People Management
March 20, 2025
Following your passion can be terrible advice
Understand why well-honed skills outperform passion in the pursuit of a job
“You’ve got to find what you love… The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle” (Newport, 2022, p. 3).
This speech was delivered in 2005 by Steve Jobs, on the stage of Stanford Stadium, at the graduation ceremony for the graduating students. A crowd of about 23,000 people attended. Later, when an unofficial video of the speech was posted on YouTube, it quickly went viral, with over 3 million views. The comments on the videos were summarized as very similar perceptions: “Follow your passion, life is to be lived”; “passion is the engine for you to live life”; “it is passion for work that really counts” (Newport, 2022, p. 4).
However, Cal Newport, author of the book “So Good They Can´t Ignore You”, translated into Portuguese as “Bom demais para ser ignorado”, is emphatic in stating that following your passion can be terrible advice, especially when entering the job market with this mindset, as any task that generates constant irritations, such as unplanned activities, routine urgencies, or bureaucratic frustrations, inherent to any profession, can end up becoming much harder to deal with.
According to Newport, Steve Jobs did not start his professional career out of a passion for technology or business. On the contrary, he entered the field almost by accident, by participating in an electronics club at school and, later, by working at Atari. It was only after many years of dedication and improvement of his skills that he developed a passion for what he did.
Newport argues that if Jobs had followed his own advice from the beginning, he might never have founded Apple. Jobs dropped out of college after his first year and, from then on, divided his time between Atari (a night job that caught his attention with the ad: “have fun and make money”) and a rural community located in northern San Francisco (USA). At one point, he left his job at Atari to go on a spiritual journey to India. According to Newport, several of his actions early in his career indicated that he was not a person so passionate about technology, the focus of his career some time later. Newport is emphatic in stating that the question “do I really love what I’m doing?” is basically impossible to validate and rarely brings clear answers of the “yes” or “no” type, for three simple reasons:
- Career passions are rare: studies indicate that less than 4% of passions identified by students are directly related to work, and 96% relate to aspects focused on hobbies, sports, and arts;
- Passion takes time: citing organizational behavior professor Amy Wrzesniewski from Yale University, Newport draws important distinctions between job, career, and calling. The first term describes a way to pay the bills, the second is the path toward an increasingly better job, and the third, an important part of our lives and essential to our identity (Newport, 2022, p. 15). The professor made important discoveries in her research by showing that the strongest indicator for a professional to perceive their work as a calling is the number of years they work, that is, the more experience a person has, the more predisposed they will be to truly love their work;
- Passion is the side effect of mastering skills and competencies: this statement can be explained by Self-Determination Theory, developed in 1981 by Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, which helps to bring understanding about why some activities motivate people and others leave them apathetic. It states that, for there to be motivation in the workplace or anywhere else, three basic psychological needs must be met: autonomy — the feeling of having control over one’s day and knowing that one’s actions are important; competence / psychological empowerment — the feeling of being good at what one does; relatedness — the feeling of having a connection with other people (Newport, 2022, p.17; Deci et al., 1994).
In this context, it is interesting to note that, in most companies, the better the professional is at what they do, not only do they feel fulfilled, but they are also rewarded for it, acquiring greater control over their responsibilities. “Competence and autonomy are achievable by most people in a wide variety of professions” (Newport, 2002, p.18).
Thus, the author states that it is important to change the mental model regarding work. He suggests swapping the “passion” mentality for that of the “craftsman“. The former emphasizes what the world can offer us, that is, we arrive at a company and expect it to bring us happiness; the latter is about what the professional can offer the world, that is, upon joining a company, our concern should be to be the best in our field of expertise, with commitment, continuous dedication, always studying, and having an “obsessive” focus on the quality of deliveries.
For this, it will be fundamental to identify rare and valuable skills such as each person’s career capital . Instead of focusing on weaknesses, it is more valuable to identify what you are already very good at, that is, your differentiator, recognized by yourself and by others, to become the best in your field of expertise.
To conclude, a point of caution identified by Professor Newport concerns three specific situations where the craftsman mentality cannot be applied, which are important to analyze. They are:
- If the job presents few opportunities for the professional to be recognized for the development of relevant skills that are rare and valuable;
- If the job focuses on something that the professional considers useless or that, perhaps, is actively bad for the world and goes against their values;
- If the job requires the professional to work with people they really don’t like (toxic people, for example).
In the next article, we will address the main aspects involving career capital. See you soon!
| To access the references of this text click here. |
Who wrote this column
Denise de Moura
