You’ve heard this advice many times before, and it comes out in full force during graduation season:\u00a0 Follow your passion.\u00a0 Whether it is picking a major in college or starting on a career path after graduation, following your passion is said to lead to self-satisfaction and the chance for greatness. \u00a0Picking the major your parents advise, the one with \u201cdecent career prospects\u201d, will lead to a soul-sucking job mired in middle management and eternal regret.\u00a0 The choice seems obvious.\u00a0 \u201cFollow your passion\u201d is inspiring advice.<\/p>\n
But it is good advice?<\/p>\n
The first problem is that many teenagers are passionate about things that don\u2019t much matter:\u00a0 video games, music, and texting (and sexting) their friends.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have a problem advising a kid to become a doctor if they are passionate about finding a cure for breast cancer.\u00a0 But for every highschooler whose passion drives them towards filling an important societal need, there are many, many others who want to be pop stars.\u00a0 And most (or maybe all) of those kids would be far better off following a different path than the passion-laden American Ideal route to fame and fortune.<\/p>\n
Others have criticized the \u201cfollow your passion\u201d or \u201cdo what you love\u201d advice as elitist (Miya Tokumitsu, Slate<\/em>, January, 2014) or as ignoring the important role of self-sacrifice and duty in building character (Gordon Marino, New York Times<\/em>, May 18, 2014).\u00a0 My criticism is more pragmatic:\u00a0 for the most part, following your passion doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n My own experiences are probably pretty typical of most post-college careers.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t follow a path dictated by my passion for the simple reason that I didn\u2019t follow any path.\u00a0 Most of what came my way was random, out of left field, and most of my choices were reactive, even when they looked and felt proactive.<\/p>\n I recently came across a paper I wrote in my senior year of college discussing my future plans.\u00a0 At the time I wanted an academic career \u2013 graduate school followed by teaching and research.\u00a0 I wrote in a mocking tone that the last thing I would ever think to do was get a government or corporate job or start my own business.\u00a0 But life has a well-known way of getting in the way of aspirational plans.<\/p>\n A girl turned my interests away from studying to marriage, and finances ended the possibility of continued graduate school.\u00a0 I took the first job I could find \u2013 with the federal government.\u00a0 Eight years and one divorce later I was starting my own business.\u00a0 Ten years after that I had sold the business and was a corporate VP.\u00a0 A late, new start at forming a family and having children prompted an end to my corporate life and now I find myself full circle, teaching part time at a university and pursuing my own research ideas on my own terms.<\/p>\n And after every turn on that wild ride I found something worthy of my passion.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t image being any place different from where I am now, and I can\u2019t imagine getting here in any other way but the actual crooked path that lead me here.\u00a0 But this reflects nothing more than a lack of imagination.\u00a0 The fact is I could have gone in hundreds of other directions and turned out just as well, and had as much fun along the way.\u00a0 The reason is simple:\u00a0 rather than take the path that followed my passion, I became passionate about whatever path I happened to take.<\/p>\n Make no mistake, not every step on my life journey was a pleasant one.\u00a0 In fact, some of my turns can only be described as wrong ones.\u00a0 That is not failure, that is just life.\u00a0 Like everyone else, I lived a life with constraints and made the best of them.\u00a0 But there was no time along that path where I couldn\u2019t find a reason to take pride in what I was doing or could accomplish: digging ditches to pay for college; studying hard for a class I wouldn\u2019t have chosen but found myself taking anyway;\u00a0 working in a decidedly unglamorous government bureaucracy; taking a second job to help make ends meet.\u00a0 In every case, there was something to learn, something to care about, something to engage my intellect and heart.<\/p>\n The \u201cfollow your passion\u201d advice makes a critical set of unstated assumptions: that we have one or very few passions, that we already know what they are (or can quickly go about discovering them), and that the only thing blocking our way to self-actualization is a lack of commitment to those passions.\u00a0 For almost everyone, all three assumptions are wrong.<\/p>\n I have found that there is an almost infinite variety of things that can ignite my passion.\u00a0 I am by nature curious, and every time I look closely at something I find it to be worthy of even closer examination.\u00a0 Do you find accounting boring?\u00a0 I promise you, it is only because you don\u2019t know enough about accounting.\u00a0 As a small business owner I had to learn enough accounting to survive, but when I moved to a large corporation I saw how seemingly mundane accounting choices rapidly distorted the ethical choices made daily by upper management.\u00a0 Passion was there waiting to be discovered.<\/p>\n My advice to high school graduates facing an uncertain college experience?\u00a0 Take the idea of a liberal education seriously and learn how to think.\u00a0 Prepare yourself not for a career, but for career potential.\u00a0 Accept that your future path is unknown.\u00a0 My advice to the new batch of college graduates?\u00a0 Following your passion is all well and good, it just usually doesn\u2019t work out.\u00a0 Instead, recognize that there is a near-infinite number of opportunities facing you at every moment, just waiting for you to care.\u00a0 Start caring.\u00a0 Be passionate about whatever path you happen to follow.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t guarantee success and happiness, but it gives you the best shot.<\/p>\n Or, to use the words of Stephen Stills, \u201cif you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You’ve heard this advice many times before, and it comes out in full force during graduation season:\u00a0 Follow your passion.\u00a0 Whether it is picking a major in college or starting on a career path after graduation, following your passion is said to lead to self-satisfaction and the chance for greatness. \u00a0Picking the major your parents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":393,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}