I spent the weekend down at my cousin’s wedding. He recently finished fire academy, and has wanted to be a firefighter since he could walk and talk. His sister has the same singular focus, except for animals. She’s starting graduate school to become a zoologist. It’s easy to look at that kind of focus with envy – I know I certainly wasn’t that sure of myself when I was younger – and I suspect most of us weren’t either. It’s easy to look back and think about what could have been, if we had just followed our passion.
But I never had a crystal clear vision of what that was when I was younger.
That’s the problem with the “Follow your passion” advice – it’s great for those of us who already have a passion suitable to make a career out of, but I suspect that’s rare indeed. Instead, we’ve got to find passion and purpose along the way. I just finished reading Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You and his central argument is to focus on doing remarkable, memorable work, and you’ll find (or build) a dream career along the way.
It’s easy to get distracted by the outliers like my two cousins who seemingly had it all figured out from the start, But for most of us, and for most of the careers worth doing, we have to find our way to them.