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‘Find Your Passion’ Is Awful Advice

315 points by _bpgl 8y ago

codesections 8y ago
A much older Atlantic article argued for exactly the same point: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/follow-your-bliss-sort-of/246350/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/follow-... A sample: But not everyone has the potential to be Steve Jobs. Not just because most people are rather more ordinary, but because there are a limited number of jobs that are really fun, greatly admired, and fairly well remunerated, which is what most people want. The problem is, the people who give these sorts of speeches are the outliers: the folks who have made a name for themselves in some very challenging, competitive, and high-status field. No one ever brings in the regional sales manager for a medical supplies firm to say, "Yeah, I didn't get to be CEO. But I wake up happy most mornings, my kids are great, and my golf game gets better every year." That's most people. But what does Steve Jobs have to tell them?
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  I find that even when I'm working on projects I'm passionate about, there are still days - and plenty of them - when the work is a relentless grind of frustration and dullness. Even when you're doing exactly what you want to do, it's still going to be tedious a lot of the time. And even if you're in the lucky position of being able to hand grunt work over to other people, admin, management, planning, and other distractions are never going to go away. Interestingly, top CEOs rarely talk about their inner lives, so we have no idea how happy or fulfilled they truly are.
  - wetpaws 8y ago
    >Interestingly, top CEOs rarely talk about their inner lives, so we have no idea how happy or fulfilled they truly are. Musk is depressed so I guess it is not always sunshine and rainbows.
    - neonnoodle 8y ago
      At least he has a goth gf?
  - ido 8y ago
    The first thst happened when I became a lead is that I got to do a lot more of the thankless grunt work so that my teammates can focus on implementing the (relatively) fun new features.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  >there are a limited number of jobs that are really fun, greatly admired, and fairly well remunerated This is somewhat a negative view of the world as a zero sum game.
  - projektir 8y ago
    Are you implying it isn't true? The world is most certainly zero sum in a lot of areas - how many people can make it as famous actors?
    - ken 8y ago
      That's a strange question. It's conflating fame and acting, which are (mostly) orthogonal. Would you ask how many people can make it as famous software engineers? There's probably a limit to the number of 'famous' people in the world, depending on your idea of fame, because people simply can't know about an unlimited set of other people. But the world can have more artists, of all kinds. We're nowhere close to the limit on the number of great actors our society can support. We'd need more theatres, acting teachers, costumers, lighting designers, etc., but I don't see why we couldn't have 1000 more Anthonys Hopkins (in skill, not fame) in my city.
    - oentc4ntp0o9e 8y ago
      > how many people can make it as famous actors? In what way do you mean this question? If the point is that there are only so many spots for talented actors, I disagree. It used to be there were 3 networks with, say, 4 half-hour slots per evening in prime time. There were maybe a handful of movies out per month. And maybe there were a dozen plays on Broadway (? - not much of a theater goer, so maybe I'm wrong on this). Now with cable, DVDs, internet, mobile phones, computers, etc. there are thousands more slots available for talented actors. There are thousands more slots available for mediocre actors. There are movies in the theater, movies that go straight to streaming/DVD, made-for-TV movies on the traditional networks and the thousands of smaller cable networks. There are series on traditional TV, series on cable networks like HBO and Showtime, series on streaming like Netflix and Amazon, series on free services like YouTube. If, on the other hand, your point is that being good at acting is limited to people with some talent, training, and time, then I agree. Most people would not be good actors. But there's no shortage of space available for actors if they want it.
peterwwillis 8y ago
The advice isn't bad, it's just being interpreted badly. You may find computer programming totally boring, and you may find environmental volunteering very fulfilling. But you're good at programming and it pays well. So take your passion, environmental volunteering, and work hard to get a programming job that is related to environmentalism. Now you're doing something boring, but in service of a cause that is meaningful to you. > "How to cultivate a “growth” mind-set in the young, future-psychology-experiment subjects of America? If you’re a parent, you can avoid dropping new hobbies as soon as they become difficult. Beyond that, there’s not a clear way to develop a growth mind-set about interests" ...Or, don't tell your kids what they should do, don't prevent them from trying new things, and engage them in different subjects in a way that inspire wonder and instill a sense of possibility and accomplishment.
- bluGill 8y ago
  There is only so much need for programmers in environmental volunteering. There is a great need for programmers who can write software for insurance companies. I know a number of great programmers who have left those jobs because they are doing boring. The ones who remain find things to enjoy outside of work. Some love programming and are happy to be paid to do it, but most are just great programmers doing a boring job 9-5 and going home at night to something they love. The only thing they love about their job is it is 9-5, overtime is rare, and they have to take a two week paid vacation every year (a fraud prevention measure to make it hard to cover any wrong doing). Likewise, nobody is passionate about hauling my trash to the dump. (I have kids in diapers so my trash stinks) Nobody is passionate about cleaning septic systems. The jobs have to be done though. All of the above jobs have something in common: well paid compared the the level of skill required. The people who do them have learned to do their job, and they have learned to find something else in life to enjoy.
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    I could be inspired to haul trash. If I knew the system put in place was designed to get people to minimize their actual trash, that organic waste was being reused properly for compost, and that multi-stream recycling was in place, I would feel pretty good about what I was doing. Work in waste management: save the planet. I don't know how to get established cities to follow such a program, but Taiwan seems to have figured it out. https://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwan-the-worlds-geniuses-of-garbage-disposal-1463519134 https://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwan-the-worlds-geniuses-of-g...
mikestew 8y ago
“Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance. That is probably the biggest load of crap foisted on pop culture in a while. I love what I do, and I work every day. This morning's task is reviewing a help file for accuracy. Hol-ee shite, that's not why I got into programming computers when I was 12. But it needs to be done, and I'm one of the ones that can knowledgeably review it. I really should write that test plan, but I keep putting it off for obvious reasons. Oh, sure, I get to play Puzzle Solver by shuffling some bits around, and it's what I spend most of my days doing, but it ain't all fun and games. And that's just Working for The Man(tm). Gonna start a brewpub? Maybe an online SaaS business? Oh, my friend, your crap work has just begun; so much so, you might have to leave the fun stuff to your employees. You will work every day, and hard. Don't get the wrong idea, I look forward to going to work most days, and I've been doing this for a long while. But there's a reason they call it "work", and there's a reason they pay you. Enjoy the hell out of the enjoyable parts, and when the less enjoyable work comes, remember that you are (if of the average HN demographic) paid handsomely for it.
- simonbarker87 8y ago
  Excellent summary, I have run my own business for 7 years and there are plenty of days that I don't enjoy. Fortunately there are enough fun bits and good moments that in the main I like what I do - I would not do it for free though, even if I didn't need the salary ... I'd probably go mountain biking instead.
- hzay 8y ago
  > Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life corollary that should be equally well-known: "because nobody is hiring in that field"
- comboy 8y ago
  Well, you can't be satisfied all the time. That's not how brain chemistry works in healthy individuals. You can enjoy what you do most of the time though. Thanks to your brain also. I find it harder when working for somebody because money is not necessarily a good enough motivator. But when working on my own project and faced with a tedious task (writing tests, fighting dependencies or whatever it is that you despise), I think why do I want to do it (e.g. I want my project to succeed it and it needs it). You can try to achieve your goal without the thing that you don't like. If you think that this is not possible, then wanting your project to succeed and wanting to do this task are the same thing. They are connected. Once you realize this it makes things much more simple. Most of suffering seems to come from some semi-conscious story in your brain: I want A but without doing B. Either it's possible to do that or it's not. If it's not then it's just wishful thinking that is only bringing you misery. The way you think and wire your brain really matters. Instead of "I must do X even though I don't want it". Think "If I want A then X comes with it - do I still want A?". Or find a way to A without X. For me at least, having that stated explicitly in my mind alters my perception of X. Because it really is hard to hold two logically inconsistent beliefs in your mind when you bring them both into focus. Your brain quick fix is usually some "but..". That's where you need to eliminate wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is imagining reality in some other way than it really is and only leads to frustration. Accepting things that already are should come pretty naturally though. You may want to change something. But you can't change the past.
seanalltogether 8y ago
How about "Figure out how to exploit your own knowledge and talents", cause that's the way the rest of the world is looking at you. It might not be something that is your passion but at least you might feel like you're in charge of your future.
gavman 8y ago
Scott Adams wrote about this in the WSJ a while back: https://www.wsj.com/articles/scott-adams8217-secret-of-success-failure-1381639163 https://www.wsj.com/articles/scott-adams8217-secret-of-succe... He says we see successful passionate people but have the causality backwards: success does not follow passion, but passion follows success.
- rfg34te4 8y ago
  So did this guy do any serious research into how people chose their careers? Did he work as a career counselor? Has he done extensive interviews with people at the top of their field? Oh no, he's apparently qualified to talk about this because he wrote Dilbert.
  - listenallyall 8y ago
    LOL like that is how you gain insight into human happiness. Scott Adams also never was a politician, never interviewed politicians, never administered a poll, never ran a campaign. And yet he accurately predicted the results of the last US presidential election, while nearly all news outlets, professional polls, and political "experts" failed to do so.
    - rfg34te4 8y ago
