‘Follow Your Passion’ Needs to Go Out of Fashion
Why it’s bad advice and what’s the alternative
When I entered college, my professor said to the class, “Find what you love and you will never have to work a single day in your life.” After several years of quitting multiple jobs in search of what I love, I learned that he was saying a bunch of bullshit.
A new Stanford research study of 470 people has found that following your passion is likely to make you less successful. “Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.”
While bad advice in good packaging can feel nice for a while, in the long term it can do you more harm than good. Following one’s passion is akin to committing career suicide. It offers an unrealistic view of the world where you are:
A) assumed to have passion in the first place.
B) told that if you love what you do, you will automatically and magically find success.
In his book ‘So Good They can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love’, Cal Newport dispels the passion hypothesis as the path to success and instead focuses on skill development as a better alternative.
“The passion hypothesis, which says that the key to loving your work is to match a job to a pre-existing passion, is bad advice. There’s little evidence that most people have preexisting passions waiting to be discovered, and believing that there’s a magical right job lurking out there can often lead to chronic unhappiness and confusion when the reality of the working world fails to match this dream.” — Cal Newport
When you have no skills or work ethic but are told to just follow your passion, that’s a recipe for disaster. Deciding work by so-called passion limits your prospects and ignores the need for a paycheck.
What results is a search for an elusive fantasy that ignores the reality of the world.
5 Steps To Go From Passion to Actual Work
1. From a “Passion Mindset” to a “Craftsman Mindset”
When you have a passionate mindset, you don’t blame yourself for your inability to work, you blame your circumstances. Instead of working hard and building your “career capital”, you expect the world to reward you for your passion without doing anything.
On the other hand, when you have a craftsmen mindset, your sole focus is on your craft. You know that improving your skills is the only way to achieve results in real life. You don’t wait for the world to offer you anything. Instead, you create value and give back to the world by putting in the effort.
The passion mindset asks, “What can the world offer me?”
The craftsman mindset asks, “What can I offer the world?”
Passion is talk, craft is work.
Passion is entitlement, craft is merit.
“The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions … there’s something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is “just right,” and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it — and the process won’t be easy.”
2. How to Implement a Craftsman Mindset
Implementing the craftsmen mindset requires a technique Newport calls Deliberate Practice.
It refers to a conscious intention to produce your best possible work. It is the secret to skill improvement because it focuses on producing high-quality work backed by a deliberate effort.
“Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and determination. That is what makes it ‘deliberate’.”
3. Overcoming the Mental Discomfort of Working
When you do something new and difficult, your mind tells you to quit and go back to your comfort level. This is called a “mental strain”. But to give in to this mental hurdle is the biggest reason for procrastination.
The discomfort and frustration of going through the “mental strain” are so much that it’s much easier to delay the task. It is also the biggest hurdle in applying deliberate practice.
This is how Newport tackles his own mental strain.
To combat this resistance, I deployed two types of structure. The first type was time structure: “I am going to work on this for one hour,” I would tell myself. “I don’t care if I faint from the effort, or make no progress, for the next hour this is my whole world.” But of course I wouldn’t faint and eventually I would make progress. It took, on average, ten minutes for the waves of resistance to die down. Those ten minutes were always difficult, but knowing that my efforts had a time limit helped ensure that the difficulty was manageable.”
4. Instant Feedback for Improving Skills
Just slaving away endlessly does not guarantee improvement. It is important to consciously learn as well. Newport calls this “Instant Feedback”.
He mentions a study of two groups of chess players who used different paths to improve their game. The first group played tournament style matches against each other while the second group studied tactics and applied them.
The conclusion? The ones who studied strategies were able to raise their skill level and beat those who simply played against each other. This was because the second group was able to receive instant feedback by learning new strategies and implementing them in their games.
“Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five
times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity.Furthermore, in serious study, feedback is immediate: be it from looking up the answer to a chess problem in a book or, as is more typically the case for serious players, receiving immediate feedback from an expert coach.”
5. The Importance of Patience
Overcoming the mental strain and receiving instant feedback ignores perhaps the most important thing: ‘patience’. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is not possible without the patience and the willingness to put in the deliberate effort for a long time. It means accepting that results are secondary to skills improvement.
Patience is “less about paying attention to your main pursuit and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you. The final step for applying deliberate practice to your working life is to adopt this style of diligence.”
Summary:
- Forget the passion mindset and adopt a craftsman mindset.
- Apply deliberate practice to improve your career capital.
- Overcome the mental strain using a time structure.
- Use Instant Feedback to gauge your progress level.
- Have patience. The quality of the work is the end. Rewards are accidental.
