Explore your passions, but stay away from callings
Callings are a corporate fairy tale
Should you find a career doing what you’re passionate about? Or just get a decent-paying job and fulfill your passions after 5 pm? Before I share my point of view, you should know that I was once so “passionate” about my work that I developed stress-related medical issues and went to the emergency room. With that in mind, here’s what I think you should do:
You should try to find work you’re passionate about.
Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to sacrifice your health. I believe that there is a right way to pursue your passions that enriches your life. Being passionate about your work has several potential advantages over having a job that you don’t care about:
- You spend most of your day doing things you enjoy
- You get a sense of fulfillment or purpose from what you do
- You have a good chance of meeting other people at your job that hold the same values as you do
- You’re more likely to be good and get better at a job that you’re passionate about
- You can still pursue your passions after work!
The dangers of pursuing passions
Pursuing your passions the “wrong” way can have harmful effects. People who are against mixing business and pleasure are usually afraid of these outcomes. Your passion might fade when you depend on it for income. You might get too emotionally tied to your job and get stressed out. Or your passion might not have good financial prospects now or growth opportunities in the future. These fears are reasonable; they can happen when you make one of these 3 mistakes in pursuing your passions. I have made all three of these mistakes at some point in my life, often at the same time.
- Failing to diversify your life
Picking passions is like picking stocks on Wall Street. No one knows what they’re doing, and listening to other people about what you should pick is somehow worse than picking blindly. Finding what you’re passionate about is a journey to learn more about yourself, and it’s a numbers game. Picking only one thing to focus on is almost always a bad idea.
When you don’t diversify, the risks of picking the wrong passion are similar to picking the wrong stock. If something isn’t going well with what you picked, the impact on your life is disproportionately bad. If you’ve dedicated most of your mental and physical energy to one thing, setbacks and bad days will feel awful, and over the long term, it’s like always being on an emotional rollercoaster. On the other hand, having more things in your life to balance it out gives you a sense of perspective, and the resilience to ride out the bad times.
When you are exploring your passions, having the mindset that you’re always learning about yourself means that if something doesn’t work out, you still got something useful from that experiment and now you can choose to keep going or try something different. You could try applying your passion elsewhere, or look for a different one. It’s a much healthier place to be than if you only had one thing going for you, and you’ve spent so much time and energy on it that switching feels like a loss; a classic case of sunk cost.
2. Confusing your passion with your identity
This is the extreme part of the spectrum when it comes to pursuing your passions. It’s when you think some pursuit, purpose, goal, or cause is so important to you and that you are such an incredibly suitable person to pursue it, that it’s literally who you are. It’s the reason you’re here on this Earth… it’s your destiny. It’s not just a job, it’s a calling. It’s a lifestyle. I cannot over-emphasize how unhealthy this is. It borders on obsession. If your work ever becomes a slog, you may start to lose your passion and find yourself in an identity crisis. Making a mistake feels like you’ve failed the world, failed to achieve your purpose.
This varies depending on the culture you grew up in, but at least in the US there is an unhealthy glorification of the obsessive pursuit of a passion, and it starts early. Children are asked from a young age what they want to be: the single thing that will be their future career. Michelle Obama dropped this nugget of wisdom in her Memoir:
“It’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child… ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ As if growing up is finite. As if, at some point, you become something and that’s the end.”
It doesn’t stop with children. Students are told to pick a major in college that will set the course for the rest of their lives. Switching courses too often is seen in a negative light, and focused commitment is commended. Entrepreneurs with stories of unlikely victories through the single-minded pursuit of their goal are put on a pedestal while the millions who failed having used the same strategy are forgotten. No one knows the names and faces of the people who didn’t win the lottery, and people forget about the sometimes less-than-perfect family lives that those successful people cultivated by obsessing over their work.
Here’s my point: you can be passionate about something, but you are and should be more than your interests and your work. Give yourself some credit, you are more than one thing, and if you are just one thing it probably shouldn’t be your day job. That’s just a contractual agreement of services for money.
3. Letting others define your passion
The first two mistakes are about having the wrong mindset. This last mistake is allowing outside entities to manipulate you into having that mindset. Education and parenting aside, there is at least one other group telling you to find work that you should be obsessed about: the people hiring you to do the work. This can come in the form of advice from your boss, organizational pressures, and even marketing efforts on the hiring side.
Organizations love employees who go the extra mile and put in effort above and beyond what is expected at personal cost, without it costing the business extra for them to do so. They especially love it when employees do all of this in the face of hardships and discomfort that would make a typical employee quit. Through careful observation, organizations have noticed that the workers who do these things tend to be the ones who are super passionate about the job.
Take a look at what Forbes has to say on the subject:
“Those who experience their work as a calling are most likely to feel a deep alignment between their vocation and who they are as a person. They feel a personal and emotional connection to their work. They are enthusiastic, have a sense of purpose, and are willing to work harder and longer to make a contribution.”
What company wouldn’t want employees like this? To them, it’s a matter of maximizing the value of their workers. How do you do that? There are three major pieces of the equation they can try to influence:
- How much good output is produced by the worker
- How much it costs to pay for that worker
- How long the worker stays at the job producing that output
For example, companies might promise job security to keep people in the mindset that staying in one place means success, making it less likely that they will give up a stable source of income for the pursuit of something better.
This is why some organizations spout the narrative that their industry is a “calling” or a “lifestyle.” It pushes you into the mindset that you have a single, correct path in life to which you should dedicate yourself without considering anything else, and accept worse conditions than you would for another job. With one swoop, they are trying to get the best of all parts of the value equation: more output, lower cost, and longer time working.
Here is a real advertisement that popped up for me on Reddit:
Lifestyle! Passion! It’s not a job or a career, it’s who you are! Have you noticed that the jobs that get characterized as a calling are usually the ones that have at least one shitty requirement? Long hours, low pay, high personal cost, high danger. Nurses, academics, military, all do work that people say is so valuable to society, and doing the work requires a high level of commitment and sacrifice for mediocre monetary compensation at best. But people accept it with a smile and keep at it because they care.
And because it’s their destiny.
The organizations and individuals describing their job openings as callings are some of the same people who, when the pandemic hit, called front-line workers “heroes” but gave them next to nothing in return for being forced to work in an environment where the risk of death had risen dramatically.
See this “calling” language for what it is: a genuine and hopeful invitation to do more for less. I recommend you politely decline and determine your own value.
How to explore your passions in a healthy way
I said before that there is a “correct” way to pursue your passion. It’s not a specific strategy per se, more of a philosophy. Here are the key points:
- There’s no rush or endpoint to finding your passions: You don’t need to have an answer right away for what you’re passionate about, it’s a journey that doesn’t (have to) end. You can find passions long after you’re wrinkly. And just because you like one thing now doesn’t mean you will want to keep going with it forever.
- You are more than your passions: You are a person who cares about things and likes doing things. Those things don’t define you and they are not your destiny. What you dedicate your time and attention to is your choice, but don’t forget about the rest of the things in your life.
- There’s more than one way to do something purposeful: When it comes to a higher purpose, those things tend to be abstract ideas, like benevolence, faith, and ingenuity. There is rarely a single course of action that lets you fulfill those ideals. Let’s say you care about helping people. Sure, you could be a doctor and do that every day. but that’s not the only way you can help. You could work in R&D and never see patients but have your work help doctors provide better care. You could work at a soup kitchen and help the needy in your free time. You could become wealthy and start a charity. You could create entertaining videos on Youtube that lift people’s spirits when they need it most. YOU get to decide what you are passionate about, and YOU get to define your path.