      LOL The night of the election, I put cat food in two bowls labeled "trump" and "clinton." The cat ate out of the trump bowl first. My cat was never was a politician, never interviewed politicians, never administered a poll, never ran a campaign. And yet he accurately predicted the results of the last US presidential election, while nearly all news outlets, professional polls, and political "experts" failed to do so.
- kadenshep 8y ago
  Or, it's neither of those things. Scott Adams is just being contrarian, as per usual.
staunch 8y ago
"Find your genius" may be intimidating but it may also be more honest and accurate. It certainly appears that some people's brains are full of passionate intellectual curiosity and most people's aren't. It seems entirely possible that if you haven't developed a passion around any topic by the time you're an adult, you probably aren't the kind of person that does. Maybe the goal for people that don't have passionate intellects should be to focus on the intellectual strengths they do have.
- randcraw 8y ago
  That was my problem with the OP's research. It presumed that techies differed from fuzzies because only techies like tech. Bzzzt. In fact, many techies have very broad interests, including fuzzy fare and math and science. Stratifying your population using a flawed premise is a bad start toward producing results that usefully describe more than a niche group or two. Then to presume that an article on black holes which is complex and challenging would cause those with an interest in them to lose interest... That conclusion is just silly. The right conclusion is that these people now have less interest in reading complex and challenging articles... perhaps on any topic. In all, I don't hold much hope that the results of this research will replicate well.
allthecybers 8y ago
"Find your passion" breaks down when we assume that every passion should pay our bills. Sometimes a job is just a job and our passions can be pursued because we are willing to put in 40 hours plus. Some passions do pay but don't pay enough to support yourself. This is the nature of life and the economy as it is. For example, working as an IT Engineer is not my first passion but it pays a salary adequate enough for me to provide a comfortable life for myself and my family. If my mountain biking skills were such that they would pay me six figures a year to ride a bike then I could say that I wouldn't have to work a day in my life
thucydidesofusa 8y ago
This article seems too focused on the idea that even if you're not passionate about something today, you can be more passionate about it tomorrow and it's easier to become passionate if you don't have a fixed mindset (imagine that!). But it still overemphasizes the importance of passion in a career IMO. I think the best career advice is to declare what's important and find a career that seems congruent with that. If the important things in your life don't pay much or require money, be prepared to select a career that's lucrative but tolerable / benign. Personally, I'm not leaping out of bed to get to work, but it pays well and I like that it supports my hobbies. I certainly wouldn't have chosen this career if I had followed my passion. However, I think I get to enjoy my passions more because I have some financial resources to pursue them and I get to enjoy them more on my own terms. The reality is this - work is lucrative either because it's unpleasant (plumbing), hard to acquire the skills (doctor / some lawyers / software engineering), performance oriented and intensely competitive (financial trading, top level management). Things that people are passionate about tend to be pleasant, easy, or doing things that are broadly appealing. It's hard to imagine that being passionate. The only people who should follow their passions are people with passions that are lucrative to follow. If you love managing projects / products, follow your passion. If you love horses, consider doing something lucrative so you can buy your own horse.
- sbob 8y ago
  I guess they should have specified that if you are choosing between being a doctor, a lawyer, or a software engineer you should select one of those specialties not randomly but based on your preferences (aka passion).
snissn 8y ago
"X is awful advice" is awful advice
- yarrel 8y ago
  That's awful advice. To be fair, so is this.
- calebm 8y ago
  False by recursion :)
vfc1 8y ago
> with the right help, most people can get interested in almost anything Yes, but those cultivated interests might not overlap with your natural talent. You might decide to cultivate an interest in accounting, but be really bad at numbers since a young age, and will always be at a disadvantage towards someone that is innately good with numbers. I think the best advice is: find something you enjoy learning about, and that fits well your natural talents and it will be much easier to make a career out of it.
- projektir 8y ago
  > You might decide to cultivate an interest in accounting, but be really bad at numbers since a young age, and will always be at a disadvantage towards someone that is innately good with numbers. This implies some very linear progression as to working with numbers ability, which is not really how these things work. And it's accounting, you do not need to be a numbers genius. What you are saying is mostly true for hyper-competitive fields like music, sports, acting, etc.
  - vfc1 8y ago
    The problem is, today almost everything is highly competitive. In the 60's you could have a degree in something that is not aligned with the persons natural talent, and still make a career out of it, because there where so few people with a degree. Now, if someone takes a degree in something that they are not naturally talented in and still tries to make a career out of it just out of sheer persistence, it's not enough anymore.
    - projektir 8y ago
      There's no space for things to be more competitive than any other time period. These things are population driven and you're always generally average in the middle of some population, so the various effects will cancel out. It might have been less competitive for someone with a degree, but more competitive to get a degree in the first place. Progress is generally not made out of sheer persistence. I think the problem might be with perceiving persistence as important, when the important thing might be doing the right thing at the right time, trying to increase the opportunity pool, etc. I can totally buy that someone might not be able to find the information to become an accountant, or that someone might have issues with test taking, but the idea that someone should not even attempt numeric professions because they had some difficulty numbers growing up is absolutely preposterous. Where does that put all the programmers who didn't know what a for loop was until college? It just doesn't follow, at all, lots of people can learn new concepts quite fine or better outside of the school environment. The only important factor is whether the job is in demand and accounting appears to be in demand to me.
thegabez 8y ago
Terrible advice. Similar to telling someone to find their soulmate...Just not going happen for everyone, and if you one of the select few, understand it was more luck than your superior self awareness.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  That mindset is self fulfilling.
- curioussavage 8y ago
  This is still wrong. “Soulmate” is a silly false idea. There are many people a given person could be happy with. Every relationship takes work, conscious effort and compromise. You don’t find your ideal mate you choose them and then develop the real lasting bond
squozzer 8y ago
Whatever you do, in the beginning, has to provide enough interest for you to want to improve. Beyond that, all I can tell you no matter how passionate you feel about something now, you will feel more passion about it some days, and on some days (considerably) less. To me, that's a sign you're on the right track.
projektir 8y ago
I think most people are just not passion-developers. I know I'm not. There are people who seem to be very single track in some areas. They like one thing and they like that one thing. Often they liked it from a young age. And they don't care that much for various other things around them. I was never like that, I was never single track. There are a lot of things I find interesting, but there's no particular thing that is so all-consuming it can eclipse everything else. There is no good advice because building a society is not about giving individuals good advice, it's about building a good society that a variety of individuals can thrive in without following esoteric advice.
- hinkley 8y ago
  People want you to have passion until you disagree with them.
Avshalom 8y ago
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/...
codegeek 8y ago
Isn't it more like "Love what you do" instead of "Do what you love" ? No matter how bad a job is, it is up to you to a certain extent as to what you make of it.
oym8 8y ago
To paraphrase Lucy Kellaway, it's very silly to apply a term which until very recently has been used to describe deepest intimacy and suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross, to describe something most of us wouldn't do unless we were paid for it.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  But the word recently has a well understood meaning, which means, something you want to do, something you would choose to do if there were no barriers. HN literally seems like the general sentiment has shifted to the opposite of what it used to be a decade ago. What happened?
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  - spicytunacone 8y ago
    For comparison: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1215907200&dateEnd=1216080000 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page... My take: gradual shift in user base especially since HN has gotten more popular, not to mention just a difference in zeitgeist. This implies the old guard have changed how they communicate or use the site as well. So just the same as anywhere else.
JackFr 8y ago
"This study was a preregistered replication, meaning the authors stated at the outset what their hypothesis and methods would be. This process is meant to prevent p-hacking, a shady data practice that has cast a shadow over many psychology studies in recent years." This is a very promising development.
- sievebrain 8y ago
  Yes I noticed that too. I'm starting to think psychology may end up ahead of other fields actually - the replication crisis is much wider than just psychology but it seems to have come to the surface there first. And so they're the first to tackle it.
J-dawg 8y ago
This seems very similar to the premise behind "So good they can't ignore you" by Cal Newport [0]. I haven't got around to reading it yet, but I'd be interested to know if anyone here found it useful. [0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/0349415862 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/034941...
- rpeden 8y ago
  I read it, and I found it very useful. In particular, I used the advice in the book to help me stay motivated when working on code bases that old, large, occasionally crufty, and once in a while downright nasty. Over time, I've grown to actually enjoy this kind of work. And as it turns out, it's pretty useful to enjoy the 'dirty jobs' of programming. Companies don't run big old code because they're on love with it. They do it because the code is making them money. And because it's making them money, and they know it, they're not afraid to pay to improve it. And the neat thing is that when working on this kind of code, you often get to work with fun newer bits of tech, too. For example, there's no reason you can't use React to spice up an old ASP.NET Web Forms site, as long as using React is the best/fastest way to deliver value for the task you're trying to accomplish. I'm not sure if any of that it useful, but at least it's one bit of data indicating that the book motivated someone to push through the pain and become good at (and enjoy) something that wasn't a passion at the start.
- theLotusGambit 8y ago
  I'm a big Cal Newport fan. Compared to other authors I've read, his books seem to have a good mix of practical, technical, and high-level advice. "So Good They Can't Ignore You" in particular is absolutely worth the time to read
