When choosing a career, do not start with your passions
This is not an endorsement for being bored on your job or with your current career. True boredom can only lead to poor on-the-job performance and eventually a parting of the ways between you and your employer. On the contrary, it is a statement about how to start the selection process and get some perspective on the relative importance of things.
Given what so much of the career counseling literature has to say, passion is one of those intangibles that requires perspective. I think I will scream if I hear one more time from any one of those well meaning career advisors that they can feel the passion in my voice when I talk about setting up my own consulting business based on my book, Are There Any Good Jobs Left? It is as if my occasional burst of enthusiasm is sufficient to carry me through the rough times: Or worse yet, makes going into business for myself a good idea because being an entrepreneur excites me. I feel like saying to these people (I started to say “idiots,” but that would not be nice), if I really followed my passion, I’d be playing golf. The problem with that is I am a terrible golfer and no one will pay me to do that.
I have written elsewhere that passion is one of those overworked and misunderstood clichés that is seemingly a part of every counselor’s tool kit. Developing and maintaining the requisite skills for a career may have little to do with passion. In fact, just the opposite is true.
Athletes understand this better than most. Their passion is more about winning. The process of getting to the winners circle often involves repetition to the point of boredom. When athletes lose their appetite (passion) for competition, they sometimes exit the competitive arena by announcing that they have lost their passion for the game. This apparently confuses some career counselors. Great athletes report that they spend many more hours practicing rather than playing. In this sense, they distinguish the process from the prize and are not deterred when the process by itself fails to excite their passion.
There are no jobs, careers or enterprises that bring with them a continual state of elation. Believing that work is simply fun does not prepare you very well for those long stretches of difficulty that are part of life. To some extent we fool our children when we place too much emphasis on the fun part of learning. Learning, just as with our jobs, is easier when it is fun, but we also need to learn how to accomplish something when the fun is gone. For a good discussion on career options, see Career Warfare by David D’Alessandro
Passion can be an important consideration, but it is not the lead variable. And, making career choices by prematurely focusing on passion can too easily beg the wrong question. I suggest that you start with what you are or can become good at. Companies are more likely to pay you for that and you will be pleasantly surprised at how much fun being good at something others are willing to pay you for really is. You might even become passionate about it.