Trying to “Find Your Passion” Can Lead to a Spiral of Despair— Here’s How to Get Out
“Do what you love” is extremely common, compelling advice for disillusioned young people.
We’re sold a narrative that looks like this:
- First, I have a passion
- Then, I work hard at it (which will be fun, because I’ll love the work)
- And finally, I find success!
Makes sense, right?
But there’s a hidden problem with this narrative.
(Well, multiple problems, but I’ll point out the biggest one).
Here it is: It’s the idea that hard work is ever fun.
Hard work is very decidedly not fun.
It sucks to burst this particular bubble, but to be honest, every time I’m confronted with this reality, I wish I’d never forgotten it.
Hard work does not feel good.
It’s true no matter what your passion is. No matter how much you are uniquely suited to the task. No matter how much your strengths align with the pursuit.
Hard work is hard (i.e., difficult, strenuous, and unpleasant) by definition.
People get discouraged and feel lost when they’re told that pursuing their passion should feel good. It doesn’t help that the successful people of our time — athletes, businessman, intellectuals — romanticize hard work.
“There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits.” — Michael Phelps
“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” — Babe Ruth
“There are no traffic jams on the extra mile.” — Zig Ziglar
What’s missing from the quote above is the reason there are no traffic jams on the extra mile.
The extra mile sucks. It’s a highway on fire, with no air conditioning, where you’re swerving across freshly paved gravel on a road filled with land mines.
Why isn’t that in the quote?
But wait… aren’t at least some parts of work supposed to be fun?
Sure. I’m not completely dismissing the idea that at some points, work might feel pleasant.
For example, there’s the popular idea of “flow states,” a type of meditative focus that occurs when you’re in the groove and time passes without you noticing. When in this state, you‘re so engrossed in working, building, and accomplishing, that you wont feel the pain of hard work. It’s well-studied phenomenon and I believe it happens on occasion.
But on the whole? Let’s say, 80% of the time?
I’m sorry friends. Real hard work won’t feel like that.
Does it ever get better?
It’s my belief that hard work feels slightly less painful once you’ve learned to master your craft. Once you get past the beginner stages where you feel incompetent and need to learn everything from scratch, then you learn to navigate the “enflamed hell road” and it doesn’t feel quite so terrible.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s still hard at all stages. But as you master new skills, you get to use those skills to overcome new challenges, and that feels enjoyable.
The more progress you make, the more pleasant moments accumulate.
That’s why successful people believe hard work is fun — they’ve built a boatload of skills to use against difficult challenges they encounter.
Keep pursuing things you believe you’ll enjoy
My hope is that simply knowing that your chosen field is supposed to be hard and painful helps you not abandon it prematurely. There’s no shortcut to success— you’re following the same painful path as every other master who came before you.
Pursue what you think you’ll enjoy, but know that if it feels bad, that’s part of it.
Joy comes after mastering the hard things.
In terms of concrete tactics to better handle the hard stuff, there are things you can do to help yourself: breaking up larger tasks into small chunks, not trying to tackle everything at once, and learning about how experts in your field achieved their success so you can follow their blueprint.
But don’t let pain and discomfort fool you into thinking you’re on the wrong path. Of course you can switch, but always know — if you want to be successful, it’s going to be tough.
It might mean you’re going the right way.
