The Perils of Following Your Career Passion

NICK SELBY: If you want to change the world, you can do that! If you want to build the Iron Man suit, you can do that! We can do that!

You know an inspiring commencement speech when you hear one. It’s electrifying. You feel so pumped up that you’re ready to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, climb El Capitan without any ropes, or build that Iron Man suit.

As a professor, I’ve heard quite a few graduation speeches. And I’ve noticed that speakers don’t just show passion. They talk about it. A lot. Here's Steve Jobs from 2005, on the importance of having passion in your career:

STEVE JOBS: The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

And Jodie Foster in 2006:

JODIE FOSTER: How lucky to find yourself with the option of filling your life with your passions.

John Legend in 2014:

JOHN LEGEND: Pursue this life of love with passion.

And Lin-Manuel Miranda in 2016, talking about what it’s like to search for your career passion:

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA: The stories you are about to live are the ones you will be telling your children, and grandchildren, and therapists. They are the temp gigs and internships before you find your passion.

But when a graduation speaker says “follow your passion,” I find myself wondering: is it actually good advice? And is everyone using the same speechwriter? I can’t answer that question, but I’m convinced that the answer to the first one is no. When it comes to your career, “follow your passion” can be a recipe for misery.

BARACK OBAMA: I want you to have passion, but you have to have a strategy.

I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with TED. I’m an organizational psychologist. I study how to work not suck. In this show, I’m inviting myself inside the minds of some truly unusual people, because they’ve mastered something I wish everyone knew about work.

Today: career callings, and why following your passion could be some of the worst advice you ever get.

Thanks to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for sponsoring this episode.

(This is the transcript of season 2 episode 4, with sources linked. If you’re thinking about gathering a podcast club—it’s like a book club, only for podcasts—you can find discussion questions at the bottom.)

Alright, I understand why “follow your passion” is such popular career advice. Chances are you spend the majority of your waking hours at work. It would be a tragedy to devote so much time to something you hate. But the reality is that many people don’t know what they love to do—and even if you do, most passions don’t translate neatly into careers. When I got to college, my two strongest passions were diving and magic… not clear that those jobs would pay the bills. For many people around the world, passion at work is a luxury, while income is a necessity.

And there’s also the question of talent. Not everyone can be anything. Don’t just take it from me. Take it from the great psychologist, Chris Rock, in his hilarious Netflix special Tamborine.

CHRIS ROCK: “This lady comes up and goes, “I want you children to know you can be anything you wanna be” …I’m like, “Lady, why are you lying to these children?” Maybe four of them could be anything they wanna be. But the other 2,000 better learn how to weld… Tell the kids the truth… You can be anything you’re good at, as long as they’re hiring.”

The thing about passions is that we often settle on them when we’re young. The danger is getting locked in. Most of the time, our early passions are not the best guide to our later careers.

MARIA: There are so many things about the future and about yourself that you don't understand—and you don't know what future you is going to be like.

Maria Konnikova knows this well. The seeds for her career were planted pretty early, tracing back to when she was a toddler in Moscow.

MARIA: God, I hate saying it, but behind the Iron Curtain—this was before the Berlin Wall fell. And my parents were able to leave the Soviet Union because we were Jewish. So we did what a lot of people did: apply for political asylum to the United States. And I think this is probably the only time in the history of the world where people would forge their passports sometimes to say that they were Jewish, because that was the only way you could leave Russia.

They moved to Boston shortly before Maria turned five. She had a lot to learn—and had to find a way to learn fast.

MARIA: I didn't speak English at all, just zero, and I vividly remember asking, “How do I write my name? What do I say when I go to school?” I was really nervous because I knew I wouldn't be able to communicate.

Since she couldn’t communicate verbally, Maria started paying attention to other clues.

MARIA: I just—I observed. I remember just trying to follow the girls who looked so nice and happy and popular. You know, even in kindergarten you can tell who the popular kids are.

ADAM: It sounds like you were a detective as a kindergartner.

MARIA: I think I had to be. I think that's a very good way of putting it. I have thought in the past that my fascination with language and with words comes from that early age.

That fascination quickly turned into a vivid career aspiration.

