Why Follow Your Passion Is Not Useful Advice

In Angela Duckworth's million-copy book "Grit," she writes, "I don't think most young people need encouragement to follow their passion. Most would do exactly that--in a heartbeat--if only they had a passion in the first place."

All my life I've adhered to one motto for all my decisions--follow my heart. The problem is, I often have year-long stretches in my life when I don't know what I want at all. There are just too many possibilities. I know a few things I don't want. For sure I'm not going to become an athlete or a musician or a cook, and I'm not particularly good at things that require physical labor such as gardening or looking after little kids, but among the many jobs that require thinking and analyzing and writing...I kind of think I have a knack for them all. So how to choose between engineering, or marketing, or project management, or administration? I am good at both math and writing--so what about that? How do I even narrow down and start exploring my options?

I started this blog because I realized that many, many, many people in this world suffer from not knowing what they want, and therefore feeling like they have no direction in life. Duckworth, a MacArthur Fellow and psychologist, defines "grit" as the combination of passion and perseverance, and in her book she even includes a test readers can take to evaluate their passion and perseverance scores. Most people, she writes, score higher in perseverance. Out of a scale of 5, I scored 3.2 for passion and 4.6 for perseverance. This is proof that we all can and are willing to work hard for the things we want--if only we knew what we want.

How prevalent is the problem of people not knowing what their passion is? In a 2014 poll, Gallup found that worldwide, only 13% of adults call themselves "engaged" at work. So you are definitely not alone if you don't have career direction.

Times have changed. It has gone out of fashion to follow the career path our parents defined for us or blindly sweat at a job we don't like for forty years until we can finally retire. If you are able to do that, I would almost congratulate you, because it seems to me that the pressure is higher than ever to live by YOLO (you only live once) and, of course, the dreaded "follow your passion" values. It may just be that we are all trying too hard to live by these values, to find that one thing we were born to do. Our expectations are just too high, so we are paralysed into not being able to playfully and leisurely explore our interests.

Duckworth makes the analogy of choosing a career path being like choosing a romantic partner, and I think it is exactly right. When you are in the dating market, people often offer advice such as "just relax," "love will find you when you least expect it," when all the while you are thinking, "but I want to be married by next year!" or "what if I never find the one I want to be together with for the rest of my life?" The anxiety is very real. And anxiety and unrealistic goals are exactly what we don't need when trying to find our career passion.

For some reason, I've always treated my romantic life and my career life very differently. When it comes to thinking about what I want to do for the rest of my life, I hold extremely idealistic to the point of romantic notions. My career cannot be purely about making money. I want my career to me meaningful, fulfilling, and encompassing all my interests and everything I am good at. On the other hand, when it comes to choosing a life partner, I've been a realist. Somehow in my early twenties, I already knew that a responsible, caring, and trustworthy husband is not necessarily the same as someone who gives you an adrenaline rush every day. I was also very honest with who I am, both in looks and personality, and the kind of people I attract, and I knew that if I was holding out for Jason Momoa to take notice of me, that just wasn't going to happen. If you're wondering, I am very happily married, but my point is that I think marriage worked out for me because I understood that there are a lot of people in this world who could potentially be my life partner, and I was completely satisfied with having found just one of those and spending the rest of my time working on how to make the relationship work. 

So, to conclude my first post, Follow Your Passion is only good advice if you know what your passion is, but most people don't. And the reason most of us can't find our career passion is because we think there is that one thing out there we were born to do, and the pressure to find that one thing is too high. I will continue to explore this topic in a multitude of ways in my subsequent posts.