Must-reads
- Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life by Ken Robinson
- Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live by Martha N. Beck
- The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine
Work is an activity that takes up about 40 hours out of your 168 hours each week. Being such a large part of your life, it intuitively makes sense that you’ll hear people tell you to find your passion. In reality, the common advice of ‘doing what you love’ is oversimplified.
It is easier to hold on to a job you like, so it makes sense to find a job you like. Work is a big part of your life, so you will feel more content with your life while having a likeable job. The goal of the ‘follow your dreams’ advice is to make you live a happy life, not necessarily work happily. There is more to your life than work. As long as you can be happy overall, not every aspect of your life has to be perfect. It is hard to find a 10/10 job, 10/10 family devotion and 10/10 personal project at the same time1. You can also be happy overall with a 7/10 job while being a good father or sportsman.
Passion projects can also serve their purpose as a nice hobby or side hustle. Maybe you can find a good enough job that enables you to live a stable life, while you happily play songs at weddings in an amateur band. If the stable job pays well enough, you can decide to work less hours and devote more time to that passion project of yours.
Passion can be grown by becoming more skilled and understanding the complexity of the situation better. As a child, you can have an ambition of becoming a firefighter, astronaut or musician, as you have come into contact with those vocations and can even so slightly understand the appeal. No kid understands what it is like to be an accountant, neurobiologist or concrete worker, while each of them has their own intricacies. You’ll learn to love the problems by becoming more familiar with them, and you grow a passion by becoming more skilled in solving these specialised problems.
It is hard to predict which specific skills will become your passion, other than generic tendencies like wanting to keep on learning, making an impact, using either physical or mental labour, leading a team or working autonomously. Knowing where you stand in these generic tendencies is your first goal. You can focus on specific skills after.
Typical passion careers include being a musician, author or movie star. Such devotions have a winner-takes-it-all distribution where a lot of people barely scrape by and a handful will make a lot of money during their career. These craftsmen have only gotten the job by being stubborn enough to gamble against the odds. Someone has to do it, but are you that stubborn person?
Following your passion is a privilege for those able to afford it, but not a right. You will have to face the reality of the world’s economy. When there is a demand for certain skills, those who have the skills are favoured. In the best case, you have a passion for needed skills and you can have a happy and easy career. Otherwise you’re up for a choice: do you go for the easy, but less fun career, or do you struggle to follow your dreams. Working on a passion career is made way easier by having your finances in order. You don’t have the luxury of starting a slow career with your family’s mouths to feed and no money in the bank.
Another trick is by combining skill sets, which is usually a valuable thing to do. One of these skills should be in economic demand, such as programming, and the other can be a passion of yours, such as being a trainer. There are a lot of programmers and a lot of trainers, but not a lot of trainers who can program or programmers who can train. Realising the worth of my professional technical skills as a programmer and my personal project skills of being a sports trainer, I combine the two into becoming a technical skills trainer for programmers. As a programmer, you have to be best of class to make an impact. As a trainer, you have to be top notch to find cool gigs. By combining skill sets, you can be mediocre in both and still make a noticeable impact. If you are better than that in just one of the skills, you’ll be even more valuable.
Whatever job you choose to do, you should be happy at your job. This can be done by doing work you totally love, or by doing work that you like just enough and living a life you love next to it.
- Power to you if you are able to combine multiple 10/10 aspects of life. Usually, to consider an aspect 10/10 you need some commitment of time to enjoy the activity and to become proficient at it. Either that, or you have to be truly happy at low thresholds. In one case, burnout lies around the corner, and for the other you have to be a zen master. Both seem difficult to me. ↩︎