There’s an all-too-common piece of advice about how to choose a career: follow your passion. But if someone tells you to follow your passion, it likely means they’re already rich. And typically, they made their fortune in some unglamorous industry like iron ore smelting.
Your mission, instead, is to find something you’re good at and apply the thousands of hours of grit and sacrifice necessary to become great at it. As you get there, the feeling of growth and your increasing mastery of your craft, along with the economic rewards, recognition, and camaraderie, will make you passionate about whatever “it” is. Nobody grows up saying, “I’m passionate about tax law,” but the best tax lawyers in the country are financially secure, have access to a broader selection of mates, and are—because they are so good at it—passionate about tax law. It’s unlikely you will ever be great at something you dislike doing, but mastery can lead to passion.
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You don’t know what you don’t know
Maybe the worst aspect of the advice to follow your passion is that for most of us, it’s just not actionable. Stanford psychologist William Damon found that only 20% of people younger than 26 can articulate a passion that guides their life choices. So four out of five of us can’t follow our passions even if we want to, because we don’t know what they are. And even when we can “articulate a passion,” it’s often socially determined, reflecting what our culture expects of us, not anything inherent to us. Researchers studying the aspirations of young people have found that their “passions” turn out to be “highly malleable and susceptible to influence” by factors such as how a topic’s classroom is decorated. For most of us, the kind of passion that guides us—a lodestar‐on‐the‐horizon kind of passion—is not a birthright. It’s something we find through hard work.
Author Cal Newport wrote an entire book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, debunking what he calls the “passion hypothesis.” He starts by looking at perhaps the most famous purveyor of this myth, Steve Jobs. In 2005, Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford and urged graduates to “find what you love” and make a career out of it. That speech has been viewed over 40 million times on YouTube. But as Newport points out, Jobs’s own career contradicts the advice in the speech. Before starting Apple, Jobs had numerous passions: meditation, calligraphy, fruitarianism, going barefoot. His initial interest in technology was in building a gadget that made free long‐distance telephone calls (if that makes no sense, ask your parents). When he finally found his calling, it was none of these things. It was promoting a hobby computer built by someone else (his friend, Steve Wozniak). Jobs didn’t find what he loved, he found his talent. He became passionate about marketing consumer computers—what he would later call “bicycles for the mind”—because he was so good at it.
Passion-focused careers are not what you think
Believing you have to be passionate about something before embarking on the uphill journey to mastery will lead you to careers where the supply of eager workers far exceeds the demand— activities better suited to be avocations than careers. Only 2% of professional actors make a living from their craft, the top 1% of musicians garner 77% of the revenue in the industry, leaving the majority far behind, and half of all visual artists obtain less than 10% of their earnings from their art. Digital media was supposed to democratize this, but it’s only reinforced a winner‐take‐most economy. The top handful of YouTube channels receive the vast majority of all views—and revenue—on the platform.
In entertainment and other careers that look desirable from the outside, casting directors, producers, senior vice presidents—aka the tiny group of people with power—know raw talent is cheap and always flowing in. They have little reason to invest in or mentor anyone who isn’t already a bankable star. Investment banking, sports, music, and fashion all suffer from this problem. And many of the most desirable fields offer unpaid or barely paid internships to young people just hoping to get a foot in the door—simply because they can. “Follow your passion” is Latin for “Prepare to be exploited.”
Read More: Why You’re Not Supposed to Know What You Want to Do When You’re in Your 20s
This advice holds even if your passion maps well to a potential career, at least early in life. Law school is full of people who grew up watching Law & Order and dreamed of being attorneys but who will be out of the profession after just a few years, regretting their choice. What a job looks like from the outside (or worse, on TV) is rarely what it’s like on the inside. That’s not to say it’s worse, just different. Professional athletes, especially in team sports, love to compete, but when they step away from the game, what they often talk about missing the most isn’t the victories, but instead the camaraderie, the moments of selfless focus, the bond of working hard with others on the practice field—stuff we fans hardly see.
Following your passion isn’t just bad for your career, it’s also bad for your passion. Work is hard, and it comes with setbacks, injustice, and disappointment. If you got into a field because it’s your “passion,” that passion may wilt. As Morgan Housel put it, “Doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.” Jay‐Z followed his passion and is now a billionaire. Assuming you are not Jay‐Z, follow your passion on the weekends.
Follow your talent instead
In contrast with passion, talent is observable and testable; it can be more readily converted to a high‐earning career, and it gets better the more you exploit it. Passion for something might make you better at it—but talent absolutely will. Economists refer to “match quality” as the fit between a worker’s talents and the job. And studies repeatedly show that people perform better, improve faster, and make more money where they have high match quality.
Doing what you’re good at creates a virtuous circle. Your accomplishments come faster, they reinforce your confidence, and encourage further focused effort. Your brain works better as well, as the flow of rewarding neurochemicals improves memory and skill development. Which makes the entire experience of your work into something more pleasurable than grueling, making it easier to return to day after day, year after year.
From The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security by Scott Galloway, published by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Scott Galloway.