Follow a Career Passion? Let It Follow You
By
CAL NEWPORT
Published: September 29, 2012
IN the spring of 2004, during my senior year of college, I faced a hard
decision about my future career. I had a job offer from Microsoft and an
acceptance letter from the computer science doctoral program at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I had also just handed in the manuscript for my first nonfiction book,
which opened the option of becoming a full-time writer. These are three
strikingly different career paths, and I had to choose which one was
right for me.
Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times
Cal Newport, a computer science professor at
Georgetown, says many people lack a “true calling” but have a sense of
fulfillment that grows over time.
For many of my peers, this decision would have been fraught with
anxiety. Growing up, we were told by guidance counselors, career advice
books, the news media and others to “follow our passion.” This advice
assumes that we all have a pre-existing passion waiting to be
discovered. If we have the courage to discover this calling and to match
it to our livelihood, the thinking goes, we’ll end up happy. If we lack
this courage, we’ll end up bored and unfulfilled — or, worse, in law
school.
To a small group of people, this advice makes sense, because they have a
clear passion. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be doctors, writers,
musicians and so on, and can’t imagine being anything else.
But this philosophy puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us — and
demands long deliberation. If we’re not careful, it tells us, we may end
up missing our true calling. And even after we make a choice, we’re
still not free from its effects. Every time our work becomes hard, we
are pushed toward an existential crisis, centered on what for many is an
obnoxiously unanswerable question: “Is this what I’m really meant to be
doing?” This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping.
As I considered my options during my senior year of college, I knew all
about this Cult of Passion and its demands. But I chose to ignore it.
The alternative career philosophy that drove me is based on this simple
premise: The traits that lead people to love their work are general and
have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense
of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are
having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace
motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” offers a nice
summary of this literature.)
These traits can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned.
Building valuable skills is hard and takes time. For someone in a new
position, the right question is not, “What is this job offering me?”
but, instead, “What am I offering this job?”
RETURNING to my story, I decided after only minimal deliberation to go
to M.I.T. True to my alternative career philosophy, I was confident that
all three of my career options could be transformed into a source of
passion, and this confidence freed me from worry about making a wrong
choice. I ended up choosing M.I.T., mainly because of a slight
preference for the East Coast, but I would have been equally content
heading out to Microsoft’s headquarters near Seattle. Or, with the
advance from my first book, I could have hunkered down in a quiet town
to write.
During my initial years as a graduate student, I certainly didn’t enjoy
an unshakable sense that I had found my true calling. The beginning of
doctoral training can be rough. You’re not yet skilled enough to make
contributions to the research literature, which can be frustrating. And
at a place like M.I.T., you’re surrounded by brilliance, which can make
you question whether you belong.
Had I subscribed to the “follow our passion” orthodoxy, I probably would
have left during those first years, worried that I didn’t feel love for
my work every day. But I knew that my sense of fulfillment would grow
over time, as I became better at my job. So I worked hard, and, as my
competence grew, so did my engagement.
Today, I’m a computer science professor at
Georgetown University,
and I love my job. The most important lesson I can draw from my
experience is that this love has nothing to do with figuring out at an
early age that I was meant to be a professor. There’s nothing special
about my choosing this particular path. What mattered is what I did once
I made my choice.
To other young people who constantly wonder if the grass might be
greener on the other side of the occupational fence, I offer this
advice: Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will
follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.
Cal Newport is the author of “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.”
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How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
by Heidi Grant Halvorson |
12:00 PM February 14, 2014
There’s that project you’ve left on the backburner – the one
with the deadline that’s growing uncomfortably near. And there’s the
client whose phone call you really should return – the one that does
nothing but complain and eat up your valuable time. Wait, weren’t you
going to try to go to the gym more often this year?
Can you imagine how much less guilt, stress, and frustration you
would feel if you could somehow just make yourself do the things you
don’t want to do when you are actually supposed to do them? Not to
mention how much happier and more effective you would be?
The good news (and its very good news) is that you can get better
about not putting things off, if you use the right strategy. Figuring
out which strategy to use depends on why you are procrastinating in the
first place:
Reason #1 You are putting something off because you are afraid you will screw it up.
Solution: Adopt a “prevention focus.”
