Don't follow your passion

So I stumbled across this TED Talk from 9 years ago on youtube called “To find work you love, don't follow your passion”:

In today’s day & age where attention is dominated by polarizing opinions, hot takes, and general absurdity from influencers on social media who promise pipe dreams to anyone & everyone as long as you buy their course, I was interested in the implied pragmatism of this video.

The speaker mentions how any given career will invariably consume most of your waking hours and that there’s not enough research helping people find one that suits them. The kicker: most career advice focuses on all the wrong things!

In recent history, the advice to “follow your passion” has been the regnant trope touted at teenagers & young people in most 1st world countries… But is that bad advice? Well, it’s nuanced.

What “follow your passion” really means:

1. Identify your interests

2. Identify careers that align with your interests

3. Pursue those careers

I’ve mentioned several times since starting this newsletter that many people - such as myself - don’t have any passions and have scattered, non-specific interests. And for people who do have a passion, oftentimes it’s something like martial arts, bow-hunting, music, etc - none of these are likely to pan out into a solid career.

Following these passions would be a risky move to say the least. In fact, the speaker points out that only 3% of jobs are in music/arts/sports and so even if 1 in 10 people followed their passion, the majority would still fail to find success.

The speaker also nails it when he brings up the point about how interests might not be realized as meaningful, for example, one might be interested in finance but fail to find meaning in the real scope of their work. While it’s another good point, I would also then raise the question; “Well is anything meaningfully lucrative?”.

So clearly there is more to finding the right career than just passion. Also consider how much of a deciding factor one’s interests actually are when it comes to choosing the right career… People’s interests are a changing & evolving composition of who they are.

So what else matters?

• skills

• tendencies

• mindset

• what’s valuable

So to find a meaningful career, understand what you’re good at in relation to what people in the market pay for.

How to find out what you’re good at in relation to providing value:

1. Try your hand at tons of different things top understand what you might be good at without having realized (you won’t figure this out by thinking about your interests all day)

2. Upskill yourself into a high-demand market once you’ve identified key strengths

3. Identify & solve for a major gap in the market

Ok, so that’s all for this edition of posting the notes I take from old youtube videos. I like to think this newsletter has the potential to be much more than that and a little less rudderless, but hopefully this serves an an example for how I’m combining content curation, education and exploration all in one not-so-clean sweep.