Why 'Follow Your Passion' is bad advice, usually?
Many successful people give the advice: "Follow your passion!"; but actually this is a bad advice. It makes us think that we will enjoy what we will do, but no one likes hard-work.
Distraction
Whatever job you are doing, whenever it gets a little tough or boring you will start dreaming about your 'passion'. Passion being the thing, you think will be really fun and exciting. But when you will actually get to do that thing, you will realize how wrong you were. You will feel the same sadness when your 'passion' job also turns out to be boring.
So stop worrying about the dream job and focus on excelling at the job at hand. As you get better at the job, you can demand autonomy in the work you do. Number one reason given for enjoying the work by those actually do is, “We are in control of what we do and when we do".
Day dreaming about your dream job, keeps you away from finding the real reasons behind the disgust for the current job.
Shows A Rosy Picture
Mike Tyson, former boxing world heavyweight champion, said in an interview that fighting is vacation but training is hard and he hates it.
In every endeavor, fruit is sweet and labor is bitter. Singers need to do boring vocal chord training, to keep performing at the best level.
To realize our dream we need to learn many different sets of skills. Whether we hate them or love them, what's necessary, needs to be done!
Miss Opportunities
Steve Jobs was not trying to create a world dominating company, he just saw an opportunity to make some money on the side by selling pre built computers to tech heads.
If an opportunity seems cool, than that's good enough to pursue it. But if you keep your focus on passion and long term goals all the time, then you will miss very good opportunities. You will try to attach the good enough opportunity with your passion and on finding it incompatible, you will drop that opportunity.
Another thing to keep in mind is that one could have multiple passions. Most innovations occur when people of one field comes into another field.
Search For Passion Is A Lifelong Pursuit
Very few people know early in there carrier, what there passion is. This is expected because at a young age, like 16, one does not have much exposure of the world. As today's schools do not challenge the students but keep them in their comfort zone.
To find your life's mission, you need to develop a routine to understand deeply all the new ideas related to your interest or field. For example, Cal Newport's three part pyramid:
- Top Level: Tentative mission statement, which currently makes the most sense to pursue.
- Bottom Level: Every week understand something new related to your interest.
- Middle Level: Generate concrete feedback by pursuing small projects based on the ideas generated from the bottom level. This feedback guides the research in bottom level and improves the mission statement in the top level.
So Good That They Can't Ignore You
Skill is more important than having a passion. Cal Newport writes in his book, "So good that they can't ignore you" that deliberate practice is needed to become a master in your field. Only then others will find you irreplaceable and give you the freedom that is the hallmark of enjoying one's work.
Relationship Between Knowledge and Interest
We can get passionate about anything. As the more knowledge we have about a thing, the more interested we are in it. Vice versa, we seek knowledge about the things which are interesting to us.
So if your job seems dull and boring, rather than thinking about other stuff, try to learn more about it. You might even find easier ways to complete that task.
School students must be given freedom to pursue their interests so that they quickly learn about the world around them and decide for themselves, what's relevant for them. Rather than being spoon-fed and having their decisions made for them by others. This way students will take responsibility of their actions and become a better person.
Listen to the podcast about this topic, in Urdu: Google Podcasts