There are two ways to look at any task. You can do something because you see it as a way to end up better off than you are now – as an achievement or accomplishment. As in, if I complete this project successfully I will impress my boss, or if I work out regularly I will look amazing. Psychologists call this a promotion focus
– and research shows that when you have one, you are motivated by the
thought of making gains, and work best when you feel eager and
optimistic. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Well, if you are afraid you will
screw up on the task in question, this is not the focus for you. Anxiety and doubt undermine promotion motivation, leaving you less likely to take any action at all.
What you need is a way of looking at what you need to do that isn’t
undermined by doubt – ideally, one that thrives on it. When you have a prevention focus, instead of thinking about how you can end up better off, you see the task as a way to hang on to what you’ve already got
– to avoid loss. For the prevention-focused, successfully completing a
project is a way to keep your boss from being angry or thinking less of
you. Working out regularly is a way to not “let yourself go.” Decades
of research, which I describe in my book Focus, shows that
prevention motivation is actually enhanced by anxiety about what might
go wrong. When you are focused on avoiding loss, it becomes clear that
the only way to get out of danger is to take immediate action. The more
worried you are, the faster you are out of the gate.
I know this doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs, particularly if
you are usually more the promotion-minded type, but there is probably no
better way to get over your anxiety about screwing up than to give some
serious thought to all the dire consequences of doing nothing at all.
Go on, scare the pants off yourself. It feels awful, but it works.
Reason #2 You are putting something off because you don’t “feel” like doing it.
Solution: Make like Spock and ignore your feelings. They’re getting in your way.
In his excellent book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking,
Oliver Burkeman points out that much of the time, when we say things
like “I just can’t get out of bed early in the morning, “ or “I just
can’t get myself to exercise,” what we really mean is that we can’t get
ourselves to feel like doing these things. After all, no one is
tying you to your bed every morning. Intimidating bouncers aren’t
blocking the entrance to your gym. Physically, nothing is stopping you –
you just don’t feel like it. But as Burkeman asks, “Who says you need
to wait until you ‘feel like’ doing something in order to start doing
it?”
Think about that for a minute, because it’s really important.
Somewhere along the way, we’ve all bought into the idea – without
consciously realizing it – that to be motivated and effective we need to
feel like we want to take action. We need to be eager to do
so. I really don’t know why we believe this, because it is 100%
nonsense. Yes, on some level you need to be committed to what you are
doing – you need to want to see the project finished, or get healthier,
or get an earlier start to your day. But you don’t need to feel like doing it.
In fact, as Burkeman points out, many of the most prolific artists,
writers, and innovators have become so in part because of their reliance
on work routines that forced them to put in a certain number of hours a
day, no matter how uninspired (or, in many instances, hungover) they
might have felt. Burkeman reminds us of renowned artist Chuck Close’s
observation that “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show
up and get to work.”
So if you are sitting there, putting something off because you don’t
feel like it, remember that you don’t actually need to feel like it. There is nothing stopping you.
Reason #3 You are putting something off because it’s hard, boring, or otherwise unpleasant.
Solution: Use if-then planning.
Too often, we try to solve this particular problem with sheer will: Next time, I will make myself start working on this sooner. Of course, if we actually had
the willpower to do that, we would never put it off in the first
place. Studies show that people routinely overestimate their capacity
for self-control, and rely on it too often to keep them out of hot
water.
Do yourself a favor, and embrace the fact that your willpower is
limited, and that it may not always be up to the challenge of getting
you to do things you find difficult, tedious, or otherwise awful.
Instead, use if-then planning to get the job done.
Making an if-then plan is more than just deciding what specific steps you need to take to complete a project – it’s also deciding where and when you will take them.
If it is 2pm, then I will stop what I’m doing and start work on the report Bob asked for.
If my boss doesn’t mention my request for a raise at our meeting, then I will bring it up again before the meeting ends.
By deciding in advance exactly what you’re going to do, and when and where you’re going to do it, there’s no deliberating when the time comes. No do I really have to do this now?, or can this wait till later? or maybe I should do something else instead.
It’s when we deliberate that willpower becomes necessary to make the
tough choice. But if-then plans dramatically reduce the demands placed
on your willpower, by ensuring that you’ve made the right decision way ahead of the critical moment. In fact, if-then planning has been shown in over 200 studies to increase rates of goal attainment and productivity by 200%-300% on average.
I realize that the three strategies I’m offering you – thinking about
the consequences of failure, ignoring your feelings, and engaging in
detailed planning – don’t sound as fun as advice like “Follow your
passion!” or “Stay positive!” But they have the decided advantage of
actually being effective – which, as it happens, is exactly what you’ll be if you use them.
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