Don't Follow Your Passion, Develop It
What I watched: “Follow Your Passion is Terrible Advice. Here's Why.” by Ali Abdaal.
Find your passion. Follow your passion and the money will follow. Success comes from finding your passion. You’ve seen these types of statements. They usually come from some variation of self-help or career guru ready to tell you how to succeed. They’re mostly wrong.
I’ve never found my passion, and I’m entirely fine with that. Instead, I’ve developed my passions over time. I’ve discovered them.
Being passionate about something is great. I’m passionate about lots of things. Books. Writing. Friendships. Community work. Helping others. Organizing projects. Public speaking. So many things. Do I have one passion? No. Do I think most people have one passion? No.
I believe the logical fallacy that underpins the find your passion myth is the unfounded contention that we are somehow born with a default preferred interest or skill set. That just doesn’t sync with the reality I’ve experienced.
Here’s a good example. One day many years ago when I was working at my former enterprise software technology job a coworker and I were looking out from my office onto the sea of cubicles and offices that comprised our department. This was back when we went into an office to work (in recent years everyone mostly worked from home).
We were discussing college degrees for some reason. Between us we knew everyone in the office rather well and knew their education backgrounds. Of the approximately 50 people in our department at the time, we couldn’t identify a single person who had a college degree in computer science or related field. There were people with degrees in marketing, French literature, general management, English, and so on. No degrees in computer science. And in a few cases like me, they had no college degree at all.
Most of these workers were not particularly young as you find in much of the tech workforce. They skewed a bit older which makes them a good example of people who found computer tech as their employment field later in life. They got degrees and pursued all sorts of jobs prior to joining our company. Were all of them just meandering through their employment history until they found their “passion?” Of course not.
Passions (note the plural) develop as we experience life, are exposed to new information and subject areas, and explore what we do and don’t like. They manifest from the sum total of our life up to the present time. That also means that a few years from now they can change too.
Which brings me to the video by Ali Abdaal referenced in this post. I’ve followed Abdaal’s channel for a while and have consistently found his opinions and commentary to be balanced and fact-based. Well worth watching his episodes.
Following your passion is really bad advice. There's this classic thing of you do what you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life. Follow your passion. All that kind of stuff. But it's not really true. It's not really the way that you find meaningful work that you actually enjoy.
If I start commenting on the entirety of the video, this post is going to be too long. I’m trying to abide by some of the feedback I’ve received to keep my posts a bit shorter. So, I’ll let you watch the video but will summarize the four key points that Abdaal gleaned from some of the reading he’s done and how those have applied to his own life.
The first is don’t follow your passion. I know. This sounds counterintuitive after so many books, articles, videos, and commencement speeches touting the advice of finding your passion to succeed in life. Well, they’re wrong. At least they’re wrong in their approach.
Even people who spew such advice have rarely found their passion. Instead, they developed their passion(s) or stumbled on them accidentally. We should navigate through life always in exploration mode. By exploring, experimenting, taking chances, and yes, failing (often), eventually we develop the passions that lead to personal or professional success and fulfillment.
The journey to our passions and satisfaction isn’t a linear trajectory. It’s a winding road with lots of forks taking us in often unexpected directions that help us discover more about ourselves and what we like.
Also, when we get really good at something, it can become our passion even if it wasn’t when we began exploring that something. If you had said to me when I was a professional dancer in my youth that I’d someday be working in upper management at a Fortune 100 software company, I would have said you were crazy. It never even crossed my mind at the time. It would be many years in the future that I happened upon a temporary job that let me learn about computers and I got really good at working with them.
It wasn’t a pre-existing passion that somehow blossomed into a deep interest in computers. It was, quite frankly, nothing more than dumb luck coupled with some intense self-study when presented with the opportunity.
Get really good at something and you’ll find a career that fits that knowledge and skill set. Typically, you won’t get really good at something unless there’s at least a modicum of interest in it in the first place. So the order is (1) decide if you have some interest in something, (2) get good at that something, and (3) maybe you’ll find something about which you’re passionate, or at least enjoy.
Related to this is the warning that sometimes making something you’re passionate about your job can backfire. There is a reason many musicians also paint and a high preponderance of Nobel Prize winners excelled in the arts or other pursuits not related to their employment field. Doing your passion day in and day out can become a grind. Sometimes your passions are best left to experiencing the pure joy of them without attaching a monetary value.
What we’re passionate about doesn’t necessarily translate into a reliable career. That’s just not how life always works.
The second point Abdaal makes is to develop a craftsman mindset. In a Forbes article, 7 Steps To Developing Career Capital -- And Achieving Success, Laura Shin explains that author Cal Newport, who to the best of my knowledge first created the career capital concept, said “Career capital are the skills you have that are both rare and valuable and that can be used as leverage in defining your career.” Developing career capital is a necessary component of developing a successful career. Newport contends that a successful career is one that is marked by creativity, impact and control, and autonomy. The more of each of those things are part of your career, the more successful you will be.
My last corporate job fit those parameters, at least enough for me to stick with it for many years. I worked with creatives and the work I did was creative. I felt like I was respected, listened to, and that what I did made a difference, and I didn’t have rigid set working hours and I mostly worked from home. And this was a job and field I had no intention of even applying for until a neighbor in my apartment building who worked there asked if I might be interested in applying since they had openings. I had just sold my book publishing company and wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. I thought I’d do that job for a year or two. The years progressed and I ended up staying for nearly 24 years. Why? Because it provided enough of the creativity, impact and control, and autonomy that make up a fulfilling career.
Another part of accumulating career capital is developing rare and valuable skills.