- FormFollowsFunc 8y ago
  I’ve just finished reading it. He comes up with a series of rules and backs them up with anecdotes though I don’t think they are thoroughly tested. But they do help you think about it more deeply. It helped bring these different ideas I’ve heard before into a more coherent form. Though personally I think you should follow what you’re interested in or suited to as it makes it a lot easier.
mozumder 8y ago
I’ve found that I’ve had an interest in everything, from mundane things to amazing things. Where do you go from that? I suspect it’s the same answer for people that have no interests in anything.
- munchbunny 8y ago
  Just pick something and see where you can take it. The problem with talents/careers/skills is that they all have a valley in between the "just started learning" high and the "I'm actually good at it now" high. When you first start, you're learning quickly, and you can celebrate the small wins as they roll in because your growth is very visible. Once you're good at something, people start to recognize you as an expert, and the external feedback helps a lot to motivate you. The valley in the middle is the tough grind that gets to many if not most people. If you are lucky enough that your enthusiasm and passion carries you through it, then good for you! But if you aren't, that middle valley is where willpower and persistence are very valuable. I've personally experienced both. I was lucky enough that a combination of formal college "do it for the grade" motivation and some inherent enthusiasm carried me through that valley for coding. But for piano... there was probably 5-6 years in the middle that was a real slog. I eventually got good enough that with practice I could play almost any music you put in front of me, and now I enjoy it, but it was a slog for most of the years I spent learning.
- volkk 8y ago
  this sort of reminds me of RPG games. i never know what class to choose, they all seem cool in most games. so what i usually do is look at the end level content for what a class will be capable of and choose based on that, even though i never have time to actually get to that stage anyway. but the concept of working towards something is super valuable to me. i know its not exactly directly applicable to real life, but perhaps finding youtube videos or something on what is possible if you're an expert at said subject would probably help you choose something
matachuan 8y ago
"Anyone can do anything" is a big lie -- people just find it hard to admit themselves are just as normal as anybody else.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  If everyone is normal then people who do extraordinary things are normal too. Don't squish people before they have a chance to blossom.
  - matachuan 8y ago
    Correct -- you should at least try and then make a fair judgment of yourself. However, that judgment is still hard to make.
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      It's always hard. Doesn't mean squish yourself with some preconception of normality, expectations. Predicting things about yourself from limited data you can't analyze in entirety is a hard problem, because the actual history of an experience always contains more information than you were able to aggregate at the time. So we refine, filter, get a perspective of ourselves. That judgement is impossible to make accurately. It's like trying to bite your own teeth. It's always balancing act. Partially judgement, partially pushing boundaries. Letting one overtake the other, I mean, if judging is what you like doing, go you. But sometimes you just have to take action instead. You can't get better at anything without doing at least that.
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kabdib 8y ago
I love the work I do. In the first few years of my career I thought to myself, many times, "I can't believe they're paying me to do this." I wouldn't have done it for free, but man, it was fun. Most days it's still fun. I've been doing this since the late 1970s. Some days have not been fun. Hell, I've had a few years of that. It happens. The trap is that, when it's not fun and you have to push through the inevitable shitty stuff that crops up (an awful boss or co-worker, a project run by psychopathic and abusive managers, a series of layoffs or a company going down the tubes) you need to figure out whether to keep your resolve and keep plugging away and try to fix things, or throw in the towel and start fresh somewhere else. Doing what you love requires that you do the difficult stuff, while not being taken advantage of. It can be tricky. So yeah, follow your passion, if it pays enough and if you're not taken advantage of. If not, find something else.
themagician 8y ago
Everyone wants to be the exception, no one wants to deal with reality. Especially in the age of social media where we can watch the exceptions enjoying their life all day long. And the few moments where it might show that they aren’t, you don’t even see those. We even try to mimick what we see by broadcasting our own lives into the ether in the hopes that somone sees it and tells us how great we are. The reality for most people is they will not have a fulfilling or meaningful career. Most people do mostly worthless work for a paycheck they can enjoy elsewhere. This is oddly MORE true in tech than in many other jobs like trade. If you’re a plumber and you fix a pipe at least you know somone used it. You can spend decades in tech working on things that go nowhere, never get released or idle and then collapse and make good money doing it. But that’s the system we have. You are paid whatever you can convince society that it owes you and the correlation to your actual contribution is increasingly more and more loose. I think for the vast majority of Americans their passion is simply making money. Some are better at it than others.
shawnfratis 8y ago
My advice to anyone would be to pick a career/job that at least relates to something that interests you. In the end it will make work a little more enjoyable. But as others have mentioned here, at some point you have to actually work and sometimes it's going to suck. That's just life. You can find a career that you enjoy, or sparks your interest enough to keep you doing it, but the idea of "never having to work a day in your life" (or however the mantra goes) is complete crap. So, get a job! And get a haircut!
j-c-hewitt 8y ago
Nonsense. It's wonderful advice for agents of the business entities that provide it. These companies can get millions of students per year to sign up for academic programs financed entirely by federally-guaranteed jumbo loans with no money down and no credit check. The institutions can then deposit the checks from those loans into their accounts and use them to build cool buildings and to pay big paychecks. As for the people receiving the advice, who cares about those idiots? By the time they suffer any negative consequences from it, the checks will have already cleared.
crazygringo 8y ago
If you need to find your latent/pre-determined passion, that ultimately means you don't really have a choice of what you do with your life. You just need to find what was already chosen for you. Conversely, the growth-mindset restores choice to your life. You can choose what to be interested in, instead of limiting yourself to what you're already interested in. That's very powerful and self-affirming, and actually has a lot in common with the philosophy of existentialism, which is about making your own meaning. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
- charlieflowers 8y ago
  Unfortunately, though, it appears to be false. It appears we have strong innate interests that we're not in control of.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    What if you're interested in everything, what do you choose then? I need to find a new job as the ceramic arts based one I'm doing now isn't working out financially. I'd like to do forestry, or maybe be a laboratory scientist, or perhaps a maths teacher, or work in a kitchen, drive an ambulance, pen tester, perhaps return to IP, or data science, or a car mechanic, or ...
- white-flame 8y ago
  Your latent passions are very likely non-specific, an affinity for particular facets of your lifestyle that resonate with you; not some specific regiment of what your business (as employee or otherwise) actually does. So no, it doesn't predestine you down a particular career path where any deviation will leave you miserable. Your passions can apply very broadly.
manfredo 8y ago
Advice that my father gave my siblings and me, "Make a career out of a field you're interested in, with colleagues you can tolerate, that affords a standard of living you can accept." All three of these criteria are fairly weak individually. The first is not passion, merely interest. The second is just "tolerate". And the last one is flexible in that people may have different expectations in income. The power is when all three combine: they should hopefully form a life of decent work experience and financial stability. Admittedly a lot more pagmatic than finding and making a career out of the thing you enjoy most - but considerably more achievable. There are plenty of things I am more passionate about than software development, but doesn't fulfill the other two categories. Those make for good hobbies, but usually not good careers.
harimau777 8y ago
I agree to a degree but the issue that I tend to have with these sort of articles is that they don't present a viable alternative. The idea that you should just pick something and get really good at it (e.g. as presented in the book "So Good They Can't Ignore You") seems like it is going too far in the other direction and seems like it relies a lot on survivor bias.
cschmidt 8y ago
There used to be a used bookstore near where I lived (McIntyre and Moore in Davis Square in Somerville). They had a sign on the wall about the kind of books they wanted to buy. They wanted books in fields where it is hard to make a living. I always thought that was an interesting heuristic. I guess that's where the passion is.
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
Except it's universally true that the most "successful" people in the world did "follow their passion." A different way to say it is that, people who make big impacts on the world are obsessed with the right problem at the right place, and the right time. We all know the crank who has been obsessed with some problem or some technology forever, but was just at the wrong place and wrong time to be successful with it. The VR field has many of these people floating around all pissed off that Palmer Luckey got the glory. Both people followed their passions, being "successful" just happened to line up for one of them instead of the others. The reason "follow your passion" is awful advice is because there is no way for an individual to really predict what is going to be a sustainable way to live and most "obsessives" end up only marginally contributing to whatever their field is because the timing is wrong. This pattern seems to hold everywhere, sports, comedy, physics, economics etc... However I can't think of one example of someone who was wildly successful who was not obsessed or "passionate" about what they were doing. Whether or not you accidentally find it or deliberately seems to be irrelevant. I for one would like someone to describe how you know if you're passionate/obsessed with something - cause I know for myself I can get obsessed about many different things.
ebbv 8y ago
Waiting to find your passion is a dead end. But seeking out what you're really interested in and enjoy, and making that your career is great advice. Maybe you don't know what you love yet, that's fine, go figure it out. I'm coming up on 40 now, and I tell any young person I talk to that they should figure out what they enjoy and pursue that. If you fail, ok but trying is worth it. Life is short and work is a huge part of it. Spending 8+ hours a day on something you don't enjoy just for a paycheck is a tragedy.
antisthenes 8y ago
