How To 'Do What You Love' and Still Be Able To Build A Career

 

Say 'follow your passion' to someone and chances are that person is not really going to live the dream.

 

Following the 'follow your passion' advice, people take up a career without fully knowing/working upon the skills and hard work needed to make it work.

 

'Doing what you love' is a cool but it won't necessarily pay the bills of life, and despair soon joins in the fun.

 

The expression 'do what you love and the money will follow' doesn't apply to everybody- then it is more like 'do what you love and never work a day in your life' but then sometimes you can't eat.

 

Too many of us focus on 'doing what we love'. In the end, nobody loves it.

 

Better, think of the 'do what you love and money will follow' idea as, 'do something you do well, that not many other people can, and the money will follow'.

Or,'do something that you do well, that there is a demand for, that you find enjoyable or at least tolerable, and the money will follow without self-loathing.

 

There are alternate routes to finding which career is right for you, and these two come up tops:

 

1. Choose 'Personal Fit' and Ditch 'Follow Your Passion'

 

William MacAskill (author of 'Doing Good Better. Want to find which career is really right for you?') says about the frequently discredited idea of 'follow your passion', 'there’s no one-size-fits-all “perfect job—personal factors are crucial to choosing the right career. Different people have different strengths, and you’ll need to play to your strengths in order to develop mastery at your work, another important part of enjoying your job.

 

Instead, MacAskill introduces the “personal fit concept of choosing a career:

 

To assess your personal fit with a career, the key question is this:

 

If you were to invest the time, how good would you become at this career, compared to other careers you might choose?

 

The focus is on what you 'could become good at', which isn’t necessarily what you’re good at now.

 

2. Forget “follow your passion or “find your true calling.'

- Cal Newport, 'So Good They Can’t Ignore You'

 

Suggesting that we can build our careers by only by building our expertise and experience, Cal says in his popular book,

Looking for your passion, purpose, or calling is an example of the fixed mindset. You’re assuming that this is an inherent and unchanging thing inside of you, like trying to read your DNA or blood type. But you won’t find passion and purpose there, because that’s not where those feelings come from.

 

Passion and purpose are emotions that come after expertise and experience. The way to get them is to commit to the path of mastery, get great at something, and do great work.

 

So instead of looking for passion and purpose, just keep mastering whatever work you’ve started, becoming more and more valuable in your field. Passion and purpose will follow a great career.

 

Thank you for reading.
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