Is Follow Your Passion Bad Career Advice - When I Grow Up

Is Follow Your Passion Bad Career Advice - When I Grow Up Live Your Passion By Bit O Whimsey In my travels through the Interwebs, I keep noticing sites quoting that Follow Your Passion is bad career advice. It happened once, it happened twice, and then when I noticed it again last week, I decided to go to a trusty Google search, type in Is follow your passion bad advice? and stood back while I got about 2,360,000 results. Wait that wasnt dramatic enough. Typing in Is follow your passion bad advice? to a Google search bar results in two MILLION, three hundred sixty THOUSAND results. {insert bumbumBUM music here} Just a cursory glance at some of the articles that show up in the first few pages of that Google search touch on the same type of thing: Passion isnt enough. Well, duh. Obviously, you cant just take what youre passionate about, snap your fingers, and find/create a successful career around it. Also, you cant just set out to find your passion, find it, snap your fingers, and find/create a successful career around it. Double obviously, theres work to be done and skills/experience to be accrued and the learnings of what you dont find passionate about that particular career to, um, learn. (Lets face it, as much as I love life coaching I dislike loading my damn newsletters into freaking AWeber and formatting blog posts and interpreting my Google Analytics. Its not all a bed of roses.) But you guys! If you dont care about what youre doing and you can substitute the word passionate for care, but I know that word sometimes sends us creative Renaissance Souls running for the hills then youre not gonna be happy. Case closed. Out of the 200+ creative peeps Ive personally coached, Ive yet to have someone complete our sessions without feeling that theyre working towards whats fulfilling for them in terms of their job tasks and responsibilities, the skills they have that they like using (as oppose to the skills theyve developed that make them wanna shoot themselves in the face, and the lifestyle that they want to create for themselves. And I hate to say it, but its true: The older you are, the more you have to know youre gonna be fulfilled by what youre working to change. Could I have pulled off my actor-to-real-estate-agent-to-salesperson-to-account-manager-to-executive-assistant-to-life-coach without being freakin passionate about working for myself and being able to help creative peeps through their career transitions? Hell no! It wouldnt have been worth it for me to turn down all the social stuff I missed so that I could spend most nights/weekends to get certified and build my business. If I didnt enjoy what I was learning and building, it wouldve been shut down. Wanna hear what saddens me almost more than anything, outside hunger and wars and sickness and that other major stuff? When I talk to someone who got their masters/law degree/whatnot in something that they knew they didnt wanna pursue whether at the start or sometime during the program just because they didnt know what else to do with themselves/their parents told them to/it was expected of them. They end up finding their way to me anyway, in the same spot they were years before, but older and with tens of thousands of dollars in debt (if theyre lucky). If they just Followed Their Passion, theyd be in much better shape than they are now. So if you wanna see this as Following Your Fulfillment or Following Your Care or Following What Matters, thats all one and the same and I encourage the personal semantics of it all. But if you allow yourself to create the trail and take action to see where it leads, itll never steer you wrong. Wanna read more bout this? Id totally direct you to: Why Follow Your Passion is Bad Advice Maybe It’s Time for A Plan, Some Research, and Living in the Questions There Won’t Be Trumpets (or Why Your Passionate Career Might Not Be Delivered via Lightning Bolt, Cartoon Lightbulb or Speeding Train)