MARIA: Apparently I announced at dinner when I was five or six years old that I was going to be a writer when I grew up. So I knew very early on that that's what I wanted to do.

But you don’t know who future you is going to be. And as any writer knows, turning that passion into a career isn't always a straight path. After Maria finished college, she tried to figure out the next steps. She worked a number of jobs that had something to do with writing.

Like… copywriting.

MARIA: It had writer in the title.

Bartending.

MARIA: I did get a lot of good stories, but I would sleep through the day rather than writing.

A newsletter for men.

MARIA: I did not want to be writing about the hottest new bar for guys to bring their bros. It took me a long time and it took me many, many years before I started being able to make my living as a writer.

ADAM: What was the emotional roller coaster of that journey like?

MARIA: In the moment, it was miserable. I definitely remember just having these moments of complete desperation where I thought, “I can't go back to this job.” I felt like I was wasting time, like I was wasting my life.

I’m all for working in a career that’s a perfect fit for your passion. But hunting for that perfect fit can be a real source of agony. There’s evidence that searching for a calling leaves college students feeling indecisive, uncomfortable, and confused. You might be one of the fortunate few to quickly find a career outlet for your passion. The rest of us just flounder around feeling lost.

Maria finally ended up working as a TV producer for two years. Although she was toying with the idea of becoming a journalist, she started opening her mind to other interests. She kept coming back to psychology, which was her college major.

MARIA: I've always thought that psychology and writing just go hand in hand that the best psychologists in the world are writers and vice versa.

So she quit her job to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology.

MARIA: I really wanted to learn more about how the mind works and how people think.

When you set your sights on a passion, you sometimes get tunnel vision. You focus on that single direction, forgetting that you have multiple interests. Now, Maria wasn’t blindly following her passion for writing. She was pursuing a different interest, which would give her a new skill set—and some content expertise—for her writing.

MARIA: Just following your passion, I think, is pretty bad advice. If it was just “follow my passion,” I never would have gone to grad school, because it would've just been, you know, “let's just try this writing thing.”

In 2013, as she was finishing her doctorate, Maria published her first New Yorker article on psychology. Then she landed a role there as a contributing writer. Over the next few years, she kept expanding her peripheral vision. And in 2017, her career took a turn that she never would have anticipated. While researching a book on the psychology of chance, Maria stumbled onto the topic of poker. She decided to learn about the game as a metaphor for chance and control.

MARIA: I said, “I'm going to learn how to play poker.”

Going in, Maria knew almost nothing about poker.

MARIA: I thought it was just a game, and I couldn't really understand why anyone who was talented or smart would ever want to dedicate their life to it.

ADAM: Do you remember the first hand of poker you played?

MARIA: Yes, it was at a poker tournament. I really had no idea what I was doing. The first playable cards I had were king, jack, off-suit, and I was so excited to see two face cards that I just butchered the hand completely.

Maria made an investment in honing her skills. She started working with a coach, studying and playing poker up to 11 hours a day. She went out to Vegas, where her coach lived, and began playing in regular tournaments.

MARIA: I remember before every single tournament, even tiny tournaments, I was so nervous—my stomach was just doing all sorts of strange things, and I was acting a little bit like a fish out of water. I was wriggling and gasping for breath.

But then something strange happened.

MARIA: You know, my hands stopped shaking whenever I would get a certain type of hand, and I started being able to stack my chips properly.

Maria was actually becoming really good. She started winning—and winning big. One day she won a major international tournament, beating more than 200 pros and earning thousands of dollars.

REPORTER: Did you start poker from scratch a year ago?

MARIA: I did, and I'm really excited, because I just won almost $85,000. I've been studying my ass off!

MARIA: I still remember the moment that I won, it was a completely surreal thing, and that was a year after I started playing seriously. Now it's become one of my main passions—and it goes even beyond that. I'm one of poker’s most passionate advocates. I mean, I think everyone should learn to play poker. I think kids should be learning how to play poker, because I think you can teach them so much about decision making, about themselves, about self-control.