Mastery gives passion as much as passion gives mastery. Become incredibly good at something, so that when you do it, you can do it quickly and go back to leisure or work on really tough problems where people look up to you as the expert.
Sol- 8y ago
While I very much endorse the growth theory (within reasonable limits I guess) and have experienced myself that things I didn't immediately find interesting grew on me, the downside for me nowadays is that I never really know whether things just aren't for me or if I'm just lazy and not trying hard enough. Guess the trade-off of exploration vs. exploitation strikes even here, in career choices (or less consequential, hobbies and such).
huangc10 8y ago
Is it possible...and I'm just conjecturing here, that this advice is for the 0.01% of humanity. Think about it from an extremely high level POV. If giving this advice to everyone in the entire world, and if 0.01% is able to follow through with it...this is how we get standouts like Beethoven, Einstein, Gates, Jobs. etc. Is this terrible advice then? Sure, it doesn't help plebs like us, but it sure does help the world move along...
- merpnderp 8y ago
  Beethoven, Einstein, Gates, Jobs. etc, all put in the grueling hard boring hours doing the things that weren't fun. They did what they were good and successful at, which when you become an expert at becomes very fulfilling. There's a guy at our Home Depot who might be the best Home Depot salesman in the country. Just fun to be around, great with customer service, knows everything about the store, and always training new employees, and honestly seems to enjoy his job. But I doubt he was thrilled when on his first day he was sweeping the floors after close.
  - skadamat 8y ago
    Cal Newport addresses this very well in the first 10 mins of his talk at Google - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwOdU02SE0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwOdU02SE0w
analyst74 8y ago
Larissa Lam from Finding Cleveland once said something along the line of "passion is not enough, you must find your purpose". I find that exceptionally insightful and succinct. Purpose is what keeps you motivated during difficult part of the journey, without purpose, empty passion will not survive through the hardships of pursuing any dream.
40acres 8y ago
Find your passion is great advice, in a world of increasing loneliness, isolation, exposure to news, etc. I think having a passion is a wonderful thing. I don't think your passion has to align with your career however. Programming is a great career for me but it is not my passion, I don't do side projects, open source, etc. etc. But it pays well and provides a standard of living that allows me to do the things I am passionate about.
DoctorOetker 8y ago
Valid long-term advice tends to be invalid short-term advice, otherwise the valid long-term advice would have been marketed as valid short-term advice...
wcchandler 8y ago
Mike Rowe has a short video on this: https://youtu.be/CVEuPmVAb8o https://youtu.be/CVEuPmVAb8o Just rewatched his TED talk and he brings it up around ~12 minutes in: https://youtu.be/IRVdiHu1VCc https://youtu.be/IRVdiHu1VCc
ggg9990 8y ago
“Find your passion” is ultimately tremendously selfish. It’s saying “I’ll do what I want regardless of what the world needs.” It’s learning to be a juggler rather than a dentist on an island with ten jugglers and twenty toothaches.
- mkagenius 8y ago
  That would make all the dentists selfless people. Its not that straightforward.
  - ggg9990 8y ago
    Sure - obviously dentistry on this island will pay better than juggling, and adding an eleventh juggler will only further reduce juggler wages. It’s not an exact science, because pay does not equal value, so you have people becoming investment bankers etc.
neves 8y ago
I really like Call Newport comments about it: http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-passion-trap-how-the-search-for-your-lifes-work-is-making-your-working-life-miserable/ http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-passion-trap-how-t... or in video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIMu1PGbG-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIMu1PGbG-0
outworlder 8y ago
One of the things I keep saying is that I made a mistake when I made a hobby (software development) into a career. I used to love it, would go through hours on my own free time to code usually completely useless stuff, for fun. Only occasionally this would yield something useful. And that was fine. Fast forward many years, and it's been a while since I've last written a single line of code at home. I don't even have Emacs installed in my home machine anymore. I can still get excited when a task requires me to learn new stuff. I can still have fun some of the time. But that flame is no longer there. I guess anything will become a chore once you do too much of it, specially if you are doing it not because you want to, but because you are required to. That said, you could not pay me enough to do something like sales. So I guess the advice would be "find something that you don't absolutely hate" and you'll do ok. It's called work, not "fun", for a reason.
- pm90 8y ago
  I've seen/read/experienced this process a lot. My personal theory is that when your hobby becomes a job, you find other hobbies. One way I've managed to deal with this is by changing what I work on in a fairly frequent cadence. So either within the same company or in different companies, changing your squad/org and working on something totally different kinda satisfies my inner craving for programming. Its not easy or always possible to do so, but I've been lucky so far to be young and single and thus flexible with moving. Not sure how I'll handle this after I'm settled down and stuff.
shiburizu 8y ago
You can genuinely find something in the world of professional work that holds your interest -- a sense of being capable and engaged in the tools of your trade should be a point to look for when engaged in something you can find a career in. Now, if I really like computer science research but I really need to feed my family I'm probably going to consider working in engineering or administration because that is where my comfort in the toolset is going to pay me. That's not to say you can't pursue something you are genuinely passionate about in the field (the notion that all fields of profession exist in general terms and not in nuanced niches is the ignorance in this "Find your passion" statement) but if you're in any business because you want to put food on the table, you probably drift towards work that is within your comfort zone just enough that you don't hate it. One of my professors laments the lack of interest in my university's "computer science" specialization over engineering or administration in the compsci degree, but how many people hedge their livelihood on becoming a researcher in experimental fields? It's a passion best chased when you have a baseline already.
elyrly 8y ago
reminds me of the quote by Scott Adams - "Success breeds passion more than passion breeds success."
pers0n 8y ago
What if you’ve been doing the same thing for over 10 years and are bored with it despite being good, I’ve been moving into design and went back to school to learn it properly but it’s hard to get into and doesn’t pay as much. I just don’t want to be bored 8 hrs a day doing html,css,etc over and over. I’ve been at it since 99. And backend coding is more boring so I’m stuck on the front end
raintrees 8y ago
I wonder if absolutes are not coloring this incorrectly... As well as maybe an underlying "I want it now" expectation? I work part time and earn a full time income doing something that is _mostly_ fun... But sometimes it is not fun, and it took me 25+ years to get to this point. Luck and perseverance both had roles to play for me...
y2kenny 8y ago
I think it's best when what you do is at the intersection of what you can do, what you should do, and what you want to do. Unfortunately, those three things don't always align in reality.
qubax 8y ago
More useless clickbait nonsense. All advice is awful and useless in one form or another because life is complicated. "Find your passion". One person could take that advice and becomes einstein. Another takes that and become a failure. "Stay in your lane". One person takes that advice and is content. Another one takes that advice and becomes a bitter old man who wonders about "what if". How about life is a crap shoot and we leave it at that? Every advice article/book/etc is just lazy greedy people trying to make money off of you. Reading carnegie's "how to make friends...", graham's "intelligent investor" or kiyosaki/robbins/etc isn't going to make you successful, happy or content. It's just going to make the writers or their estate money. It's funny how many new self-help and advice nonsense is out there? If any of it actually worked, there wouldn't be a market for new self-help and advice nonsense year after year.
- darkkindness 8y ago
  I don't disagree with self-help being nonsense. Most that I've read is certainly written to be authoritative when they're not, drawing on a fresh selection of recent 'scientific' studies that are really cherry-picked to fit the author's opinions. So why not treat self-help as opinions? They might click with you or they might not, but in the end they represent someone else's thoughts of how the world works, not a general truth of the world. That's still valuable. Sure, some of those opinions can be popular and sell millions of copies (e.g. Carnegie), and yet are real useless for many readers. But is it really fair to say that they're awful and money-grabbing for that reason?
bovermyer 8y ago
Working is shit. But working can be rewarding, even if it's not what gives you the biggest and longest dopamine hit. I don't know exactly what my passion is. I know that I love coding, and solving problems that I care about. I also know that I love telling stories, trying new things, and generally feeling good. I also know that pain feels bad and that hardship makes me question my choices. But for all of this, I'm content with my life and where I think I'll be in five years, probably. I think that's plenty. And if I think that's plenty, doesn't that mean my life is good enough?
Ngunyan 8y ago
I say this is bullshit. It looks like black-white dichotomy because we frame it as passion-vs-work. Even if we are passionate about something, there will always be parts that are boring and feels like work. That does not mean we are not following our passion. Far from it. It's like love or sleep. You fall for it, you do not actively and directly chase it. Passions find us, and we are made aware, yet they also need to be developed. If you have not encountered your passion yet, it just means either that you are not self-aware, you're ignoring the signs, you're at the wrong place, you haven't tried a lot of things yet....so many reasons.
jokoon 8y ago
I love video games, yet I have trouble pursuing my game project. I work as a developer instead, in domains I don't really like. Maybe Im lucky that I can adapt my skills to realize my passion? The only obstacles being money, discipline and project management.
sunstone 8y ago
Some people at a very young age have a passion that is very difficult for them not to follow. For the rest of us aimless souls finding your passion is probably poor advice. For us creating the venn diagram of "don't mind doing", "can make money", "has no moral compromises" is not a bad place to start.
amorphous 8y ago
Always the same vastly simplified discussion. Obviously, having a deep interest in your work, something you may feel "passionate" about is a good thing. Obviously, the opposite, hating your work or what it represents is not good for you. Obviously, every work, no matter what, has boring parts. Obviously, if you like chocolate cake and eat it every day you gonna hate it. Obviously, waiting to find your "passion" is not gonna help you. It is just an excuse to procrastinate or avoid work. So the truth is somewhere in the middle. Obviously.
firemelt 8y ago
I felt my youth is wasted because I only do things that I like(my passion) anyone can give me some uplifting words about this feeling?

