This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
Steve Jobs: And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
James: Hello and welcome to Graduate Theory. On today’s episode, we are going to talk about following your passion. What does that mean, and is that advice really something that you should be following? Following your passion is advice that’s given by people all across the internet and all across the world. It’s often well-meaning advice, but, as we’ll see today, this advice is also a little bit flawed. Today, we’re going to dive into where the idea of following your passion actually comes from, some critiques that have come out in the last few years from people who have investigated this further, and some general thoughts around why this might not be the best approach to making decisions in your career.
Without further ado, we’re going to dive into where this first came from. Where did the idea of following your passion really start? It’s been around for a little while now, but it first became popular during the infamous Steve Jobs commencement speech back in 2005. This is a fantastic speech and has so many great points in it, but one of those was around following your passion. We’re going to play that part of the speech for you now. Here is Steve back in 2005.
Steve Jobs on Following Your Passion#
Steve Jobs: I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.
You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life. And the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.
Like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
Thoughts on Steve Jobs#
James: If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Isn’t that fantastic, what Steve shared with us there? It’s certainly a very noble pursuit, right? We all want to do things for work that we enjoy and that we love. Who wants to work somewhere and do something that they don’t love or enjoy?
No one wants that. What Steve is saying is absolutely right. You want to find something that you’d love to do, but the problem we get into here is that this advice now gets presented as something where you should start by thinking of things that you love and then try and match your career to that.
For example, if I like maths, then I should have a job in maths. If I enjoy going outside and exercising, then perhaps I should be a physio or something like that. These are all interesting applications of this advice where we should do something that we love. The idea is to start with something you do love now and match your career to that.
That’s what we get taught as what this advice means. When we think about this further, what we can realise is there are some flaws with this. We’re now going to investigate some of these flaws more deeply. I’m going to call on some people that have thought about this in more detail and we’re going to hear from them.
First, we’re going to hear from Cal Newport and Cal Newport is someone that I really admire. He’s a professor, a podcaster and a writer. He wrote a book that investigates this topic in a lot of detail called So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
He wrote this back in 2012, so it’s now 10 years old, but on his podcast he recently did a little recap of some of the core messages in the book. In this video, he explains this idea of following your passion, and how what it’s meant to mean and what we take it to mean are slightly different.
He also explains how you can start to think about why matching your passions to a job is perhaps not the right way to think about things, but I’m going to let Cal explain his thoughts and his rationale on this topic. We’ll hear from him now.
Cal Newport on Following Your Passion#
Cal Newport: I researched and wrote this book as a postdoc at MIT, trying to answer the question: how do people end up loving what they do?
At the time, and continuing till today, the common answer to that question was “follow your passion”. That’s by far the most common answer, especially in the American context. There are definitely some regional differences here, but definitely in the American context, it didn’t take much pushing to realise that there are problems with this advice.
Number one, a lot of people—and by a lot, I mean most—don’t have clearly defined pre-existing passions that they can identify to then follow. That’s a real issue. If you talk to a bunch of, let’s say, 22-year-olds just coming out of school and say, look, you got to follow your passion or you’re going to be a miserable, sad sack.
And they say, “Well, what’s my passion? I don’t know.” That’s a problem. Second, there is not a lot of good evidence that matching the content of your work to a pre-existing interest is a major driver of satisfaction in that job. We just assume that’s true. That advice just assumes that’s true. “Oh, I like this thing, so if I do that for my job, I’ll like my job”, but we actually don’t have a lot of evidence that’s true.
We have a ton of evidence that other factors are much more important. Things like autonomy, things like mastery, things like impact, things like connection. A lot of other things that are really important for job satisfaction. They have nothing to do with whether the content of my work matches a pre-existing interest.
We of course have plenty of counterexamples of people who build jobs out of hobbies and are miserable. These are clichés: the amateur baker who’s miserable as a professional baker, the amateur photographer who’s miserable doing six wedding photography gigs per week. This is so common.
It’s a cliché that when you take what you love and say, “Let me make a job about it,” you no longer love that thing. And that’s because the thing that makes you really love a job is not, “Me really like this topic. Me job now has this topic in it. Me now really like my job.” It’s way more complicated than that.
The final issue—I’ll throw in a third here—that I noticed when I was researching So Good They Can’t Ignore You is that if you just go out there and grab a bunch of people who love what they do for a living and look at their actual stories, nine times out of 10, they were not following a clear pre-existing passion.