Maria’s experience highlights something about passion that most people get wrong. Passion is a consequence of effort, not just a cause. Take a recent study of entrepreneurs. When they weren’t excited about their startups but put time in anyway, they actually became more enthusiastic over the next week. Their passion grew as they made progress.

ANGELA: Follow your bliss. I think it's half-right and half-wrong.

That’s Angela Duckworth, a fellow psychologist at Penn. She’s best known for her research that put the concept of grit on the map. Angela defines grit as passion and perseverance toward a long-term goal.

ANGELA: It's one thing to have a work ethic, but to have all of that without the guiding passion is—it's really awful.

But she doesn’t think “follow your passion” is good career advice.

ANGELA: I like the passion part. There is no other way to describe the kind of voluntary obsession that people have in their careers other than passion. But I don't love the follow part, because it sounds like it's out there, and you just have to discover it—and if you don't feel like you have passion for your work, you missed it somehow, or you have to keep looking for it, as if it were a whole thing—and not something that gradually develops over time. That's actually the better verb: that you should develop your passion, not follow it.

Some of Angela’s colleagues have recently gathered evidence for that. When people tried to follow their passion, they were less likely to consider other areas of interest where passion could develop-- and less likely to anticipate difficulties. And when they did run into obstacles pursuing a passion, they were more likely to lose interest and give up.

ANGELA: When young adults have the idea that passions are discovered whole, they're like, you just have to poke around for a while and get to it. They are much more likely to get easily discouraged when they try something like reading a difficult passage on a on a topic that was initially interesting—very quickly that interest falls off if you have that mindset.

So, the problem is, the advice to “follow your passion” reflects a fixed mindset: it assumes that your interests are stable. So if you don’t immediately enjoy a field or a task, the writing is on the wall: this must not be your passion. But that’s a mistake. You don’t want to quit the moment you don’t like a job, because passion can grow over time.

ANGELA: For so many people, you know, the first year on the job is not a great year, and it would be very easy to get discouraged and think, “Oh I thought medicine was for me,” or, you know, law or marketing or whatever, “but I guess not.”

So Angela has a rule: you don’t quit on a bad day.

ANGELA: You should not quit things when you're in that acute period of pain and disappointment and self-doubt. I always recommend quitting things on good days. If you come in and it's a nice Thursday morning, and you know everything's gone reasonably well and you still want to quit, well, there is maybe something going on.

ADAM: So Angela, it’s interesting that we talk about career passion and loving our work. That almost makes it sound romantic.

ANGELA: I think the reason why the romantic metaphor makes sense is that it's like marriage. I think you have to date a lot. For most of us, you know, we had to sample widely. That's generally what's found when you look at people who develop interests over their life, but yeah, I think there is eventually a commitment that is like a marriage—and it's as satisfying as a marriage, and it grows like a marriage.

ADAM: Wait, do you think, then, you should date lots of jobs or careers before you pick one?

ANGELA: I do. I do believe in dating different careers, but I do think that if you're 60 and you're still dating, you know, waiting to get married, then you do want to question whether whatever algorithm is in your head about whether the dating is leading to something or not, you might have mis-calibrated.

Career passion is rarely love at first sight. It’s hard to enjoy something when you’re not good at it. For Maria Konnikova, her passion for poker was the product of learning and eventually mastering a skill.

MARIA: I enjoyed it because I felt like I was improving at it, and I could see tangible signs of progress.

ADAM:  So it sounds like, at least in the case of poker, you didn't follow your passion. You followed your curiosity.

MARIA: Absolutely. That's exactly right. You sometimes don't know what your passion is. I had no idea it'd be playing poker right now.

Which means that when you’re considering career paths, you shouldn’t cling to your old ideas of what your passion is. Don’t pursue the job that your past self thought would make you happiest. Follow your curiosity into the job where you think you’ll learn the most, where you can gain mastery over useful skills and build your passion over time.

MARIA: I think my best advice is to just be open-minded rather than narrowly focused and thinking, “This is the way my life has to go. This is what I have to do.”

Maria is still a psychology writer—she’s currently taking a break from poker to write the book about chance that started her on this path in the first place. Developing her passion for the game of poker paid off... in more ways than one.

