Today, I want to turn our attention towards the world of careers, and do a core idea deep dive on the idea that you should not follow your passion. Here's a core idea. Don't follow your passion. Let me give some background here. What do I mean by don't follow your passion?

Well, this all goes back to a book I published in 2012. It was called So Good They Can't Ignore You. And the whole premise of this book was to take a look from scratch at the core question of how do you end up loving what you do for a living.

I wrote this book as a postdoc at MIT before I took my first professorship at Georgetown. Because professorships, if done right, is a job you have for life. My thinking was, if there was any time in which I would get a lot of leverage out of understanding what makes people end up loving what they do for a living, this was the time that I would get the most leverage out of it.

This was the time I needed an answer to that question. This was a time in which I was cementing what my professional life was going to look like. And I said, I better understand how people end up loving their work before I start setting into stone career trajectories that are hard to otherwise later change.

And so I went and I researched and wrote this book as a postdoc at MIT, trying to answer the question, how do people end up loving what they do? At the time, and continuing till today, the common answer to that question was follow your passion. That's by far the most common answer, especially in the American context.

There are definitely some regional differences here, but definitely in the American context. It didn't take much pushing to realize that there are problems with this advice. Number one, a lot of people and by a lot, I mean, most don't have clearly defined pre existing passions that they can identify to then follow.

Real issue if you talk to a bunch of let's say 22 year olds just coming out of school, and say, look, you got to follow your passion, or you're going to be you know, a miserable sad sack and say, well, what's my passion? I don't know. That's a problem.

Second, there is not a lot of good evidence that matching the content of your work to a pre existing interest is a major driver of satisfaction in that job. We just assume that's true. That advice just assumes that true. Oh, I like this thing. So if I do that for my job, I'll like my job.

But we actually don't have a lot of evidence that's true. We have a ton of evidence that other factors are much more important. Things like autonomy seems like mastery seems like impact things like connection. A lot of other things that are really important for job satisfaction have nothing to do with is the content of my work matching a pre existing interest.

And we of course have plenty of counterexamples of people who build jobs out of hobbies and are miserable. I mean, these are cliches that the baker, the amateur baker who's miserable as a professional baker, the amateur photographer, who's miserable, doing six wedding photography gigs per week. This is so common, it's a cliche that when you take what you love and say, let me make a job about it, you no longer love that thing.

And that's because the things that makes you really love a job is not me really like this topic. Me job now has this topic in it. Me now really like my job. It's way more complicated than that. The final issue I'll throw in a third here that I noticed when I was researching So Good They Can't Ignore You is that if you just go out there and grab a bunch of people who love what they do for a living, and look at their actual stories, nine times out of 10, they were not following a clear pre existing passion.

So if this is the universal advice we give, you would expect that it's what most people who love their job did. That's why we give this advice. Most people don't. And the reality is when you just ask someone casually who loves their work, what's your advice? And they say, follow your passion.

What they really mean is follow the goal of ending up passionate about your work. They don't mean identifying advance what you're passionate about, match that to your job, and then you will love your work. That's not really what they mean. It's not really what they did. It's just a shorthand.

But we interpret it as meaning we're wired to do one thing, match our work to that one thing, then we will love our work. That's not actually the way it works. And you know what, we can't blame people for falling back on that shorthand, because the reality of what really matters for building a career love is complicated.

We're about to get into it took me a year of research to really untangle this storyline. So we should not expect it when we grab some entrepreneur in a magazine interview and say, what's your advice that they'll have this all figured out? They just say follow your passion, but they don't really mean it, because it's not really what they did.

They followed the goal about being passionate about their work and how they got there was complicated. All right, let's get into it. How do you get there? What I uncovered in my work is that the skill that the what we call attributes of a job that makes it great, the properties of a career that makes it something that you love, are almost always in demand.

They're rare and valuable, most jobs don't have them. And so if you want those, if you want those in your job, you have to have something rare and valuable to offer in return. The world doesn't care that you want to be happy in your job, and you think those things will be good for you, and you just want them in your job, it doesn't care, you have to have something to offer in return.

And almost always the things you have to offer in return is rare and valuable skills. So if you want the rare and valuable traits that makes great jobs great in your job, you have to have rare and valuable skills to offer in exchange. And therefore the whole game in building a career you love is skill acquisition.

Step one, get really good at things. Step two, use those skills as leverage to shape your career towards the elements that resonate in a way from the elements that don't. Get good uses leverage, get better uses even bigger leverage. You cultivate over time a career that then is a real source of meaning and satisfaction for you.

