Passion in Work – Taking It Further

Couple of weeks back, I wrote about Passion in Work. Around the same time, I read this post titled, “Forget Passion, Focus on Process” at 37Signals blog which really got me thinking.

The premise?

The problem with the “follow your passion” chorus: We can’t all love the products we work with. Someone has to do the jobs and sell the things that don’t seem sexy but make the world go round.

Here are a few important observations:

First thing – a lot of people I have met/seen don’t really know what their passion is. Most of them take up the work they encounter first and keep doing it. They get into it by a chance. A few bold ones experiment with different areas of work before finally finding out something that they really enjoy doing everyday.

Second thing – people don’t always like what they do, but they still keep doing it well because the larger context of their work excites them. Even when people pursue work they love doing, there is a lot of chunk within that same work which they may not like (daily grind).

Third thing – ideas of ‘passion’ and ‘job satisfaction’ only come into play when we have a choice. There are millions of people across the globe who don’t have any choice about what they are doing. Their options are limited, and hence they try to be the best in whatever they do without thinking too much about their passion. (Read this story). The key is to do the work where we can expand our choices.

Finally, different people are passionate about different things. If our passion is aligned to a very narrow activity (e.g. performance testing of a software) then we are more likely to lose motivation at some point. So, our passion has to be defined by a broader context (e.g. constantly raise the bar of quality we deliver to customer). While the former is very specific, the latter provides us many more avenues to pursue our passion.

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Join in the conversation: Is this “passion” thing overrated? Does thinking too much about our passion make us even more unhappy with our current work? Is it always possible to find the work we really love doing? Tell us what you think.