On the clichés of 'following your passions'
Everything you've heard about following your passion is wrong
There are two clichés you may have heard.
The first cliché is, “Follow your passion.”
Those that say this have a belief that passion is within, you need intrinsic motivation and work needs to feel good.
The other cliché is, “Following your passion is bad advice.”
Those that say this express passion as coming from skill acquisition, effort and not always feeling good.
Both sides misunderstand passion and treat it as a fleeting feeling to be followed or repressed. But true passion is not a feeling to pursue or a danger that will lead someone astray. It is something far more enduring and far more sacred.
Imagine two people
Let’s call one of them The Hopeful and they follow their passion. Whilst the other resists following their passion and we’ll call them The Hardened.
The Hopeful may pursue their path in a way that only feels good, may seek ease and desires alignment. Over time they come up against challenges and fall to them because it’s too hard or the energy they had in the beginning is no longer there.
The Hardened on the other hand may pursue their path logically, fitting with market conditions and soldering on no matter what. Over time they desensitise themselves to higher pursuits, lack introspective maturation and mistake endurance for the calling itself. The Hopeful is crushed by the weight of hardship whereas The Hardened never knows the reason for the weight. Both approaches can lead us astray.
The very word passion is misunderstood
The very word passion is misunderstood in both contexts. If we look into the etymology of the word passion, coming from the Latin word Pasio, it meant to endure and undergo. This came from ancient christianity and later, in medieval France (Passiun) meant suffering for a noble or sacred cause.
Meaning that though these clichés are talking about passion, they’re not talking about what passion actually means at the root. Because passion means the will to endure for something sacred, truthful and beloved. Rather than viewing our path as a feeling, we should seek to look for what we would endure because our love and inner necessity leave us no other choice.
For The Hopeful they need to learn to endure for what they love and The Hardened needs to soften to find what’s worth the endurance.
“If you want to write it must be the thing, not that you want to do or would like to do, it must be the thing you feel you have to do. It must be that without which you could not live. If you've got that then it'll be all right because you'll survive the disappointments.” – Christopher Hitchens, Writer
So what does this mean for you?
Instead of seeking what feels good or pursuing an economically viable skill and repressing feeling, you need to unearth your vocation from within. Our calling is not invented or manufactured within industry. It’s there in you, waiting to be found. This calling is seeded internally at birth (what I call the Career Archetype) and coming to awareness of it gives you a natural willingness to endure pain and hardship and hell for it because the love and devotion are already there.
Passion is useful because it teaches us to endure hardship. It asks us to seek and pursue what we love, to acquire skills in service of it and to remember the higher reason as to why we endure. It’s connected to our vocation.
So if you’ve heard this cliché passion advice and chosen a side of the argument, question where you now sit. Start by asking yourself, “What type of work gives me the sense that I'd be willing to devote myself to it, even when it gets hard?”
Stepping out of the trivial definition passion is mistaken for today, and going beyond it.
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I love your take. Thank you for this read. I think a part of the problem that people face is they need (sometimes) to be externally motivated because determination is a choice. You give energy to your passion because it gives energy back to you. You choose committing to the thing because you are called to it and doing it gives substance and sustenance to your soul.
This is a wonderful perspective on passion. I tend to fall in to the Hopeful camp. I often put some work toward my passions but when the going gets tough or I’m inundated by social factors or hardships or fall out of routine I flail.