Following Your Passion Is Bad Career Advice For Most People
A focus on passion is dangerous and outright bad career advice for most people.
The recruiting observation is based on comparing two candidates that both meet the skill requirements BEFORE passion plays into the equation.
If you don’t have the skills, expertise or background for the job, you can jump up and down with all the passion in the world and it won’t make a difference for your career.
In fact, people will get annoyed and will question your passion if you don’t have the skills, expertise or background to back it up. It’s a case of style without substance.
- How can you say you’re passionate about a job or company or industry that you know nothing about?
- How can you say you’re passionate about something you’ve never tried before?
- If you’re so passionate, why do you have to keep telling people you are (instead of just showing them)?
This isn’t to say that you need to have years of traditional, full-time, paid work experience in an area to demonstrate passion for that area. But you have to have something tangible, actionable or measurable as evidence that your passion manifests in something real. Volunteer work in your passion, a side business in your passion, an encyclopedic knowledge of your passion, and an extensive network of contacts active and influential in your passion are examples of ways to tangibly demonstrate your passion. Yes, it will take time, energy and focus to accumulate any of these – that’s the point!
Don’t just say you’re passionate. Demonstrate your passion.
If you’re too busy or tired or frustrated to do anything more than you what you’re currently doing, then you haven’t found something you’re passionate enough about. Encouraging people like this to get more passionate is like encouraging people to practice more wishful thinking. Fantasizing does not get you jobs.
Now, if you work 24/7 and never take a step back to question what you should be focusing on, then you might be a candidate for more passion-centered encouragement. If you’re a hard worker AND you can tap into your passion, then that IS a magical combination to success. So passion does play an important role. Just make sure you’re doing the hard work behind your career.
