“Follow Your Passion”
“Follow your passion, and success will follow you.”
Terri Guillemets
“Follow your passion, it will lead to your purpose.”
Oprah
We hear similar messages all the time about the virtues of following your passion. And this might be because people confuse what you love with what you’re passionate about. Well, we love a good dictionary definition, so let’s start with that:
pas·sion
/ˈpaSH(ə)n/
noun
strong and barely controllable emotion.
"a man of impetuous passion"
2. the suffering and death of Jesus.
"meditations on the Passion of Christ"
Here’s what we came up with as our working definition of passion: when you love something so much that you are willing to suffer for it. This is why we tell young people to find what they are passionate about and to turn it into their career, right? It’s as if suffering for work is a foregone conclusion, so at least if you love the work, you are willing to endure suffering in order to make a living.
Let’s take a closer look at passion’s two components based on our definition: love and suffering. It’s the suffering bit that keeps us from considering passion a type of happiness; suffering definitely does not make you happy. Also, Oxford’s definition of passion includes the phrase “barely controllable.” Anything that threatens to push you out of control should alarm you to get your Sage Brain involved; you don’t want to act thoughtlessly and in a way that will lead to unhappiness. That’s why we think passion should be filed under the category of elemental imbalances.
In this light, is it really such good advice to tell young people to follow their passion when looking for a profession? You are quite literally setting them up to suffer!
When I think of careers that require passion, I immediately think of startup entrepreneurs (call it a bias from living in the Bay Area). They struggle with mental health (72%), suffer from anxiety (37%), experience burnout (36%), and lose sleep (50%); founders spend 60% less time with spouses, 58% less time with kids, and 73% less time with friends and family, and the average level of loneliness reported is 7.6 out of 10. (check it out here.) That is a lot of suffering.
So why do they do it? (A rhetorical question for now, but a discussion we can take up in the comments section if you’re interested.) As a former management consultant, I have worked in environments where there was a lot of cachet and bragging rights that came with how much we worked, how many hours we billed, how little we slept – in essence, how much we suffered for our work. But how many of us were passionate about management consulting? Please. We suffered for our work without the love, because suffering for work became a badge of honor, a sign of our dedication to our careers; somehow, love got erased from the picture. Still, this was supposed to lead us to success, to achieving our purpose.
The problem with choosing a career based on passion is not with doing what we love, it’s with going into a situation knowing that we will suffer and treating this as something we should aspire to. We expect that the suffering, not the love, will bring success.
There are paths to doing what we love and achieving success without having to suffer, but we need to engage our Sage Brain to think through the various possibilities so that we can make wise decisions.
What is the healthy alternative to following our passion? If passion is a destabilizing or barely controllable form of love, then what is love in its highest balanced form?
e·qua·nim·i·ty
/ˌekwəˈnimədē,ˌēkwəˈnimədē/
noun
mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.
"she accepted both the good and the bad with equanimity"
The word equanimity stems from the Latin words for “balanced mind.” No suffering anywhere, just a whole lot of self-possession. But don’t assume that just because someone is balanced that they don’t have intensity. Equanimity is not something we are trained to look out for; it’s not scandalous or salacious, and therefore it’s not necessarily interesting to watch (we all love to watch a proverbial train wreck… or at least some of us do).
If you think about the people you know, you’ll probably identify some people with equanimity: it’s almost by definition the happy, even-keeled ones in your life. You’ll find that they have varying degrees of what we traditionally think of as successful careers, but I like to think of happiness as the truest success in life, and that’s where they come out on top.
A very famous example of someone who displays equanimity is singer-songwriter, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton has said in interviews that she loves what she does, but what struck me in particular was that she said she hires people to handle the things she can’t handle, and to do the things she can’t do. We can’t all necessarily outsource these things, but she has clearly engaged her Sage Brain to find a way to avoid suffering while still allowing herself to do what she loves. And her love for what she does has made her a living legend.
Don’t let anyone judge you for not having a passion for your career – there are plenty of ways to make a living and achieve success without signing yourself up to suffer. Suffering isn’t a virtue. Instead, embrace a career that you love and that gives you equanimity – you’ll be much happier for it.
