So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
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| The Passion Hypothesis
The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion. This hypothesis is one of modern American society’s most well-worn themes. Those of us lucky enough to have some choice in what we do with our lives are bombarded with this message, starting at an early age. We are told to lionize those with the courage to follow their passion, and pity the conformist drones who cling to the safe path. If you doubt the ubiquity of this message, spend a few minutes browsing the career-advice shelf the next time you visit a bookstore. Once you look past the technical manuals on résumé writing and job- interview etiquette, it’s hard to find a book that doesn’t promote the passion hypothesis. These books have titles like Career Match: Connecting Who You Are with What You’ll Love to Do , and Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type , and they promise that you’re just a few personality tests away from finding your dream job. Recently, a new, more aggressive strain of the passion hypothesis has been spreading—a strain that despairs that traditional “cubicle jobs,” by their very nature, are bad, and that passion requires that you strike out on your own. This is where you find titles like Escape from Cubicle Nation , which, as one review described it, “teaches the tricks behind finding what makes you purr.” These books, as well as the thousands of full-time bloggers, professional counselors, and self- proclaimed gurus who orbit these same core issues of workplace happiness, all peddle the same lesson: to be happy, you must follow your passion . As one prominent career counselor told me, “do what you love, and the money will follow” has become the de facto motto of the career-advice field. There is, however, a problem lurking here: When you look past the feel-good slogans and go deeper into the details of how passionate people like Steve Jobs really got started, or ask scientists about what actually predicts workplace happiness, the issue becomes much more complicated. You begin to find threads of nuance that, once pulled, unravel the tight certainty of the passion hypothesis, eventually leading to an unsettling recognition: Yüklə 1,37 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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