When I was 11 years old, we had to draw self-portraits for art class one day. I remember excitedly running around the room gathering my materials, including the mirror and the oil pastels. I sat down, looked myself straight in the eyes, and observed every small detail of my identity: I could see my eyes, my nose, and my mouth, so that’s what I drew. I set the oil pastels down and admired my work, feeling proud of the girl looking back at me. This was my passion.
“When you’re finished, write down your name and what you want to be when you grow up,” my teacher announced. Suddenly, the pride was gone – I looked back at the girl in the mirror and saw her blue eyes, her blonde hair, but I couldn’t see what she wanted to be. My mind raced to find an answer, something to write so I wouldn’t be the last one. I want to be an artist, I scribbled at the bottom. I thought I had found my calling, but as I looked around the room to see astronaut, doctor, and teacher written on my classmates’ papers, I realized how much I really had to choose from – and this was beyond daunting.
From the moment my future was on the table, it’s all I heard: “Follow your passions.” I’m willing to bet this is the most popular saying in the books on career advice, given how many times it’s come up in conversation. But as a girl with many passions, this phrase has always sent me into a spiral – how am I supposed to pick just one? If I become a doctor, I’ll give up on being an artist or a baker. This dilemma has followed me for 8 years now, ever since that day in art class.
I’ve read several articles recently about Sylvia Plath’s book, The Bell Jar. I had never heard of the book before, but as I read its summary, I felt like I was reading a synopsis of my own life. For those who are unfamiliar with it, the story is famous for its fig tree metaphor, in which a girl named Esther finds herself at the foot of a fig tree, gazing up at each fig representing a different path she can choose from: but if she chooses the fig with her dream of being a poet, the figs containing her other dreams shrivel up and fall. She becomes so afraid of picking just one fig that she slowly watches all of them wither and die. I remember scrolling through hundreds of reviews of The Bell Jar and realizing that uncertainty is slowly sending us all into spirals.
However, there is one book that completely changed my perspective on it all, called So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport. If you’ve ever felt like you’re spiraling from uncertainty or just caught in the dilemma of choosing a career, this book is for you. Here’s a little bit about the book and the biggest takeaways from it that I like to remind myself of.
Challenge Yourself with new passions
What I’m about to say will sound very contradictory to what you’ve grown up hearing, but just for a moment, forget about the phrase “follow your passions,” because Cal Newport argues that this is terrible career advice. It suggests that finding a job that you enjoy requires enjoying it from the beginning.
Oftentimes, the things that make us happiest are the things we do for fun: spending time with family and friends, playing with our pets, or going for a walk. These are called “personal passions” and often don’t relate to work. These are all wonderful things, but it’s important to realize that these things are ‘fun’ because we choose to do them. Likewise, if you do something because you have to, it stops being fun.
For example, many students struggle to find the motivation to read the required chapters of their history textbook. This is in large part due to the fact that it’s a requirement – if they picked up that book on summer vacation because they were genuinely interested in its content, they’d likely whizz through those chapters in no time.
Another example: I used to dread practicing my piano scales every day because it felt like a chore my parents were forcing me to do. However, once I stopped, it was no longer required of me, and so today I often sit at the piano and teach myself songs as a break from my work. As soon as it became voluntary, I found the joy in the freedom that I knew I had.
This is not to say that you will not find your job enjoyable once you have it for a while; it’s to emphasize the fact that you shouldn’t be afraid to challenge yourself and try things out that don’t seem exactly ‘fun’ at first. If you listen to “follow your passions”, you’ll likely start filing through all the fun activities you can think of doing and pick one of those. Just remember that passion takes time. In Newport’s words, “No one owes you a great career… You need to earn it – and the process won’t be easy.”
Passion Comes From Hard Work
Many of the hardest things in life are also the most rewarding; the feeling of successfully overcoming a difficult challenge is unbeatable. From hiking back to the base of a mountain to finally submitting that big essay, this is a feeling we all know.
Newport claims that “passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before… what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.” In other words, passion is a side effect of mastery. This means that, contrary to what “follow your passions” suggests, you don’t need to start with something you already love because the enjoyment will follow your hard work. He goes on to state that “the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.”
You will never be happy 100% of the time in any job, so it’s unfair to yourself to quit the second you sense any difficulty. If you work hard and stay consistent, you will naturally get better at whatever skill or goal you’re working towards. Studies have shown that just 30 days of consistency is all you need to see progress.
Humans like being good at things. We like the success and praise that comes when we can outperform others – the better we are at something, the more likely we’ll continue because we want to keep that validation. This is why sticking with a challenge, even if you’re not the best at it yet, is extremely important: slowly, you will rise to become better at that skill and outperform all the people quitting because it’s too hard or they’re not seeing the progress yet. With enough consistency, determination, and hard work, you will begin to find enjoyment and passion in things that were once big walls. So don’t be afraid to dream big, because hard work can get you anywhere.
Adopt the Craftsman Mindset
The Craftsman Mindset often starts by identifying a problem you want to solve. You can start big: climate change, homelessness, gender inequality. Then, slowly break it down into specific sub-issues that are more easily tackled: designing bicycle lanes for your city, ensuring there is a homeless shelter in every neighboring town, and creating a platform to share access to educational resources with young women in underserved communities.
Thus, the Craftsman Mindset is all about reflecting on what you can offer the world instead of focusing on what the world can offer you. If you keep looking for external opportunities that come to you, you’ll be waiting a long time – but if you put yourself out there and offer the opportunities you can give, you’ll have a lot more luck finding happiness in what you do. Shape your future instead of letting it shape you. Choose a problem you’re passionate about solving, figure out how you might be able to help solve it in some way, and stick to that. If you keep jumping around, you’ll lose your progress.
So next time a new opportunity presents itself, give it a try – even if it’s hard, stick with it for 30 days and reassess. I can almost guarantee that you’ll feel differently about it. Remember that growth is not linear; you won’t be perfect the first time you try, but hard work and perseverance are ultimately what shape passion.
As Newport wrote, “If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (‘what can the world offer me?’) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (‘what can I offer the world?’).”