MARIA: I'm still doing something poker-related, about an hour to two hours a day, just so that I stay fresh.

ADAM: Is it your main source of income now?

MARIA: As of now, my main source of income is poker, yes.

In her first 14 months of playing, Maria won over $200,000.

If you foreclose on one passion too early, you can miss out on a lot. But you have to start somewhere. What are the best strategies for planning your career? More on that, after the break.

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In the fall of 2017, a junior in my class at Wharton stopped by office hours for career advice. When I asked her what avenues she was considering, she pulled out a piece of paper. It looked like a world map, if the different continents were connected in a flow chart. It was her 20-year career plan.

I knew what I had to do. I invited a speaker to class who convinced her to throw away that career plan.

TIM: I'm a writer—a blogger, which is an awful word—but I write the blog Wait But Why. 

Tim Urban has over half a million subscribers. He told my students he was in the middle of writing a post about how to pick a career, which grew out of his reflections on his own winding career path.

TIM: I came out of college and I was like, “I’m going to go write movie scores in LA,” and my grandmother vomited. She was like, “You’ll get your law degree, and then you can go write your stupid movie scores.”

When Tim finished the post on careers, I shared it in my monthly newsletter, Granted. It was the most popular link of the entire year—by a long shot. The post captured why career choice is so hard. With the help of some entertaining stick figure drawings, Tim created a framework that explains why our elders often encourage us to make career plans that aren’t right for us.

TIM: Timothy, when are you gonna apply to law school?

As wise as older generations can be, Tim realized that their career plans for us are… not always on target.

TIM: So we're wired to really listen to elders and to listen to conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom used to be wise. If you were told not to eat a certain mushroom, don't eat the mushroom! Someone learned that the hard way. Now today the world is changing so fast that people become wise for a world that's no longer there.

In a stable world, it made sense to figure out your career goal and then map the steps to achieve it. That’s what my students often try to do. Experts call it the plan-and-implement strategy.

TIM: You know, when my dad was a kid, you pick a career and you go into basically a 40-year tunnel, and you come out for retirement.

But today, careers are rarely that linear.

TIM: You're not picking a tunnel anymore. Careers are really fluid and the world's changing quickly.

So instead of plan-and-implement, we might be better off with a different approach: it’s called test-and-learn.

Think of yourself a little like a scientist running experiments on your career: you have a hypothesis that a job might be a good learning opportunity, and you’re going to try it out to see if you’re right or wrong. One recent study looked at people who had career catapults that launched them onto the fast track to become CEOs or top executives in major companies. They didn’t plan those moves in advance. They just kept their eyes open for interesting challenges. For some, it was taking a step sideways or even backward to build something from scratch. For others, it was inheriting a big mess and proving they could clean it up. And for many, it was taking a big leap outside their comfort zones.

TIM: It doesn’t have to be perfect. A lot of times you get surprised by something you learn when you're there, and it leads to something you never expected.

Once you develop a passion, you still need to be careful about expecting your career to fulfill it. Career expectations start forming when we’re kids. Adults are always asking us, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

From an early age, Emma Lock knew her answer.

EMMA: You ask most kids, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and they say, you know, “a pilot” or “a princess.” I wanted to be a flamingo.

We sent a producer to meet Emma in her natural habitat: the zoo.

PRODUCER: It's a cold day for the zoo, isn't it?

EMMA: It is a cold day for the zoo.

PRODUCER: What do you like most about coming to the zoo?

EMMA: I like seeing people's reactions to the animals—really just seeing people and their delight. So, we’re looking at the sea lion exhibit right now. He’s blowing bubbles at me!

If you walk around with her, you can hear how delighted she is to teach you about the animals there.

EMMA: Something that a lot of people don’t realize with goats, is they are fantastic climbers!

And naturally, they are called Madagascar hissing cockroaches.

In the wild, many sloths will turn green.

When we start to look away he will vocalize, [chirp] there we go! Perfect. Right on cue.

That is a gorgeous millipede.

Emma’s career passion started taking shape early. Her first job with animals was when she was 10. She volunteered in a pet shop in exchange for supplies for her own animals. She had a lot of responsibility there.

