As promised, let’s sort through a few more objections to the idea that following your passion is solid career advice.
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE
This is clearly not true but I have to get it out of the way. There are at least 14 people who are doing it and they’ve all written e-books.¹
FINE, IT’S IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE
First off, I find this argument a little unsporting for the simple reason that it isn’t exactly an argument against following your passion. The question itself assumes that it will work for the minority of people.
Also, it seems suspiciously like the Excluded Middle Fallacy. Stick with me here as I attempt to unmask it – both versions of it.
- Because certain, specific passions don’t make money, none make money. Specific to general. Hunter can’t support a family knitting grey beanies so everyone just needs to suck it up, put on a suit, and find a cubicle.
- Because everyone can’t do it, no one can. General to specific. Everyone can’t be a popstar so Hunter should sell his guitar, get a haircut, and buy a suit.
The first idea basically says that people don’t pay for stuff that other people are excited to produce.
The second is like saying that we shouldn’t skateboard because not all places in the world have paved sidewalks.
These are fallacies; these are unhelpful. So far we’ve gotten nowhere.
OK THEN, IT’S STATISTICALLY UNLIKELY: THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE FOR TOO FEW POSITIONS.
This objection is pretty much the same as the last one but I’m going to go ahead and talk it over. There’s no way this means that following your passion is impossible but it could mean that it’s really difficult and therefore, not broadly good advice.
Viewing the objection that way… it’s actually pretty good. There are probably more people who’d like to make art than the market can support – particularly with cheaper faux-hand-made art that sells at Target and Hobby Lobby. My husband and I would like to get back into making pottery but with all the pretty stuff around, will people pay $20 for a mug?
Even if you take out all the people who’s paintings and clumps of yarn shouldn’t count as art, it’s still a tough market.
As has been sited around the blogosphere, William MacAskill pointed out that…
A 2003 study of college students by the University of Quebec found that 84 percent of them had passions, and 90 percent of these passions involved sports, music, and art. But only 3 percent of jobs are in the sports, music, and art industries. The result is massive competition for a few highly-prized jobs. And just because you have a passion for, say, music, doesn’t mean that you’ll be a particularly good professional musician.”
Not a bad observation. Unfortunately, none of the blogs actually point to the study so I can’t say if the “only 3 percent of jobs” thing includes coaching sports, sports related non-profits, selling sports paraphernalia, sports writing, youtube sports commentary, sports team management etc. But those things are related to sports and most have little to do with actual ball skills.
Maybe the word “passion” is the problem. After all, if my husband talked about pottery for 30 minutes straight at a party or if I elucidated the nuances of the characters in Jane Austin’s novels for 15 minutes every morning in the office one might conclude that we were passionate about those topics.
Obviously those were just examples, folks. I don’t think I’m passionate about Austin… it’s just interesting, ok… but if you were to pay me…
By the same measure, most guys I know are passionate about sports and exactly zero of them actually hope to play sports for money. Most are content to coach the players from their sofa and give the locker room speeches to their office mates.
Back to that survey. It doesn’t really surprise me that college students would rate activities that were popular extracurricular clubs in high school as passions. College students hardly know what’s even available so they may just be picking something really easy to pin down, like sports. When I was in college, I had no idea what an ERP Analyst was – and now it’s my job. I mean, I still hardly know what it is but I do it five days a week.
I also wonder what would have happened if the students had listed math as a passion. Would people have said that they just need to forget math and do something practical because there just aren’t enough math jobs? I know two people in the world who are so passionate about math that they even do algebra “for fun.” I feel like responding with something like, “No way, I water board myself for fun” but it looks like they are serious so I only nod until I can turn the conversation to something safe like sports.
I think the take away here is that nerds and masochists have way better job prospects than jocks and artsy people do. Well, on second thought, just jocks. At least the artsy people can become baristas – provided the history and sociology majors haven’t already snapped up all the jobs.
It’s tricky to connect someone’s passion with the job they’re actually hoping for. Still, this objection isn’t too bad. As someone pointed out in the comments section of a pro Follow Your Passion TED Talk, if we all follow our passions then who’s going to build the roads and clean toilets?
The fact that everyone in the world can’t be an artist doesn’t play into whether or not you could be one… or ought to be one (however, the next objection does).
IT DOESN’T BUILD CHARACTER
“Well, I worked hard for 40 years doing a job I hated every day, it was like hell. But it builds character.” Wow, it’s amazing that you built that amount of character in only 40 years.
Stinky work can either build character or build up bitterness and complaining. The same sun that melts ice hardens clay, after all… so it’s the material that matters – and you are the material.
It could equally be the case that pursuing a job you’re passionate about may build character simply because it required thought, effort, and persevering through the criticism of those who funded your now-useless degree and the skepticism of those who are concerned about your becoming a hobo.
Having said that, I think that having a stinky job at some point is usually beneficial – for the sake of empathy as much as for work ethic. If you were a waitress once, you probably won’t yell at the poor waitress who accidentally spilled your drink.
IT ISN’T “HARD WORK”
This means that people who work at Target are harder workers than NFL players. I’m unwilling to say that in order for something to qualify as hard work, you have to hate it. Goodness, and while I’m at it I certainly won’t say that busyness is the same as hard work.²
We need to define “hard work” otherwise we’ll fall into the same trap that one McD’s employee did when she complained that she should earn $15/ hr because her job was tiring and she had to keep track of more than one task at a time. Shortly before those minimum wage wars, I had been managing a crew of over 60 people for $11/ hr. Believe it or not, I even had to do more than one task at a time.³
These are different types of hard work. One will make you sweat but takes 10 minutes to learn while the other takes 2 years to learn, thousands of dollars, and makes your head hurt. The bar to entrance on the former is just a smidgen lower, therefore, supply and demand drive the wage up for the latter.
I’m not criticizing elbow grease at all but if griddle-scrubbing earned 85k then fewer people would bother spending 2-4 years of their life and thousands of dollars learning to wear a white collar. It makes sense that people don’t get the same prize for climbing a hill that they get for climbing Mt. Everest. Unless of course the hill was in the middle of the Fire Swamp, in which case, give the man a raise. I’m ok if high risk jobs pay more.
YOUR INTERESTS CHANGE
True, but that only means that the worst that could happen is that you’ll end up in a job you don’t enjoy. I suppose the advice to counter this is to begin with a job you don’t enjoy and hope you begin to enjoy it? …until your passions change again and you’re sunk.
Note, the following objections came from this article. Despite my rebuttals, it’s worth a read.
IT CAN MAKE PEOPLE NEEDLESSLY LIMIT THEIR OPTIONS
Yes, but not more than getting a college degree can limit one’s options. Plenty of people feel trapped in their business job because of that MBA they paid for. And when the layoffs come, they probably have trouble looking for jobs outside their field too.
IT SUGGESTS THAT PASSION IS ALL YOU NEED
I guess… maybe? That would explain some of the most interesting people on American Idol. But they get set straight pretty quick.
MANY PEOPLE DON’T FEEL LIKE THEY HAVE A CAREER-RELEVANT PASSION
We need specifics because there are people out there making some serious cash from playing video games.
In the end, following one’s passion isn’t looking so foolish… it’s just looking more complicated. But is it selfish? To be continued…
- The number 14 has not been evaluated by any organization but is commonly used by mathematicians as well as people who don’t know the actual statistic in question but know that the actual number is somewhere between 4 and infinity.
- A easy fallacy to fall into and one that I wouldn’t mind digging into sometime.
- I’m not saying that I think NFL players’ salaries should be so ridiculously high or that there aren’t issues with the cost of living vs. average salary ratio.