How to Find Your Passion Without a Conviction of Love

A letter to my son for the year 2038

I know what you’re thinking. This isn’t another iteration of banal life advice disguised as transcendent wisdom. I promise it isn’t another opportunity for me to drive you in a specific direction, either. Please know that I respect and encourage your need to explore life’s mountains and valleys at your own pace, navigating your map, trusting your plan.

My purpose for writing this is to share a perspective experientially grown. My only wish is that you read it.

We live in a society that romanticizes the idea of doing what you love. We hold this ideal upon an altar of life’s greatest successes because it emphasizes sharp differences in the hierarchy of happiness.

It’s the difference between “working for the weekend” and willingly working on the weekend. It’s the difference between working for survival and working for fulfillment. It’s the difference between treating work as an obligation and treating work as a way of life.

We perceive, even assume, those in the latter categories have achieved greater amounts of happiness. Indeed, it is a beautiful success. As the proverbial advice goes, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

There’s nothing wrong with endorsing this philosophy. It works for some people, and those people have acquired an incredible amount of happiness because of it.

However, that evidence doesn’t make it practical advice for you. It’s only great advice for people who already hold a conviction of passion. These are the few among us gifted with what most religious acolytes would consider a “calling.” It is a pursuit for which they would claim no other psychological possibility.

What good is this advice for someone without that kind of conviction?

What if you don’t have that conviction? What if you think you do, but it turns out to be some form of career-lust that later disappoints you?

For some people, our cultural romance with career-passion induced within them a state of hypnosis. They indulge themselves so deeply in this idea of work-life harmony that they develop ideas about what they think their passion is and make a plan to pursue that. They’re devastated when it doesn’t work out because they spent so much time building a romance that now feels broken.

A Turn to Practicality

How reasonable would it be for your mom and me to assume you know what you want to do for the rest of your life, having acquired your driver’s license but a few months ago? We might get the hint if you’ve shown us patterns of behavior or often communicate your passions.

Perhaps you have, but as of today, you haven’t reached the age of two. Your passion now is a digital camera from the early 2000s and animal crackers. Burgeoning wildlife photographer?

The point is you’ve only been around seventeen, eighteen years — only ten of which could you form a respectable sentence. Your mom and I don’t expect you to know which career you want to pursue. And as it turns out, neither do your peers. There’s no need to oblige the pressures of telling everyone you know what you want to do if you’re not ready.

Take a look at this Washington Post article from 2013 that points to research conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. According to their data, only twenty-seven percent of college graduates end up with a job related to their major.

The year 2013 may seem like a long time ago to you, but you can take my word for it: the world hasn’t changed much. I’d argue those numbers dipped even further during the 2020 pandemic.

Remember, we encourage you to pursue your passion, but if you don’t have that “no-other-psychological-possibility” conviction, you might benefit from thinking about passion a bit differently.

There’s still time for self-discovery.

If you want to pursue a four-year college degree, your first two years require many pre-requisite credits, the sum of which everyone must meet to graduate. Some of them will be elective courses, or those elected at your behest. If you still like photographing animals or crackers, take Intro to Photography. The first two years of college allow for some exploration. Take advantage of it.

Explore your existing areas of skill.

If you pursue things you’re already good at, you might develop a passion for one of them. You might find rewarding challenges in the venture of sharpening those skills, meaning in what good they can do for others, or feel justly distinguished from others in the field.

Treat passion as a choice.

As Seth Godin so practically argued, being passionate could really be a matter of choice. People don’t usually achieve success without a bit of deliberate, emotional engagement. Maybe finding happiness and success isn’t limited to pursuing your passion. Maybe you just have to put a bit of passion into your work.

The best passion is a marketable one.

Just loving your passion is enough to make it great, but it’s even better when it’s marketable. You won’t hear this advice whispered through the circles of die-hard passion-seekers, but practicality would advise developing a marketable one. This way, if your academic or trade pursuits end up being a passionate waste, at least you’ll have acquired skills in demand.

Please do what makes you happy so long as it doesn’t impede your life’s further goals. We all want to find happiness. Many of us spend our entire lives following paths we believe will take us there. If you want to get there too, without spending your whole life working on it, try pursuing it strategically first.

With love,

Ba