Beyond Passion
Before continuing, I should emphasize an obvious point: For some people, following their passion works. The Roadtrip Nation archives, for example, include an interview with Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers, who claims that even as a child he used to bring notebooks into movie theaters to record his thoughts6. The power of passion is even more common when you look to the careers of gifted individuals, such as professional athletes. You’d be hard-pressed, for example, to find a professional baseball player who doesn’t claim that he has been passionate about the sport as far back as he can remember.
Some people I’ve talked to about my ideas have used examples of this type to dismiss my conclusions about passion. “Here’s a case where someone successfully followed their passion,” they say, “therefore ‘follow your passion’ must be good advice.” This is faulty logic. Observing a few instances of a strategy working does not make it universally effective. It is necessary instead to study a large number of examples and ask what worked in the vast majority of the cases. And when you study a large group of people who are passionate about what they do, as I did in researching this book, you find that most—not all—will tell a story more complex than simply identifying a pre-existing passion and then pursuing it. Examples such as Peter Travers and professional athletes, therefore, are exceptions. If anything, their rareness underscores my claim that for most people, “follow your passion” is bad advice.
This conclusion inspires an important follow-up question: Without the passion hypothesis to guide us, what should we do instead? This is the question I take up in the three rules that follow. These rules chronicle my quest to figure out how people really end up loving what they do. They represent a shift away from the tone of lawyerly argument used here and into something more personal: evidence of my attempts to capture the complexity and ambiguity of my encounters with the reality of workplace happiness. With the thorny underbrush of the passion hypothesis cleared, we can only now bring light to a more realistic strain of career advice that has so long been strangled in the shadows. This is a process that begins in the next rule with my arrival at an unlikely source of insight: a group of bluegrass musicians practicing their craft in the suburbs of Boston.