When it comes to the task of
figuring out what to do with your life
or what kind of work to go into,
one of the most common pieces of advice
that gets thrown around is,
"Just follow your passion, yeah!
"Just gotta find your passion, man.
"And go after it to the ends of the earth."
This word, passion, it keeps cropping up
again and again.
And we're constantly being told
that we simply need to go find out
whatever ours is.
No longer shall we be relegated to the work
of previous generation's tedious, boring,
factory work that our parents did before us.
Oh no, no, no. This is the now.
You can go make super hero capes for dogs
if that is what your passion truly is.
Actually, that's not a bad idea.
But, no, "follow your passion",
as inspiring as it is, is bad advice.
It build its foundations off of its assumptions
that everyone is just born
with a pre-existing passion.
It's like we're all onions and all you've
gotta do is peel back the layers
to figure out what's inside.
Though, I don't know about you,
but I'm not an ogre.
And for most of my life,
I would've been pretty hard-pressed
to tell you what the heck my passion is.
'Cause I just didn't know.
And this is the problem that most people face.
Either they don't have anything in their life
that they can identify as a real passion
or there's a lot of things all over the place.
Lots of vibrant interesting things
that they could identify as passions
but they don't really know which one
to latch on to and pursue.
This problem is all the more common
for students or people who don't really have
a whole lot of experience in their careers yet.
I'm guessing that you probably fall
into one of those two categories.
Which is unfortunate because this is also
the point in your life where you're being asked
to figure out what to do with that life.
Luckily, there is better advice that you can use.
Cal Newport, the author of the fantastic book,
So Good They Can't Ignore You,
summed it up perfectly for me when I asked him
for his advice on choosing a major.
He said, simply, "Pick something you have
an interest in, and then go full-bore and try
to get as good as you possibly can at it."
This advice, this focus on building skills
and gaining experience,
this is the most effective way to figure out
what work truly fulfills you.
You're not born with some innate thing
you're supposed to do with your life.
Rather you're born with personality traits
and certain qualities of work that you'll enjoy.
Maybe creativity, maybe working with people,
or working with very logical things,
autonomy or a sense of impact in your work.
These specific qualities are going to be
unearthed and slowly discovered as you make more
connections with people, as you do more things,
as you create things, and gain skills.
In the book I just mentioned, Cal talks about
a concept in the scientific community
called the Adjacent Possible.
If you think about all of our
collective, scientific knowledge
as an ever-expanding bubble,
then the Adjacent Possible
is right outside that bubble.
Right within our grasp.
That's where most new discoveries are made.
As we continue to make new discoveries,
and we continue to grow that bubble
the Adjacent Possible grows as well.
New things we didn't even know were possible before
start to come out of the fog and start
to be within reach.
In an article for the New York Times,
Steven Johnson states it eloquently,
"The strange and beautiful truth
about the Adjacent Possible is that
its boundaries grow as you explore them."
This concept perfectly illustrates
how you can go about finding work that you love.
As you learn and do more and meet new people
new opportunities and possibilities
are gonna emerge that you didn't
even know existed before,
and that were completely inaccessible
in the past.
Also, this focus on skills and experience,
rather than passion or enjoyment,
is gonna become immensely helpful
when you reach the dip.
A concept that the author Seth Godin
popularized in his book of the same name.
The dip is the point at which pursuing
a skill becomes difficult or boring.
Let me tell you, this always comes
no matter what skill you're pursuing.
At first, things start out fun.
Your interest in the subject keeps
your motivation levels high
and you're able to grasp the low-hanging
fruit pretty easily.
As time goes on, though,
eventually those easy progress gains
stop coming and the initial novelty
of the subject wears off.
To give you an example,
beginning weight lifters often make huge
progress gains when they first start lifting.
I'm talking, like, adding 50 pounds to their
initial squat after just a few weeks.
Lifters call these the "noob gains."
They happen because beginning lifters
are using muscles that they already had
but in ways that they haven't been used before.
Also, they're not really lifting enough weight
to truly challenge their body's ability
to recover quickly.
Pretty soon, though, most lifters hit a plateau.
A point where gains, either, really slow down
or stop altogether.
Even though they're continually hitting the gym
as much as they were before.
This is the dip for lifters.
They have to do a couple of things
to really push through it.
Number one, they have to adopt
smarter training techniques that take
into account the additional recovery time
needed for higher levels of performance.
But number two, they really just have to adopt
a lot of sheer determination to keep
pushing through and making progress
even though the rewards have started to diminsh.
This is the exact same with any skill
that you're pursuing.
At first, it's going to be easy.
The initial levels are going to be easy
to conquer, it'll be fun.
But, eventually, those rewards will diminish
and to continue building that skill, to reach
true excellence, you do have to adopt
smarter training methods and you also have to
simply have the grit to keep pushing through
even though it's not fun.
Once you do push through that dip,
and once you do start building true excellence,
this is where things actually do start
to get fun and interesting
because now you have the skill
to start doing things that most people can't do.
You also have enough experience and work
under your belt that people trust you
and they know who you are.
That means they're gonna start bringing you
more interesting proposals and projects
which are gonna be a lot more fun
than the grunt work you've been doing before.
This has been my experience exactly.
I'm definitely not alone in my belief
that the pursuit of excellence and skills
and experience is far better
than trying to find your passion.
Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner
of the Dallas Mavericks, once wrote a blog post
a few years ago that really crystallized
this idea for me.
I want to wrap up this video by quoting the part
where he says, "Let me make this as clear as possible.
"When you work hard at doing something,
"you become good at it.
"When you become good at doing something,
"you will enjoy it more.
"When you enjoy doing something,
"there is a very good chance that you will
"become passionate or more passionate about it.
"And when you are good at something,
"passionate, and work even harder to excel
"and be the best at it, good things happen."
So stop trying to find your passion
through introspection or BuzzFeed quizzes
or whatever it is.
Just pick an interest you have
that has the potential to be useful
to other people in the future and then go after it
with as many smart training techniques
and as much sheer determination
as you can muster.
Good luck and thanks for watching.
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