Should you follow your passion when choosing a career?
Helpful perspective for early career idealists
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
“More than anything else, what I tell young people is that you’ve got to find that thing you’re passionate about. It might be literature, it might be medicine, it might be law, whatever it is that you want to take on. Find out what you’re passionate about and then really understand what your greatest aspirations are in achieving something that will be lasting in that area of your passion.”
This was the take-home message in a speech I attended my freshman year at Dartmouth College. The speaker was our incoming President, Jim Yong Kim, who would Dartmouth for three years before moving on to act as President of the World Bank for the next seven years.
Kim was insistent with this message: young leaders should find what they’re passionate about aspire to change the world. “Passion and practicality,” he said, “either without the other will be inadequate to tackle the challenges we face today.”
I remember being inspired by the speech. Not just by the words, but by Kim’s bio, which was a side plot in the book assigned to my class as summer reading (Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder). Kim had an MD and PhD in anthropology from Harvard, and was well known for his work establishing radical new community-focused health care programs in Haiti. His story seemed like proof that it’s possible to be successful, make money, follow your interests, and make a difference in the world.
But Kim’s speech landed differently with many of my peers. In the coming weeks and months I heard my classmates express more cynical views about choosing a career path you’re passionate about:
“This passion stuff nonsense, I just want to make good money.”
“Nobody makes money in jobs they like.”
“Easy to follow your passion if you’re rich, but my parents are poor. I have to make a good living to support them.”
“The world’s falling apart anyway. I’ll probably just go into investment banking.”
I’m sad to admit that over the years I gradually bought in to this notion that “following your passion” was a kind of fuzzy, even selfish pursuit, relevant only to well-meaning — but ultimately naive — young people. I remained an idealist at heart, but questioned the merits of following your passion as career advice. I started to wonder: maybe aligning your career with your passion is only relevant to people who, like me, grew up in relative privilege. “Maybe,” I began to wonder, “I just need to ‘grow up’ and worry more about paying the bills.”
You might have heard a version of the above from your own classmates or from someone in your life. In fact, lots of writers have jumped on the “don’t follow your passion” bandwagon. They argue that not all passions translate well into a career, that building a career you love takes commitment, and that there are better questions to ask.
This is sound advice, but I think it still organizes career advice around an implied false dichotomy: your passion vs. being practical. It makes many college students and young professionals believe they have to choose between work they love and making money; between a prestigious career and making a difference.
A decade later —and from my perspective as a career coach — I see that nothing could be further from the truth. The passion vs. practicality binary simply misses the point. If we look a little closer, we see that of course everyone wants to make a difference thorough a career they’re passionate about. And yes, like all of us, they’re also worried about money.
The false binary of passion vs. practicality
If you’re a young person trying to decide what direction to take your career, I hope you’ll take this to heart. I’m not going to make an ideological argument (although I believe there is one to be made). Rather, this appeal is purely logical. Think about it:
Most career professionals work at least 40 hours a week for most of their lives. If you’re looking for a career, you can expect to spend about half your waking hours at work.
“Following your passion” simply means pursuing jobs you enjoy (mostly) at organizations you believe in (again, mostly). It means you seek out work opportunities that feel meaningful — both day-to-day and when you consider the organization’s larger mission. It means making a conscious effort to hone in, over time, on a job you’re excited to wake up for and a career that you believe is doing good in the world.
So, would you rather spend half your waking life doing something you enjoy or something you don’t enjoy? Something you believe in or something you don’t believe in?
Put this way, the answer is obvious. “But,” you’re likely to protest, “I have to pay the bills! I want a comfortable lifestyle! I have medical expenses and family to support! I need to save for retirement!”
Of course you do! But who said anything about any of that?
Too often we assume that making money is incompatible with doing work we love or doing good in the world. We confuse our worries about money with pursuing the career of our dreams.
The good news is that it’s normal — even inevitable — that you’re worried about making enough money early in your career. Almost everyone worries about money, because we have a brain that evolved to imagine all the ways things could go wrong. But if you assume a tradeoff between making a good living and doing work you’re passionate about, you’re eliminating that possibility before you even get started.
Why we all worry about money
Let’s put our worries about money in context. Many of my career coaching clients bring a version of the following challenge to our first session:
“I’m not passionate about my job. I make enough money and I’m pretty good at it, but I’m not excited to go to work. I have some ideas about other career directions I’d be more passionate about, but I’m worried I can’t make money doing those things.”
This concern — “I’m not going to make enough money if I pursue my passion” — is so common because our brains are wired with what psychologists call a “negativity bias.” In the simplest terms, this means that as humans we are really good at imagining everything that could go wrong in a situation.
Think about the last time you had to speak publicly in front of an audience. Before speaking, you probably imagined how you were going to forget what to say or how people might laugh at you. You probably didn’t imagine how courageous people would think you were or how inspired they’d be by your content. That’s the negativity bias.
Imagining everything that could go wrong was very useful 100,000 years ago when we were trying to avoid being eaten by predators. But today’s it’s mostly a nuisance. For young people choosing a career, it leads to an unhelpful either/or conversation: either I’m financially well off or I love my work and am making a difference in the world. I can’t have it both ways.
A more creative approach to finding your career
The problem with pitting passion against practicality is that we assume something has to give. Starting with that assumption is like putting blinders on: you’ll find plenty of evidence to justify how it’s impossible to have both. What you’re unlikely to find is creative ways to become passionate about your work, or to make money doing something you believe in.
To move beyond the passion vs. practicality binary, simply turn that either/or conversation into a creative question:
“What might it look like for me to be making a comfortable living doing work that I love?”
What happens when you focus on that question? Do you relax a little? Does it give you some breathing room? Do you experience a hint — even just a glimmer — of possibility?
If you do, it’s because both things are important to you: having stability so you can pay the bills and having a career you love and believe in. When you’re worrying about not having both, you probably feel stuck. That’s when you’re likely to beeline to the next available job with a descent salary and benefits (whether you enjoy it or not).
Asking “What might it look like…?” is the first step toward seeing an answer. You might not find a solution immediately, but be patient. Try the question on for a few weeks and see what comes up for you. Finding your ideal career is a process, and how you approach it makes all the difference. Creative questions like this help us step away from our worrying brains long enough to explore the possibilities.
When I think think back to my first year at Dartmouth, I see that Jim Kim was anticipating the skeptics. “Passion and practicality,” he told us, “either without the other will be inadequate to tackle the challenges we face today.”
It ultimately comes down to a choice. You could spend the coming years justifying why you had to “be practical and take a certain job to “pay the bills.” You could tell the story of how you never pursued that field you’re passionate about because it was “too risky” or “probably wouldn’t work out.”
Or, you could look back on your career and say: “Wow, I had no idea this would be my path but I just kept following what interests me. I was clear about my values and the difference I want to make in the world, and at each crossroad that’s what I chose to focus on.”