You don't need to be passionate about your job
another krappy newsletter #37
Sup homies?
Welcome back to another krappy newsletter. A newsletter about nothing delivered every Tuesday to make Tuesday suck a little less.
I appreciate you all taking the time to read these posts and a thank you to everyone who has reached out to say supportive things by email, Substack comment, text, Slack, Facebook message, Facebook post, SnapChat, Instagram DM, Instagram post, Twitter DM, tweet, voicemail, voice memo, and in person.
Something something gratitude. So blessed. So thankful.
I strive to respond to everyone. However, it is low key overwhelming so I am sorry if it takes me a while to get back to you.
One way to have me respond quickly is to talk about it in person. I am super good at getting back to you if we are in a real life conversation and I like that medium of communication the best.
Before we get into this edition, I would like to document a couple interesting observations about the in person conversations I have about the newsletter:
People who talk to me in person are the most candid about their opinions, hopes, dreams, and fears.
There is a level of trust that comes from an in person conversation that is not captured by Twitter DM. I imagine it is because everyone is afraid they are being watched by the social media companies.
The DM conversation with me in your mind might look like “OMG you got a new job? Me too!” and Jack Dorsey will be like:
learn about Panopticons so you can realize why this is funny, meme source Seeing the stark difference between what people say on social media and what they say in person is why I think preference falsification is so real.
Feel free to keep reaching out with your real opinion. I will not out you for what is most likely a super mild opinion that everyone agrees with except some small, but very vocal subsection of the Internet.
You learn things that you won’t learn through textual communications.
I had the following conversation five times now:
THEM: I really liked that piece you wrote on [SUBJECT]
ME: Oh yay that’s great!
THEM: I would love to sign up to receive more!
I would laugh because a “Subscribe now” button was the third line of every email I sent for the last four months. It is not a mystery what clicking that button will do. But then I thought to myself “why is this the fifth time I am having this conversation?”
So I went back to my posts and I realized something that is so obvious it makes me laugh at myself now.
People don’t open an email and immediately know they want to receive it every week. They need to read it and say “oh I like this!” Then they will subscribe.
Thinking someone would just open an email from me and know immediately they wanted to read more stuff like this forever was some odd manifestation of my enormous ego.
So now the subscribe button is going to live right after my self indulgent opening narrative.
On to the newsletter!
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You don’t need to be passionate about your job
When I was 24, I was infected with a mind virus.
I was convinced that I needed to “find my passion”.
I believed that humans were immutable creatures born with inherent passions. A human’s primary job was to find that passion and align their career with it.
This logic resonates with the demographic I was in: people who hate their job.
“I just have to find my passion!” was a seductive siren song. My mind rushed to accept this narrative because it externalized blame.
It was not my fault. I just needed to do some searching!
And search I did…
How to get infected with stupid
I acquired this mind virus where everyone acquires mind viruses: the Internet.
Fueled by my burning hatred of that job, I fired off Google search after Google search hoping that the correct arrangement of keywords would provide me with the article that would plug the hole in my soul.
I visited every guru’s website. Reading blog post after blog post, book after book. Deep down the rabbit hole I went. All in search for the answer to “why do I hate my job?”
Low and behold, many people have an answer to this question.
The problem, they assured me, was that I was not “following my passion.”
Of course!
But how do I follow my passion? Well that will cost you...
Welcome to the world of life coaching.
Life coaches are mostly hucksters. Some of them are successful people trying to give back, but the majority are marketers preying on your insecurities in order to extract money from your pocket.
If they convince you that you are not passionate then they can convince you to buy their solution. But what you find is they are not your answer, you are their answer. You are their golden ticket to quitting their job. Not the other way around.
They cannot provide you with the product they claim to sell. The only outcome they can give you is the tools to become a life coach. That is why the most “successful” people from these courses are all life coaches.
Welcome to the life coaching pyramid scheme.
Eventually you figure out that you got got.