EMMA: The person who actually I worked for, they had a bit of a gambling problem and they left me at the age of 10 to run the whole store for them. So I was basically being a shop manager.

Shortly after that, she volunteered with a veterinarian, but quickly realized that wasn’t the right career for her. 

EMMA: I don't want to deal with tendons and putting thermometers in animals' rectums. That's just not really my thing.

Since she especially loved exotic animals, relatives and career counselors encouraged her to become a zookeeper.

EMMA: Every time I would be in a room with adults, it was always, “You'd absolutely make a wonderful zookeeper!” So I suppose from very young, I was kind of set up with this expectation that that was my calling.

So, when she was a teenager, Emma started implementing that plan. She applied to a job at a zoo in London, with some romantic ideas of what it would be like.

EMMA: As a child, when you think of the word zookeeper, you imagine someone with, you know, a wonderful set of keys on their belt, feeding the lions and playing with the elephants.

Two long years later, she got the call. They wanted her to start as a temporary zookeeper, on a track to becoming permanent.

EMMA: So naturally I jumped at it.

The pay was low, but she was excited to work with the 50 or so animals there. Finally, she had a job where she could be around animals all day. And she loved interacting with them.

EMMA: Hands down, my favorites were the donkeys. And one of the donkeys that I worked with, she'd love to steal my keys whenever I was picking her hooves and run off with my keys.

But jobs are collections of different tasks. And emma discovered that her passions didn’t extend to many of the tasks.

EMMA: The reality was, England is notoriously bleak. And when you have to work outdoors in all weather, sometimes it's just not the most fun job—especially when you're covered in donkey manure and it's raining, it can really smell.

There were other challenges. Some people would bring unwanted pets to the zoo and just leave them there.

EMMA: I've lost count of how many times I found dogs dumped at the zoo. Someone had dumped Guinea pigs as well, and rabbits.

Plus the constant hassles of dealing with the public.

EMMA: There's always going to be someone who finds a way to stick their keys into the lemur enclosure.

And Emma was unprepared for another disappointment: the job can be incredibly lonely. There were only two zookeepers: Emma and her manager—who wasn’t exactly a people-person.

EMMA: Sadly, this other person was the kind of animal person who is only an animal person. They did not want to socialize with people at all. This person would often just hide away in one of the sheds in one of the aviaries for most of the day. So most of the time, I would end up singing to myself or the animals and finding a lot of comfort in them. But really it could be very lonely at times.

A pair of my colleagues actually did a big study of zookeepers. The more passionate zookeepers were, the more willing they were to make sacrifices in their jobs—like putting up with poor working conditions and being underpaid with few benefits. Zookeepers who saw their work as their calling were more inclined to give up their free time, unpaid, to care for a sick animal. In other words: they were more vulnerable to being exploited by management. This was true for Emma, who even suffered a physical ailment from the job.

EMMA: I actually developed a very severe hay allergy, and every single day was a real struggle to just breathe at work, literally breathe. But because I loved the animals so much, I stayed.

Expecting to love your work is a really high bar. Take a study of college seniors. The ones who were looking for the ideal job felt more negative emotions throughout the job search and ended up less happy with the job they ultimately got.

The higher your expectations, the more disappointed you are by everything you don’t enjoy about a job. When you’re aiming for nirvana, there’s a bigger gap between what you want and what you get. You’re always evaluating, never experiencing. You’re left wondering whether there’s something better, so you end up comparing the job you have to what might have been, which leaves you with regret. Chasing happiness can chase it away.

Because of her high hopes, Emma was hit especially hard by the parts of the job she didn’t love. Which were quite a few.

EMMA: I suppose the amount of time that I spent on the jobs I actually really liked, it would be less than 10 percent.

Besides, most entry-level jobs aren’t designed to be fun. So, recruiters often try to paint a rosy picture of the job to entice you. Extensive research shows it works—but then it leaves you less productive and more likely to quit. You want to go in with a realistic job preview: an honest portrait of the work, warts and all. Yeah, you might be a little less excited to start—but the data show you’re more likely to perform well and stick around.

Emma didn’t get that realistic preview. And finally, she’d had enough. The weather, grunt work and isolation got to her. She decided to leave.

