”Follow your passion’ is dangerous advice”
Why do some people end up loving what they do, while so many others fail at this goal?
Intro
Roadtrip Nation - archive which became a series on PBS about young people interviewing people about their jobs. there are perhaps no better single resource for diving into the reality of how people end up with compelling careers.
“passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there’s a magic “right” job waiting for them and that if they find it, they’ll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, such as chronic job-hopping and crippling self-doubt.”
In other words, our generation-spanning experiment with passion-centric career planning can be deemed a failure: The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.
The Science of Passion
Conclusion #1: Career Passions Are Rare
Conclusion #2: Passion Takes Time
Conclusion #3: Passion Is A Side Effect of Mastery
The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous. Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst
(Or, the Importance of Skill)
“Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Steve Martin