Don't Follow Your Passion
It’s not how you create a lasting career – Issue #49
How often have you heard that you should follow your passion? Over the past 20+ years of my career, I’ve listened to so many people say that they would be happier if they could follow their hearts and chase their dreams. Unfortunately, it’s the go-to advice from people who are minimally trained in life coaching, and even for well-intentioned friends and family.
Miserable at work?
– You should be following your passion instead.
Confused about what to do with your college degree?
– Just follow your passion.
Just went through a layoff?
– Great! Now you can follow your passion.
“Following your passion” has also become popular advice in books on self-improvement, entrepreneurship, and life transformation over the past few decades.
I understand why.
It is a beautiful fantasy to see yourself making good money by merely pursuing something that is already a personal passion. Who wouldn’t want to get paid to do something that they love?
It is so seductive, and it sounds so easy. Right?
It’s risky advice
There’s a reason that I don’t like to use the word “passion” with my career clients. Turning your passion into a profession — or a business — is a risky proposition.
First, having a passion for something doesn’t necessarily mean that you can translate that into a financial return. Passion and willpower alone are not enough to drive real, lasting success.
Second, it’s easier than one might think to kill your passion for something once you try to monetize it. Dealing with the day-to-day issues isn’t as sexy as following your passion sounds.
Making your passion your career changes everything. If you’re lucky, sometimes that works out. But, more often than not, forcing your passion into a 9-to-5 job kills your love for it.
Career success doesn’t come that easy
Several years ago, I made a recruiting trip back to Rice University in Houston, Texas. That’s where I went to graduate school and received my Ph.D. in Psychology. We spent the afternoon with some of the grad students who were interested in Human Factors and Human-Computer Interaction.
We talked about how we had applied our degrees to get jobs in the Tech industry in Silicon Valley, and worked our way up into leadership positions. Now, we were back to share our advice and talk with them about internships and entry-level design positions.
Some of the students approached us at the end to talk more about the types of jobs they wanted. They were interested in following their passion for psychology and technology and wanted the fast path to success that should come with that.
One said, “So, since we’ll have our Masters degrees, or maybe even a Ph.D., we’d probably start out as Directors there, right?”
I think we stood there, blinking silently for a couple of seconds. Then, we started laughing. We couldn’t help it.
We had just explained how we had worked for over ten years to get to where we were, even with advanced degrees. Yet, somehow, these students assumed that they could package up their passion and degrees, and slide right into career success.
“Follow your passion” misleads so many people to think that it somehow flips a switch, and success lies just around the corner. All it takes is a new way of looking at yourself and the world.
I wish it were that easy. But, it takes years of hard work, dedication, and determination.
Passion isn’t enough to sustain you. Passion doesn’t necessarily map to demand. Passion alone isn’t the answer.
Business success doesn’t come that easy either
It’s also a significant risk to assume that you can make a living creating a business based on your passion. For one, you may love doing something, but you’re not that good at doing it.
There are several things that I love doing. But, if I honestly assess my talent and skill associated with that passion, I will be the first to admit that I’m not that great at it.
That’s fine. No one is telling you to abandon a passion just because you’re not a world-class performer, artist, athlete, etc. But don’t expect that you can make a business from it either.
Maybe you are great at doing it. But, if you take a look at the competitive landscape, so are hundreds or thousands of other people. Hollywood teems with talented actors and actresses who never get a break. Nashville is bursting with talented musicians who will never sell enough albums to quit their day jobs. You have to be quite extraordinary and unique even to be noticed for doing it.
I think about this every time I walk by yet another hand-carved wooden bear, display of ceramic mugs, or rack of familiar-looking necklaces and earrings at the local art festivals. The craftsmanship is just fine. The quality is great. But, nothing sets them apart from a similar booth 20 yards down the street.
Maybe you’re great at whatever your passion project is. Heck, perhaps it even is genuinely unique.
But, if no one needs it or wants it, you will not be able to make a living following that passion. I’m not saying that it is impossible. I’m saying that it isn’t simple or easy.
Unfortunately, there is one more thing that you may discover after everything is up and running successfully: You killed your passion.
