Passion's overrated: why loving your job is about action, not dreams

“Follow your passion. Live your dreams. Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

Entrepreneurs, social media influencers and high-school careers advisers often roll out these soundbites when they’re trying to encourage young people to discover their purpose in life.

It works for some people. My mum always wanted to be a teacher. My sister always wanted to be a dancer. And they followed through and achieved their goals.

But it doesn’t work like this for everyone. Or, in fact, most people: the number of people working in the job they dreamed of as a child is only 6%.

I never wanted to be a copywriter. There, I said it. But I also didn’t not want to be a copywriter.

The summer after graduating, I applied for dozens of jobs. As far would have it, Anne Tait from Scottish Amicable, a medium sized life insurance company in Glasgow, was the first person to take the chance on a raw marketing graduate with zero experience.

The point is this: I found a job. I worked long hours, learned from smarter people and became pretty good at it. And in doing that I grew to love it.

Alex Hormozi, the founder of acquisition.com, says (and I paraphrase) “Passion sets too high a bar. It’s about lots of action. You get good at whatever the thing is. And then you like it and you’ve found your passion.”

That resonates for me and I’m sure many readers here. Let’s look at the industry that Copylab serves – financial services marketing. I doubt there’s a single person I’ve met in the past 30 years of work that can say they dreamt of being a financial services marketer when they were teenagers. But I also know that there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people I’ve met who genuinely love what they do – myself included.

And so, this is not so much a message for people who are already in the world of work. It’s more a counter-message to the tik-tok business ‘influencers’ who are creating a sense of purpose that’s impossible to attain for most young people.

It’s an important message for my daughter, and millions of other kids, who doesn’t have that burning passion for one thing. It’s OK not to know what you want to be when you grow up. But it’s not OK to do nothing and wait to be struck by lightning. Go and do something, indeed many somethings. Work really hard at it. And pay attention to how it makes you feel. Eventually, you’ll find the thing that you’re happy to get up at 6am every morning for.

I think that’s a much better message to be sharing with our kids as they approach the world of work.