Don’t follow your passion.
This is Cal Newport’s central argument in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love.
I admit that the first time I read this book in 2021, I stopped reading after the first 50 pages.
I was in a different headspace then. I was burnt out and gave up my career as a software engineer after spending three years studying, coding, and looking for work in an oversaturated market in a paralyzed economy.
Lost, tired, and confused, I needed career advice. I stumbled on Newport’s book after reading his other book, Digital Minimalism. While I praised that book, I did not expect to have such mixed feelings about this one.
But things are different now.
I’m at a completely different part of my life, both physically and mentally. I have a different job and live in a different country. While my mental health has improved, I’m still haunted by the question:
“What do I want to do with my life?”
Since the last time I read this book, my views on careers and life have changed, and I wanted to see if my attitude towards this book has changed as well.
Newport’s 4 Rules to Finding Work You Love
Newport argues that following your passion will not lead to a fulfilling career. As a matter of fact, he goes as far to say that it is terrible advice and will lead to a life of discontent.
In his book, he presents a few cases of people who followed their passion and ultimately suffered, while those who didn’t have careers that they enjoy.
So, if you shouldn’t follow your passion, what should you do instead?
According to Newport, there are four rules you ought to follow to have a fulfilling career:
Rule #1: Don’t follow your passion.
Rule #2: Develop rare and valuable skills and be so good at your job to build “career capital”.
Rule #3: Leverage your skills and career capital to garner more control.
Rule #4: Have a captivating mission that fuels you and drives your career.
*According to Newport, you must follow these rules sequentially to achieve a career you love.
To briefly elaborate on these rules, Newport says you should not follow your passion. Instead, you should get exceptionally good at rare and valuable skills that employers and clients will pay you for. As you become more valuable, you build “career capital,” an abstract currency you can use as leverage for things like higher pay, more desirable hours, or desired responsibilities.
According to Newport, this capital and leverage allow you to have more control of your career. Once you have more control, you must define a meaningful career mission to sustain your drive (ie. finding cures for diseases in Africa, building green-energy companies).
My Critique
So that it’s clear, I agree with most of Newport’s arguments. You should not follow your passion as a method to find your career. While it’s possible, some passions, such as playing video games or making music, struggle to pay the bills. However, while following your passion is not the best advice for finding a fulfilling career, it should not be entirely dismissed, and I think Newport does not present solid cases for this argument.
One of my biggest issues with Newport’s argument is that he neglects how match quality plays a role in your career.
I learned about this term in David Epstein’s book, Range, where Epstein defines match quality as:
“the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are —their abilities and proclivities.”
In other words, match quality, or fit, refers to how your interests, skills, and values align with your work. For example, I was a software engineer for about three years. While I love solving problems and making things, I hated sitting in front of a computer screen for hours looking at code. To this day, I still develop headaches that even painkillers can’t relieve if I stare at a screen for too long. Eventually, I decided that software engineering ultimately wasn’t a good fit for me.
Newport argues against this idea of searching for a career that fits you because he believes the passion mindset leads to constant job hopping and overall dissatisfaction.
According to Newport, regardless of fit, “leave behind whether your job is ‘just right,’ and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good… I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can’t ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer.”
I agree with Newport that you should not let a lack of passion for your job stop you from becoming good at it.
However, you probably know someone good at their career but still dislikes it. This was me with software engineering.
But after I left software, I worked as a sales representative at a large tech company. There, I applied what Newport calls the “craftsman mindset”. This mindset refers to the attitude of approaching your work with the goal of getting good.
To be clear, I dislike sales. I hate the pressure of quotas, cold calling, and treating customer relationships as transactions. Despite these aspects, I grew a lot in those 2.5 years when I shifted my mindset to “I may dislike this job, but I’m going to do my best and learn as much as I can” because frankly I like learning the skills of a salesperson such as persuasion, problem solving, and building relationships.
In my role, I learned how to ask customers better questions to uncover their needs and provide personalized solutions. I became more knowledgeable about processes and products and because of this, I garnered “career capital” with my colleagues, clients, and managers as I became a reliable resource for them.
But I didn’t have aspirations to do more than “good enough”. I didn’t see a future for myself in this role and had no intentions of moving up the ladder. As a result, I didn’t have many incentives to get really good.
So, exactly how does one pursue a high level of competence or mastery without interest in their work? According to Newport, this is irrelevant. You should strive to get good regardless of your feelings towards your job. He even provides case studies.
However, I don’t think Newport’s case studies align with his argument because many of the people he discussed such as Alex Berger, a successful television writer, and Mike Jackson, a cleantech venture capitalist, already had certain proclivities towards their professions before they got “good”. These people already enjoyed their work and that’s how they got good, established career capital, and pivoted to similar professions that gave them more control and meaning in their careers.
So if you shouldn’t follow your passion but recognize that fit is important, how can you proceed to find work you enjoy?
Perhaps there’s another way to look at the passion question.
Passion is Superficial; Look Deeper
I struggled for years, asking myself, “What is my passion? How can I make it into a career?” This is understandable. For many of us, myself included, the majority of our lives consists of work. We work to pay bills, support our families, or save to afford our dream lives. It makes sense that if we spend a significant part of our lives working, we should enjoy our work and that’s why many of us look to make our passions a career.
But I realized that these were the wrong questions to ask in finding a suitable career.
The passion question is superficial. When we think of passion, what may come to mind is something tangible like an activity such as knitting or making music. But it’s the wrong angle.
Think of all the things you enjoy doing, consuming, and talking about. Now, ask yourself a deeper question as to why. Why do you love sport? Is it because you love competition? Is it the sense of improving yourself? List all your interests and find their underlying commonalities.
For me, some of my interests include reading, writing, martial arts, language learning, and much more. For those who have read my previous articles, you will know I’m passionate about learning languages. But why?
Learning languages is one way I can apply what I learn to the real world. I love experimenting and trying these out. Learning new skills such as a language from books or the classroom and immediately having a conversation with someone evokes such a riveting sensation. Similarly, I get so excited in Brazilian jiu jitsu when I successfully apply a newly learned technique in a sparring match.
But I don’t have any aspirations to become an interpreter or a BJJ instructor. I love these activities because they allow me to experience the joy of applying what I learn to solve real-world problems. And that is what I strive to find in a career, one that allows me to learn meaningful skills and apply them to solve real-world problems.
This deeper understanding of my interests allows me to think more deeply about the types of jobs I may enjoy, rather than just get good and hope I eventually fall in love with the job.
Conclusion
It’s unrealistic to believe that there’s a perfect job for you. There’s no such thing as a career where you don’t dislike a single aspect of it. However, that should not stop you from finding one that may suit you.
While you shouldn’t blindly follow your passion, I don’t believe “put your head down and just get good” is great advice either. You should follow your curiosity and strive to find a profession where your interests, skills, and values are aligned.
However, this does not mean you should sit idly and contemplate what job is most suitable because you will never know unless you do it. Despite the stigma of job hopping, I encourage it as long as you are hopping towards a career that best aligns with your interests and skills as opposed to escaping your current one.
Despite my strange career history, every new job I transitioned to feels closer to what I ultimately want to do because I understand myself better.
Transitioning to a new career does not mean you lose all your career capital because you can’t lose the experiences and skills you have learned from your previous careers. As long as you learn as much as possible, do your best, and strive to better understand yourself, you can indeed have a fulfilling career regardless of your passions.
