Niklas Goeke  Monday, January 23, 2017 at FEE

Has anyone ever asked you for directions and you were too embarrassed to admit you don’t know? So much in fact, that you tried to tell them where to go regardless? Just to save your face?

“Uhhh, I think it’s that way.”

That’s what most career advice feels like these days. Nobody has a clue, so everyone goes with their best guess — which is everybody else’s best guess also.

Hence, we live in a world of depressed millennials, which is permeated by two ideas:

1 – Only once you find your passion can you become really good at what you do.

2 – This passion will magically carry you through years of hard work, because suddenly, every day will be fun.

If you’re fine with putting your life into the hands of chance, then you can stop reading right now.

Or, you can flip both of these ideas on their head.

Idea #1: Passion follows from being good at what you do, not the other way around.

The word “passion” in combination with career advice only showed up in modern business literature in the 1980s and started to really take off in the 90s, when “follow your passion,” became the go-to mantra of career advice gurus.

You don’t find passion. You build it.

By the early 2000s, authors had stopped bothering to even explain the idea and why it’s good, just assuming you’d already be familiar with it and had accepted it as the right thing to do.

This has led to an entire generation, namely our generation, the Millennials, desperately trying to figure out their passion, so that they can then choose the right career accordingly. As a result, now only one third of the U.S. workforce feels engaged at work.

Passion first, great career later, that’s what we’ve been told.

In 2012, Cal Newport dedicated an entire book to debunking this myth, called So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

It argues that passion is slowly built over time, as you get better and better at your craft — it’s not a predisposed character trait that you can draw upon to pick the perfect career.

You don’t find passion. You build it.

It’s your job to choose your passion. There’s no passion set aside for you somewhere. You can’t just go somewhere and pick it up, like a package sitting on a shelf, waiting to be delivered to the right owner.

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