Some say "follow your passion", others "follow your effort", "do what contributes" or even "forget passion, forget goals".
Please see below the links to the original articles and some highlights.
In my case, FOLLOW YOUR EFFORT worked best.
But I consider Scott Adam's point of view equally important (WORK HARD, FAIL, TRY AGAIN).
Testing, my work passion, is not the first IT job that I had.
Over the years, I worked also as IT analyst & manager, software developer and web support manager.
The web support manager position was temporary by replacing someone who took maternity leave.
When that person came back to work, since the company did not have a testing team then, the opportunity was too good to miss.
It took a while to build the team and the department but testing was not a passion at that time.
An interesting job, yes, passion, no.
I kept working at getting better at testing, read everything I could find and tried new things all the time.
After a while, I discovered crowd-source testing (yes, uTest.com) and from that moment, the passion switch was turned on.
So, I found the passion by following the effort as Mark Cuban explains in his article :)
.
JIM CARREY
FOLLOW YOUR PASSION, DO WHAT YOU LOVE.
http://www.businessinsider.com/jim-carreys-advice-to-graduates-2014-5
MARK CUBAN
DON'T FOLLOW YOUR PASSION, FOLLOW YOUR EFFORT.
http://blogmaverick.com/2012/03/18/dont-follow-your-passion-follow-your-effort/
- If you really want to know where your destiny lies, look at where you apply your time.
- Time is the most valuable asset you don’t own.
- You may or may not realize it yet, but how you use or don’t use your time is going to be the best indication of where your future is going to take you .
- When you work hard at something, you become good at it.
- When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more.
- When you enjoy doing something, there is a very good chance you will become passionate or more passionate about it
- When you are good at something, passionate and work even harder to excel and be the best at it, good things happen.
DON'T FOLLOW YOUR PASSION, FOLLOW YOUR EFFORT.
It will lead you to your passions and to success, however you define it.
MARC ANDREESSEN
DO WHAT CONTRIBUTES
http://www.businessinsider.com/andreessen-whatever-you-do-dont-follow-your-passion-2014-5
Too often, people follow their passions into fields that are simply too competitive for where their skills are in those things.
Instead, Andreessen believes one should "DO WHAT CONTRIBUTES" — FOLLOW THE THING THAT PROVIDES THE MOST VALUE TO OTHERS.
- Thesis: "Do what you love" / "Follow your passion" is dangerous and destructive career advice
- We tend to hear it from (a) Highly successful people who (b) Have become successful doing what they love.
- The problem is that we do NOT hear from people who have failed to become successful by doing what they love.
- Particularly pernicious problem in tournament-style fields with a few big winners & lots of losers: media, athletics, startups.
- Better career advice may be "Do what contributes" -- focus on the beneficial value created for other people vs just one's own ego.
- People who contribute the most are often the most satisfied with what they do -- and in fields with high renumeration, make the most $.
- Perhaps difficult advice since requires focus on others vs oneself -- perhaps bad fit with endemic narcissism in modern culture?
- Requires delayed gratification -- may toil for many years to get the payoff of contributing value to the world, vs short-term happiness.
ALISON GREEN
DO SOMETHING THAT YOU ARE GOOD AT, THAT BRINGS YOU A REASONABLE AMOUNT OF SATISFACTION, AND EARNS YOU A LIVING.
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2013/04/17/why-you-shouldnt-follow-your-passion
The problem is that "Do what you love" is terrible advice. Here's why.
Most passions don't line up well with paying careers.
If you're passionate about poetry or salsa dancing, you're going to find very limited job opportunities for those things ..... Those are lovely passions to have, though — and often the best choice is to find a career that supports you enough to pursue those passions outside of work.
Turning what you love into a career can ruin what you loved about it.
You might love to bake, and your friends might regularly swoon over your cakes and tell you to open a bakeshop. But getting up at the crack of dawn every day, baking 100 cakes daily, and dealing with difficult customers and the stress and finances of running your own business might have nothing to do with what you love about baking — and might sap the joy right out of it.
Do what you love," for most people, isn't a reliable way to find the right career — and can lead to anxiety, job-hopping and dissatisfaction.
Often what makes people happy at work isn't that they're passionate about what they're doing, but rather that they have a sense of accomplishment or impact, or they enjoy the autonomy they're given, or they feel respected or useful.
So a better goal than "follow your passion" is probably to DO SOMETHING THAT YOU ARE GOOD AT, THAT BRINGS YOU A REASONABLE AMOUNT OF SATISFACTION, AND EARNS YOU A LIVING.
SCOTT ADAMS
SO FORGET ABOUT PASSION. AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT, FORGET ABOUT GOALS, TOO.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579121813075903866
... the most dangerous case of all is when successful people directly give advice. For example, you often hear them say that you should "follow your passion." That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?
Here's the counterargument: When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don't want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He's in business for the wrong reason.
My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over 30 years, said that the best loan customer is someone who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or invest in a fast-food franchise—boring stuff.
THAT'S THE PERSON THAT YOU WANT TO BET ON. YOU WANT THE GRINDER, NOT THE GUY WHO LOVES HIS JOB.
For most people, it's easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion.
I've been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion.
The ones that didn't work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion when they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded.
In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. SUCCESS CAUSED PASSION MORE THAN PASSION CAUSED SUCCESS.
SO FORGET ABOUT PASSION. AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT, FORGET ABOUT GOALS, TOO.
.... He offered me some career advice.
He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one.
For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary.
It was a continuing process.
This makes perfect sense if you do the math.
Chances are that the best job for you won't become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready.
Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for a better deal.
The better deal has its own schedule.
I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job.
YOUR JOB IS TO FIND A BETTER JOB.
This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal.
The system was to continually look for better options.
If you drill down on any success story, you always discover that luck was a huge part of it.
You can't control luck, but you can move from a game with bad odds to one with better odds.
You can make it easier for luck to find you.
The most useful thing you can do is stay in the game.
If your current get-rich project fails, take what you learned and try something else.
Keep repeating until something lucky happens.
The universe has plenty of luck to go around.
You just need to keep your hand raised until it's your turn.
It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.
If I forgot to mention it earlier, that's exactly where you want to be: steeped to your eyebrows in failure.
It's a good place to be because FAILURE IS WHERE SUCCESS LIKES TO HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT.
Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure.
THE TRICK IS TO GET THE GOOD STUFF OUT.
Share this