315 points by _bpgl 8y ago

A much older Atlantic article argued for exactly the same point: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/follow-your-bliss-sort-of/246350/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/follow-... A sample: But not everyone has the potential to be Steve Jobs. Not just because most people are rather more ordinary, but because there are a limited number of jobs that are really fun, greatly admired, and fairly well remunerated, which is what most people want. The problem is, the people who give these sorts of speeches are the outliers: the folks who have made a name for themselves in some very challenging, competitive, and high-status field. No one ever brings in the regional sales manager for a medical supplies firm to say, "Yeah, I didn't get to be CEO. But I wake up happy most mornings, my kids are great, and my golf game gets better every year." That's most people. But what does Steve Jobs have to tell them?

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
I find that even when I'm working on projects I'm passionate about, there are still days - and plenty of them - when the work is a relentless grind of frustration and dullness. Even when you're doing exactly what you want to do, it's still going to be tedious a lot of the time. And even if you're in the lucky position of being able to hand grunt work over to other people, admin, management, planning, and other distractions are never going to go away. Interestingly, top CEOs rarely talk about their inner lives, so we have no idea how happy or fulfilled they truly are.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  >Interestingly, top CEOs rarely talk about their inner lives, so we have no idea how happy or fulfilled they truly are. Musk is depressed so I guess it is not always sunshine and rainbows.
  - neonnoodle 8y ago
    At least he has a goth gf?
- ido 8y ago
  The first thst happened when I became a lead is that I got to do a lot more of the thankless grunt work so that my teammates can focus on implementing the (relatively) fun new features.
wetpaws 8y ago
>there are a limited number of jobs that are really fun, greatly admired, and fairly well remunerated This is somewhat a negative view of the world as a zero sum game.
- projektir 8y ago
  Are you implying it isn't true? The world is most certainly zero sum in a lot of areas - how many people can make it as famous actors?
  - ken 8y ago
    That's a strange question. It's conflating fame and acting, which are (mostly) orthogonal. Would you ask how many people can make it as famous software engineers? There's probably a limit to the number of 'famous' people in the world, depending on your idea of fame, because people simply can't know about an unlimited set of other people. But the world can have more artists, of all kinds. We're nowhere close to the limit on the number of great actors our society can support. We'd need more theatres, acting teachers, costumers, lighting designers, etc., but I don't see why we couldn't have 1000 more Anthonys Hopkins (in skill, not fame) in my city.
  - oentc4ntp0o9e 8y ago
    > how many people can make it as famous actors? In what way do you mean this question? If the point is that there are only so many spots for talented actors, I disagree. It used to be there were 3 networks with, say, 4 half-hour slots per evening in prime time. There were maybe a handful of movies out per month. And maybe there were a dozen plays on Broadway (? - not much of a theater goer, so maybe I'm wrong on this). Now with cable, DVDs, internet, mobile phones, computers, etc. there are thousands more slots available for talented actors. There are thousands more slots available for mediocre actors. There are movies in the theater, movies that go straight to streaming/DVD, made-for-TV movies on the traditional networks and the thousands of smaller cable networks. There are series on traditional TV, series on cable networks like HBO and Showtime, series on streaming like Netflix and Amazon, series on free services like YouTube. If, on the other hand, your point is that being good at acting is limited to people with some talent, training, and time, then I agree. Most people would not be good actors. But there's no shortage of space available for actors if they want it.

peterwwillis 8y ago

The advice isn't bad, it's just being interpreted badly. You may find computer programming totally boring, and you may find environmental volunteering very fulfilling. But you're good at programming and it pays well. So take your passion, environmental volunteering, and work hard to get a programming job that is related to environmentalism. Now you're doing something boring, but in service of a cause that is meaningful to you. > "How to cultivate a “growth” mind-set in the young, future-psychology-experiment subjects of America? If you’re a parent, you can avoid dropping new hobbies as soon as they become difficult. Beyond that, there’s not a clear way to develop a growth mind-set about interests" ...Or, don't tell your kids what they should do, don't prevent them from trying new things, and engage them in different subjects in a way that inspire wonder and instill a sense of possibility and accomplishment.

bluGill 8y ago
There is only so much need for programmers in environmental volunteering. There is a great need for programmers who can write software for insurance companies. I know a number of great programmers who have left those jobs because they are doing boring. The ones who remain find things to enjoy outside of work. Some love programming and are happy to be paid to do it, but most are just great programmers doing a boring job 9-5 and going home at night to something they love. The only thing they love about their job is it is 9-5, overtime is rare, and they have to take a two week paid vacation every year (a fraud prevention measure to make it hard to cover any wrong doing). Likewise, nobody is passionate about hauling my trash to the dump. (I have kids in diapers so my trash stinks) Nobody is passionate about cleaning septic systems. The jobs have to be done though. All of the above jobs have something in common: well paid compared the the level of skill required. The people who do them have learned to do their job, and they have learned to find something else in life to enjoy.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  I could be inspired to haul trash. If I knew the system put in place was designed to get people to minimize their actual trash, that organic waste was being reused properly for compost, and that multi-stream recycling was in place, I would feel pretty good about what I was doing. Work in waste management: save the planet. I don't know how to get established cities to follow such a program, but Taiwan seems to have figured it out. https://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwan-the-worlds-geniuses-of-garbage-disposal-1463519134 https://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwan-the-worlds-geniuses-of-g...

mikestew 8y ago

“Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance. That is probably the biggest load of crap foisted on pop culture in a while. I love what I do, and I work every day. This morning's task is reviewing a help file for accuracy. Hol-ee shite, that's not why I got into programming computers when I was 12. But it needs to be done, and I'm one of the ones that can knowledgeably review it. I really should write that test plan, but I keep putting it off for obvious reasons. Oh, sure, I get to play Puzzle Solver by shuffling some bits around, and it's what I spend most of my days doing, but it ain't all fun and games. And that's just Working for The Man(tm). Gonna start a brewpub? Maybe an online SaaS business? Oh, my friend, your crap work has just begun; so much so, you might have to leave the fun stuff to your employees. You will work every day, and hard. Don't get the wrong idea, I look forward to going to work most days, and I've been doing this for a long while. But there's a reason they call it "work", and there's a reason they pay you. Enjoy the hell out of the enjoyable parts, and when the less enjoyable work comes, remember that you are (if of the average HN demographic) paid handsomely for it.

simonbarker87 8y ago
Excellent summary, I have run my own business for 7 years and there are plenty of days that I don't enjoy. Fortunately there are enough fun bits and good moments that in the main I like what I do - I would not do it for free though, even if I didn't need the salary ... I'd probably go mountain biking instead.
hzay 8y ago
> Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life corollary that should be equally well-known: "because nobody is hiring in that field"
comboy 8y ago
Well, you can't be satisfied all the time. That's not how brain chemistry works in healthy individuals. You can enjoy what you do most of the time though. Thanks to your brain also. I find it harder when working for somebody because money is not necessarily a good enough motivator. But when working on my own project and faced with a tedious task (writing tests, fighting dependencies or whatever it is that you despise), I think why do I want to do it (e.g. I want my project to succeed it and it needs it). You can try to achieve your goal without the thing that you don't like. If you think that this is not possible, then wanting your project to succeed and wanting to do this task are the same thing. They are connected. Once you realize this it makes things much more simple. Most of suffering seems to come from some semi-conscious story in your brain: I want A but without doing B. Either it's possible to do that or it's not. If it's not then it's just wishful thinking that is only bringing you misery. The way you think and wire your brain really matters. Instead of "I must do X even though I don't want it". Think "If I want A then X comes with it - do I still want A?". Or find a way to A without X. For me at least, having that stated explicitly in my mind alters my perception of X. Because it really is hard to hold two logically inconsistent beliefs in your mind when you bring them both into focus. Your brain quick fix is usually some "but..". That's where you need to eliminate wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is imagining reality in some other way than it really is and only leads to frustration. Accepting things that already are should come pretty naturally though. You may want to change something. But you can't change the past.

seanalltogether 8y ago

How about "Figure out how to exploit your own knowledge and talents", cause that's the way the rest of the world is looking at you. It might not be something that is your passion but at least you might feel like you're in charge of your future.

gavman 8y ago

Scott Adams wrote about this in the WSJ a while back: https://www.wsj.com/articles/scott-adams8217-secret-of-success-failure-1381639163 https://www.wsj.com/articles/scott-adams8217-secret-of-succe... He says we see successful passionate people but have the causality backwards: success does not follow passion, but passion follows success.

rfg34te4 8y ago
So did this guy do any serious research into how people chose their careers? Did he work as a career counselor? Has he done extensive interviews with people at the top of their field? Oh no, he's apparently qualified to talk about this because he wrote Dilbert.
- listenallyall 8y ago
  LOL like that is how you gain insight into human happiness. Scott Adams also never was a politician, never interviewed politicians, never administered a poll, never ran a campaign. And yet he accurately predicted the results of the last US presidential election, while nearly all news outlets, professional polls, and political "experts" failed to do so.
  - rfg34te4 8y ago
    LOL The night of the election, I put cat food in two bowls labeled "trump" and "clinton." The cat ate out of the trump bowl first. My cat was never was a politician, never interviewed politicians, never administered a poll, never ran a campaign. And yet he accurately predicted the results of the last US presidential election, while nearly all news outlets, professional polls, and political "experts" failed to do so.
kadenshep 8y ago
Or, it's neither of those things. Scott Adams is just being contrarian, as per usual.

