The Surprising Problems with Pursuing Your Passion

0:00Passion for your job is everywhere. It is in the way that we are supposed to think about the work that we do, what it means to have a good job, and at the end of the day, how we are supposed to feel about the jobs that we have. The idea that following your passion is the best career decision-making guide seems obvious, seems like it doesn't need any kind of explanation, but it's built on a lot of false assumptions about the way that the labor market works.

0:34One of those false assumptions is that the labor market is meritocratic, that the people with the most talent and skill will always succeed, and those who are lacking in talent and skill won't succeed to the same extent. But there's been a century of social science research that has demonstrated that the labor market is not a meritocracy. It is not fair and equal in that way. There's not equality in terms of who is able to turn what they're passionate about into a kind of gainful employment. One of the major ways that people are able to take the thing that they're passionate about and get a job in it, and get a job that's decently paying and kind of secure, is by relying on the resources from the families in which they came.

1:21I talk about this as having safety nets and springboards. Safety nets are often financial safety nets. Having a parent who is able to pay for college so you don't amass a ton of student loan debt, or be able to float you the money while you take three months after graduating college to figure out what your passion is about. Springboards are those connections that you might have that allow you to know somebody in an industry that you're passionate about and get a leg up. And that kind of cultural capital is really profoundly important for being able to launch into a job that's not only aligned with people's passion, but has some element of stability in it.

2:10So take for example two people who are equally passionate about computer programming. And one person has had the resources to have been able to go to camps about coding since they were young. And maybe they have an aunt who is a computer programmer as well, who tells that person about how computer programming is as a profession and what kinds of classes you can expect and what kinds of skills would be really useful for that person to be able to be successful as a computer programmer. And then you have another person who is really interested about computer programming, but has never done a line of code in their life before walking into college.

2:51Those two individuals are at profoundly different starting points. And so saying that the second person, as long as they're passionate about it, they will be able to get the skills as necessary, really belies the fact that these could be years, if not decades, of differences that are really baked into the structure of opportunities. We know that people who are going to put in 60, 70, 80 hours a week, but have had advantages that allow them to have a leg up, will have a better opportunity to be successful than somebody that doesn't.

3:30Employers really like people who are passionate about their work, but they like it because they believe that people will put more effort into the work that they're doing without asking for additional compensation or asking for recognition of the passion that they put in. People who are passionate about their work do tend to put in more hours than people who are less passionate about the work that they're doing. They're willing to eat ramen noodles for three nights a week as long as they can do work that they love. They're willing to forgo vacations or time with family or even starting a family at all if that's something that they're interested in, in the pursuit of work that they love.

4:13And in trying to pursue the work that they love, they're putting in these extraordinarily long hours to be able to find and secure and continue in work that aligns with their passion.

4:29We now exist in a labor force that doesn't deal with an increase in the amount of productive expectation by hiring more people. it just has greater expectation of the people who are in the jobs to do more work, right? So that means that people who are on professional jobs are doing not 40 hours a week, they're doing 60, 70, 80 hours a week in their one job. Many of the people I talked to said that following your passion wasn't irrational. In fact, it was highly rational because it was the only thing that would allow some kind of insulation from the drudgery that might come along with working for 60 years of your life.

5:15But what that does fundamentally is just provide an individual level solution to what is fundamentally the structural problems of the paid workforce, of paid employment. We have to address that structural problem with structural solutions. How we manage things like overtime pay and managing the expectation of overwork and work devotion. The message is not that we shouldn't enjoy the work that we do or that we should all follow the money and find work that's the most well-paying, the most stable that we can and disregard any consideration of work of whether we find work interesting or meaningful.

6:04One of the ways to deal with the negative consequences of the passion principle is to try and shrink the footprint of work in your life. Regardless of whether you're passionate about your job or not, trying to make work fit into a smaller time frame in your life will provide many more opportunities for engaging in activities that are meaningful to you and are fulfilling to you. One of the concerns about centering your work as a core part of your identity is that no amount of passion for your job is going to mean that an employer is going to keep you if that employer is facing downsizing or other constraints.

6:53If we lose our job, that can not only feel like a change or a loss in our economic security, but a change or a loss in our sense of identity and our sense of self. One of the most important things that we can do is think about about diversifying our meaning-making portfolio. And what I mean by that is finding activities outside of our paid employment that we find meaningful and fulfilling to us. That can be community service activities, some kind of intramural sport, some kind of artistic or creative endeavor. Things that we personally feel attached to but isn't part of our job. The idea of what it means to make a good career decision shouldn't only be about money or only be about passion, but rather should be a much more holistic balance that starts with the question, what do I want my relationship to paid employment to be?