Leave your passions for the weekend

One of the worst pieces of advice I’ve ever heard is as simple as it is wrong.

“Follow your passion”.

It sounds good, doesn’t it? After all, we should all love what we do for a living. We should want nothing more than to walk into the office and be excited for the day, ready to pursue all those things that we love doing most.

The problem with this advice? It’s not realistic for the vast majority of us, and it could be hurting your career income potential.

For most of us, our passions don’t pay the bills. Not like our strengths. Our passions tend to be more creative. More high-level. Our strengths, on the other hand, are often more analytical. And while there are exceptions, most employers pay more for analytical-type jobs, not creative ones.

But, that’s not the only problem with the “follow your passion” advice.

Problem: It assumes that our passions never change.

If we set sail along a career trajectory based on our passions as young people, we will very likely find ourselves looking for a change later in life. The fact is for most of us, our passions change. Our life experiences alter our passions every year. And when that happens, we could find ourselves working a job that we no longer enjoy. Changing careers to reflect new passions is tough.

Problem: It makes it seem like jobs should be “fun”.

Granted, we should never work a job that we hate. That’s certainly no way to go through life or a career. But, let’s face it: jobs are not always fun. And, we should never expect our jobs to be fun, because when we do, we will often find ourselves disappointed when they become stressful or difficult.

Problem: Your passions are not your strengths.

Employers pay us a salary because we are good at doing something. If you’re good at math, maybe you’re an accountant. Or if you’re a great writer, perhaps you write technical manuals or edit manuscripts at publishers. The fact is we may not be good at our passions, even though we enjoy doing those things. That’s what makes them passions. We don’t have to be good at them. We just need to enjoy doing them.

Problem: You might not know your passion.

Most of us choose a career path when we’re young. We might go to college and get a degree and then we enter the workforce ready to start making some money. But, what happens when we don’t know what we are passionate about? This happens more than you probably realize. Very often, or passions are not necessarily readily apparent, especially at such a young age.

Problem: Full-time jobs destroy passions.

If we turn our passions into a full-time job, the not-so-nice elements of the job could destroy any passion that you once had for it. The performance reviews. The pointless meetings. Sitting in uncomfortable cubicles. There is a lot about jobs that most of us don’t like. The last thing we want to do is associate something that we enjoy doing with job-related activities that we don’t.

So, what’s better advice?

I encourage everybody to follow their strengths.

Our strengths are those things that we are naturally good at. And while these things can (and do) change over the course of a lifetime, they don’t tend to change quite as rapidly, or as fully, as our passions.

And, our strengths are probably easier to earn a living off of, too. For instance, some of us are gifted marketers. Others are skilled at writing complex math algoriths. You might be a natural “people person”, making you great at human resources. Employers all around the world are looking for exactly these types of strengths and are willing to pay for skilled labor (you) to do them.

And, following your strengths at the office means you can more fully embrace your passions without the need to turn them into a source of full-time income. In other words, we shouldn’t force our passions to pay the bills. Instead, we are free to pursue passions simply because we enjoy doing them.

Lastly, most of us have a good idea of what we’re good at even at a very young age. Some of us are great in math or science. Others, language or history.

School makes it easy to determine what areas we are naturally gifted in, and by following our strengths instead of our passions, we can more easily pursue a career path that will more likely jive well for us over the long term.

To add icing on the cake, we will probably earn more money over the course of a career by following our strengths instead of our passions, too.