3 Common Fallacies Surrounding The ‘Follow Your Passion’ Advice

Behind the mass appeal of the famous 21st-century wisdom

One of my early career mistakes was to gamble all my resources in one basket to pursue what I thought was my passion.

When I made the decision to choose my undergraduate degree, I was in an intensive training program for an international physics competition. The program was mentally strenuous and I was not performing as well as the older students. We were learning the first-year college physics curriculum cramped in a 6 months period. By the 4 months mark, I hated physics. I ended up spending more time doodling on my practice papers instead of actually using the papers to practice.

The combination of beaten ego and excessive exposure to physics led to my decisions to leave years of school career in the subject, and instead to start afresh in a subject that is completely opposite to it.

I thought that I was not performing well because it was not my passion. I also thought that I was no longer excited to solve physics problems because it was not my passion. In hindsight, I used the word ‘passion’ to justify my disappointment in life — to reason that my life can be better than this, I just haven’t found my passion yet.

The real humble definition of passion is indeed beautiful. It is the inner artist that can only be satisfied through the continuous process of creation. It is the constant curiosity to explore the inner working of the world, the inner drive that can’t be tamed unless we give it a chance to be unleashed outside of the constraint of our mind.

But sometimes, our denial to deal with the real world also pushes us to transform passion into a scapegoat, the primary cause why we do not feel as satisfied with life as we should be.

When we start to put labels on the word ‘passion’, we also start to see it as something more than just its neutral definition. Passion now is associated with endless devotion, unbreakable resilience, and the kind of focus that can produce a great result.

To make a more objective career decision, we need to strip the common thinking fallacy surrounding the ‘follow your passion’ advice. Here are the 3 factors that contribute to the popularity of the advice.

1. We Follow That Advice Because Successful People Advocate It

Conventional wisdom says that if you want to be successful, you need to follow the habit of successful people. One of the successful people’s most popular advice happens to be ‘follow your passion’. The list of iconic figures who promoted this advice is extensive; starting from Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Vincent Van Gogh, Nelson Mandela, and many others.

The only thing that is missing is the understanding of survivorship bias. Famous people look back at their journey and they discover that passion is the common feature of their big gains. Yet, they also forgot to see their failure and how passion could lead to those too. This is the common statistically involved cognitive bias in which we pull a conclusion by only observing one side of what people have done successfully. On this cognitive bias, Gary Smith, an economist at Pomona College said:

It is not fair or meaningful to predict which companies will do well after looking at which companies did well! Those are not predictions, just history.

The interesting part is, successful people might advocate the importance of passion, but they never overthink it. It’s because passion looks great when you see what it can do through the years, but when you only look a day forward, the impact of passion in your craft is so small it’s almost invisible.

The story that you see when you look at something from its past and its future can be different. That’s why the conclusion that successful people make when they look at their past can’t be applied to you when you make the decision about your future.

As Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement speech, we can only connect the dot backward. Everything will make sense when we have all the information to make a complete picture. Until then, the only tool that we can use to approach our life from the present moment forward is to have faith.

2. Passion Becomes Our Justification To Avoid Tedious Hard Work

Most of the time, it’s not even about passion. It’s about fame, autonomy, income, fulfillment, and any other things that come from a successful career. We have a definite idea of what our career should look like, and ‘passion’ becomes an easy excuse to leave our progress when our career does not match that perfect picture image.

This false concept of passion matches the fixed mindset’s tendency to think we are born with inherent talent and passion in certain subjects. The fixed mindset believes that when you find your passion, your work will be enjoyable and easy to master. The reward of accomplishments will also come easy because we already have a genetic head start.

But the reality of the beginner phase is always filled with menial tasks and mastering the basics. No matter how talented you are, you need to put in a crazy amount of practice hours to achieve what you dream out of your career.

To understand what it really takes to achieve mastery, let’s visit the advice from the old school kungfu master. In one of his famous quotes, Bruce Lee said that people who practice 1 kick 10,000 times will achieve more mastery than the people who practice 10,000 kicks one time. That should be a statement enough on how boring it is to achieve real mastery over something.

This notion is also summarised well by Mark Z. Danielewski:

Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.

Maybe your dream job is already in front of your eyes, but you might miss it because right now they look ugly and unpromising. Surprises and changes happen every day in life, and your career might end up drastically different from how you start it. Strip your expectation, then your vision might be clear enough to see the subtle hints of humble opportunities that already exist in your life.

3. It Is Easier to Believe That There Is Only One Correct Answer For Your Career

Terri Trespicio‘s TED talk on passion is one of the most insightful materials you can learn on this topic. This is one of her main points at the talk:

It is a dangerously limiting idea at the heart of everything we believe about success and life in general. And it is that you have one singular passion and your job is to find it and to pursue it to the exclusion of all else, and if you do that everything will fall into place. And if you don’t, you failed.

Putting this big perceived risk on your career decision can give you a fear of paralysis. People delay decisions in favor of keeping their options open because they believe the consequences of making a wrong one is irrevocable.

But why do we have this belief in the first place?

People like the concept of ‘the one’ career because it eliminates uncertainty and potential future mistakes. This concept tells us that once we find this passion, we just need to follow it forever — there will be no other difficult risky decision in the future. But that belief is far away from reality.

In reality, people rarely only work with one thing forever. Uncertainty is inevitable for growth, and being only good at one thing rarely makes you successful. Which is also the case with Terri Trespicio’s career.

In her TED talk, Terri told her experience of joining a Silpada Designs rep program for the simple reason that people buy jewelry, and people have fun doing it. It does not align with her passion or even her day job. There was no expectation either that she will learn an important entrepreneurial skill when she signed up — but that was exactly what she learned from the process. The entrepreneurial skill she got from the experience will help her to build her career as a successful speaker, writer, and brand advisor in the future. And it all comes out of a random interest in a jewelry sales program.

When we only expand our career in a linear predictable way, we will only get a predictable mediocre outcome. What we can learn from Terri’s experience is that there is no straight point to success. The arbitrary experience in your resume might actually teach you the most essential skill that will set you apart from anyone else.

Passion and the feeling of truly enjoying your work are real. You even probably already live with it — it is when you curiously and endlessly pursue the answer to a question, or when you practice your soccer kick every day without being told to. And this concept of humble passion might lead you to your dream career, but it does not have to be.

If you look carefully at three previously mentioned mindsets, they have one thing in common: the answer to your future lies in the present moment.

• The first mindset tells us that we can only thread our life forward, and to do it we need to have faith in the present moment.
• The second mindset tells us that a grand picture starts with your current humble beginning.
• The third mindset tells us that any arbitrary events that happen right now are not a mistake because our career rarely develops in a linear way.

Passion is not a job, a sport, or a hobby. It is the full force of your attention and energy that you give to whatever is right in front of you

— Terri Trespicio

“What is your life calling?” is not the kind of question that can be figured out by thinking. You can only experiment, the result will slowly guide you to understand more about yourself and your life.