Skill > Passion
Why 'how you work' is more important than 'what you work' on
On the importance of ability
Don’t follow your passion, let it follow you.
Try refocussing from finding the right work/course and towards working right and you will eventually find fulfilment.
The passion hypotheses says:
The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion.
But passion is rare…
The more you seek examples of the passion hypotheses, the more you recognise its rarity.
We try to judge things in the abstract before we actually do them. You might think that you’ll enjoy a job from looking at the job description or a degree by reading a few lines about. This is a wrong approach.
Instead, try setting a goal for yourself to be the best at whatever you do. Look at Joseph in the Bible; he didn’t have a say in the nature of work he did, but he made sure he executed his tasks well.
Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.
Passion is not sufficient
They are many reasons for loving your job/course, but the reductive notion of matching your job/course to a pre-existing passion is not primarily among them.
Career passions are rare: at the core of the passion hypothesis is the assumption that we all have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered.
In an experiment, 84% of students surveyed indicated that they had a passion. Here are the top 5 identified passions: dancing, football, travelling, reading, and swimming. Though important to the students, these passions don’t have much to offer when it comes to choosing a job/course.
Passion takes time: A job is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.
We mustn’t try to find in a job only what can be found in a calling. we need to leverage our job and career to optimise our calling.
Passion is a by-product of mastery
You need to have worked at a thing long enough before you get really good at it and start enjoying it. Nothing meaningful and worthwhile comes easy even if it’s connected to our natural talent.