www.fastcompany.com: Yes, it’s cliché. But while we all seem to get that marriage requires more than a little love and affection, there’s still this pervasive myth that passion is the secret key to your career.
Don’t get me wrong. Passion counts for a lot, especially if you’re tasked with convincing someone to give you a shot.
3 comments:
This article seems to have been writing about the realizations I have been going through over the past year and a bit. Passion is not a sustainable thing to build a career on. Because it crumbles under long hours and hard work and parts of your jobs you might not like. Passion leads to burnout and feeling guilty for not being more committed to the thing you were once passionate about. Don't get me wrong, it is a wonderful thing to be passionate about what you do, but passion (or at least the modern all-or-nothing interpretation of it) cannot solely sustain a career. My connection to the work of theatre was almost entirely emotional. It was never going to last. I would propose to rather build a career on what you are curious about, what thing could you spend your days learning more about and never get tired of it? In the final paragraph of this article, the author describes the people they know with truly successful careers as, "The ones who don’t treat “passion” as their everything but simply as the product of putting effort into working, questioning, and exploring." Follow your curiosity. Do things and do them well. Learn as much as you can, only to discover innumerable new skills and questions along the way, I promise, passion will follow.
While this article does explain that passion is not the sole element for a successful employee, I do think it is much more valuable than this text makes it out to be. I disagree with the notion of “do the work first, find the passion second” which is reiterated often throughout. Passion is what gives me motivation, what fuels my work ethic, what allows me to take on a robust workload. For me, passion is what has guided me to work harder. I understand the perspective brought up that not everyone has something they are necessarily passionate about, or rather, not yet. But to invalidate the importance of having a fire, a desire to dream, is an incredibly generalized statement. This is especially true in the world of theatre, where finding jobs (and well-paying ones) can be a huge challenge, even for very qualified individuals. If they did not care about our work to the degree that they do, I do not think people would last in the industry.
I don’t know if I particularly agree with this article, but I do think that I have learned a lot from it. I think especially as a freshman, we are all eager to prove ourselves. The idea of passion is something that brought us all here. However what the article says is true, we have also worked really hard to get here as well. The point of disagreement for me is that I believe people are willing to work 60 hour weeks or more, move across the country, and work decades like the woman mentioned in the article simply because they are passionate. To me, I believe that passion comes before hard work, because it is what drives someone to work hard. Additionally, while I understand that an employer would want an employee with a worker mindset, I don’t know if I agree with that as an actual personality trait. Especially in the creative industry, a worker mindset is great at getting people through the door, however I don’t think there will be anything new made if everyone had that kind of mindset.
Post a Comment