staunch 8y ago

"Find your genius" may be intimidating but it may also be more honest and accurate. It certainly appears that some people's brains are full of passionate intellectual curiosity and most people's aren't. It seems entirely possible that if you haven't developed a passion around any topic by the time you're an adult, you probably aren't the kind of person that does. Maybe the goal for people that don't have passionate intellects should be to focus on the intellectual strengths they do have.

randcraw 8y ago
That was my problem with the OP's research. It presumed that techies differed from fuzzies because only techies like tech. Bzzzt. In fact, many techies have very broad interests, including fuzzy fare and math and science. Stratifying your population using a flawed premise is a bad start toward producing results that usefully describe more than a niche group or two. Then to presume that an article on black holes which is complex and challenging would cause those with an interest in them to lose interest... That conclusion is just silly. The right conclusion is that these people now have less interest in reading complex and challenging articles... perhaps on any topic. In all, I don't hold much hope that the results of this research will replicate well.

allthecybers 8y ago

"Find your passion" breaks down when we assume that every passion should pay our bills. Sometimes a job is just a job and our passions can be pursued because we are willing to put in 40 hours plus. Some passions do pay but don't pay enough to support yourself. This is the nature of life and the economy as it is. For example, working as an IT Engineer is not my first passion but it pays a salary adequate enough for me to provide a comfortable life for myself and my family. If my mountain biking skills were such that they would pay me six figures a year to ride a bike then I could say that I wouldn't have to work a day in my life

thucydidesofusa 8y ago

This article seems too focused on the idea that even if you're not passionate about something today, you can be more passionate about it tomorrow and it's easier to become passionate if you don't have a fixed mindset (imagine that!). But it still overemphasizes the importance of passion in a career IMO. I think the best career advice is to declare what's important and find a career that seems congruent with that. If the important things in your life don't pay much or require money, be prepared to select a career that's lucrative but tolerable / benign. Personally, I'm not leaping out of bed to get to work, but it pays well and I like that it supports my hobbies. I certainly wouldn't have chosen this career if I had followed my passion. However, I think I get to enjoy my passions more because I have some financial resources to pursue them and I get to enjoy them more on my own terms. The reality is this - work is lucrative either because it's unpleasant (plumbing), hard to acquire the skills (doctor / some lawyers / software engineering), performance oriented and intensely competitive (financial trading, top level management). Things that people are passionate about tend to be pleasant, easy, or doing things that are broadly appealing. It's hard to imagine that being passionate. The only people who should follow their passions are people with passions that are lucrative to follow. If you love managing projects / products, follow your passion. If you love horses, consider doing something lucrative so you can buy your own horse.

sbob 8y ago
I guess they should have specified that if you are choosing between being a doctor, a lawyer, or a software engineer you should select one of those specialties not randomly but based on your preferences (aka passion).

snissn 8y ago

"X is awful advice" is awful advice

yarrel 8y ago
That's awful advice. To be fair, so is this.
calebm 8y ago
False by recursion :)

vfc1 8y ago

> with the right help, most people can get interested in almost anything Yes, but those cultivated interests might not overlap with your natural talent. You might decide to cultivate an interest in accounting, but be really bad at numbers since a young age, and will always be at a disadvantage towards someone that is innately good with numbers. I think the best advice is: find something you enjoy learning about, and that fits well your natural talents and it will be much easier to make a career out of it.

projektir 8y ago
> You might decide to cultivate an interest in accounting, but be really bad at numbers since a young age, and will always be at a disadvantage towards someone that is innately good with numbers. This implies some very linear progression as to working with numbers ability, which is not really how these things work. And it's accounting, you do not need to be a numbers genius. What you are saying is mostly true for hyper-competitive fields like music, sports, acting, etc.
- vfc1 8y ago
  The problem is, today almost everything is highly competitive. In the 60's you could have a degree in something that is not aligned with the persons natural talent, and still make a career out of it, because there where so few people with a degree. Now, if someone takes a degree in something that they are not naturally talented in and still tries to make a career out of it just out of sheer persistence, it's not enough anymore.
  - projektir 8y ago
    There's no space for things to be more competitive than any other time period. These things are population driven and you're always generally average in the middle of some population, so the various effects will cancel out. It might have been less competitive for someone with a degree, but more competitive to get a degree in the first place. Progress is generally not made out of sheer persistence. I think the problem might be with perceiving persistence as important, when the important thing might be doing the right thing at the right time, trying to increase the opportunity pool, etc. I can totally buy that someone might not be able to find the information to become an accountant, or that someone might have issues with test taking, but the idea that someone should not even attempt numeric professions because they had some difficulty numbers growing up is absolutely preposterous. Where does that put all the programmers who didn't know what a for loop was until college? It just doesn't follow, at all, lots of people can learn new concepts quite fine or better outside of the school environment. The only important factor is whether the job is in demand and accounting appears to be in demand to me.

thegabez 8y ago

Terrible advice. Similar to telling someone to find their soulmate...Just not going happen for everyone, and if you one of the select few, understand it was more luck than your superior self awareness.

s-shellfish 8y ago
That mindset is self fulfilling.
curioussavage 8y ago
This is still wrong. “Soulmate” is a silly false idea. There are many people a given person could be happy with. Every relationship takes work, conscious effort and compromise. You don’t find your ideal mate you choose them and then develop the real lasting bond

squozzer 8y ago

Whatever you do, in the beginning, has to provide enough interest for you to want to improve. Beyond that, all I can tell you no matter how passionate you feel about something now, you will feel more passion about it some days, and on some days (considerably) less. To me, that's a sign you're on the right track.

projektir 8y ago

I think most people are just not passion-developers. I know I'm not. There are people who seem to be very single track in some areas. They like one thing and they like that one thing. Often they liked it from a young age. And they don't care that much for various other things around them. I was never like that, I was never single track. There are a lot of things I find interesting, but there's no particular thing that is so all-consuming it can eclipse everything else. There is no good advice because building a society is not about giving individuals good advice, it's about building a good society that a variety of individuals can thrive in without following esoteric advice.

hinkley 8y ago
People want you to have passion until you disagree with them.

Avshalom 8y ago

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/...

codegeek 8y ago

Isn't it more like "Love what you do" instead of "Do what you love" ? No matter how bad a job is, it is up to you to a certain extent as to what you make of it.

oym8 8y ago

To paraphrase Lucy Kellaway, it's very silly to apply a term which until very recently has been used to describe deepest intimacy and suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross, to describe something most of us wouldn't do unless we were paid for it.

s-shellfish 8y ago
But the word recently has a well understood meaning, which means, something you want to do, something you would choose to do if there were no barriers. HN literally seems like the general sentiment has shifted to the opposite of what it used to be a decade ago. What happened?
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- spicytunacone 8y ago
  For comparison: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1215907200&dateEnd=1216080000 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page... My take: gradual shift in user base especially since HN has gotten more popular, not to mention just a difference in zeitgeist. This implies the old guard have changed how they communicate or use the site as well. So just the same as anywhere else.

JackFr 8y ago

"This study was a preregistered replication, meaning the authors stated at the outset what their hypothesis and methods would be. This process is meant to prevent p-hacking, a shady data practice that has cast a shadow over many psychology studies in recent years." This is a very promising development.

sievebrain 8y ago
Yes I noticed that too. I'm starting to think psychology may end up ahead of other fields actually - the replication crisis is much wider than just psychology but it seems to have come to the surface there first. And so they're the first to tackle it.

J-dawg 8y ago

This seems very similar to the premise behind "So good they can't ignore you" by Cal Newport [0]. I haven't got around to reading it yet, but I'd be interested to know if anyone here found it useful. [0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/0349415862 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/034941...

rpeden 8y ago
I read it, and I found it very useful. In particular, I used the advice in the book to help me stay motivated when working on code bases that old, large, occasionally crufty, and once in a while downright nasty. Over time, I've grown to actually enjoy this kind of work. And as it turns out, it's pretty useful to enjoy the 'dirty jobs' of programming. Companies don't run big old code because they're on love with it. They do it because the code is making them money. And because it's making them money, and they know it, they're not afraid to pay to improve it. And the neat thing is that when working on this kind of code, you often get to work with fun newer bits of tech, too. For example, there's no reason you can't use React to spice up an old ASP.NET Web Forms site, as long as using React is the best/fastest way to deliver value for the task you're trying to accomplish. I'm not sure if any of that it useful, but at least it's one bit of data indicating that the book motivated someone to push through the pain and become good at (and enjoy) something that wasn't a passion at the start.
theLotusGambit 8y ago
I'm a big Cal Newport fan. Compared to other authors I've read, his books seem to have a good mix of practical, technical, and high-level advice. "So Good They Can't Ignore You" in particular is absolutely worth the time to read
FormFollowsFunc 8y ago
I’ve just finished reading it. He comes up with a series of rules and backs them up with anecdotes though I don’t think they are thoroughly tested. But they do help you think about it more deeply. It helped bring these different ideas I’ve heard before into a more coherent form. Though personally I think you should follow what you’re interested in or suited to as it makes it a lot easier.

