“Never Follow Your Passion But Always Bring It With You”
“A former psychologist and guidance counselor is now sucking the shit out of people’s septic tanks full time,” Mike Rowe tells Tim Ferriss on The Tim Ferriss Show episode number 157 titled “The Importance of Being Dirty: Lessons from Mike Rowe.”
At first glance, the story of this former guidance counselor, now sewage-handler, evokes sympathy. But there is more to the story than that.
Host of the Emmy-nominated show Dirty Jobs, Rowe spent eight years interviewing people with the grimiest, most back-breaking or dangerous jobs imaginable, experiencing first-hand the work in their shoes.
He ruminates about the unique perspective this experience gave to him and the patterns he recognized that run counter to most of the scripture about buzzwords such as fulfillment and passion touted by “gurus.”
Rowe and Ferriss quip about platitudes on posters often found in conference rooms “that have pictures of guys in kayaks or rainbows — ” “Or eagles,” Ferriss chimes in. “Eagles soaring,” adds Rowe. “The thing that chapped my ass more than any of them was follow your passion.” Rowe began questioning guests on his show about passion and shares some important lessons he learned:
“Regarding passion, I began asking around. And I heard the same thing from everyone. The happiest people I met, the people who were most passionate about their work were people who looked around, watched where everyone was going, and simply went the opposite direction. That’s how Les Swanson from Wisconsin wound up with three honey wagons. A former psychologist and guidance counselor is now sucking the shit out of people’s septic tanks full time. He’s in his 60’s. He loves his work. He can work whenever he wants.”
Long-time listeners of the show may be reminded of a Mark Twain maxim favored by Ferriss: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
Being a disciple of the “Follow Your Passion” religion can be stressful — the stakes are high! If you pursue your dream or passion and fall short, it could be devastating. The story of Les Swanson, and many others like him, convinced Rowe that following your passion is a fool’s errand.
True, we hear of stories in the media of inspirational people who followed their passion and achieved greatness. We don’t often hear of those who pursued their passion and instead failed, which isn’t a bad thing in itself. Failure can be good. It means you at least tried something.
For those perhaps with children and tight budgets — or just anyone with a tight budget — there has to be a better way to lead a rewarding life without trudging through the mire of high risk involved with following your passion. Something you can start doing today.
Like many people, apprehension of your path in life and the implications of your decisions crash over you, like waves over a drunkard fallen in the sand, trying to recover his ground (a feeling certainly shared by this author).
Is this the right move for my career? Better yet, is this even the right career for my life? Should I choose money and security over fulfillment and passion? Where can I find answers?
For someone wrestling with this anxiety from before, during, and since college, only one thing has proven to be the true elixir: learning to manage the impressions that events and things make on the mind. Learning that perception is a skill and a muscle to exercise and grow.
These concepts can be gleaned from Stoic Philosophy. If there is one thing to which finding peace-of-mind amid stress can be attributed, it is philosophy.
Before you close this out and move on to cheap and quick distractions, know that it is not the philosophy portrayed in pop culture: high-brow intellectuals fervently and pointlessly contemplating mankind’s purpose in life or what it means to be human.
Philosophy, particularly Stoicism, is a practical guide for navigating through life’s valleys and peaks. It’s a manual for harmonious living — dealing with stress and anxiety, overcoming obstacles, getting up when you’re knocked down, building a bulletproof shell around you impervious to naysayers and haters. This is a small sample of the catharsis it can provide.
The following advice outlines the ingredients for a rewarding life and endured two millennia and was written by a man in a position of paramount power and influence: the philosopher-king of the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius. In his private wartime journal, a must-read now known as Meditations, he writes:
“If you do the job in a principled way with diligence, energy, and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside you undamaged, as if you might have to give it back at any moment — If you can embrace this without fear or expectation — can find fulfillment in what you’re doing now, as Nature intended, and in superhuman truthfulness (every word, every utterance) — then your life will be happy.”
In one sentence he defines a way to approach any task, or really anything in life, that will lead to happiness and fulfillment. I like to distill these abstract ideas into concrete terms such as being excited to wake up in the morning, satisfying curiosities, living in the present moment, being engaged in and by your work, nurturing relationships with loved ones, building new relationships and friendships, being grateful for what you have now.
Unpacking this approach, we can extract directives to guide decision-making.
“do the job in a principled way”
Approach your work according to your principles or values. Contemplating your values leads to decisions in consonance with your beliefs. What’s truly important to you.
You ask, “What even are my core values?” They can be difficult to clarify. It’s helpful to start by asking yourself questions.
Apprehension about your life’s trajectory and meaning is a disheartening state of mind. A master at helping others find purpose in life, Tony Robbins declares wisely that “suffering is an excessive focus on yourself.” To combat the inward focus, I’ve found it useful to remind myself of Tony’s piece of wisdom, then reframe my internal dialogue with a question posited by another wise man, Martin Luther King, Jr: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”
To consecrate his values and aid his decision-making, CEO and founder Jeff Bezos uses a “regret minimization framework.” He explained in an interview that, “If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, ‘What will I think at that time?’ it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. That’s the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.”
