I’ve been hearing, here and there, a backlash of late against the notion of calling, against following your passion/heart/dreams or whatever we’re calling vocation these days. We’re living in hard times, I guess. This Onion Article from a few days ago sounds like just the kind of thing you hear (and see people doing) so often it takes a minute for the joke to sink in:
I have always been a big proponent of following your heart and doing exactly what you want to do. It sounds so simple, right? But there are people who spend years—decades, even—trying to find a true sense of purpose for themselves. My advice? Just find the thing you enjoy doing more than anything else, your one true passion, and do it for the rest of your life on nights and weekends when you’re exhausted and cranky and just want to go to bed.
It could be anything—music, writing, drawing, acting, teaching—it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that once you know what you want to do, you dive in a full 10 percent and spend the other 90 torturing yourself because you know damn well that it’s far too late to make a drastic career change, and that you’re stuck on this mind-numbing path for the rest of your life.
Writer Kevin Fanning, responding to this Onion piece, argues that :
Maybe it’s not useful to define one person as the garbage collector and one person as the singer. Maybe everyone is a lot of things. Maybe the self-obsessed celebrity artist culture isn’t that helpful or useful. Maybe eventually we get to a place where we see that books and music and art are created by us, people who have school and day jobs and other shit we care about. And we’re not rich celebrities, and we are all always being pulled in different directions, but we’re present and engaged with the people in our lives? And we value what we contribute as much as what we create? And we create things because want to, and not because we have expectations for what it will get us, or how it will cause society to value us? And we don’t berate and hate ourselves for the very human failure of having a lot of complicated shit to juggle in our lives? That might be kind of cool?
I sat next to guy on a plane recently who was reading So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newton, which essentially argues what the title says, that “conventional wisdom on career success—follow your passion—is seriously flawed” advice. I am often telling students (and their parents) who are worried about jobs that the secret is pretty easy: make yourself into a compelling, employable person. This is kind of what Newton is arguing, except with subtlety and evidence:
The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.
I am not the best person to come to if you’re looking for advice on a balanced life, or if you’re looking to understand happiness, but I’m pragmatic enough to know that this kind of rhetoric is right. Like others who work hard toward their goals, a feeling of futility, if not failure, can even accompany our modest successes. Though I work in a field that encourages and requires big dreams and we have our share of Voices of Reason) I do wish more people talked more honestly and intelligently about the work required to have a good life, or any life at all. I see a lot of young people who lack the drive—which I think is actually the ability—to work on their own behalf toward becoming the kind of person they would value being, doing a thing each day that brings them meaning as well as money.