mozumder 8y ago

I’ve found that I’ve had an interest in everything, from mundane things to amazing things. Where do you go from that? I suspect it’s the same answer for people that have no interests in anything.

munchbunny 8y ago
Just pick something and see where you can take it. The problem with talents/careers/skills is that they all have a valley in between the "just started learning" high and the "I'm actually good at it now" high. When you first start, you're learning quickly, and you can celebrate the small wins as they roll in because your growth is very visible. Once you're good at something, people start to recognize you as an expert, and the external feedback helps a lot to motivate you. The valley in the middle is the tough grind that gets to many if not most people. If you are lucky enough that your enthusiasm and passion carries you through it, then good for you! But if you aren't, that middle valley is where willpower and persistence are very valuable. I've personally experienced both. I was lucky enough that a combination of formal college "do it for the grade" motivation and some inherent enthusiasm carried me through that valley for coding. But for piano... there was probably 5-6 years in the middle that was a real slog. I eventually got good enough that with practice I could play almost any music you put in front of me, and now I enjoy it, but it was a slog for most of the years I spent learning.
volkk 8y ago
this sort of reminds me of RPG games. i never know what class to choose, they all seem cool in most games. so what i usually do is look at the end level content for what a class will be capable of and choose based on that, even though i never have time to actually get to that stage anyway. but the concept of working towards something is super valuable to me. i know its not exactly directly applicable to real life, but perhaps finding youtube videos or something on what is possible if you're an expert at said subject would probably help you choose something

matachuan 8y ago

"Anyone can do anything" is a big lie -- people just find it hard to admit themselves are just as normal as anybody else.

s-shellfish 8y ago
If everyone is normal then people who do extraordinary things are normal too. Don't squish people before they have a chance to blossom.
- matachuan 8y ago
  Correct -- you should at least try and then make a fair judgment of yourself. However, that judgment is still hard to make.
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    It's always hard. Doesn't mean squish yourself with some preconception of normality, expectations. Predicting things about yourself from limited data you can't analyze in entirety is a hard problem, because the actual history of an experience always contains more information than you were able to aggregate at the time. So we refine, filter, get a perspective of ourselves. That judgement is impossible to make accurately. It's like trying to bite your own teeth. It's always balancing act. Partially judgement, partially pushing boundaries. Letting one overtake the other, I mean, if judging is what you like doing, go you. But sometimes you just have to take action instead. You can't get better at anything without doing at least that.

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kabdib 8y ago

I love the work I do. In the first few years of my career I thought to myself, many times, "I can't believe they're paying me to do this." I wouldn't have done it for free, but man, it was fun. Most days it's still fun. I've been doing this since the late 1970s. Some days have not been fun. Hell, I've had a few years of that. It happens. The trap is that, when it's not fun and you have to push through the inevitable shitty stuff that crops up (an awful boss or co-worker, a project run by psychopathic and abusive managers, a series of layoffs or a company going down the tubes) you need to figure out whether to keep your resolve and keep plugging away and try to fix things, or throw in the towel and start fresh somewhere else. Doing what you love requires that you do the difficult stuff, while not being taken advantage of. It can be tricky. So yeah, follow your passion, if it pays enough and if you're not taken advantage of. If not, find something else.

themagician 8y ago

Everyone wants to be the exception, no one wants to deal with reality. Especially in the age of social media where we can watch the exceptions enjoying their life all day long. And the few moments where it might show that they aren’t, you don’t even see those. We even try to mimick what we see by broadcasting our own lives into the ether in the hopes that somone sees it and tells us how great we are. The reality for most people is they will not have a fulfilling or meaningful career. Most people do mostly worthless work for a paycheck they can enjoy elsewhere. This is oddly MORE true in tech than in many other jobs like trade. If you’re a plumber and you fix a pipe at least you know somone used it. You can spend decades in tech working on things that go nowhere, never get released or idle and then collapse and make good money doing it. But that’s the system we have. You are paid whatever you can convince society that it owes you and the correlation to your actual contribution is increasingly more and more loose. I think for the vast majority of Americans their passion is simply making money. Some are better at it than others.

shawnfratis 8y ago

My advice to anyone would be to pick a career/job that at least relates to something that interests you. In the end it will make work a little more enjoyable. But as others have mentioned here, at some point you have to actually work and sometimes it's going to suck. That's just life. You can find a career that you enjoy, or sparks your interest enough to keep you doing it, but the idea of "never having to work a day in your life" (or however the mantra goes) is complete crap. So, get a job! And get a haircut!

j-c-hewitt 8y ago

Nonsense. It's wonderful advice for agents of the business entities that provide it. These companies can get millions of students per year to sign up for academic programs financed entirely by federally-guaranteed jumbo loans with no money down and no credit check. The institutions can then deposit the checks from those loans into their accounts and use them to build cool buildings and to pay big paychecks. As for the people receiving the advice, who cares about those idiots? By the time they suffer any negative consequences from it, the checks will have already cleared.

crazygringo 8y ago

If you need to find your latent/pre-determined passion, that ultimately means you don't really have a choice of what you do with your life. You just need to find what was already chosen for you. Conversely, the growth-mindset restores choice to your life. You can choose what to be interested in, instead of limiting yourself to what you're already interested in. That's very powerful and self-affirming, and actually has a lot in common with the philosophy of existentialism, which is about making your own meaning. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

charlieflowers 8y ago
Unfortunately, though, it appears to be false. It appears we have strong innate interests that we're not in control of.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  What if you're interested in everything, what do you choose then? I need to find a new job as the ceramic arts based one I'm doing now isn't working out financially. I'd like to do forestry, or maybe be a laboratory scientist, or perhaps a maths teacher, or work in a kitchen, drive an ambulance, pen tester, perhaps return to IP, or data science, or a car mechanic, or ...
white-flame 8y ago
Your latent passions are very likely non-specific, an affinity for particular facets of your lifestyle that resonate with you; not some specific regiment of what your business (as employee or otherwise) actually does. So no, it doesn't predestine you down a particular career path where any deviation will leave you miserable. Your passions can apply very broadly.

manfredo 8y ago

Advice that my father gave my siblings and me, "Make a career out of a field you're interested in, with colleagues you can tolerate, that affords a standard of living you can accept." All three of these criteria are fairly weak individually. The first is not passion, merely interest. The second is just "tolerate". And the last one is flexible in that people may have different expectations in income. The power is when all three combine: they should hopefully form a life of decent work experience and financial stability. Admittedly a lot more pagmatic than finding and making a career out of the thing you enjoy most - but considerably more achievable. There are plenty of things I am more passionate about than software development, but doesn't fulfill the other two categories. Those make for good hobbies, but usually not good careers.

harimau777 8y ago

I agree to a degree but the issue that I tend to have with these sort of articles is that they don't present a viable alternative. The idea that you should just pick something and get really good at it (e.g. as presented in the book "So Good They Can't Ignore You") seems like it is going too far in the other direction and seems like it relies a lot on survivor bias.

cschmidt 8y ago

There used to be a used bookstore near where I lived (McIntyre and Moore in Davis Square in Somerville). They had a sign on the wall about the kind of books they wanted to buy. They wanted books in fields where it is hard to make a living. I always thought that was an interesting heuristic. I guess that's where the passion is.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

Except it's universally true that the most "successful" people in the world did "follow their passion." A different way to say it is that, people who make big impacts on the world are obsessed with the right problem at the right place, and the right time. We all know the crank who has been obsessed with some problem or some technology forever, but was just at the wrong place and wrong time to be successful with it. The VR field has many of these people floating around all pissed off that Palmer Luckey got the glory. Both people followed their passions, being "successful" just happened to line up for one of them instead of the others. The reason "follow your passion" is awful advice is because there is no way for an individual to really predict what is going to be a sustainable way to live and most "obsessives" end up only marginally contributing to whatever their field is because the timing is wrong. This pattern seems to hold everywhere, sports, comedy, physics, economics etc... However I can't think of one example of someone who was wildly successful who was not obsessed or "passionate" about what they were doing. Whether or not you accidentally find it or deliberately seems to be irrelevant. I for one would like someone to describe how you know if you're passionate/obsessed with something - cause I know for myself I can get obsessed about many different things.

ebbv 8y ago

Waiting to find your passion is a dead end. But seeking out what you're really interested in and enjoy, and making that your career is great advice. Maybe you don't know what you love yet, that's fine, go figure it out. I'm coming up on 40 now, and I tell any young person I talk to that they should figure out what they enjoy and pursue that. If you fail, ok but trying is worth it. Life is short and work is a huge part of it. Spending 8+ hours a day on something you don't enjoy just for a paycheck is a tragedy.

antisthenes 8y ago

Mastery gives passion as much as passion gives mastery. Become incredibly good at something, so that when you do it, you can do it quickly and go back to leisure or work on really tough problems where people look up to you as the expert.

