Don't Follow Your Passion. Become the Passionate Craftsman.
There's something better than passion. There's something *more than.*
This is part one of three in the passionate craftsman series. You can find the full series here.
Don't Follow Your Passion
This is the opening salvo of Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You, which, admittedly, made for a tough opening chapter to a book I'd very much looked forward to reading.
I've written plenty about the notion of passion over the years, including in ways that, in retrospect, perilously bought into the injurious notion of vocational awe. I even did an entire podcast episode about writing one's passions back in 2020, as well as a separate episode altogether about how a penchant for passion-hopping led one guest from a career as a professional hockey player to one as an author.
And why shouldn't this have been celebrated? The belief that one should follow their passions is, in our culture, axiomatic; find what you love, follow it where it leads, and never work a day in your life.
That's the adage, anyway.
Now, even as someone who knows firsthand that the notion of never working a day in your life when pursuing one's passion is an absolute falsehood, I found myself struggling to read beyond the initial pages of Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You.
And yet, here I sit having finished the book, bracing myself to share with you that, believe it or not, I think I'm now with Newport. Don't follow your passion.
Why? Because there's something better. There's something more than, and I want you to have—to become—that more than, too.
The Pitch to Ditch the Passion Pit
“The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you're passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion.” This is, as Newport calls it, the passion hypothesis.
He goes on to argue, by way of others' career journeys, that the passion hypothesis often leads to chronic job hopping and crippling self-doubt, going so far as to say that “telling someone to follow their passion is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.”
His arguments against the passion hypothesis are well supported; though he acknowledges our culture is riddled with tales of much-heralded entrepreneurs who claim to have followed their passions to achieve great success, the truth is often far more complex. In profiling these and other figures—Steve Jobs among them—he demonstrates that for every one of these exalted fables, there are countless others whose spirits have been crushed after they left their careers behind to start youth yoga studios, lifestyle blogs, and other doomed-to-fail ephemera undergirded only by the shaky notion that if one's passion shines through, the pay, acclaim, and autonomy of entrepreneurship will follow.
I won't detail here the specifics of the individuals who Newport interviewed for the book (you can—and should—read the book for yourself if you'd like all of that), but I will share how frightening it was to find myself relating to the arguments he constructed over the course of its first chapter before, in the next post, we examine Newport's counter to the passion hypothesis: the craftsman mindset.
Riches and Ruin
My experiment in following one's passions wasn't one of woe alone. On the contrary, jumping ship on a burgeoning career in international regulatory affairs (sound familiar?) to achieve my dream of becoming an author was, at the time, an extraordinary gift.
How many people can say they were willing to take that leap? How many people can say it led to their books making it to print? How many people can say it provided opportunities to speak at conferences, to read and write as the pillars of one's day, to mentor and coach others on how they can improve their chances of doing the same? Very few people, it turns out, and I remain grateful to have had all of these experiences (and, to the extent I'm able, to continue to have them to this day).
That said, and this will not be surprising for those of you who have watched me come in and out of passion-first pursuits over the years, my experience was not without its pitfalls. I've detailed elsewhere the pitiful pay and fraught power dynamics one endures in publishing. And that autonomy I expected with respect to reading and writing all day? Between the purported need (read: industry demand) for authors to build a platform from which to preach—and the hustle required to keep up with ever-changing social media algorithms—well, it's enough to make one feel as if they've traded a career working for a buck for one that has them working for the Zuck.
None of this is to mention that my particular pursuit of my passion led me to an ecosystem where subjectivity rules the day. Publishing is, to put it plainly, not a meritocracy. The effort one puts in to honing their craft and cultivating captivating stories does not correlate strongly with the outcomes of those efforts. I can attest to that, personally, having worked with dozens of authors over the years whose work absolutely astounded, but who never once found the traction they or their books deserved. Meanwhile, you needn't pluck too many tomes from the shelves of your local bookstore to find yourself questioning how, exactly, a particular tale made it through all of the industry's hurdles to wind up in print.*
If this sounds frustrating, it is! And in what does it have its origins? In the misguided belief that to sow one's passions is to, without question, reap a life of joy in the long run.
The Craftsman Cometh
What's one to do, then? Abandon all hope? Accept a fate as a desk-tethered paper-pusher?
Not at all.
In So Good They Can't Ignore You, Newport posits that adopting the craftsman mindset is the true key to occupational satisfaction, and in part two of this multi-part series, we'll explore what makes the craftsman mindset so appealing—as well as where it comes up short. Then, in the third and final installment, we'll take a look at how the marriage of passion and craft may, in fact, be the key to loving one's work and, most importantly, oneself.
*As someone who looks back on some of their publications and goes, “Oof,” I am not exempt from this outcome. I try to tell myself they can't all be winners, but… it still hurts to think about.