about digital disruption. I needed a job to pay the rent. Next thing I knew, I had connected with a bunch of like-mined people and was swept up in the culture. We were building something and had the opportunity to impact those around us. We were in the opportunity business.

Lo and behold, I also was able to tap into some of those old passions. We weren't the Phillies or Sixers, but we were a high-performance team that cared about winning, and we cared about one another. I wasn't publishing books, but I was telling stories, helping people see what was possible, and helping people to connect their work with the opportunities we were creating.

Conclusion

I'm not suggesting you shouldn't have passions or you shouldn't pursue them. If you're truly passionate about something, you'll make time to do it. When it comes to work, though, people put a lot of emphasis on Where they work and When they work. My advice: spend more time figuring out Why you work.

The Japanese have a concept called Ikigai, which loosely translates to "that thing that gets you out of bed in the morning." Ikigai extends life and correlates with happiness. Purpose trumps passion every day and twice on Sunday.

So, do me a favor. Ignore those commencement speakers. Or at least temper their advice. With the bias of hindsight, they'll tell you they followed their passion and, as a result, never worked a day in their life. In reality, they likely tried a bunch of stuff, failed at some things, worked really hard, got incredibly lucky, and then realized outsized success. I'd posit that most of them found their purpose and passion followed. Or they followed their passion on the side while they worked their butt off making ends meet.

So, try new things, make mistakes, move on from "learning experiences," don't take yourself too seriously, figure out who you are, surround yourselves with people you care about, live your values, and, at some point, you'll probably realize why you're doing all this stuff. That's a great day. Odds are, it will also stoke your passion.

*Kudos to Jerry Seinfeld for calling this out in his Duke 2024 Commencement Speech last week. If you haven't watched it in full, you should. It's fantastic, and for me, it joins George Saunders, David Foster Wallace, Sheryl Sandberg, and Pete Davis as speeches that I'll re-watch and share. I'd love to add to that list; what are the best commencement speeches you've seen?