Should You Follow Your Passion?

Eventually, everyone has to confront the question of: “What should I do for a living?”

It’s expected that people would struggle with this when they’re young–say, right after leaving school or during their first job–but even those who are well into a ten-year career can be at a loss for an answer.

If we spend eight hours a day working, then that amounts to 80,000 hours for the rest of our lives. That’s also equivalent to at least one-third of our day, with another one-third occupied by sleep. What we do at work, then, also has a huge impact on our happiness and wellbeing.

Option 1: Go with what you love  

One school of thought says, “Follow your passion”–and this is quite radical, considering that it has only been recently in history that we’ve conceived of work as something more than paying the bills.

The most typical statement of this is that you’ll be better off doing what makes you happy rather than plodding away at a soul-sucking job that you dislike.

The main obstacle to this path is money, but with our increasingly flexible economy, people are becoming free to create their own jobs centered around their interests (just look at the diverse topics of bloggers out there).

It’s a protest against the 9-to-5 grind where employees are treated like machines, and it also addresses the fear of being crushed by regret on your deathbed because you never pursued your own dreams.

Option 2: Be pragmatic 

On the other hand, a backlash is also emerging: Google “why follow your passion” and most of the links that show up will be about not following it. The argument from this side is that following your passion is inspiring, but ultimately, it’s only a feel-good platitude.

For all that we highlight success stories involving passion, there have also been lots of cases–even more–where people took the leap and ended up poor, disillusioned, or dissatisfied. Moreover, if you examine some of the people today who are happiest with their  work, what they’re doing right now isn’t necessarily something that they had been passionate about originally.

Cal Newport, author of “Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You,” explains that passion should be cultivated instead of followed. We become passionate about what we’re good at–and we can become good at nearly anything with practice and concentrated effort over time.

Weighing the pros and cons

The “follow your passion” mindset provides a compelling narrative, but applying it is difficult. What if you don’t have one burning passion, or what if doing it for money turns out to be unappealing?

It also gives the impression that your path will be effortless, and you’ll always feel good about it. But no matter how much you love doing something, it’s inevitable to get tired of it sometimes, or even to feel frustrated.  

However, what the passion mindset gets right is that happiness with work does matter. For one, our emotional state bleeds over to the quality of our work–we perform better when we’re intrinsically motivated rather than miserably going through the motions.

It also seems like a stretch to insist that we can be satisfied in absolutely any job–there are certain activities, after all, that naturally engage us more than others. However, we’re bad at predicting what makes us happy (and this can lead to erroneous job choices).

This means that, rather than making predictions from the comfort of our sofas, we’re better off trying out various kinds of jobs, plotting how we feel after doing them, and going with what gives us the most energy and satisfaction.   

Conclusion

What’s emerging as a compromise between these two viewpoints is that we ought to strive for contribution or impact.

Instead of asking what our work will do for us, we should ask how our work can bring value to other people. It’s scientifically proven that being altruistic makes us happy. You likely won’t weep on your deathbed about your job if you felt that you made people’s lives significantly better.

By anchoring our job to a sense of purpose beyond ourselves, all of the highs and lows come together into something meaningful. The days that we put into it all make sense; nothing is wasted.

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