Trying to find my Passion

I read a statistic that scared the shit out of me when I was little:

70% of Americans hate their job

I recently found the statistic again, and it turns out I just remembered the provocative and misleading headline, but the actual statistic is not far off. ~70% of Americans are “disengaged” or “actively disengaged” at their jobs.

Since we work a majority of our awake hours, this means that 70 % of us are disengaged with a majority of our lives. This is scary.

Since that day, my biggest life goal has been to find a career that I am passionate about. I told myself: I don’t want to be unhappy my whole working life. I don’t want to just be waiting for retirement. I’m going to find a career that makes me jump out of bed each morning on Monday morning.

Here is my problem: I don’t know what I have a passion for. I have fallen in and out of love with a bunch of fields before.

I recently listened to some interviews with Atul Gawande, who I think has wonderfully combined all three of his passions into his own career. He is 1) a practicing surgeon, 2) a professor and public health researcher at Harvard, and 3) best-selling author. Here is why he fell in love with each of these three fields (all paraphrased):

Medicine

“You’re deeply inside people’s lives. And you feel the complexity of how all these forces in the world. Medicine became a vantage point for me to think about human experiences.”

Journalism

“I can ask people to do things that may seem very odd. I can ask a patient to visit them at home and other surgeons. I don’t normally have the permission to ask people these sensitive questions.”

Public Health Research

“ Along the way, I was trying to figure out how I could feed the part of me that cared about how we make a difference in people’s lives on a large scale,… The do-er in me couldn’t just write and think about these issues. I wanted to test them and drive them.”

All Dr. Gawande’s fields contribute and feed off of one another.

• Medicine provides him with a practical lens to be in the world and experience problems as an insider
• Journalism allows him to ask questions and puzzle over both small and systematic issues
• Public Health allows him to make large-scale changes to things he saw as a physician.

Dr. Gawande is probably not the best surgeon, the best journalist, or the best public health researcher. But, he is near the top of all these fields and he is undoubtedly the best surgeon-journalist-public health researcher.

It is not just Dr. Gawande, many successful people have become sucessful by combining disparate fields.

• Steve Jobs used his passion for design and simplicity and combined it with technology.
• Arnold Schwarzenger used his passion for bodybuilding to become a Hollywood star and then subsequently used his fame to become govornor of California.
• Eric Kim, a street photographer, has combined photography, with sociology, with education, with self-development.

Most of the people that I admire the most have used the skills they have learned in one field to put a unique perspective on a different field.

Prospectively, it is hard to figure out what I’m going to do. I have no idea how my interests will combine to make a career for myself in the future. Prospectively, I don’t think Dr. Gawande had any idea either, but it makes perfect sense for him. I think that it will all make sense for me too.

For me, I’m not sure how the pieces will end up falling together, but I’m going to keep following my interests and hope they take me somewhere. In the end, I think that the most important thing is constantly self-reflecting and make sure I don’t site of the ultimate goal.