Top 5 Wrong Reasons to Follow Your Passion
In June 2005, Steve Jobs delivered a globally well-known speech to Stanford’s graduating class. The statement he shared that’s remarkable and has reached across generations was:
“You’ve got to find what you love…. the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.”
I believe that people who love their jobs and careers would also agree that passion plays a really important role in keeping you going, helping you appreciate the process and bringing positive energy in difficult times. However, is passion the be-all and end-all?
In the past decade or so, there are countless messages that motivate Generation Y to follow their passion, to be courageous, and simply have faith that once you are brave enough to follow your passion, the money would soon follow.
As someone who supports the importance of happiness in advancing a career, I must firmly state that such message can be dangerously misleading. It’s true that if you are able to do what you love every single day, it would bring joy in life.
However if any of these following reasons being your ultimate driver to quit your job and follow your passion instead, you might want to think further:
1. Because you just want to be your own boss
Following passion should never be defined as ultimately being an entrepreneur so that you don’t need to follow other people’s order.
First of all, doing what you’re passionate about can also be done inside a corporate system and being led and/or supervised by another person. Meaning: facing a difficult boss, trapped in a bad company culture, or the bad feeling of being misaligned with company’s vision could still be a possible variable in a miserable and unhappy career life, even when you have followed your passion.
Second, even if your passion was related to running your own business and becoming an entrepreneur, you would always have customers, and their satisfaction really matters for your business to grow. In a way, you still have a boss who takes a form and shape as your customer.
By the way, I really think that even when we work for someone, we can still be the boss for ourselves. It is even really crucial that we know how to lead ourselves in any kind of circumstances, whether as a superordinate or subordinate. It is really a matter of attitude and behavior rather than a position.
So if you don’t like to be led by other people, rather than jumping to a conclusion that you need to quit a corporate job and follow your passion (if that’s your ultimate reason to be released from a corporate life) you probably want to first try evaluating your general interpersonal skill in professional working scene.
2. So you don’t feel like “working” even for a minute in your life
Some people are driven to make a career out of their passion so that they could enjoy it so much to the extent that they wouldn’t feel like working at all. Some people also say that they want to have a freedom of time and space so they can do less (even up to only 4 hours a week) and have more time to enjoy life.
I happen to know a bunch of amazing people who work on something they are passionately doing. They do love their job, but none of them has ever said that they feel like not working. Exhaustion and frustration are indeed existed in their dictionary, just like any other normal human being. For those of them who work independently, either as freelancer, artist, writer, or entrepreneur, they even admit that they work way harder and longer than 9–5 corporate employees. As one of my entrepreneur friend’s favorite quote says:
“Entrepreneurs: people who work 80 hour weeks to avoid working 40 hour weeks.”
Furthermore, the moment you finally start your own venture — unless you are inherited a fortune from a very wealthy family — you would realize that paying other people to do other jobs that you don’t like doing would not be on the first list on your investment priority. There would be endless, inevitable other responsibilities that might not be your cup of tea but you would need to end up doing. You might need to do it long enough just to realize how much you hate it and decide to hire a person to do that, or you would just adapt and don’t mind doing it, or eventually you might start liking it, which leads us to the next point.
3. Because you think you wouldn’t be happy doing something else
I personally think our generation has been fed with too much talent show that is packaged beautifully as a so-called reality show. While it’s also part of my guilty pleasure to enjoy it from time to time, we definitely need to have a clarity of mind in dividing what’s really real and what’s has been spiced up, which eventually would create and evolve a new reality in the society. One statement we’ve been hearing thousands of times in any talent competition is,
“I couldn’t imagine doing something else besides singing (or dancing, or cooking, or modeling)”.
In today’s world, we have been made to believe that having a passion is like finding a treasure or one true soulmate in a fairy tale. It feels magical, we see unicorn jumping on a rainbow kinda feeling when we finally discover that one ultimate passion — that once we finally find it, we couldn’t be happy if we do something else besides doing our passion.
The truth is, just like a lot of people saying they think they don’t have any passion, I strongly believe that people can have more than one passion. In fact, those who say they don’t know what they’re truly passionate about might be in the dilemma because they actually have a lot of things they enjoy doing, it’s just nothing stands out among the others.
