Think Twice Before You Follow Your Passion

In a critical rejection of the widely accepted notion to follow your passion, Dorie Clark argues in a Harvard Business blog that the strategy can be wrongheaded. As Clark points out, doing what you love can inspire great dedication and a sense of meaning, but it can also blind you to real problems.

She suggests four straight-forward reasons why the strategy can be a serious blunder.

1. You may not have a knack for your objective. Remember, it's always hard to judge yourself, to know what your strengths and weaknesses might be. Indeed, I've learned as an executive coach that though many have a sense of their weaknesses, few have a real sense of their strengths. It's often the case that personal passion may not play to one's strengths.
2. You hate the work surrounding your passion. Though your passion might truly reflect your strengths, it's also true that some really can drop the ball when it comes to the work surrounding their passion, putting them in serious risk. I've known numerous would-be consultants who love the work, but find that the sales processes involved drive them nuts. As a result, their passion goes by the wayside. 
3. You're too emotionally attached. I see this regularly in many well-trained professionals. Writers hate feedback. CPA's despise someone suggesting their financial strategy is limited. Physicians hate being challenged in their diagnoses. And business people have difficulty objectifying their expertise enough to accept criticism. When you care too deeply about a project, it's very difficult to make a rational decision about whether it should live or die.
4. No one will pay for it. You can turn your passion, your hobby into a job--only if someone's willing to pay for it. I've had two careers for which I was passionate, but learned that that both placed serious limitations on my financial future. Neither were financially viable. With three daughters off to college, I needed a more lucrative profession. Thankfully, I was able to leverage my experiences. But if I'd stayed in them, I would have been up the financial creek and our children would have suffered for it. In short, what was once a viable career may go out of existence tomorrow. 

Although Dorie Clark's recommendations are very practical and make a lot of immediate sense, there are two more profound reason's why following your passion can be a clear dead-end.

First, you may not be aware either of your future interests or strengths. It usually takes a significant amount of experience and feedback to draw relevant conclusions about one's own career. What's interesting and inspiring today may be exceedingly dull and boring tomorrow. So rather than being concerned about your dreams and your passion, I'd work on the skills of adaptability and take the opportunities that come across your path. Indeed, the combination of globalized competition and technological development have made rapid change and adaptation an absolute necessity for career survival and success.

But the most important reason not to follow your passion is to understand that the entire midset of "following your passion," the theory, is built upon false premises about us as humans. It's built upon the notion that you and I have one true self and that our task in life is to identify that true self. But you and I do not have one true self or one single identity. Instead we are a lot of selves with a lot of identities. In a previous blog I wrote about the disbelief and suprise of a high school classmate when she finally figured out who I was at a fifty year reunion. For a good laugh, check out my blog, How to change your personality. My career passion never entered into the matter. It was ultimately about family need and the demand for financial survival and success.

The notion of a true self, though exceedingly popular, has been thoroughly dispelled by research. To appreciate this dynamic—that each of us is not one true self but many selves, a whole cast of characters that we might become, think we should become or even fear becoming in the future—consider a study by Stanford’s Hazel Markus. In this study 210 college students were asked to “tell us about what is possible for you.”  With that information, Markus and Paula Nurius created a questionnaire of 150 possibilities.  Broken out into six categories, the questionnaire included general descriptors such as creative and intelligent; life-style possibilities such as being health conscious or alcohol dependent; and occupational alternatives such as business executive, supreme court justice, taxi-driver or police officer.  The categories were then broken down into how they thought about themselves currently and whether they considered an alternative for themselves in the future.  

The study showed that when the context is changed, the possibilities a person faces spur them to find role models they’d like to become.  So think twice before you follow your passion. You're liable to find a lot more out there than you suspect.

 Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius.  Possible Selves. American Psychologist 41(9) (1986), 954-969.