Turning it into your full-time career can throw cold water on a fire that previously burned so hot that you thought it could never be extinguished.
How to kill your passion
I know. You may be thinking that I’m full of crap right now. People who fail to succeed with their passions didn’t know how to go about it the right way.
Maybe this is how they screwed up:
They turned their passion activity into a formulaic routine. For example, the comedian who has finally made it, but now must tell the same jokes night after night because that is what the audience demands.
They stopped experimenting or pushing the envelope. We’ve all witnessed music artists who are afraid to experiment or venture beyond their familiar style. They fear that they will lose the audience that made them successful, and they’ve witnessed that disaster befall other artists.
They took something they enjoyed doing a little every day, or a few times a week, and forced themselves to do it for 8 to 12 hours a day. Some people mistakenly label a hobby as a sincere and burning passion. They might love doing something, but not when it becomes what they have to do every single day, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
They assumed that they had to take on all operational tasks required for making a passion function in a business framework. For example, you may love creating pottery. But, once you turn that into a real business, you find that you are responsible for renting and maintaining a studio space to attract customers. You spend hours shuffling legal documents and insurance paperwork. You end up standing on your feet and answering questions all day long. You discover that you have to embrace sales or you’ll never make any money. You end up spending tons of time every week dealing with accounting, balancing the books, and many more tasks that you aren’t passionate about.
They took something they loved and made it the only way they could survive. Make that little passion responsible for paying your bills. Never let it fade or falter. Because, if it does, you’re back out on the street looking for a regular old job. It sounds like a great way to keep the love light burning, doesn’t it?
I speak from experience because I spent years exploring business models for various passions that I enjoy (e.g., coffee, music, art, fitness, outdoor recreation). I spun up multiple small businesses, built websites, had a few sales, and even made some money. Like many, I thought that transforming one of my passions into a full-time profession was the answer to career happiness.
But, in each case, I discovered that the joy started slipping away as the reality of the business occupied my days. I’ve finally accepted that I’ll probably never run a coffeehouse/wine bar/bookstore/live music venue.
So, I did a big reset and approached everything from a completely different perspective.
Flip it around
Now that I’ve been a colossal buzzkill and told you that I don’t believe that you can follow your passion let me tell you what does work. I used the following approach with my 2nd-act career, and it’s what I recommend for many of my clients.
Rather than trying to monetize one of my non-work passions, I decided to take the opposite approach. I took what I loved doing in my old 9–5 corporate exec job and turned that into a standalone business instead.
I was already doing it as part of my work as a leader. So, I was familiar with being paid to do it as an employee. But, I also ended up doing it for free for over ten years. Flipping the switch back to doing it as work for my own business just made it even better.
It sat at the beautiful intersection of:
I had deep experience doing it
I already knew that I enjoyed doing it
I was good at doing it (thanks to all of my work experience)
I already knew that it provided a meaningful benefit for people
I could make a living doing it full time
If you’re reading this, I would guess that you already have a 9-to-5 job. Or, you have had one in the past. If you’d already succeeded in creating a thriving independent business from your most profound passion, you probably wouldn’t be reading this.
I know that some people have been able to turn a personal passion into a business and make it work. But, it’s not as common as many business coaches or life coaches would lead you to believe.
I suggest that you explore flipping your current job skills and experience around to see how you can successfully apply them in a new way. It’s one of the fastest methods I’ve found to create a new business or career path.
Why? Because you base it on something you already have several years of experience doing. Also, you’ve probably developed deep expertise in doing it.
Spend some time finding that intersection of talent, joy, and demand, rather than risk destroying one of your favorite passions, going broke trying to make a passion work as a business, or hating your job because you tried to force a passion into profession.
A homework exercise
The following homework exercise is something I have my clients do during our engagement.
Create a list of everything you do in your current job. Don’t just focus on your high-level job description (e.g., “I’m an accountant, and I do accounting”). Break it down into a more detailed list of tasks and subtasks (e.g., creating plans for business owners, researching laws and regulations, filing tax returns). Some will be obvious, but some of the more exciting items will be non-obvious (e.g., working with business owners to discover more efficient tools and processes).
