The Passion Myth

2024 Fall/Whitney Cranford Crowell

When my kids were small, they had all kinds of interests. One week, it was lions, the next cheetahs, then wolves. They obsessed over trucks and construction equipment. They spent hours in the kitchen baking. They talked incessantly about MarioKart, or Warrior Cat clans, or automobiles.

Most little kids are like that. The world is such a new place; everything is exciting. They jump from idea to idea, each new topic an epic adventure. They may drink deeply from one well for a time, but almost inevitably, they move on when the next shiny object catches their eye.

Ask a little kid what she wants to be when she grows up, and you’ll likely get a different answer every time. At one point, my daughter had five careers picked out—one for every day of the week. I don’t remember them all, but I know astronaut and pastry chef were in there.

My son, on the other hand, wanted to be a strawberry delivery driver (or, if I’m being specific, a “strawberry deliverman”)—that is until he went to preschool and decided to become a police officer. There were maybe ten boys in his class, and eight of them wanted to be police officers, so I’m not sure, but there may have been some peer pressure at play.

When our kids are little, we think all of this jumping around, trying on different ideas and new identities, is cute. We share in their joy of exploration. We don’t worry that they don’t have deep interests or a plan. We go with the flow.

Somewhere around high school, all that changes. Suddenly, we decide these kids need to get with the program. They need to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives. They need to find a career. They need to discover their passion.

We’ve been sold a story about passion for at least the past few decades. “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” someone said, and we all believed it, while we went to jobs that were definitely still a chore some days, even if we liked them. Commencement speakers took to podiums across the country and proclaimed, “Follow your passion!” As career advice, this phrase was the penultimate.

What if it wasn’t true?

Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown University and bestselling author, has made a career out of studying systems. He’s particularly interested in systems of success—what leads some people to fruitful endeavors while others fail. His 2012 book So Good They Can’t Ignore You looks at this question from the angle of career satisfaction. Ultimately, Newport argues that “follow your passion” is exceedingly bad advice. Why? Well, for one, most people—especially young—don’t have pre-existing passions to follow. Teens lack the experience even to know what all the options are, much less which ones they’re passionate about. We all have interests, hobbies, and things we enjoy spending time doing, but rarely do those reach the level of passion. Even if they do, that passion may or may not be marketable.

For a long stretch of time during middle and high school, if my daughter had anything that could be termed a passion, it was dragons. She read about them, talked about them, sketched them. She could identify a Chinese dragon from a Japanese one by the number of toes. We even did a whole year on dragon lore in our school. Can you think of any jobs that involve dragons? Yeah, me neither.

My son, on the other hand, eats, sleeps, and breathes golf. Now, there are lots of careers related to golf, one of which is his current goal: pro golfer. But the odds of any given kid making the PGA Tour are somewhere just north of never. We encourage his dedication and hard work, of course, and if he’s ever on the first tee at Pinehurst #2, you better believe I’ll be there with bells off (golf courses frown on extraneous noise). But if I’m being honest here, strawberry deliverman is looking pretty good.

The good news is that there’s little to no evidence that matching the content of work to a pre-existing interest is a major driver of career satisfaction. In fact, as Newport points out, there’s ample evidence to the contrary. Being a hobby baker or amateur photographer bears little resemblance to the day-to-day reality of running a bakery or a photography studio, as many a hobbyist-turned-pro can attest.

Nor do the actual trajectories of people who do end up loving their work bear out this idea that following their passion was the key—even though they are likely to give exactly that advice. Just look at someone like Steve Jobs, who by all accounts was passionate about his work and even once told the graduating class at Stanford, “You’ve got to find what you love.” But Jobs didn’t start out with a dream to revolutionize the technology industry. He started with a very simple product that eventually grew into an empire as he gained mastery and leveraged each small step into something bigger.

What makes a compelling career, according to Newport, is almost never the content of the work. Rather, happiness in your career is driven by intangible assets like autonomy, creativity, and impact. Those are what he terms “rare and valuable” traits in a job, and to get these assets, you must be able to offer something rare and valuable in return—skills and expertise that others in your field don’t possess. In Newport’s view, developing those skills carefully, intentionally, and over time is the common factor among people who end up passionate about their jobs. Passion, as it turns out, follows success, not the other way around.

It’s true that at a certain point, young adults need to start taking steps towards planning for the future. But instead of despairing that your child doesn’t have a passion, or worse, urging him to find one, as if there’s a singular soul-mate job out there just waiting for him to discover it and live happily ever after, try reframing your perspective. Interests and aptitudes make a fine foundation for a career path. Build on those, seeking out occupations that resonate with his natural gifts. Encourage your teen to master skills that will allow him to bring value to the marketplace, deliberately and intentionally, looking for what he can give to the world, not what he can get from it.

Success will come. And with it, passion.

Whitney Cranford Crowell knew she’d reached peak homeschooling when she bought a custom nine-foot by six-foot bookcase with matching ladder and still didn’t have room for all the books. She lives in her childhood home outside High Point with her husband of twenty-four years and their thirteen-year-old son. Their daughter and first homeschool graduate is a National Merit Scholar at The University of Alabama. Whitney is the founder of Launchpad Consulting, a career and college coaching firm. She can be reached at whitney@yourguidancecounselor.com.