The more rare and valuable skills that you can develop, the more career capital you'll have. And then you can cash in that career capital and exchange it for a desirable job.
There's no point trying to get a desirable job if you have zero skills because it's just not going to happen because five zillion other people are trying to land that same desirable job. But if you have rare and valuable skills, you're way more likely to be able to get one of those jobs or to be able to craft that kind of job for yourself.
And so coming back to this craftsman mindset thing, the craftsman mindset is the pursuit of rare and valuable skills. And that's basically where you focus on becoming so good they can't ignore you.
And the craftsman mindset is the opposite to the passion mindset. The passion mindset is I want to follow my passion. The craftsman mindset is I want to become really frickin’ good. I want to develop rare and valuable skills. And then as a result, I will become passionate about the thing that I'm doing by default, and I'll also be able to land myself a desirable job.
Here I’d like to note that although the video focus on careers, you can apply a lot of the same advice to anything you do in life whether it’s for your career or simply something else you want to pursue in life.
Abdaal explains Newport’s idea of two types of employment markets, winner takes all and auction markets. This is a really important section of the video because I think many people worship and fantasize about winner takes all market careers rather than auction market careers. Yet, there is less likelihood one will reach a high level of career success in those winner takes all markets. But I’ll let you watch the video to hear more about that.
Abdaal is also honest that timing, luck, and being in the right place at the right time impact your success with something too.
Another important point Abdaal makes it that successful careers often come about because one has an assortment of knowledge domains and skill sets that synergize with whatever career you’re pursuing. Some skills, let’s say playing video games, aren’t likely to support one’s career except in a few rare instances. However, other skills, such as software coding, design, writing, public speaking, statistical analysis, or understanding artificial intelligence, are much more likely to synergize with a wide range of careers and jobs.
This aligns nicely with a trend human resources professionals are increasingly mentioning in articles and books about finding good jobs. Since so much of the modern workplace requires a set of skills and information specific to that job and must be learned in real time once hired, companies are looking for people with a broad range of skills, many of them soft skills not as easy to be trained into, that make it more likely they’ll succeed.
This is why I’m a fan of a broad-based education and the development of varied skills. You never know what combination of them will contribute to getting a job you love.
The third point Abdaal highlights is to cash in your career capital for control.
Now, the point here… is that one of the if not the biggest determinant of whether you're going to enjoy your career or enjoy your job is the amount of autonomy or the amount of control you have in that job. When you don't have any autonomy, when you're told what to do and how to do it and when to do it, and you have to show up at a certain time, and you have to be there at the desk, generally when you're very junior in a job like junior doctors, for example, you basically have zero autonomy, and therefore it's really hard for that job to be particularly fun. But as you become more senior in any kind of job, as you develop career capital, you can then cash in that career capital for autonomy, for control.
I dislike being controlled. I dislike being micromanaged. I dislike rigid schedules. I dislike not being able to generate some of my own work as opposed to always being told what to work on. And so on. In short, I like, indeed crave, autonomy.
Based on what I've read, there appears to be a consensus among many social psychologists that humans have three primary psychological needs, often called self-determination theory. This model for achieving happiness (fulfillment) was devised by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan and has been elaborated upon and refined by many scholars and researchers from around the world. The self-determination theory proposes that every human being needs three things – autonomy, competence and relatedness – in order to achieve optimal happiness.
So, autonomy is not only a good barometer by which to judge if a job is a good one for you, it’s also a necessary component of overall happiness. I’ll suggest that competence correlates to becoming good at something whether that’s a job or some other pursuit. Gain competence and you’ll find your passions more easily. Relatedness means meaningful interactions with people. We need to feel connected to, bonded with, and cared for by other people. The degree to which we satisfy this need is a thoroughly validated predictor of personal well-being whether in a career, job, or life generally.
It can be tough to ask for the autonomy you need. It’s more difficult when you’re new to something. If it’s an entry-level job, you’re not going to have much leverage when requesting autonomy. Once you have more experience, more knowledge, more skill, your ability to get more autonomy is much greater.
A good contemporary example of requesting autonomy is the growing trend of remote work, working from home. Some jobs might hire you right away into a fully remote position, but often you’ll need to prove yourself before being able to request an accommodation such a working remotely or flexible work hours. Autonomy benefits you, not necessarily the company or organization. There will often be built-in resistance to giving you autonomy. But it’s worth proceeding with a strategy for getting more autonomy in your work or anything you do if you’re going to be happiest. We might want to think that autonomy is a basic human right, but it’s not, at least not in the job marketplace. You usually have to earn it or get lucky with a savvy and progressive employer.
The final point Abdaal makes, referencing Cal Newport again, is to find a mission. This is about finding purpose and meaning in what you do.
If you want a particularly interesting mission for your career, then you get it by becoming really good at the thing first, and then a mission or a niche or whatever will slowly emerge over time. I'm not 100% sure I fully agree with this, but I think the sentiment is probably directionally very reasonable – the idea that you become really good at the thing, develop career capital, cash in that career capital for control, and then you can worry about the question of meaning and fulfillment and stuff a little bit further down the line.
Abdaal concludes by suggesting to young people just exiting their education and starting out in the work arena that finding meaning and purpose may take time. They’ll have relatively few practical skills and little real-world work experience. It’s difficult for them to find a job right out of the gate that has meaning. Jobs typically become meaningful only once you get really good at something. Then what’s meaningful can come into sharper focus.
Phew. Earlier in this post I mentioned I was taking my readers’ feedback to heart and writing shorter. I appear to have failed with this one, but I hope you found it interesting. I’ll work on the brevity (I even wrote about that).
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