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“Follow your passion and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
I disagree.
In reality, the things that we are naturally drawn to have functions around them that feel a whole lot more like work than play. For example, I may love painting, so I follow my passion to become a painter. I quickly realize that if I want to be a painter for my livelihood, I will need to find people to buy my art. I’ll need to be strong in sales and marketing. I’ll need to research art markets, face rejection, develop relationships in art communities, and spend a lot of time not painting.
Instead of focusing on items outside of myself to see what inspires me, I have become an inspired person. I’ve worked jobs that many people would not have enjoyed, but I became passionate about the work that I was doing and focused on being excellent at the job at hand. Life is more fun when you create intrinsic motivation and decide to enjoy the things that get you closer to your goals.
By turning the focus inward, we have the ability to influence our experience of our environment, instead of trying to control the environment to positively influence our internal experience.
In the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport states that passion can be grown by taking the job you’ve got and working hard to become excellent at something valuable. He also argues that the mantra “follow your passion” can provoke anxiety and lead to job hopping. I assert that this messaging also leads to chronic dissatisfaction, because in this mindset we are expecting external factors to dictate our internal joy and excitement for the work that we are doing.
Instead, I offer the suggestion that practicing and reframing our mindset with the simple outline below can lead to more success and life satisfaction than trying to find work that doesn’t feel like hard work. It goes like this:
- Make a decision to be excellent and joyful about the work that you do. It is your mindset. You get to choose. The person who is going to benefit most from you choosing to be excellent and joyful is you. The other primary people who are going to benefit from it are the people you love the most, followed by other professionals you work with and for. Making this decision costs you nothing other than that decision, commitment, and continual attention to keeping your focus on this.
- Put in the work that it takes to become excellent at what you do.
- Take pride in the work you do.
- Look to the path that you are building. Excelling at the work in front of you often means that you’ll be able to promote your work and take on new things that excite and inspire you even further. Make the conscious choice to work toward those next steps every day.
Once you’ve become passionate, if you want to direct that into starting your own business, check out my article Top 3 Do’s and Don’ts of Starting a Business.
