Don't Follow Your Passion

“You’ve got to find what you love … the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.”

Thus spoke Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, to which Cal Newport replied, bollocks. Actually he replied '"follow your passion" is bad advice' and then wrote a book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You about why this is bad advice - not least because Jobs didn’t follow his own advice anyway, when he first got started - he just sort of tripped over his sandals into the computer industry and then got really good at it.

'Follow your passion' is bad advice, Newport argues, not just because the kind of passion that translates into a career is rarer than you might think, but because passion itself is dangerous: if you can’t find that job you were ‘meant to do’ then you set yourself up to be riddled with confusion and angst and never-ending job searches, and listen, do we need any more of these in our lives right now?

Luckily you don’t need to follow your passion to find work that you love; instead you need to leverage for traits like autonomy, control, and a sense of purpose or mission, all of which can be found in most jobs and careers.

(This is good news for those of us whose only original passions in life are eating pasta and yelling at drag queens on Drag Race. Seek is not advertising jobs that require these qualifications, I checked.)

But the traits of autonomy, control, and purpose that contribute to an enjoyable working life don’t come cheap, which is why we don’t all have them. They’re rare and valuable commodities, so you need to offer something rare and valuable in return. Newport calls this ‘career capital’, and says you acquire that by being so good they can’t ignore you (to quote Steve Martin) - and to be so good they can't ignore you, you need to put in deliberate effort and practice.

Which sounds like hard work, but, as Steve Martin points out, is much easier than going to cocktail parties.

I think this dovetails perfectly with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on Flow, by the way, which gives the whole thing a nice ring of construct validity - where Flow is that sense of satisfaction or even, dare we say, happiness you get from an activity, that can be found in any activity so long as it gives you an opportunity to immerse yourself, concentrate, and stretch your skills.

In other words, ‘working right trumps finding the right work’.

I loved and was inspired by Newport’s follow-up book Deep Work, which is a ‘how to’ for developing those rare and valuable skills, and this book is similarly both inspiring and practical  - ‘intensely pragmatic’, as Newport puts it. It’s not that the ideas in this book are new - in fact they’re exactly the sort of stuff your mother probably raised you on, if she grew up before the onset of the passion obsession - it’s that they’re common sense, but in a way that feels almost deliciously counter-cultural and like they just might work.

Obviously this has made me think about my own working life, in which studying a phd in linguistics signifies a return to my first true love - but while I do love linguistics, now, it's also the case that I didn't even know what it was before I started my undergrad. Let's be honest, my 'passion' for linguistics increased the more effort I put in. And while I still really enjoy doing this phd thing, it’s also liberating to think that I might be able to continue to enjoy it even when my enthusiasm waxes and wanes. Because inevitably, enthusiasm and passion and all those good feelings come and go - but what you get in postgrad study (whether because you built up enough ‘capital’ to earn it, or because no one’s paying you enough to want to dictate the terms and conditions otherwise), is enough autonomy and control and purpose to annihilate a small village, or to give you the first taste of what you really need to find work that you love.