It's backwards
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) Today, I can’t think of a more misused word than passion.
It’s used as generously as gravy on mashed potatoes by ambitious, creative people to describe themselves and how they view their career path.
You can’t blame them, of course. Most of us have been told how passion was somehow a good predictor in choosing a fulfilling career:
“Find your passion and success will follow.” You’ve heard that before…right, |NAME|?
It’s not terrible advice: it’s just backwards.
Here’s the fundamental problem with it. Passion is a self-appointed feeling.
You don’t have to earn it. You can decide to possess yourself with a passion for anything.
Your opinion about something is not just as good as someone else’s knowledge about a subject.
Just being passionate about something doesn’t put food on the table.
The Stoics understood this. They saw passions (patheiai) as things we need to overcome. Writer Donald Robertson points out in his book on Stoicism (https://www.amazon.ca/Stoicism-Art-Happiness-Don-Robertson/dp/1444187104/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=) that pathology finds its origins in patheiai, noting that the latter word was meant to “refer to the irrational, unhealthy and excessive desires and emotions.”
Passion is undomesticated, as are your raw talents.
Just as choosing to be a creative pro is the domestication of your raw talents, so too must you bring your passions to heel.
Doing this, you can focus where your time and attention really matter: by constantly developing and refining the skills that you give a damn about AND that the market is willing to pay for.
I like how Cal Newport explains this in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You (https://www.amazon.ca/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=) . Arguing that we develop a skill from doing great work, he calls this career capital.
As we earn it, we have more and more career capital to spend on our autonomy, which is control over how we accomplish that work. The more autonomy you have, backed by an ever-growing mastery of your craft (including having a process (http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=410a3214f3) to govern it), the more you are able to accomplish as a creative entrepreneur performing fulfilling, meaningful work.
Passion then is not an input. It’s an outcome.
Do great work: it shapes you. You do more of it by learning how to sell that work. You get better at it by constantly refining your skills. You then get to do more of it the way you want to do it after you’ve proven your mastery of the subject. Only then is passion worth exercising.
Very best, Patrick
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