Stop Following Your Passion
How a well-meaning piece of advice can lead us down an unhelpful path.
Before you get ready to fight me
(I mean, isn’t everyone’s favorite piece of career advice to follow your passion?), give me a moment. I’m not asking you to agree with me right away—I disagreed the first time I was challenged with these ideas—but simply hear me out. First, let’s talk about a couple words and what they mean.
Hot take: I think most of us (myself included) use the word “passion” when we actually mean “interest.” Try replacing passion and interest with the definitions and tell me if you still disagree: “I have a strong and barely controllable emotion for math” vs “My curiosity is excited by math.” I’ll venture to say if you have a strong and barely controllable emotion for something it’s probably more of an addiction, frankly, than a life-purpose. Now, I don’t think most people are deliberately using passion improperly, but I think we have gotten a bit lazy in how we describe what we care about and how we choose what to pursue.
Now that we’ve got definitions out of the way, let’s reevaluate the advice we often hear as young people: even if we replace “follow your passion” with “follow your interests,” I still think we’re going to miss the mark. Here’s why.
Our interests can be misleading.
One of my good friends is a field agronomist for a leading seed brand. She spends most of her days doing research about, presenting on, and answering questions regarding agronomic topics from corn diseases to best management practices to how to place the right hybrid on the right field. I assumed that folks who excel at that type of work are just out-of-their-minds excited about nerdy plant knowledge. Turns out, I assumed wrongly.
We were on the phone the other day and my agronomist friend told me she doesn’t care all that much about plants, soil types, and disease management. “Really?!” I was surprised. “No,” she said, “but I like helping people solve problems, and that’s why I love what I do.” Huh. Here I was, thinking you have to be crazy obsessed with a certain topic to do well in a job in that field, when all along that’s never been the point. Rather than chasing down the ever-elusive “dream job” by getting caught up in a certain interest of ours, I believe we are called to something deeper in our vocation. I believe we will find more fulfillment—and success—in our careers if we start pursuing meaning instead of blindly following our interests.
Here’s the thing: I’m not recommending you do a job you hate. I’m challenging you to dig deeper than the subject you’re interested in (history, art, livestock, graphic design) and find out the why behind it. Does history fascinate you because you want to help people learn from it and live better lives as a result? Do you appreciate art because it makes people think, or brings joy? Are livestock your thing because it’s a family legacy? Do you enjoy design because you have a knack for bringing order out of disorder? For each of these things, there may be a career we should pursue that is directly related to that subject; yet, I’m convinced there are even more career options that fulfill the same why but may not have anything to do with the original subject matter. Perhaps you think history is your calling, but you could also help people avoid repeating mistakes of the past through a career in psychology, or journalism, or business. Maybe livestock are the tangible family legacy, but the intangible is the work ethic: you can apply that to nearly any career by being the person who keeps going when everyone else quits.
Do you see where I’m going with this? It’s not that our interests aren’t important; it’s that there’s typically a “why” behind our love for a certain topic, and the “why” is deeper than the “what.” If you’re looking for more evidence to support the idea that pursuing meaning is better advice than following our interests, here are two more points:
Not everyone has a strong interest in a topic that can become a sustaining career.
I struggled for a long time to know what I wanted to do with my life--in fact, I still don’t actually know. At least, not in terms of what my interest is. Believe it or not, if I were to follow an interest, I don’t even know what it would be. The closest thing I’ve got is agriculture, and frankly, that’s not specific enough to help very much. See the second point for more on this. But, trying to “follow my passion--or interest” didn’t give me much clarity to help determine what specific career path I should follow.
Another hot take: the world doesn’t owe you a salary for doing something you love. I’m not suggesting you should choose a job based on the paycheck alone; what I would encourage you to do, however, is to evaluate the goal of your life, holistically, and determine what career(s) might make sense based on all of your goals. I love spending time in the gym, but very, very few people get paid simply for lifting a lot of weight. Since I have other life goals like traveling, raising a family, and supporting those less fortunate, I’m choosing to aim my career path in a direction that can support those goals, all the while maintaining lifting as a hobby.
If we limit ourselves by subject matter, we may be missing a whole world of new opportunities to make an impact.
Back to my point about my struggle to know what to do with my life… I’ve always known I’m interested in agriculture, but I kept waiting to find the specific thing within agriculture to pursue. Early on in my senior year of college, I still didn’t know what I was looking for in a full-time job. That’s when a few of my mentors stepped in and challenged my way of thinking: they helped me think about where I wanted to create meaning for others. I did know that I enjoyed being curious, helping make people’s lives easier, and building relationships.
Enter: a career in sales. The subject matter, or the products being sold, were pretty irrelevant. I made it my mission to find a role with a company where I could add value in all the above ways while learning an incredibly useful, and transferable, skill. I landed with an ag chemical company, which is not where I would have expected. In the past, chemistry was never really my thing, but here I am, eight months into a role which ultimately comes down to molecules, and I genuinely love what I do. I’ve learned this job is a lot less about being fired up about acetochlor (although I’ve realized some of this chemistry stuff can actually be pretty fascinating) and a lot more about showing up and caring about my customers. If I had shut down the idea of working for a chemical manufacturer because I didn’t think of myself as a chemistry person, I would have missed out on a deeply meaningful start to my career. The same could be true for you.
Okay, I think I’m done with the hot takes. Now, what do we do with these ideas?
1) If you’re deciding what to study in college, think beyond subject matter and think about what you can do with the subject matter you choose to study.
I’m not saying if you love history you shouldn’t necessarily study history, but I am suggesting you think about what one might do with a career in history and decide if that’s still what you want to study. I’m also not saying to study the most broad thing you can find: in fact, I chose agribusiness because it was broad, and if I could go back, I would study something more technical like agronomy or finance. I don’t necessarily want to be an agronomist or a financial expert, but those are both areas relevant to the broader work I hope to do.
2) If you’re feeling stuck in your career path, open your mind to other ways to pursue meaning.
If you’ve always been the “data guy,” or the “social media gal,” you may start to believe that’s all you can ever be. If you want to become known for something else, or just try something new, start thinking about the deeper why behind the subject. Start to ask for projects that let you try out a new application for your skill, or pursue hobbies that allow you to expand. You may ask friends or coworkers what they see in you, as often we have blind spots about our own strengths.
Closing thoughts.
First off, thanks for sticking with me. Part of my purpose in sharing thoughts with y’all is to bring light to ideas which are unpopular or uncommon, because we won’t live the life we’ve dreamed of by listening to the same ideas as everyone else. Secondly, a lot of these concepts are related to earlier posts about purpose, clarity, and focus. I’m learning that most things in life aren’t as set-in-stone as we think: our purpose isn’t the same thing as our job, our interests don’t define us, and most things really aren’t that deep. What is deep is how we treat the people around us, how we find meaning in life, and from where (or Whom) we derive our value. My prayer is for each of us to grow more in peace, in love, and in meaning, regardless of our interests and what we’ve been told about them.
Journal Prompt of the Week
What’s the interest you’ve been trying to follow? What’s the why behind it?