The Perils of Passion
For the past many years, we’ve heard time and again that we should follow our passion, follow our bliss, or some other derivation of that idea. I love the idea of doing something you love, but I’ve always thought it sounded a little goofy (Really? Bliss?), and I’ve been nervous about the fact that we keep hearing it from absurdly wealthy people.
Then a few years ago, I started sending kids off to college, and the idea became more important for me because I wondered whether it was actually good advice for my kids to be taking. So, I started reading up about it.
Here’s some of what I’ve learned.*
Passion? What Passion?
The first peril of taking this advice too seriously is that most people actually can’t even tell you what their “passion” is. Can you do it? I don’t know if I can. I love a lot of things, and I care a lot about a lot of things. But one abiding, life-long “passion” to the exclusion of all others? Now imagine you’re a 19-year-old kid being told you need to find your passion and follow it, come what may. It can be debilitating.
Monetizers Beware
The very act of trying to monetize your passion is dangerous, for at least two reasons.
Supply and Demand
First of all, many passions are not monetizable for the vast majority of people. There are millions of sports fans in the United States alone. According to TV ratings, American Football is the most popular sport in the US, and it also has the biggest teams and coaching staffs. There are 32 teams in the NFL. Each team has a 53-man roster. That means there are 1,696 NFL players. There are an average of 15 assistant coaches on an NFL team, so with 16 total coaches, that’s about 512 coaches in the league. So that’s about 70 people employed on each professional football team. Add all the other ancillary people you want. What does that get you to? Maybe 100 per team? About 3,200 people? Add to that sports casters, and blah, blah, blah. Let’s double it to about 200 people per team actually involved with professional football. That’s 6,400 people you could say are monetizing their passion.
Well, it turns out that in 2012, there were 1.1 million high school football players and around 70,000 college football players. Let’s not even worry about the high-schoolers, but it seems pretty safe to assume that a lot of those 70,000 college players were pretty passionate about the game. In the 2012 NFL draft, 253 selections were made. So, even if you assume that only ¼ of the 70,000 college players (just the seniors) were under consideration, that’s 253 out of 17,500. There had to have been more than 253 college senior football players who were passionate about football. What becomes of the other 17,247 players. What advice do they follow if everyone is telling them to follow their passion? Just tell them to settle?
Just a Job
But even if you are one of the lucky one who is able to monetize their passion, here’s another peril: money can cause you can lose your passion for it. It turns out that the very act of making a loved activity into a professional responsibility can strip the love right out of it.
There’s a long history and debate over the role of money in motivation, and it comes down to an argument over intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation (that is, love of the job or task itself vs. the external rewards you get for doing the job or task). Like all things having to do with the human mind, the conclusions are imperfect, but the best summary I have found of what we know comes an article in the Harvard Business Review.** These are some highlights of the article.
When rewards are tangible and foreseeable (if subjects know in advance how much extra money they will receive) intrinsic motivation decreases by 36%.” (Author quoting article by Edward Deci)
That is a very elegant way of saying that when the money goes up, the passion goes down. Here’s another statement in which the author cites research from Yoon Jik Cho and James Perry.
The authors analyzed real-world data from a representative sample of over 200,000 U.S. public sector employees. The results showed that employee engagement levels were three times more strongly related to intrinsic than extrinsic motives, but that both motives tend to cancel each other out. In other words, when employees have little interest in external rewards, their intrinsic motivation has a substantial positive effect on their engagement levels. However, when employees are focused on external rewards, the effects of intrinsic motives on engagement are significantly diminished. This means that employees who are intrinsically motivated are three times more engaged than employees who are extrinsically motivated (such as by money). Quite simply, you’re more likely to like your job if you focus on the work itself, and less likely to enjoy it if you’re focused on money. This finding was true even at low salary levels.
If you’re trying to make a living by following your passion, this is bad news indeed. The living can kill the loving.
If not Passion, then What?
Having argued that following your passion is a bad idea, let me now argue for a better idea: create your passion. Here’s what I mean.
When Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, started interviewing people who reported they were passionate about their jobs, he found something very interesting. The deeper he got into the conversations with them, the more it became clear that they weren’t actually all that passionate about their jobs. They were passionate about the life their jobs gave them. That’s not to say they hated their jobs, either. They liked their jobs just fine, but they loved the life they were able to create through their jobs. Here’s a common pattern:
get out of college
get a job you think you’ll be good at
work hard
become good
become better
become good enough that you have some leverage
get something you want (better hours, more flexibility, better job, better money, etc.)
continue to get better and build more leverage
get something else you want
etc.
Over time, it turns out that people who said they were passionate about their jobs were people who became passionate about their lives, by way of a job.
This is consistent with a point Clayton Christensen made in his book How Will You Measure Your Life. He talks about career planning through the lens of strategy, arguing that early in one’s career it’s best to follow an Emergent Strategy (meaning, following the opportunities that emerge) until you reach a point of expertise and self-awareness at which you can shift to a Deliberate Strategy (a strategy based on experience, skills and an informed understanding of where the strategy is likely to take you). The word passion is nowhere to be found in that approach, but it certainly doesn’t preclude falling in love with your work.
And maybe that’s where to end this: arguing against following your passion is not the same as telling you to do something you hate, just because it pays. Not at all. In the film, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the hero and subject of the documentary, Jiro Ono, a Michelin three-star sushi chef, makes a fascinating statement, but one that’s easy to miss unless you’re thinking about this question of passion. Notice how he has turned the common and easy advice into something more nuanced. It gives us a sense of purpose in our work, rather than the chore of finding something that may or may not exist.
“Once you decide on your occupation, you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That’s the secret to success, and is the key to being regarded honorably.”
*Two really helpful books on this subject are So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport and The Passion Paradox, by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness.
**”Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research” by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, April 10, 2013 (https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv)