11 Uncommon Career Tips That Are Better Than ‘Follow Your Passion’

Elaine C.
Curated Careers
Published in
7 min readMay 3, 2020

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Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

“We often tell our students, ‘The future is in your hands.’ But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to live in first.”

Ocean Vuong

We love an inspirational quote, a 5-step process to success, the stories and profiles of high-fliers who are living the career dream we aspire to. In truth, we’ve become career junkies. I’m not exactly sober when it comes to this myself. As a Career Educator, I devour this stuff by the bucket load. It’s part of my job to keep up to date with the latest research, but I know my students aren’t interested in data and statistics. They want human stories and motivational quips they can post on their Instagram.

There’s a lot to be learned from other’s stories and their inspiring sound bites, but I can’t help feeling we’re missing something. Having consumed more of this content than the average Joe, I have to confess there’s a lot of repetition and empty anecdotes without any real substance. The trouble with relying on everyone else to craft our career plans and stories for us is that we end up doing ourselves a massive disservice. When we try to emulate other people, we forget to add a…

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