If this is the universal advice we give, you would expect that it’s what most people who love their job did. That’s why we give this advice. Most people don’t. The reality is when you just ask someone casually who loves their work, “What’s your advice?” and they say, “Follow your passion.” What they really mean is follow the goal of ending up passionate about your work.
They don’t mean, “Identify in advance what you’re passionate about, match that to your job, and then you will love your work.” That’s not really what they mean. It’s not really what they did. It’s just a shorthand, but we interpret it as meaning we’re wired to do one thing, match our work to that one thing, then we will love our work.
That’s not actually the way it works.
James on Cal’s Advice#
James: Wow. Some really cool thoughts there from Cal. To summarise his points, there were three things he thought were not great about the follow-your-passion advice. One was that we don’t actually have clear passions, so most people don’t really know what they’re even passionate about. Especially when you’re young, you might not have anything that you’re super passionate about.
Number two, as he said, there’s not a lot of good evidence that matching the content of your work to a pre-existing interest is a major driver of job satisfaction. Number three, and this is something that I’ve really seen a lot of, as I’ve done a lot of podcasts: we’ve now interviewed over 30 people on Graduate Theory.
One of the key themes is exactly that: Most people don’t actually follow this advice. Most people who get up there and say, “Follow your passion” didn’t actually do that. They did something and ended up being passionate about it later rather than starting with an existing passion and then matching a career to that.
That’s something that I’ve absolutely picked up, and something that even in my personal life has been true: things that I’ve enjoyed doing haven’t necessarily been something that I was passionate about before I started doing them. Certainly, you could take almost any successful person.
The chances are they didn’t do it this way. They didn’t start out with some crazy passion about a topic or about a career or a job and then somehow turn that into the thing that they do for a living. Often, passions come after you decide to do something.
Another piece of advice that I found online around this topic was a fantastic talk by Ben Horowitz. Ben Horowitz is a co-founder of a16z, which is one of the world’s biggest venture capital firms.
He gave a talk to the graduating class at Columbia University in 2015. This is a really, really fantastic talk. All of the links and videos that I’ve shared here will be in the show notes somewhere. I encourage you to go watch this later, but this is fantastic, and he has some really good thoughts on passions and why following your passion isn’t necessarily the best idea.
He discusses some problems he saw with that and what you should do instead, because it’s important to know: if we’re not going to follow our passion, what are we going to do instead? I liked what he had to say here. Here is Ben sharing with us.
Ben Horowitz on Following Your Passion#
Ben Horowitz: Don’t follow your passion. Now, you’re probably thinking that’s a really dumb idea because everybody who’s successful—if you poll a thousand people who are successful, they’ll all say that they love what they do. The broad conclusion of the world is that if you do what you love, then you’ll be successful. But we’re engineers.
We know that might be true, but it also might be the case that if you’re successful, you love what you do. You just love being successful and everybody loves you. It’s awesome.
Which one is it? Well, I think to figure it out, you have to go back in time. You have to back off from when you were successful to right now, when you’re graduating as the class of 2015, and the first tricky thing about passions is that they’re hard to prioritise. Which passion is it? Are you more passionate about math or engineering?
Are you more passionate about history or literature? Are you more passionate about video games or K-pop? These are tough decisions. How do you even know? On the other hand, what are you good at? Are you better at math or writing? That’s a much easier thing to figure out. The second thing that’s tricky if you’re going forward in time with this follow-your-passion idea is that what you’re passionate about at 21 is not necessarily what you’re going to be passionate about at 40. This is true for boyfriends as well as career choices.
The third issue with following your passion is that you’re not necessarily good at your passion. Has anybody ever watched American Idol? Just because you love singing doesn’t mean you should be a professional singer. Finally, and most importantly, following your passion is a very me-centred view of the world.
When you go through life, what you’ll find is what you take out of the world over time—be it money, cars, stuff or accolades—is much less important than what you put into the world. My recommendation would be: follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better.
That is the thing to follow.
James on Ben Horowitz#
James: That’s a really interesting piece from Ben. What we heard from him was an interesting distinction: it’s this chicken or egg problem. Which is it? Do you follow your passion and then love what you do, or do you love what you do and then become passionate about it afterwards? I think that was a really interesting thing there.
Certainly it seems from the people we’ve seen and the things we’ve heard so far, it’s definitely more of the latter. You become passionate as you get better at what you do; that definitely seems to be the case. To summarise the things that Ben said, many of which are similar to what Cal had to say, Ben’s reasons for not following our passion, and his thoughts on deciding what to do instead, were that often we don’t have clear passions and our passions change over time.
