
‘Find Your Passion’ Is Awful Advice - _bpgl
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/find-your-passion-is-terrible-advice/564932/?single_page=true
======
mikestew
_“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.

~~~
sharkweek
I decided, after burning out of Startupville a bit ago, that I was going to
take some time off and... wait for it... _write a novel._ I love writing, I
love blogging, so how hard could this be? It's the next natural step, right?

I thought this would be a dream experience, sitting at my computer and
creating beautiful prose for hours a day, my creativity flowing like a river.

After about 20,000 words (a debut novel should be between 70-100k words), it
turned into hard work. One thousand words a day becomes quite tedious,
especially when the initial steam wears off.

Great, so I pushed through for months, putting in the daily grind. Draft
complete at 90k words! First round of edits, cutting almost 20,000 words
(about a month of work, all for "nothing"). Back at the writing grind again to
get the word count and story aligned to be more marketable.

Edit number two complete. Edit number three complete. Beta readers telling me
there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this
character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc. Just now wrapping up edit number
four, and I'm actually quite happy with how it reads.

But now... onto the business end of this deal, querying agents. Agents reject
about 99% of the pitches that come into their inbox. The 1% gets a full
manuscript request. Of those 1%, about 10% get offers of representation.

An offer of representation often turns into several more rounds of edits
before the agent will sell it to a publisher. So if I'm lucky enough to get an
agent, it'll be even more editing (my least favorite part of this process so
far).

THEN, the agent has to successfully sell the book to a publisher. The odds
that this happens also pretty low. And since I'm a first-time writer, I'd be
looking at a pretty small five figure advance for what will end up being about
two years of work.

Anyways... writing, my favorite form of art, has become a roll-of-the-dice
grind. I'm not sure I would go back in time and do this again, but regardless,
I've come this far so...

I think chasing a "dream career" whatever that is can be a tough lesson in
setting realistic expectations in what it means to make money.

~~~
gt2
It sounds like you were doing another form of startup. Perhaps some writers
bang out the prose and have an editor help to trim the fat rather than trying
to wear all of the hats required to launch a new novelist. Also:

> Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This
> character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc.

I think what makes a great story, and novelist for that matter, are some of
those rough edges and you should ignore the critics just like an opinionated
CEO might be advised to do. Those people may be looking out for you, but
you're the artist and can use your vision to create your world with your
unique voice!

~~~
sharkweek
Thanks - That's a really fun observation, that I'm wearing a lot of hats that
a more established novelist/executive wouldn't. I also appreciate the
positivity (it has been very easy to be negative about this process so far).

And you're right, it's important to only take beta readers' opinions as just
that, opinions. It is super helpful though to get their take, as I've been so
close to the project where sometimes I can't see the forest for the trees.

~~~
xapata
You can also see that when an author becomes too famous and starts to ignore
the editor(s), the books become heavy and repetitive. Editors are sharp. Trust
them.

~~~
sharkweek
Fingers crossed I make it to the point where I have an editor =)

Definitely noticeable though, sometimes authors get too attached to the smell
of their own farts to realize their writing is suffering under the weight of
their own hubris.

------
manfredo
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.

------
peterwwillis
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
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.

~~~
_raoulcousins
What do you mean by "(a fraud prevention measure to make it hard to cover any
wrong doing)"?

~~~
rpeden
It's not all that common for developers, but forced vacations are fairly
normal in accounting and finance - or at least they were in another lifetime
when I worked in accounting.

There have been cases where an employee has been committing fraud, but it
wasn't discovered for years because the person never took a day off and so was
able to continually cover up their wrongdoing.

There's a decent discussion of it here on Stack Exchange:
[https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/107060/mandator...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/107060/mandatory-
vacation-as-a-security-control)

~~~
mikestew
_but forced vacations are fairly normal in accounting and finance - or at
least they were in another lifetime when I worked in accounting._

It probably hasn't been ten years since my aunt's most recent husband got
caught in that exact manner, and I'd frankly be surprised if it weren't still
common, given that it appears to work.

