(Newswire.net — December 14, 2016) — Work is not work if we pursue whatever we’re passionate about. It’s why so many mentors, teachers, parents, and professionals tell young people to “follow their passions,” but there’s something fundamentally wrong with this approach.
The Seductive Logic of Following Your Passions
On the surface, turning your passion into a career seems like a fantastic idea. If you enjoy your career, it won’t feel like work: You’ll be motivated to work harder and perform better, and eventually you’ll be more successful. Because you enjoy your work, you won’t be as stressed, and you’ll live a fuller, happier life.
Today, support for entrepreneurs, combined with the unlimited resources of the Internet, makes it easier than ever to follow your passions. Almost anyone can make at least a little money doing what they love.
For example, if you’re passionate about music, you can be a professional musician, sell musical instruments online, teach music lessons, or write content about music on a blog. Unfortunately, many have found out the hard way that “doing what you love” isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be.
The Downsides of Following Your Passions
There are some harsh realities involved with following your passions. You ought to know what they are before you move forward with a hobby as a career:
- Loss of interest. When you’re forced to pursue your passion, day in and day out for years, you might start to lose interest. In a sense, your hobby becomes a career, and loses its status as a pure pleasure. Eventually, you get little enjoyment out of it. Choosing a career you aren’t passionate about enables you to stay motivated about your passions as side opportunities to be enjoyed in your leisure time.
- Work-life balance. Turning work into play, or play into work, blurs the line between work and life. This may appeal to some people, because work is no longer work. By extension, however, life may no longer be life. Depending on how you’ve arranged your career, your life may become an indistinct amalgamation of work and play, and that could end up stressing you out more than if you had a job completely distinct from your “real” life and interests.
- Accomplishments and progress. Just because you like something doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at it. It’s rare that someone’s greatest interest also turns out to be one of their greatest skills. As a result, people are more likely to find success and accomplishment in disciplines that are separate from their main interests. This isn’t always the case, but it happens.
- The plight of perfectionism. Working in a discipline you’re passionate about can make you an undue perfectionist about your work. This elevated perfectionism can affect your life negatively in a number of different ways. It can make you chronically dissatisfied with your work, it can interfere with your productivity and output, and it can make you stressed, anxious, and depressed even outside of working hours. Though it’s almost counterintuitive, it’s better to pursue work you don’t take very seriously.
- Disillusionment. Finally, if you pin all your hopes on “following your passion” to make you happy, you could end up utterly crushed if it leaves you unsatisfied. The disillusionment when you realize your greatest passion isn’t working as a career can be confusing and frustrating, and it could kill your progress in other areas of career development.
Alternatives and Workarounds
None of this is to say that following your passion is always a bad idea. For some people, it works out marvelously. The point is that you can’t fool yourself into thinking that following your passion will result in instant happiness.
By all means, give it a try, but only if you can acknowledge the potential downsides. Even then, it pays to have a backup plan. Consider a career that plays to your strengths and gives you the best chance for success … even if it’s not the most enjoyable activity in your life. You may thank yourself later.