Following Your Passion, and Other Nonsense
At one time in my life, I read a lot of self-help books. More than I’d like to admit; these days I call it a phase. It took going through quite a few of them to realize the obvious, that improving yourself is hard, and self-help books tend to offer easy answers. No one has the secret. In fact, the more the author bragged about knowing a shortcut to success, the less likely it was that he had anything, and if he wanted you to pay extra for further secrets by signing up for a program or more books, you could be certain he had nothing at all.
High quality ideas spread rapidly. If someone has an idea that he has managed keep hidden in a book, it is probably a garbage idea. No truly helpful idea ever remained a secret for long. A garbage idea only becomes a moneymaker in the hands of the snake oil salesman, who conceals it from view, marks up the price, and whistles for the suckers to come take a peek — but not without their wallets.
One of the garbage-est of the garbage ideas out there is the notion that you have to “find your passion” to be happy in your work life. It is not enough to work for a living, you must be thrilled to earn the money that puts food on the table. Like 5% total body fat and six pack abs, finding your passion has taken its place among the goals in life that, if you never attain them, are supposed to make you feel like a failure.
I think all of us would be delighted to make piles of money doing the things we love the most, but there isn’t money to be had eating chocolate, drinking beer, or watching football on Sunday. A few people every now and then, I suppose, make money eating French fries. The rest of us work.
Work is the act of doing something that is hard to do. It has to be, or we wouldn’t call it work, for heaven’s sake. The notion that work should be fun or fulfilling for most people is oversold in our culture — for most people, work is always necessary, mostly tolerable, at times rewarding, but almost never a passion. If anyone says otherwise, ask them if they would like to take the day off. I don’t know anyone who, no matter how much they say they love working, wouldn’t be happy to take the day off.
There are exceptions. Every once in a while a person is born who is happiest solving second order differential equations, calculating the heat tolerance of jet engine parts, or compiling actuarial tables. But for the rest of us, fun-and-easy aligns better with our preferences. The trick to choosing a vocation is to find balance: something that, while it might not be our favorite thing to do, requires some effort but not too much, some level of difficulty but not an extreme. Work is bound to be frustrating and exhausting at times; the goal is manageable frustration and acceptable fatigue. It’s what we can live with, not what turns us on. (I don’t know about you, but I would be disconcerted if my work turned me on. Work for a living, have fun for free.)
This is where discernment comes in. The key is not to choose the thing you love and try to make money at it. That’s the road to bankruptcy. If you want to make money, and I think this is the whole point of subjecting ourselves to paid labor, you must to choose a career that is enjoyable but not so enjoyable that everyone will want to compete with you, and difficult enough that you cannot be put out of a job by a dilettante.
There is a subtle line between an activity so enjoyable that you would do it for free and an activity that requires an act of will to get started. You must cross that line. Work has to feel like work, or it will not pay for long. It is the difference between watching a music concert on TV and studying musical theory in a book, between reading a novel and writing an essay. One is passive; you would do it forever without tiring. The other requires an act of the will, enough that you would not think of doing it for long without getting paid. You have to cross that line — not a line of pleasure, let alone passion — if you expect to cash any checks.
The two factors to weigh are how hard a job is and how much you hate it. For everyone, the balance between these two is different. Some people will work jobs they absolutely hate if they are not too hard (think sewage processing), and others will to work a very hard job they do not hate much (think neurosurgery). There will always be a little difficulty and a little hate. If someone is paying you to do the work, it is either because it is either too hard or too distasteful for them. What you are looking for is not easy and joy, but a combination of job hatred and difficulty you can live with.
That, then, is your career path. Not to follow your passion, which is nonsense, but to balance dislike and difficulty.
Oh: That, and high salary. A high salary usually neutralizes the hate factor for awhile. But remember, if you are ever lucky enough to be offered a high salary for a job you hate, even if only slightly, the patience for such a job tends to terminate abruptly. You make great money for awhile and like it, and then suddenly the money doesn’t matter anymore and you start regretting the day you were born. We call that burnout. In cases where the money is good, prepare yourself for burnout, Save as much as you can, so when you can’t stand it any longer you can at least walk away with some nice scratch to go with your basket of self-loathing.