I’ll give you an example from my last corporate job as the VP of Consumer Products for Yahoo Search. My first business was a more direct transfer from typical tasks in my old job. I created a tech startup consultancy. I advised clients on product and design strategy, consulted on search and semantic technologies, explored new revenue models, helped mentor their teams, collaborated on investment presentations, made introductions to potential business partners, etc.
But, my latest business was born from a non-obvious part of my job, which I hadn’t considered turning into a business. But, now that I have, I love it!
One of my favorite activities in my previous corporate leadership roles was mentoring my team. I looked forward to our one-on-one meetings when we discussed their projects. I enjoyed helping them solve the issues they were facing. I loved talking about their long-term career goals.
I spent quite a bit of time mentoring past employees, as well. We’d chat about what was going on in their jobs, talking about potential career paths, and even do some interview prep work. I did this for over ten years until, one day, I finally woke up and realized that it could become my new career path.
It’s not a personal passion, like my love for coffee or music. However, I really do enjoy it, and I love helping good people escape bad situations. It is more fulfilling than I ever would have imagined.
We all have the opportunity to adjust and tune our careers to do more of the work we are great at doing and enjoy doing. It is possible to remove vulnerabilities so that you have more flexibility and freedom in your career path. Once you have that, you can reduce or eliminate the activities that you don’t enjoy doing.
If you create an intentional plan for your career, you can continue to enjoy your passions while you also enjoy greater fulfillment in your work that pays the bills!
Quick Tip
As you create your list of tasks and subtasks that you perform in your job, make a note of how you feel about each one.
Do you enjoy that task and want to do even more of it in your next role?
Or, is that task simply “ok”? You don’t love it, but you don’t mind doing it either. It’s just part of the job.
Or, you dislike performing that task. You’d like to avoid it entirely in your next job.
Take that a step further to understand what it is that you really enjoy or dislike about each task. Apply the “Five Whys” technique to get to the root of your feeling.
I’ve found this exercise to be useful when uncovering what it really is that someone loves about their work. For example:
“I love my work”
Why do you love your work?
“I love to design”
Why do you love to design?
“I get to create something new”
Why do you like creating something new?
“Because I get to make something cool that solves people’s problems”
Why do you want to solve people’s problems?
“Because I know that it makes their lives better”
Why do you want to make people’s lives better?
“I guess because it makes me feel like my work has meaning”
So, now this person understands that the act of designing won’t make them happy in and of itself. It’s about feeling like their work has meaning and makes people’s lives better. In fact, they might be happy with a job where they know that they can make people’s lives better in ways that don’t necessarily involve design.
This technique can also be applied to the tasks that you dislike. Use it to get to the bottom of why you hate those tasks. What is it about them that makes you not want to do them?
This process helps you identify new opportunities that maximize the tasks you enjoy the most, and eliminates the tasks you’d like to avoid.
Remote Jobs
Designer (with management experience) at Bandcamp. Bandcamp is seeking a talented designer to help them create new products and features, improve existing ones, and make their site and mobile apps “shining beacons of wonder for all who gaze upon them.” Wow. You can live in any part of the world, but your work schedule must overlap with GMT-7 at least four hours each day.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Mozilla. Mozilla wants you to help fight for an Internet that’s open and accessible to everyone. They fulfill that mission as both a corporation and a non-profit organization, blending technology with advocacy, policy, and education. Site Reliability Engineering treats operations as a software problem. In SRE, they flip between the fine-grained detail of application debugging to the big picture of capacity across a range of systems with a user population measured in hundreds of millions.
Intelligence Analyst, eCrime at CrowdStrike. They are on a mission to stop breaches. Their groundbreaking technology, services delivery, and intelligence gathering together with innovations in machine learning and behavioral-based detection, allow their customers to not only defend themselves but do so in a future-proof manner. CrowdStrike Intelligence, a core component of CrowdStrike, is seeking an Intelligence Analyst for its Global Threat Analysis Cell (GTAC) to focus on eCrime activity.