I was a misguided child that put my fate into the hands of Google’s algorithmic determinism. Surprising that I didn’t end up in Q’Anon. In an alternate reality, this whole post is me convincing you of some pedophile pizza parlor conspiracy.
But instead, here I am talking about what I did to correct my passion problem.
So what did I do?
Curing yourself of stupid
I reanalyzed the problem.
I hated my job.
Why? Because I was not passionate about my job.
Why was I not passionate about my job? Because I did not like being there and I did not find the work very stimulating.
Why did I not like being there? Because I disliked the culture.
Why did I not find the work very stimulating? Because I was not being given tasks that intellectually challenged me.
In other words, I needed a new job…
So that is what I did.
In my new role, I liked the people so I liked being at work more. As I liked the work more, I started to pride myself in getting better at the job. As I got better at the job, people gave me more intellectually challenging things to work on.
One day I looked up and I weirdly found myself “passionate” about what I did.
What happened?
How to become passionate about what you do
The passion rhetoric is attractive because we remember a time we felt “passionate” which lead us to a mental state where we had boundless energy to do some task. It might have been baseball in high school, writing in your English class or stuffing nerds in a locker.
So you intuitively know what it feels like to be “passionate” about something. Shouldn’t you feel that about your job?
No. You shouldn't.
Because if you are just starting out in a job, you suck at it. That is OK! We all suck at stuff when we start. But then over time, we become good at that thing and we suddenly find ourselves “passionate” about it.
Passion comes from being good at something.
That is why you have a passion for stuffing nerds into lockers. Because you have put in the time to get great at it.
Your problem is that you suck at what you do. Your time would be better spent getting better at it then searching for some nebulous, non-existent, “pre-existing” passion.
There are two ways to “become good” at something:
Natural talent
Some people are naturally good at a task. Maybe this is because of some genetic advantage or they are good at a similar skill. But whatever it is they are good at it with what appears to be minimal effort.
“Natural talent” tends to be the focus of the follow your passion crowd. The logic goes that you need to keep searching for these types of activities that don’t seem to require a lot of effort. This is not a bad idea. LeBron James should play basketball. Michael Phelps should swim. Mozart should do music. But this is not really useful for how to think about your career. It glosses over the fact that all of those people put thousands of hours into becoming better at what they did. Yes they had a high ceiling, but they needed to put the time in.
Which is what leads us to our next point.
Hard work
You can get much better at something if you work hard at it. Through the course of working hard and deepening your understanding of a subject, you will become good at that skill. Once you are good at the skill, you will surprise yourself by looking up and suddenly being passionate about it.
That was the case for me. In the last six years as I have kept with my career, I have found that I am a lot more passionate about the work than I was because I am good at it now. I do a unique thing that most people cannot do. It brings me joy to be the person who can solve that problem.
Overly simplistic, pithy takeaway for your career
If I could go back and give my younger self career advice, I would tell him two high level things:
If you hate your job, it is almost always a culture problem.
While occasionally there is a job function that is just the wrong fit for someone, the majority of the time the issue for people is that they dislike the people they are around.
We are social creatures. If we don’t like the people we are socializing with, we are guaranteeing misery.
If you have already fixed the culture problem and you still find yourself hating the work, move on to the next point.
Passion for jobs will come with time as long as you are getting better at what you do.
Getting better at something is a mental slog. There will be a lot of discomfort. You have to keep pushing through that and deepening your expertise.
While you are learning to master your discipline, one way to increase your personal energy and morale is to pick up hobbies. These might be things that you are good at so you are at least finding a respite from the mental anguish of being bad at something for 8 hours a day. At different points in my life, these things were ping pong, volleyball, or writing. Choose something you look forward to doing. You are also a much more interesting person if you do other things besides work.
Now go forth and conquer the world 24 year old me.
Let’s chat!
What do you think about “following your passion”?
Let me know in an email or the comments below. I read every reply.
Additional readings on developing passions instead of finding them
Not to send readers down Internet guru rabbit holes, but here are further readings from two writers who have shaped my thinking on this topic:
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own.