Something you might be passionate about when you’re younger might not be when you’re older. That makes it hard to have a career that’s based on your passion when it’s changing. You might not actually be good at your passion. The American Idol example—or whatever talent shows you might have seen—was a really good one.
People can be passionate about things and not very good at them. That might be a reason not to have it as your career if you’re not actually good at your passion. I loved what he finished with, which was: let’s do something that can benefit the entire world and let’s do something that can put some good into the world.
Perhaps you can be passionate about providing something great for the world and that can be something that you’re passionate about and build your career on, rather than it being, “How can I get my needs met?” I thought that was a really interesting piece there from him.
I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here. It’s clear to me through my experiences and the people I’ve spoken to, and even clearer from researching this topic, hearing from these people and researching this episode, that our passions should not be the things that we use to decide what we’re going to do.
The things that we’re passionate about are things like sport and fun things, whereas the things that we’re going to have a career in are things that are meaningful and where we can have a positive impact. We can develop passions for these things as we go on.
This is what’s really important. Cal was explaining this well, I thought, when he said that following your passion isn’t necessarily starting with your passion and then finding a job. It’s more about having the goal of becoming passionate about whatever it is that we decide to do.
We want to have our passion eventually, but it’s not the place to start. I think that’s a really interesting insight: we can all strive to become passionate about what it is that we do. That can be by becoming better at what you do. Perhaps that will give you more passion.
If you are better, you have more accomplishments in the field. Perhaps you’re able to create a bigger impact and have a positive impact on others and on the world. Perhaps that will increase your passion for what it is you do. These are things that you can do, and something worth striving for is: “How can I become more passionate about the things that I do?”
That’s certainly a way that you can increase your career satisfaction. One thing I want to finish with as well is this talk from Scott Galloway. Now Scott is a professor of marketing at the New York University School of Business. He’s a public speaker, author, entrepreneur, et cetera, and he had a really interesting piece to say on this topic of passion as well.
I think he had similar thoughts to mine on what you should do. If you don’t follow your passion, what else should you do instead? We’ll hear from him now.
Scott Galloway on Following Your Passion#
Scott Galloway: Another one of my mentors told me, “Don’t follow your passion,” and that’s always stuck with me. I thought, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, find something you’re good at.” In business school, what I noticed is that every speaker always says, “Follow your passion.” That’s how they end their talk.
“What’s your one piece of advice for young people?” “Follow your passion.” What things are people passionate about? Luxury, food, entertainment and sports. Those areas are massively overinvested. A very small fraction—less than 1%—of the people who are passionate about those things are able to make a living at them and God bless them.
There’s a lot of very well-publicised wins around people who follow their passion and become fabulously wealthy. But what’s so unusual about this is what I find is that the people who are telling you to follow your passion are already rich. They typically got rich following their passion of software as a service for healthcare scheduling.
It’s like, “Oh, that was your passion.” Let me tell you what their passion was. Anytime someone tells you to follow their passion, it means their passion was getting rich so they could buy a fat car and marry someone much better looking than them. That is their passion. I would say: find something in your work that gives you joy and disproportionately allocate as much time as you can, based on your credibility in the organisation, to that part of your job that just gives you joy. I think that’s about as good as you can do. Then find something you’re good at so you can develop the economic currency to live a nice lifestyle and spend more and more time as you get older, following your true passions.
Final Thoughts#
James: I think he’s absolutely right: let’s start with the things you’re good at. Find a job doing the things that you’re good at, and then let’s try and get better at those. Let’s try and do the things or the parts of the job that you enjoy the most and try and build out your career to the point where you have some leverage to work less or get paid more or whatever it is so that you can then start to spend more time on the things that you’re passionate about outside of work.
I think that is a fantastic strategy and a fantastic way to wrap up this episode. I hope that you’ve seen throughout this episode that perhaps following your passion as a starting point isn’t really the best idea, but the end goal is really to be passionate about the things that you do.
Whether the passion comes before the job or comes as a result of being good at what you do, most successful people—and most people who have great careers—are passionate about what they do. That is something that you should absolutely try and build.
I’ll leave it there.
I wish you all the best going out and building that passion for what it is that you do. Thanks so much again for listening to the Graduate Theory podcast. If you have enjoyed this episode, please consider going to GraduateTheory.com where you can subscribe to the newsletter. You get my takeaways from each podcast episode straight to your inbox every single week.
Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next week. Bye for now.