Don’t Follow Your Passion

image cc BurgTender

It’s an age-old story: Boy meets passion, boy follows passion, passion turns out to be a mirage and/or actually a big pain in the ass, despite how rosy it may have seemed from a safe distance.

(And, ladies? You’re just as susceptible to this as men. Don’t think I’m giving you a pass.)

Let’s Talk About You

So. You’re in love with a thing. Let’s say it’s coffee, books, design, code or solving interesting problems. You decide to open up a café to follow your passion for coffee. Or a used book shop, because you’re passionate about books. Or, because you’re passionate about solving interesting problems through code or visuals, you hang out your shingle as a freelance developer or designer.

Six months to a year later, and guess what?

Turns out that you hate running a café (or book store, or…). Turns out that running a café is as much about the coffee as raising a child is about snuggles. Yes, the coffee happens — and so do snuggles — but what really makes up the typical day is very little sleep and lots and lots of poop.

And who has a passion for poop?

A Perfect Example, in the Flesh

The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper–all the way to Barbie tea sets–than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they’re going to lose a lot of it…

Guess what, dear dreamers? The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it’s fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous. Within weeks, Lily and I — previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage — were at each other’s throats.

— Bitter Brew: I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life.

Another well-meaning passion-follower falls victim to The Cute Little Café Syndrome. The Cute Little Café Syndrome will never die — it’s too damned appealing. It’s romance, it’s magical princes, it’s Happily Ever After with a side order of delicious Vienna roast and the absolute best croissants.

It’s Follow Your Passion.

And it’s hardly limited to real-life, actual cafés. The Cute Little Café Syndrome applies to any situation where you blindly follow your passion… and it leads you to a pit of despair (or at least, a pit of debt).

Battling the Cute Little Café Syndrome

Don’t want to find yourself chewed up & spat out by The Cute Little Café Syndrome?

There’s only one thing for it: abandon meatless aphorisms like “Follow Your Passion!” and take stock of reality.

In reality…

Turning your beloved, refreshing hobby into a job can kill it.
Doing something you love for yourself isn’t the same as doing it for others.
You can love something and not know the slightest thing about it.
You can love something and not be good at it.
You might not know what Your Passion™ is, at least not with enough fiery motivation to get you going.
You may believe you’re passionate about a subject but it’s likely your true deep-down-fulfillment passion is about actions, connections, or environment.
Or, your logical conclusion is that you should engage in actions when your passion is really a subject.
The Poop Factor is ever-present: most of what goes into running a real business is very different than what you fantasize about.
Finally… some things just aren’t money-making propositions. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love them.

So. Does all this mean your working life is doomed to be dull and loveless? That you should go bet on “a sure thing” that you don’t enjoy?

Not at all.

Smokey Robinson Has the Answer

There’s nothing wrong with passion. Passion is a good thing. A good thing you nevertheless need to approach with your eyes open.

Take a page out of Smokey Robinson’s book:

Try to get yourself a bargain, son.
Don’t be sold on the very first one.
Pretty girls come a dime a dozen.
Try to find one who’s gonna give you true loving.
Before you take a girl and say I do, now.
Make sure she’s in love with you, now.
Make sure that her love is true, now.
I hate to see you feeling sad and blue, now.
My momma told me, you better shop around!

Yep. Shop around. Eyes open. Don’t take your passion and assume that its ultimate manifestation, the thing you should do, the thing to follow, is the very first idea that pops into your mind.

Don’t assume that just because you love coffee, you should open a café.

Or because you love books and cozy reading nooks, a book store.

Or because you love photography, a tool for amateur photographers.

Or because you love programming, a software dev shop.

Or because you love design, a freelance design co.

These are obvious top-of-mind ideas. And heck, you might end up loving them. But the likelihood is that you won’t.

After all: would you rather use your passion, or sell it?

Ask Yourself…

Would you still feel passionate when you were struggling to pay the bills and hire wait staff? Or struggling to deal with the clients that inevitably come with solving interesting problems on a freelance basis? Or what about handling customers who are cheapskates and not even particularly tech-savvy?

If you want to run a successful café — and enjoy it — you need to love a lot more than coffee. You’ve also gotta get some kind of pleasure, even grim satisfaction, out of the daily grind. (Ha ha.) Which means, of course, interacting with customers, hiring & managing wait staff, handling the day-to-day necessities like ordering supplies, cleaning, paying rent, marketing your butt off, and dealing with customers who want to squat on your valuable tables all day for just $2 of brew.

Likewise, if you love slinging code, but hate interacting with people who don’t understand you immediately, then you’re going to be miserable doing training or providing support of any kind. If you love creating dramatic illustrations of people and places, but chafe at people who tell you what to do, being a freelance illustrator is going to rub you raw.

And everyone’s heard the story of the guy or gal who quit the rat race, retreated to a cabin in the woods to write a novel… and proceeded to go absolutely bonkers from loneliness, without even a single chapter to show for it.

That’s what Following Your Passion can do to you.

The Solution: 6 Steps

So what’s the alternative? Go to law school? No. (Not unless you’d love being a lawyer. Which means, by the way, a lot more than enjoying reading about torts and arguing.)

