Follow Your Passion - Bad Advice?

September 25, 2012

Interview with Cal Newport, author of the book So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

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Mike Carruthers:
How often have you heard the advice that the key to success is to follow your passion?

Cal Newport:
It is good obviously to feel passion about what you do but that’s a different proposition then saying following your passion is a good idea. Because following your passion implies that the passion exists in advance which just isn’t true for most people and that’s where we get into trouble.
 

Cal Newport, author of the book So Good They Can't Ignore You...

The message I try to get to people is that there’s no 1 job that you were meant to do. So the pressure is off and you can turn your attention to given the jobs available to me how do I cultivate those into something I love.

If you don’t know what your passion is common advice is to think back to what you liked to do when you were 12 or 13 years old.

And I don’t buy that advice because again it goes to this idea that we were meant to do something and that’s how you end up happy in work. This is not what the evidence shows from a scientific research; it’s not what the evidence shows when you go out and talk to people who love what they do.  Passion is something that is cultivated over time.

So where did this idea of follow your passion come from?

You can actually track the occurrences of the phrase follow your passion in English printed literature. It really has its hay day in the 90tys and 2000’s before that you don’t see it showing up that often so it’s actually a relatively new idea not some iron clan fact that’s been around for decades.