(As a footnote, it was an interesting phenomenon to watch. "He's an accountant
at some no-name company, and she sells Mary Kay. Where the hell are these
Bahama vacations and the big house coming from? Mary Kay didn't give her that
Cadillac, she bought it because no one buys Mary Kay. I dunno, must be up to
their eyeballs in debt." Of course, looking back now it was friggin' obvious.
His unfortunate solution to the hammer that was soon to fall on his head
involved a 12 gauge shotgun.)

------
codesections
A much older Atlantic article argued for exactly the same point:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/follow-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/follow-
your-bliss-sort-of/246350/)

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
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
>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
At least he has a goth gf?

------
themagician
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.

------
J-dawg
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/034941...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-
You/dp/0349415862)

~~~
skadamat
I help people get data science jobs for a living (and I'm an otherwise
annoying career advice giver to others) and this is the ONLY book I recommend
everyone to read. I've read it probably 10 times and it's a quick read, finds
a good balance between stories and developing his framework further, but much
harder to implement the advice.

But he installs a powerful mental framework for thinking about careers and
gives you a new way of looking at the world. You may not see "results"
immediately, but it really helps you focus on how to determine what work
traits are meaningful for you and the types of career moves you should make to
match.

Deep Work is an excellent follow up on the tactics / daily practice, and also
a must read for knowledge workers.

------
AndrewKemendo
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.

------
JackFr
"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
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.

------
40acres
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.

------
seanalltogether
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.

------
oym8
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
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?

~~~
spicytunacone
For comparison:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1215907200&dateEnd=1216080000)

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.

------
ggg9990
“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
That would make all the dentists selfless people. Its not that
straightforward.

~~~
ggg9990
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.

------
gavman
Scott Adams wrote about this in the WSJ a while back:
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/scott-adams8217-secret-of-
succe...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/scott-adams8217-secret-of-success-
failure-1381639163)

He says we see successful passionate people but have the causality backwards:
success does not follow passion, but passion follows success.

~~~
rfg34te4
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
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
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.

------
outworlder
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
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.

------
projektir
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
People want you to have passion until you disagree with them.

------
staunch
"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
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.

------
neves
I really like Call Newport comments about it:
[http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-passion-trap-
how-t...](http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-passion-trap-how-the-
search-for-your-lifes-work-is-making-your-working-life-miserable/)

or in video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIMu1PGbG-0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIMu1PGbG-0)

------
shiburizu
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.

------
huangc10
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
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
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)

------
kabdib
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.

------
cschmidt
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.

------
wcchandler
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)

------
crazygringo
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
Unfortunately, though, it appears to be false. It appears we have strong
innate interests that we're not in control of.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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 ...

------
allthecybers
"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

------
j-c-hewitt
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.

------
bovermyer
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?

------
shawnfratis
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!

------
codegeek
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.

------
vfc1
> 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
> 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
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
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.

~~~
vfc1
The thing is, if someone is forc example not good at numbers growing up, they
where probably good at something else.

Everybody is good at something, its a matter of trying different things out.

We will be better of persuing our natural tendencies and talent areas, and
spend our persistence there rather than in some other area that we are not
naturally gifted at.

There is usually a natural overlap between the areas we are interested and the
ones we are talented.

If we follow that intersection of interest and talent our changes of being
able to make a career in that area are higher.

------
amorphous
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.

------
Sol-
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).

------
pers0n
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

------
harimau777
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.

------
sunstone
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.

------
analyst74
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.

------
Avshalom
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/...](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)

------
raintrees
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...

------
squozzer
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.

------
jokoon
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.

------
antisthenes
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.

------
thegabez
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.

~~~
curioussavage
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

------
DoctorOetker
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_...

------
y2kenny
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.

------
firemelt
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?

------
matachuan
"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
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
Correct -- you should at least try and then make a fair judgment of yourself.
However, that judgment is still hard to make.

~~~
s-shellfish
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.

------
elyrly
reminds me of the quote by Scott Adams

\- "Success breeds passion more than passion breeds success."

------
qubax
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
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?

------
thucydidesofusa
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
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).

------
ebbv
_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.

------
mozumder
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.

~~~
volkk
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

------
snissn
"X is awful advice" is awful advice

~~~
calebm
False by recursion :)