It has nothing to do for nine out of 10 people with leaving college at 22 and saying, I am wired, and I just know this, I've known this my whole life, I am wired to be a social media brand manager for a major hotel chain. If I could just go get that job, I'm going to be passionate.

And if I don't, I'm going to be miserable. It's not how it works. Get good uses leverage, get good use as leverage. I ended up calling this career capital theory. My metaphor is, as you get good at things that are rare and valuable, you are acquiring more career capital, you then must invest that capital to get returns in your job that are positive.

So I use that metaphor of career capital. Two quick follow up. One, how do you do that? How do you get good at things? How do you build rare and valuable skills? The short answer is deliberate practice. You need to very careful, carefully figure out what's valuable in your current career or job area, and then train to get better at that deliberately like an athlete adding a new jump shot to the repertoire or a chess player mastering a new in game strategy.

Specific activities designed to stretch you past where you're comfortable on things you know are valuable. You got to be training yourself to get better. That's how you get career capital fast. That's how you move towards passion very quickly. Two, how do you know what to do with that career capital?

How do you know, like, what do I want to invest that career capital to get in exchange? When I, when I say you want to invest that capital to move your work towards things that resonate and away from things that don't, you might be suspicious that I'm just being circular here.

And somehow it all comes back to some pre-existing passion. But no, it's much more complicated here. What do I mean by moving your work towards things that resonate away from things that don't? What you need to do here is what we call on this show, lifestyle centric career planning.

You have to, through reflection and experimentation, fix in your mind a very clear image of what you want your life to be like. All the elements of your life. You're really like imagining typical days in a way that just, you feel this intimations of that's right. That's what I want my life to be like.

Where do you live? What type of place do you live? Where are you working? How much work are you doing? What else are you doing with your time? What's happening with your family or your community? Are you in the woods all day? Are you in a high rise? Are you in this vision?

Are you a master of the universe type that's making deals and moving things? Or are you a Bill McKibben type cross-country skiing in the snow for three weeks before writing one article the next week? You really just want to have this feel of what type of lifestyle resonates with me as deep.

What I want. And then you work backwards from that. Okay. What I'm trying to do now is build up rare and valuable skills in my job so that I have leverage and then use that leverage to shape the way my work unfolds. What I work on, when I work on, the arrangement for my work, all of that.

So it is pushing me more towards this image of the optimal lifestyle for me and away from things that are contrary to that to that lifestyle. So you're working backwards from a clear image of a lifestyle. And the way you get there is not by saying at 22 to your boss, I want to live in the woods.

I want a lot of free time. I'm going to cross-country ski all day. So I want my work to be just stuff I'm interested in. And I only work on on Monday and Fridays and they get paid really well. The boss will say in that context, that's great. Good luck with that.

Can you get your stuff off the desk there? Because the person we just hired to replace you is here and they need to get back to work. That's not how you do it. How you do it is you become so good. You can't be ignored. They're desperate to keep you.

And now you're able to start adjusting. Well, you know, I'm going to work part-time or I don't do this type of work that goes to the entry level. I'm not at the entry level anymore or pay me by my performance. I want to shift to a pseudo consulting type contract.

You pay me by my performance. All of that requires. I have gotten very good and that requires that you train. All right. So let me pull together these pieces. This is not as sexy as the Disney version fairy tale of you were wired for one job. And if you can figure out what that is, there will be fairy dust in the air and you'll be happy in your career from then on out.

And conversely, if you don't like your job, if you find it hard, or there's anything that's hard about it, that's because you have the wrong position. You just quit and try something else. You're almost there. Then everything will be easy when you get the right job. The storyline I'm going to give you is much harder than that, but it actually works.

So the compress everything I just said here, don't obsess too much about what job you take. Yes, the choice matters, but you know, any job that matches your interest in some sense, and it's going to give you good options. If, and when you get better is good enough. Don't obsess over them dream job or having just the right job to train like an athlete, what matters.

I'm going to systematically improve that skill. No one else in your job is going to be doing that. So you're going to start getting advantages opening up really soon. Three, use the resulting career capital to as leverage to push your career towards things that resonate and things and away from things that don't.

And you, your compass for that is lifestyle centric career planning, very clear image of what you want your days to be like all the elements of your days. And so what can I do to make my life more like that and get away from the stuff that gets in the way, do those three things, give yourself five years, you will probably be pretty happy in your job, give yourself another five years, you might be downright passionate about it.

But then just what you have to do for me is when someone fresh out of college looks up at you and says, well, how did you do it? How do you have this cool job where you ski all day or whatever? Don't just say, follow your passion. Say, it's kind of complicated.

Go watch this video at Cal Newport's YouTube page.