Besides the fact that a person can have multiple passions, I also believe that passion may continue to evolve. I just realized a new passion lately. I have never imagined, in any moment in my life, that I would become a writer. I did like to write short notes occasionally, do some journaling, or write secret poems, but I only did those short writings for random fun and to express myself.
I never had the courage or intention to take professional writing seriously. Especially writing one whole book! If I told my 10-year-old self that she would write a book in the future, she might hide and lock herself in her bedroom and think that I was crazy. I’ve only tried to write frequently these past few months, mostly because I tried to discover a method that enables me to facilitate more and more people without being bound by geographical limitations.
I had no idea in the beginning how I would feel about writing, and I was a bit scared of the commitment I had to make. But surprisingly, I really love it! I feel a thrill when I open my laptop to continue writing. I experience a great joy whenever I realize that I am able to describe and deliver my thoughts and what I believe in through words for people who need them. And all those things just appeared a few months ago. So there, passion does evolve.
4. To finally have a work-life balance for the rest of your life
“Being balance” doesn’t have any correlation with “following your passion”. They don’t have any cause-effect relationship thus, those two phrases should never be forced to be coexisted in one sentence. A person who hates their job could be in a good balance in managing their time for sports, entertainments, and spend time with family, while also always meeting their deadlines .
Someone who does a career out of their passion, even if they had a freedom of time and space to work, might not have time to manage different aspects of their life better. They tend to be overworked sometimes, or to work less some other times, which would make them feel guilty so that they would work too much the next day, then they would have no time to do something else.
If you’re an independent location professional, being 24/7 in your own bedroom wouldn’t also shout the word balance. I believe being balance is a matter of prioritization and being committed to your plan. It is about consciously choosing balance, it is a commitment to make and a skill that should be trained, continuously, regardless whether you like or dislike your job, whether you work for someone else or you work for yourself.
5. Because you think you need to simply do what you love doing in order to have a happy life
Rather than chasing happiness through doing what you love, do something that would make you feel fulfilled instead.
Even when you do things you love, there are still a lot of difficult things in life you would face that make you unhappy. Losing a family member, rejection, failure, broken heart, sickness, those are some realities in life that is able to hit you to the ground. Even by doing the activity you’re passionately doing, there will come the time— after the honeymoon period is over — when your passion would also feel like a responsibility, like any other job would do.
There is also always a huge risk of failure and crazy dynamic endless road in starting over a career path. Here’s the secret. Simply doing what you like to do for a living wouldn’t give you a strong reason to get up once again when things are freakishly difficult (oh yeah, those toxic days would eventually come, no matter what).
Besides being crazily stubborn, what would help to bring you back on track is not the joy you find when you do the activity you love. As much as I find joy and pleasure in writing, there are days when my bed and blanket are way more pleasurable than opening my laptop and start typing.
There are also tons of different circumstances that try to bring me down from time to time. What brings me back to my table, every single day, is understanding the reason why I want to do what I do, not necessarily the particular activity that I do. It is with the clarity of reason, or some might say it is in the clarity of purpose.
Some people might have tons of different passions, some people might even say that they have none. In any case, I strongly believe that passion does not exist to be blindly followed. Recognizing passion can be a sign that you’re able to do something great in life, and that’s awesome!
Passion plays the role of sparking the fun. Passion gives an additional joy in the process of delivering a particular purpose. In a difficult and endless career journey, it supports you by nudging you back to the field even knowing that unexpected challenges are waiting for you.
It’s like playing your favorite sports or taking a dancing class in a gym — you know that exercising is important to keep you healthy and fit, and you would enjoy the process when you love doing the activities. It’s also like eating your favorite nutritious foods during meal times, because you know that eating on time and regularly is crucial for your health, and you would enjoy the process of managing your health when you love the taste of your meal.
Passion can be a channel or an important tool in delivering a purpose. However, just having passion is not enough to get you to success and fulfilment. It needs to be supported by other elements, such as talents, continuous and endless hard work, the right network, or even the right timing. Most importantly, follow your passion for the right reason, for having the clarity of reason why you want to do what you do.
Thank you for reading :) If you enjoyed this piece, please consider hitting that recommend heart shape thing and feel free to share and spread the ideas.
