I bet you’ve heard this career and retirement advice, “Follow your passion!” (Complete with the exclamation mark!)
It’s great advice—but only under certain conditions:
- You’ve experimented or experienced enough to have and therefore choose a passion.
- You know what living with this passion as your work would feel like.
- You are sure you will never want another passion again.
That’s because following your passion assumes you don’t need to learn or experiment anymore. You know what your passion is—you can “just” follow it. That certainty is what I think is so seductive.
But life is uncertain. That’s why I don’t buy the idea of following anything—not your passion, your heart, or anything else. The more adaptability we want in our lives, the more we need to experiment, to learn early, to build resilience.
Why would I want to follow anything, when I can create and recreate my own, unique way?
This advice is seductive because it assumes you will be content (forever) with this passion. But especially now, where technology is changing everything, why wouldn’t we want to create or experiment, or combine various passions to make a better life for ourselves?
Create Your Passion, Don’t Follow It
Think back to the start of your career. If you’ve worked for even five years, I bet your job has changed. If you’ve worked for twenty, I can almost guarantee you don’t use the same tools or work in the same way you used to. And, if you’re older (ahem, yes, I’m older), I can guarantee that the work you do now is nothing like the work you did when you started.
The principles of your work might be the same. The practices? The ways you work? No. Those are totally different.
Following means we don’t have to think. Creating means we must think.
That’s why I want to create my passion.
Here are things I’ve tried that help me decide what’s next:
- What can I build on? I’ve been writing a variety of nonfiction for years. I started to write short stories back in 2016. This is the year I’m trying longer fiction. No, my fiction writing speed is not what I want, but I’m learning. (That’s more important to me, right now.)
- What is a brand new idea I might use? I’m following the AI changes even though I’m not using them right now. Will I use them in the future? It depends on many things. Especially copyright law. But this is just one example of a new idea.
- What is something I always said I would never do and how can I turn that around? I don’t have an answer to this question yet, but asking it might help me build my resilience.
You might need other questions.
Purposefully Create Your Life & Passion
With any luck, we work for about forty-five years, and we “retire” for another forty-five. Give or take. Yes, it requires some luck, to avoid early death.
That means we have lots of opportunities to discover our passion through experimentation. Or to refine it, based on experience. And, to create it.
Because who wants to let their passion become boring? Not I.
That’s the question this week: How can we avoid the seductive advice to “follow your passion” and create our passion instead?