My other post for The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics this month. In it, I once again take issue with the increasingly common view that “follow your passion” is bad advice.
The most important point in the post is that we need to recognize that our passions are actually activities, not abstract generalizations. Recognizing that point alone will bring amazing clarity to all of your career decisions.
Here’s the start:
We often hear the advice “follow your passion” or “do what you love and the money will follow.” Is that good advice?
A few business thinkers have recently been saying that it is not. Even the author of the popular Dilbert comic, Scott Adams, was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, where he argued that “follow your passion” is bad advice.
Adams gives an example from when he worked as a commercial lender. The person who came in and said, “I want to open a sporting goods store because I really like watching sports on television,” was not the kind of guy who tended to be a good investment. Hence, “following your passion,” he argues, is not usually good advice.
But what’s the real problem here? I would argue that following your passion is, in fact, good advice—as long as you understand what that actually means.