While embracing an attitude of service to others helps you escape an imprudent inward focus, looking back on life from the vantage point of being eighty-years-old cuts through the bullshit, the non-important, and non-consequential.
“with diligence, energy, and patience”
Diligence — as in never half-assing anything. Always doing your best. There’s a helpful little book called The Four Agreements, a great resource if you’re in the market for information on Mexican Shamans. More seriously, once past the fluff, it touches on profundity. One of the four agreements to make with yourself is to always do your best.
Your best will vary from moment to moment, day to day, and year to year. When you strive for your best in every situation, task, and relationship, you minimize psychological discomfort created by conflict between an undesirable outcome and knowing you could have done better. Even if you fell flat on your face, you can rest easy at home that night knowing that you did your best.
Energy — as in enthusiasm and vigor (call it passion if you like). If you’re introverted, this doesn’t mean you have to be bursting at the seams with excitement like Chris Traeger in Parks and Recreation. Just approach life’s tasks with conviction and full presence.
Patience — as in remaining motivated during trial and error. Adamantly accepting failure, learning what you can from it, and trying a better iteration of it or something completely different. Shifting your view of failure from a bad thing to a positive growing experience is an essential life-pursuit.
“if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside you undamaged, as if you might have to give it back at any moment — If you can embrace this without fear or expectation”
Be fully present and focused on one task at a time. And whatever that task is, whether joyous like planning your wedding or sorrowful like arranging a funeral, make the absolute best of any situation through presence and meaning. Contemplating daily your mortality, remembering that life at any moment can be snatched away, can help you make the best of the scarce time we have on earth.
Aurelius’s call-to-action about embracing the trials of life without expectation can be translated into another of the four agreements to make with yourself: don’t make assumptions.
Author of The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz believes “all the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally.” While his thoughts point toward assumptions as it relates to the interaction others, they can pivot to dealing with self-set expectations.
Murphy’s Law states that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Given the tremendous randomness of life and constant collision of all its moving parts, there are myriad outcomes to any situation. To expect the best out of every situation is to expect a baseball player to bat 1000%. The all time record-high is about one-third of that.
“I am prepared for the worst,” wrote Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of the UK twice over, “but hope for the best.” Perhaps hoping for the best is even overstepping. Pursue vigorously the best possible outcome, but also prepare for the worst, and leave expectations out of the picture.
“can find fulfillment in what you’re doing now, as Nature intended, and in superhuman truthfulness (every word, every utterance) — then your life will be happy.”
One thing Aurelius got wrong, I think, is that his method can help you find fulfillment. This approach toward anything in life will help you create fulfillment.
This may dishearten the artistically-inclined who crave making a living from their art. Derek Sivers, a musician, entrepreneur, author, and philosopher in his own right, has a helpful thought-framework for this dilemma.
In dissonance with the romanticized notion of pursuing your passion, and the deep joy attained by this pursuit evangelized by self-help “gurus” — who are rather projecting a problem for which they often conveniently sell the solution — his advice may be hard to stomach. It’s time for some tough love.
Sivers is asked consistently for advice by people who want to quit their well-paying jobs to become artists, and by artists struggling to make a living. He defines art as “anything you do for expression, even just blogging [thanks Derek!] or whatever.”
“For both of them, I prescribe the lifestyle of the happiest people I know:
Have a well-paying job
Seriously pursue your art for love, not money”
For anyone wrestling with potential future regret of an unpursued passion, this paradigm-shifting philosophy is just the right prescription. With this mindset, the pressure, imposed by the rampant guidance found on social media and elsewhere to meld together the pop-culture buzzword “passion” with your career, melts away.
Sivers believes this structure eliminates the expectation that your job should satisfy all emotional needs, and preserves your passion by preventing it getting tangled up with monetization.
“I’m fully expecting you to disagree with this advice. But I’ve met about a hundred people a week for the last 18 years, many of them full-time musicians, many of them not, but the happiest people I know are the ones that have this balance. So there’s my blunt template advice, given only because people keep asking.
Don’t try to make your job your whole life.
Don’t try to make your art your sole income.
Let each be what it is, and put in the extra effort to balance the two, for a rewarding life.”
From his time with Les Swanson, the psychologist/guidance-counselor-turned-sewage-worker, Mike Rowe seems to have solidified his own prescription relating to passion:
“I’m having this conversation with Les Swanson, and he’s saying this is not my wish fulfillment, except for the fact that I love what I do, and I’m very good at it. And my question to him was well, which one of those came first. And he said, ‘Neither. What came first was the fact that nobody was doing this.’
‘What came second was my own, hardheaded commitment to be very good at it. And then, I did the thing that is the hardest thing to do. And that is figure out how to love something that you didn’t think you did.’ So always follow your passion, for me, became never follow your passion but always bring it with you.”
Sure, we all have interests about which we are passionate, but we also have passion inside of us, whether latent or burning furiously. It’s up to us to rouse that passion and bring it with us wherever we may go.
This article was originally published at thoughtmedley.com.
Couple this article with how Jerry Seinfeld uses Stoic Philosophy in his daily life, or the Stoic Philosophies present in the music of the Grateful Dead.
(This article contains Amazon Affiliate links to show you where to find the invaluable resources mentioned within.)
