The passion trap

You've probably been told your whole life to follow your passion, and I'm here to tell you that might be some of the worst advice anyone's ever given you.

Hear me out, because this one tends to get people defensive.

Following your passion sounds beautiful in theory, but in practice it falls apart pretty quickly, because what you're passionate about and what the world actually needs are often two very different things. And the world, unfortunately, is the thing that pays you.

Maybe you're really good at piano. That's amazing, genuinely. But you are most likely not going to be the next Lang Lang, and the world doesn't really have a lot of room for the second best piano player in your town. So if you're staking your whole future on being a concert pianist, you're staking your future on a really small probability, and that's a hard way to live.

The reframe I'd offer is this. Instead of asking what you're passionate about, ask what skills your passion has actually taught you, and where else those skills might be useful.

Because the same part of you that makes you a really good pianist might also, for some reason, make you a really good systems thinker, which might make you a really good IT person, which is a job that actually exists and actually pays. The discipline you built sitting at a piano for three hours a day is real, and it transfers, and it's worth more in the marketplace than the piano playing itself probably is.

Same goes for almost anything. You're a creative person? Cool. There are a hundred ways to apply creativity to roles that pay well, and most of them aren't called "creative jobs."

Now, this is where I have to say something that might sting a bit.

Don't tell yourself you're a creative person and then go pursue a media or communications degree, because those roles are notoriously hard to make a stable living in, especially early on. There are exceptions, of course. Maybe you'll be one of them. But you have to be really honest with yourself about the odds, and about your fallback.

Which actually brings up the bigger point I want to make in this chapter.

Your job is not supposed to be the thing that gives your life meaning.

I know that sounds harsh in a culture that keeps telling you to find your purpose at work, but think about it for a second. If your job is the thing that gives your life meaning, then a bad week at work becomes a crisis of identity, and that's not a way to live.

Your job is supposed to be something that lets you provide for the people you love, that you don't hate getting up for, and that gives you space outside of work to actually live. That's it. That's the bar. A boring, stable job that you can come home from is genuinely one of the best things you can ask for.

And ironically, if you're someone who's deeply passionate about something, doing that thing for work is often what kills it. The artist who has to draw what the client wants every day stops loving drawing. The musician who has to play the wedding circuit to pay rent stops loving music. There's a real chance that the thing you love most in this world is something you should protect from your career, not build it around.

This isn't me trying to crush anyone's dreams. It's me trying to get you to set up the most boring, stable, secure worst case scenario possible, because that's the foundation that actually frees you up to chase your dreams in the margins.

Pursue what pays. Protect what you love.

—

Reflect: What's a skill or strength your passion has actually given you, that might be useful somewhere completely different from where you'd normally apply it?