Sol- 8y ago

While I very much endorse the growth theory (within reasonable limits I guess) and have experienced myself that things I didn't immediately find interesting grew on me, the downside for me nowadays is that I never really know whether things just aren't for me or if I'm just lazy and not trying hard enough. Guess the trade-off of exploration vs. exploitation strikes even here, in career choices (or less consequential, hobbies and such).

huangc10 8y ago

Is it possible...and I'm just conjecturing here, that this advice is for the 0.01% of humanity. Think about it from an extremely high level POV. If giving this advice to everyone in the entire world, and if 0.01% is able to follow through with it...this is how we get standouts like Beethoven, Einstein, Gates, Jobs. etc. Is this terrible advice then? Sure, it doesn't help plebs like us, but it sure does help the world move along...

merpnderp 8y ago
Beethoven, Einstein, Gates, Jobs. etc, all put in the grueling hard boring hours doing the things that weren't fun. They did what they were good and successful at, which when you become an expert at becomes very fulfilling. There's a guy at our Home Depot who might be the best Home Depot salesman in the country. Just fun to be around, great with customer service, knows everything about the store, and always training new employees, and honestly seems to enjoy his job. But I doubt he was thrilled when on his first day he was sweeping the floors after close.
- skadamat 8y ago
  Cal Newport addresses this very well in the first 10 mins of his talk at Google - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwOdU02SE0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwOdU02SE0w

analyst74 8y ago

Larissa Lam from Finding Cleveland once said something along the line of "passion is not enough, you must find your purpose". I find that exceptionally insightful and succinct. Purpose is what keeps you motivated during difficult part of the journey, without purpose, empty passion will not survive through the hardships of pursuing any dream.

40acres 8y ago

Find your passion is great advice, in a world of increasing loneliness, isolation, exposure to news, etc. I think having a passion is a wonderful thing. I don't think your passion has to align with your career however. Programming is a great career for me but it is not my passion, I don't do side projects, open source, etc. etc. But it pays well and provides a standard of living that allows me to do the things I am passionate about.

DoctorOetker 8y ago

Valid long-term advice tends to be invalid short-term advice, otherwise the valid long-term advice would have been marketed as valid short-term advice...

wcchandler 8y ago

Mike Rowe has a short video on this: https://youtu.be/CVEuPmVAb8o https://youtu.be/CVEuPmVAb8o Just rewatched his TED talk and he brings it up around ~12 minutes in: https://youtu.be/IRVdiHu1VCc https://youtu.be/IRVdiHu1VCc

ggg9990 8y ago

“Find your passion” is ultimately tremendously selfish. It’s saying “I’ll do what I want regardless of what the world needs.” It’s learning to be a juggler rather than a dentist on an island with ten jugglers and twenty toothaches.

mkagenius 8y ago
That would make all the dentists selfless people. Its not that straightforward.
- ggg9990 8y ago
  Sure - obviously dentistry on this island will pay better than juggling, and adding an eleventh juggler will only further reduce juggler wages. It’s not an exact science, because pay does not equal value, so you have people becoming investment bankers etc.

neves 8y ago

I really like Call Newport comments about it: http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-passion-trap-how-the-search-for-your-lifes-work-is-making-your-working-life-miserable/ http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-passion-trap-how-t... or in video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIMu1PGbG-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIMu1PGbG-0

outworlder 8y ago

One of the things I keep saying is that I made a mistake when I made a hobby (software development) into a career. I used to love it, would go through hours on my own free time to code usually completely useless stuff, for fun. Only occasionally this would yield something useful. And that was fine. Fast forward many years, and it's been a while since I've last written a single line of code at home. I don't even have Emacs installed in my home machine anymore. I can still get excited when a task requires me to learn new stuff. I can still have fun some of the time. But that flame is no longer there. I guess anything will become a chore once you do too much of it, specially if you are doing it not because you want to, but because you are required to. That said, you could not pay me enough to do something like sales. So I guess the advice would be "find something that you don't absolutely hate" and you'll do ok. It's called work, not "fun", for a reason.

pm90 8y ago
I've seen/read/experienced this process a lot. My personal theory is that when your hobby becomes a job, you find other hobbies. One way I've managed to deal with this is by changing what I work on in a fairly frequent cadence. So either within the same company or in different companies, changing your squad/org and working on something totally different kinda satisfies my inner craving for programming. Its not easy or always possible to do so, but I've been lucky so far to be young and single and thus flexible with moving. Not sure how I'll handle this after I'm settled down and stuff.

shiburizu 8y ago

You can genuinely find something in the world of professional work that holds your interest -- a sense of being capable and engaged in the tools of your trade should be a point to look for when engaged in something you can find a career in. Now, if I really like computer science research but I really need to feed my family I'm probably going to consider working in engineering or administration because that is where my comfort in the toolset is going to pay me. That's not to say you can't pursue something you are genuinely passionate about in the field (the notion that all fields of profession exist in general terms and not in nuanced niches is the ignorance in this "Find your passion" statement) but if you're in any business because you want to put food on the table, you probably drift towards work that is within your comfort zone just enough that you don't hate it. One of my professors laments the lack of interest in my university's "computer science" specialization over engineering or administration in the compsci degree, but how many people hedge their livelihood on becoming a researcher in experimental fields? It's a passion best chased when you have a baseline already.

elyrly 8y ago

reminds me of the quote by Scott Adams - "Success breeds passion more than passion breeds success."

pers0n 8y ago

What if you’ve been doing the same thing for over 10 years and are bored with it despite being good, I’ve been moving into design and went back to school to learn it properly but it’s hard to get into and doesn’t pay as much. I just don’t want to be bored 8 hrs a day doing html,css,etc over and over. I’ve been at it since 99. And backend coding is more boring so I’m stuck on the front end

raintrees 8y ago

I wonder if absolutes are not coloring this incorrectly... As well as maybe an underlying "I want it now" expectation? I work part time and earn a full time income doing something that is _mostly_ fun... But sometimes it is not fun, and it took me 25+ years to get to this point. Luck and perseverance both had roles to play for me...

y2kenny 8y ago

I think it's best when what you do is at the intersection of what you can do, what you should do, and what you want to do. Unfortunately, those three things don't always align in reality.

qubax 8y ago

More useless clickbait nonsense. All advice is awful and useless in one form or another because life is complicated. "Find your passion". One person could take that advice and becomes einstein. Another takes that and become a failure. "Stay in your lane". One person takes that advice and is content. Another one takes that advice and becomes a bitter old man who wonders about "what if". How about life is a crap shoot and we leave it at that? Every advice article/book/etc is just lazy greedy people trying to make money off of you. Reading carnegie's "how to make friends...", graham's "intelligent investor" or kiyosaki/robbins/etc isn't going to make you successful, happy or content. It's just going to make the writers or their estate money. It's funny how many new self-help and advice nonsense is out there? If any of it actually worked, there wouldn't be a market for new self-help and advice nonsense year after year.

darkkindness 8y ago
I don't disagree with self-help being nonsense. Most that I've read is certainly written to be authoritative when they're not, drawing on a fresh selection of recent 'scientific' studies that are really cherry-picked to fit the author's opinions. So why not treat self-help as opinions? They might click with you or they might not, but in the end they represent someone else's thoughts of how the world works, not a general truth of the world. That's still valuable. Sure, some of those opinions can be popular and sell millions of copies (e.g. Carnegie), and yet are real useless for many readers. But is it really fair to say that they're awful and money-grabbing for that reason?

bovermyer 8y ago

Working is shit. But working can be rewarding, even if it's not what gives you the biggest and longest dopamine hit. I don't know exactly what my passion is. I know that I love coding, and solving problems that I care about. I also know that I love telling stories, trying new things, and generally feeling good. I also know that pain feels bad and that hardship makes me question my choices. But for all of this, I'm content with my life and where I think I'll be in five years, probably. I think that's plenty. And if I think that's plenty, doesn't that mean my life is good enough?

Ngunyan 8y ago

I say this is bullshit. It looks like black-white dichotomy because we frame it as passion-vs-work. Even if we are passionate about something, there will always be parts that are boring and feels like work. That does not mean we are not following our passion. Far from it. It's like love or sleep. You fall for it, you do not actively and directly chase it. Passions find us, and we are made aware, yet they also need to be developed. If you have not encountered your passion yet, it just means either that you are not self-aware, you're ignoring the signs, you're at the wrong place, you haven't tried a lot of things yet....so many reasons.

jokoon 8y ago

I love video games, yet I have trouble pursuing my game project. I work as a developer instead, in domains I don't really like. Maybe Im lucky that I can adapt my skills to realize my passion? The only obstacles being money, discipline and project management.

sunstone 8y ago

Some people at a very young age have a passion that is very difficult for them not to follow. For the rest of us aimless souls finding your passion is probably poor advice. For us creating the venn diagram of "don't mind doing", "can make money", "has no moral compromises" is not a bad place to start.

amorphous 8y ago

Always the same vastly simplified discussion. Obviously, having a deep interest in your work, something you may feel "passionate" about is a good thing. Obviously, the opposite, hating your work or what it represents is not good for you. Obviously, every work, no matter what, has boring parts. Obviously, if you like chocolate cake and eat it every day you gonna hate it. Obviously, waiting to find your "passion" is not gonna help you. It is just an excuse to procrastinate or avoid work. So the truth is somewhere in the middle. Obviously.

firemelt 8y ago

I felt my youth is wasted because I only do things that I like(my passion) anyone can give me some uplifting words about this feeling?