EMMA: Although zookeeping at the time I felt that it was my dream job, it wasn't the job that was best suited to me given my personality and my talents.

Often we’re so enamored with the ideal of a job that we don’t pay enough attention to what it involves day to day. Once Emma took the time to understand the realities of each role, she realized there was one aspect of zookeeping that she could turn into a job she would enjoy.

EMMA: I loved being able to interact with the children, interact with the adults, and teach them something new and exciting and unexpected about the animals. That was a wonderful part of the job. That was fantastic. I loved that.

Today Emma gives public talks, online.

EMMA: I'm better known as Emzotic, and I am an online animal educator.

On YouTube, she posts educational videos with pythons, lizards, chinchillas, hawks and more.

EMMA: Hey guys, it’s Em. Today I’m going to be sharing with you my snails and the story behind one snail in particular, called Shrek.

Her channel has more than 30 million views. She found a job that involves animals—her passion—but where the day-to-day work on a computer is about as far as you can get from having to keep visitors out of the lemur cage.

EMMA: I really feel like I’ve arrived at my own personal paradise job.

Not everyone is going to find a personal paradise at work. Some colleagues and i have found that many people have unanswered callings—passions that they never got to pursue in their careers. Sometimes they’re perfectly content to do them as hobbies on the side. In other cases, they find small ways to incorporate those passions into their jobs. Like a flight attendant who turns boring announcements into a comedy routine. A priest or rabbi who brings a guitar to a sermon. The professor who uses magic tricks to get a point across in the classroom.

So when you’re thinking about your career, the best place to start is not to follow your passion. As is so often the case, a better place to start is to follow some advice from Oprah.

OPRAH: Your job is not always going to fulfill you… and the number one lesson I could offer you where your work is concerned is this: Become so skilled, so vigilant, so flat-out fantastic at what you do that your talent cannot be dismissed.

WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Dan O’Donnell, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Angela Cheng, and Janet Lee. This episode was produced by Jessica Glazer. We had production help from Scott Gurian. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton Brown. Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Media.

Special thanks to our sponsors: JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bonobos, Accenture, and Hilton.

For their research, appreciation to Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues on the joy of having a calling, Ryan Duffy and colleagues on the confusion of searching for a calling, Michael Gielnik and colleagues on how effort leads to passion, Paul O’Keefe, Carol Dweck, and Greg Walton on how passions are developed rather than discovered, Herminia Ibarra on plan-and-implement vs. test-and-learn, Elena Botelho and colleagues on career catapults, Stuart Bunderson and Jeff Thompson on the double-edged sword of having a calling for zookeeping, Barry Schwartz, Sheena Iyengar, and colleagues on how looking for the best can make us unhappy, Iris Mauss and colleagues on how chasing happiness can chase it away, Jean Phillips on realistic job previews, Justin Berg and Victoria Johnson on unanswered callings, and Nicole Stephens and colleagues on closing the achievement gap for first-generation college students. And gratitude to Roadtrip Nation for their input and Nick Selby for the Georgia Tech convocation speech about the Iron Man suit.

Next time, on WorkLife: Building a workplace without any jerks-- and dealing with the ones who sneak in.

SHEILA: Am I an asshole by training? Yes, yes I am.

EMMA: Now we’ve got a beautiful rooster in front of us right here. What’s your name? Oh, I must’ve insulted him… in rooster.

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. What passions have you developed over time that you didn’t originally know you had?

2. Do you have a career plan? Should you scrap it?

3. For the next steps in your career, what curiosities might you consider following? What are the roles where you think you could learn the most?

4. Have you ever tried quitting on a good day rather than a bad one? What was it like?

5. How do you know what the right time is to leave?

6. What’s the worst career advice you’ve ever received? What conventional wisdom about careers do you think is wrong?

7. Whose career path do you admire most, and why?

8. When you start a new job, how can you make sure you go in with realistic expectations?

9. When you break your job down into different tasks, which ones do you enjoy most and least? Are there adjustments you can make based on that?

10. Do you have any unanswered callings? How have you incorporated them into your job or your leisure time?