It was 1671, and Christopher Wren, the architect commissioned to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of London in 1666, was observing three bricklayers working on completing one of the many cathedrals destroyed during the conflagration.
To each bricklayer, Wren asked, “What are you doing?” The first bricklayer replied, “I’m a bricklayer. I’m working hard, laying bricks to feed my family.” Looking down at Wren, the second bricklayer responded, “I’m a builder. I’m building a wall.”
But the third bricklayer, the most productive and the hardest worker of the three, when asked the question, “What are you doing?” stood tall and replied proudly, “I’m a cathedral builder. I’m building a great cathedral to The Almighty.”
Why “Follow Your Passion” Is The Worst Career Advice
“Do what you love” is a mantra that has long adorned many a meme, urging us that the key to a fulfilling career is to figure out what we’re passionate about and then find a job to match.
The passion hypothesis, as Newport calls it, is well-meaning and perfectly sound in principle, but in practice, it’s flawed for two reasons. Firstly, rarely do we have passions we can parlay into a full-time living.
When students in one study were asked about their passions, many listed their favorite hobbies, which didn’t offer much when choosing a career after graduating. As much as we might want (or think we want) to turn our hobbies into our careers, we can’t all read, lift heavy weights, or watch documentaries for a living. [2]
The second reason the passion hypothesis is flawed is that switching jobs to find something we were “meant to do” can lead to job dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
“The Passion Hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous,” writes Newport in So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. “Telling someone to ‘follow their passion’ is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.”
Fortunately, not all is lost. Newport explains that rather than “do what we love,” we can learn to love what we do by meeting three core psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. [3]
The Deliberate Craftsperson
Autonomy, the feeling that we have control over our day and that our actions matter, doesn’t happen overnight. Oftentimes, the jobs that afford its employees the greatest freedoms are reserved only for those that have, or are willing to invest, a decade or more mastering rare and valuable skills.
To develop those skills, we must adopt a craftsperson’s mindset. We must focus on continually improving the quality of the work we do now, day in, day out, regardless of our current employer, through what is known as deliberate practice—a practice that aims to help improve specific aspects of our performance. [4]
Research has found that the more we improve our skills, the more competent we feel at work. And the more competent we feel at work, the better qualified we feel about acquiring further rare and valuable skills (or “career capital,” as Newport calls it), which enables us to find jobs that better meet our needs.
Relatedness, the feeling of connection to other people, and the third basic need, is the least surprising of the three—we enjoy our work when we feel close to the people we work with. But relatedness isn’t limited to our colleagues.
When we feel like the work we’re doing is in the service of others—that it’s part of a cause that’s bigger than ourselves (like the cathedral builder serving a community)—we can ignite a deeper, more profound sense of passion and purpose in our daily work.
Only when we learn to love what we do can we do what we love.
Footnotes
[1] Many versions of the bricklayer’s parable are circulating online, but its original source can be traced back to What Can A Man Believe by Bruce Barton.
[2] It’s tempting to think we want to turn our hobbies into a career, but it doesn’t always end well. When asked, those who made the switch often admit to feeling a void left by their now missing hobby.
[3] Cal Newport quotes Daniel Pink, who explores self-determination theory (SDT) in his excellent book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. You can read my summary of the book here.
[4] Knowing our Life Task can help us know which area to master.
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