I’m skeptical that “passion” is a healthy (or realistic) criteria to guide your career. But the advice to “do what you’re passionate about” gets bandied about all over. It can have the unfortunate effect of making you doubt yourself if you don’t currently love your career, or feel hopeless because passion? What does that even mean??
Interestingly, new research from Duke University discovered another unfortunate effect of passion: if you’re passionate about your work, you may be more likely to be exploited.
The research found that people think it’s okay to make passionate workers do more (unpaid, extra, or grunt) work. Why? It comes from two assumptions:
- That the work is its own reward, and
- That the worker would’ve volunteered anyway
Yikes! Nothing can take the passion out of passion than your passion being exploited.
When it comes to entrepreneurship, many an entrepreneur has been quoted saying some version of, “if you’re not passionate about it, you’ll never make it because it’s too hard.” Nice and uplifting, huh?
Which makes me wonder: are you exploiting… yourself?
Do you push yourself to hustle without asking yourself, why am I doing this? Not in an existential way, but in a is-this-really-necessary-or-am-I-doing-it-because-everyone-else-is way.
And if you resent the hustle or the task, do you berate yourself for not feeling rewarded by the work itself? Because isn’t passion supposed to feel good?
Are you volunteering to do more than is necessary? In other words, could you stand to drop some balls or at least delegate them?
Sometimes company-running feels like hamster-wheeling, and maybe it’s unavoidable for some periods to be intense and full. It’s not a sustainable (or desirable) pace, but it’s eeeeeeeasy to get in its habit. You forget to ask yourself do I really need to do that?
This is a gentle reminder.
