Discovering What Life Expects of You
Follow your dreams is terrible career advice.
You are not here to get or not get something your ego thinks it wants. You’re going to have to surrender, each step of the way, and let what’s here to be discovered reveal itself. —Ann Linthorst
We have been working with Viktor Frankl’s thesis that what matters is what life expects from us, not what we expect from life.
We can see how confused people are about this idea by how they approach their careers. They mentally decide what will fulfill them and complain when life doesn’t deliver their fantasies.
We saw that David Whyte calls this a “self-referential mind game”—a game that dooms us to misery and victimhood.
Recently, Bonnie Hammer explained why “follow your dreams” is “terrible career advice:”
When we enter the workplace convinced that we already know what we want to do in a specific field and are committed to it at all costs, we’re saying, in essence, that there is very little left for us to learn, discover or be curious about. That nothing else could make us happy or fulfilled. But we can’t dream what we don’t know, and the world of “I don’t know” is expanding.
Of course, “we can’t dream what we don’t know” is valid at all stages of life; it is best to be a lifelong learner.
I wrote an earlier version of the following essay for Learn Liberty in 2017. It draws on the work of Cal Newport, an author whose books we will eventually work with at Mindset Shifts U.
We can’t figure out our path; we can only discover it by immersing ourselves fully in the next emergent step.
Popular culture teaches that finding your passion is a major ingredient for career success. When Marsha Sinetar published her 1989 book Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow, she probably had no idea of the millions who’d come to see her book title as solid career advice. What if that advice is wrong?
Psychologist Robert Vallerand conducted a study of Canadian college students with the aim of learning if they were passionate about work or education. His startling findings were that “less than 4 percent of the total identified passions had any relation to work or education, with the remaining 96 percent describing hobby-style interests such as sports and art.”
Are these passionless individuals just unlucky? Did the passion muse pass them over? Do they need to take more career guidance tests or attend “find your passion” workshops?
To be sure, “find your passion” workshops have plenty of potential customers. According to a 2016 Conference Board survey, only about 50% of those employed are satisfied with their jobs. A Gallup survey finds that over 50% of employees are not engaged with their work and an additional 17% are “actively disengaged.”
From my experience delivering leadership workshops, I know many people are certain their work environment is the source of their dissatisfaction. Many point to obsolete hierarchical management styles as the problem. But what if their own mistaken ideas about success, passion, and job satisfaction are the real problem?
First, Be Good at Something
During a 2007 interview with Charlie Rose, comedian Steve Martin was asked to elaborate on career advice he once gave on how to be successful. At the time, Martin stated the obvious: “You have to be undeniably good at something.”
The obvious answer, Martin reflected, is not what many want to hear. Martin explained, “What they want to hear is, here’s how you get an agent. Here’s how you write a script. Here’s how you do this. But I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”
Georgetown University computer science professor Cal Newport used Martin’s advice as the title of his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You – a book that debunks the passion hypothesis.
Newport believes having a craftsman mindset, rather than a passion mindset, is the way to a fulfilling career. Instead of waiting for passion to strike, Newport’s research finds that people get passionate about work as they become good at work. “Passion,” explains Newport, is a “side effect of mastery.”
Passion is Not Enough
Newport advises, “If you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.” By itself, your passion is not of great value. Every career path is littered with passionate but unsuccessful people.
“Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world,” writes Newport, “the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you.” Newport emphasizes the need to offer value to the world.
For entry-level positions, the passion mindset leads to chronic unhappiness and a feeling that something is missing. Newport explains:
First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy – these come later. When you enter the working world with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks you’re assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can become too much to handle.
Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindset – “Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?” – are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?” rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses. In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused.”
For those who want to whine about their unfulfilling job or career, it is probably best to avoid Newport’s book. Newport offers tough love. The craftsman mindset “asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is ‘just right,’ and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good.”
No One Owes You a Great Career
Newport writes, “No one owes you a great career…you need to earn it – and the process won’t be easy.”
Hammer agrees. She wrote that “the blanket statement ‘know your worth’ conflates our personal and professional worth. I’ve watched many entry-level and early-career employees trip up when their otherwise enviable self-worth manifests as entitlement.”
When individuals examine their careers through a passion mindset, they often make statements that begin with, “If I had the courage, I would quit my job and do…” Newport believes they are missing the point: “Great work doesn’t just require great courage, but also skills of great (and real) value.” In other words, if you leave a job prematurely, before developing your career capital, you will likely fail.
In an interview, Ira Glass, the famed creator of the longtime radio series This American Life, cautioned, “In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream. But I don’t believe that. Things happen in stages.”
Mastery takes hard work and time. Glass didn’t just fall into his great job. He offers this advice: “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase.”
Newport believes the craftsman approach to work leads to the accumulation of “career capital.” You obtain career capital by developing “a collection of hard-won, rare, and valuable skills.” You can then exchange your capital for a “fantastic job.”
In short, with a craftsman mindset, you can earn a great job. If you are blinded by a passion mindset, you may never begin the journey.
At Mindset Shifts U, beginning June 22nd, we continue our exploration of transformational books with C. Terry Warner’s Bonds that Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves.
In September, in time for the election, we will begin our study of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.
I have been following along with Barry Brownstein as we worked through Meditations and Man’s Search for Meaning and the experience so far has had a unexpectedly profound impact on how I perceive myself and the world around me. I have noticed a marked increase in my patience and decrease in my anger towards myself and others. I am finding peace in the simple moments in life and find myself refusing to shirk away - giving up my resistance to life Barry says.
It has not been an easy journey so far to open myself up to the self-reflection that these tomes inspire, but I am convinced that although I am in my infancy in this journey that the benefits by opening myself up are incalculable. I hope you join us.
If you can join us and become a paying subscriber today, your support makes possible these essays and Mindset Shifts U.
Life is about “doing what’s needed when it’s needed.” Often, you find unexpected joy somewhere along the way to doing the next thing.
My entire career has been in manufacturing, which can be very difficult and demanding and unpleasant work. I can't count the number of times over the decades I found myself thinking, "There has to be a better way to make a living."
As I now write and speak about manufacturing, and host a web show and podcast about it, I guess there was a certain level of passion there too. But it was rarely if ever about "doing what I loved."
What I definitely love (yet oftentimes also hate, because it can be painful) is bicycling, which I started as a young teen. Many times in the early years I thought I'd love racing, but I didn't have the time or money until I finished college and got a good-paying job (yes, in manufacturing).
I began racing and was soon training with a couple of the best amateur bicycle road racers in the country. I won some races, including a state championship at the lowest ranking.
And I discovered that, even at that low level, bicycle racing was already a second full-time job, and it was EXHAUSTING. I wound up scaling back, doing some on-again, off-again mountain bike racing, and finding the joy of it again. Eventually I stopped racing entirely and just rode for fun and fitness again, because that's where the joy was for me.
If I had made it my career I would have been miserable.