Follow Your Passion!❤️ (And Get Stuck with It?🫣)
The Pitfalls of the Famous Mantras
Find a job that you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
—Anonymous
You have probably read or heard this phrase in many self-help books, on Instagram posts, or in graduation commencement speeches. When I first heard this, it seemed like a great idea. I just need to know what I enjoy doing and find a job for it, right? But this idea doesn’t really work well for various reasons. Often, you cannot make a living with what you enjoy doing or it’s so hard to find a job, as the intersection between what you enjoy doing and your job is too narrow.
Another popular version of this career advice is “Follow your passion.” It also sounds like great advice on the surface. Yet Carol S. Dweck and her colleagues at Stanford University have discovered in their research it can hold back your life satisfaction due to its narrow-mindedness and dedication to a single passion. This seemingly helpful advice is actually loaded with so many unhelpful assumptions.
(Image by Miroo Kim)One, it presumes you already know what your passion is. Your passions and interests are preformed, so you simply need to discover them. However, most people need to learn and expose themselves to different jobs and companies over time in order to develop their interests and passions. In other words, your passions are what you get to learn about only after you go through different experiences. It can be a source of tremendous stress and anxiety in case you believe you need to define your passion first.
Two, it assumes you will have only one passion in life. You are multidimensional and evolving as you go through different experiences in many life stages. You will have more than one interest and passion in life. Also, your passion might change too. Therefore, if you focus on a single career based on one passion or interest, you will leave no room for other passions and interests to be discovered and developed.
And three, it makes you less resilient at work. “Follow your passion” creates the illusion that a “dream job” is waiting for you somewhere, and once you find it, everything will be easy. In their research, Dweck and her colleagues discovered that the level of engagement at work tanked significantly more for those who strongly believed in “Follow your passion” when they encountered issues at work. They concluded that “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.”
In one way, the “Follow your passion” mantra makes sense on the surface. It restates the main purpose of work as to satisfy individuals, not to treat them like a cog in a wheel to maximize profits, as it was for factory workers in the nineteenth century. But can you say things got better if you continue to feel stuck with your career under the name of “the passion?”
The peculiar point in the way we think about our career is that it’s all deductive. Rather than discovering and creating through many empirical examples, we start with a conclusion. The classic question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a great example. By declaring what we want to be first, we naturally conclude our future in a singular way.
The underlying assumptions our college major would determine our career, and we would never want to change from it pressure us to hold onto that conclusion. Then another catchphrase, “Follow your passion,” only reinforces this overly deductive way of thinking about career—and makes it even more limiting.
When I first toying with many random ideas in the beginning of my Placeholder, a dear friend of mine recommended me to read Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra, the Professor of London Business School. This book was an eye-opener for me, because it helped me immediately drop the idea I had to redefine my passion and rediscover what I enjoy doing in order to create a new path in my career. Ibarra wrote:
“Research on how adults learn shows that the logical sequence—reflect, then act; plan, then implement—is reversed in transformation processes like making a career change. Why? Because the kind of knowledge we need to make change in our lives is tacit, not textbook clear; it is implicit, not explicit; it consists of knowing-in-doing, not just knowing. Such self-knowledge has a personal and situational quality; it comes from social interaction and involvement in a specific context and with specific people, not from solitary introspection or abstract information gleaned from theoretical, general-purpose personality profiles. It can be acquired only in the process of making change.” - Working Identity, Herminia Ibarra
As you go through your Placeholder, you are working on launching yourselves anew. Doing so is as if you are sculpting a shape out of a big piece of amorphous marble or painting a picture of your future. The inspiration for what you’d like to create doesn’t suddenly strike you like a thunder, but you come to know it little by little through countless chiseling or sketches, like “flesh and blood examples, concrete experiments,” as told by Ibarra. Through three perspectives of the Placeholder, you need to get curious, envision, explore, and experiment.
Ibarra writes, “Working identity is above all a practice: a never-ending process of putting ourselves through a set of knowable steps that creates and reveals our possible selves.”
A truly action-oriented mindset is what’s waiting for you in the Placeholder. With this mindset, you become more flexible, ready, and unafraid to experiment, whether it’s small or big.
The Placeholder is going to be published and available in May, 2025. If you are interested in reading the Early Reviewer Version before others and share your review with me, please click the button below!
Great read and so true! The pressure of "committing" to your passion and then facing an insurmountable pressure to always keep up with it, is something not enough people consider.