What you really need is to:

Figure out what your passion(s) really are — process? environment? action? subject? connections?
Ask yourself all the different ways you could work that passion into different kinds of businesses — less obvious than coffee->café
Add in the Poop Factor for your fantasies — all those daily things we never imagine when we’re fantasizing, you’ve got to confront them head-on — in advance
Imagine selling it, or dealing with clients, or a certain type of customers — and be honest how you’d feel about that all day long
Honestly appraise the potential for sustainable income — by studying other people/businesses doing the same kind of thing, and comparing it to how much you want to live comfortably
Take your best shot from all of the above

It’s true that this won’t all fit in a three-word slogan as eminently tweetable as “Follow your passion”. But how about this?

Practice open-eyed passion.

Or, as Smokey would say:

You better shop around.

When Your Job Is Killing You Slowly
Throw Down: Why I’m Doing This
Dear Startup World: Chill the Fuck Out
You Are So Damn Lucky – Stop Blaming Your Family, Your Friends, & Your Society & Get Off Your Ass

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2011 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Purpose. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

81 comments

Alan Wilensky

January 26, 2011 at 3:40 pm

Saint Amy:

It happened to me. I loved electric vehicles, scooter and such, well before it was fashionable. I opened one of the first EV shops in MA. Oy! Hoy! It was a mostly a nightmare punctuated with glimmers, glimmers of potential. Since I could not buy the high en EV’s (nothing like todays products), I had to buy mid prices and lower end, I fixed, I sold, the market and ebay slashed, the mfr slashed. Not good.

We had a few good days there in Northampton MA. One day, with less then 27K in the bank, I said, “lets just stock up and see what happens”. We had sold like 12 units that week, and UMASS was coming back into session. The container of 30 bikes came in on 9/10/2001. There was no holiday buying that year, obviously.

50K down the pooper. I hated dealing with retail customers that complained of the self inflicted damage to themselves and their scooters. It takes a certain type to do a retail shop on the street. I am a born tech and strategy evangelist. I was born that way, a radio experimenter since boyhood, the fist to author CD-ROMs and the high school crop out that wrote the business plans for Harvard MBA’s without a clue

And you are my hero,. BTW, what do you make of this Node.js thingy?

Reply
- Amy
  
  January 26, 2011 at 6:52 pm
  
  Oh, Alan, you’re right, that’s the perfect illustrative story. Thanks for sharing… and sorry you went through all that!
  
  As for Node, it’s really super cool. But I haven’t used it yet – it’s on my list – so I don’t have much of an opinion except that it’s super cool I don’t know yet if it’s pragmatic to use for anything or not.
  
  We’re working on an app that has constant ajax polling, and might normally have a teeny tiny backend written in C. Ours is in Ruby now, but when it gets too slow, we’re probably going to do it in Node. If we do, Thomas will blog about it at mir.aculo.us !
  
  Reply
  - Noah Gibbs
    
    January 26, 2011 at 7:05 pm
    
    Amy, if you switch from Ajax polling to Comet and want a Node.js backend, look into Juggernaut 2 (Juggernaut on Github, written by maccman). It’s not for doing the heavy server-side work, but it does a great job of combining the messaging stuff via socket.io with great scalability using Node.js and Redis.
  - Amy
    
    January 26, 2011 at 8:31 pm
    
    Ooh, thanks for the tip, Noah!
GreggB

January 26, 2011 at 4:06 pm

I’m following my passion and loving every minute of the poop and the smiles. Although I did one thing differently: tossed the romance of a “passion” out the window, and then dug deeply into fully understanding what I was getting yourself into. I interviewed others, even used job interviews to grab face time with competitors. In the end; listen and learn their failures, struggles, and successes…and above-all, never do it in isolation; build and maintain a strong support network.

Reply
- Amy
  
  January 26, 2011 at 6:09 pm
  
  Gregg, sounds like you did everything right! I’m glad your passion turned out to be something you could enjoy WITH the reality instead of in denial of it!
  
  Reply
Max

January 26, 2011 at 5:00 pm

To put it in other words: Just cos you love sex, don’t mean you’d love being a prostitute.

Reply
- Amy
  
  January 26, 2011 at 5:15 pm
  
  Haha, good one Max!
  
  Reply
Chenoa

January 26, 2011 at 7:41 pm

OMG. This article is so wise! I definitely did that with Freelance web design and painting. I went and got a degree and every time I start a project for someone else I get irritated…

I’ve got to figure it out — deep down inside lol.

Thanks for this article!

Reply
- Amy
  
  January 26, 2011 at 8:28 pm
  
  Chenoa, I hear you. I wrote that part about freelancing from my own experience. At one point I thought, “Hey, if I raise my rates, I’ll get a better class of client and I’ll enjoy it more.” Well, I did get better clients, and I earned a helluva lot more, but I still hated to do work for somebody else.
  
  So I’m making products and teaching other people how to do the same. It’s much, much, much more fun
  
  Reply
- Jessica
  
  January 27, 2011 at 1:19 am
  
  i did the same thing. i got a graphic design degree because it was art i could make money at. right? um no. i hate doing design work for people. People changing their mind is the most infuriating part for me. I stopped, and decided to start an artisan craft business making handmade custom leather jewelry and am happier than ever.
  
  Reply
  - Amy
    
    January 28, 2011 at 10:19 pm
    
    That is such an awesome story, Jessica. Congrats on your jewelry business!
Tara

January 26, 2011 at 9:08 pm

How is ‘Your Passion’ a trade mark?

Reply
- Amy
  
  January 26, 2011 at 11:12 pm
  
  It’s sarcasm punctuation, Tara. IOW: a joke!
  
  Reply
  - Tara
    
    January 27, 2011 at 9:04 pm
    
    Phew. I thought the whole world was going mad. I’ve just read about Apple trying to trademark ‘App Store’!
Reid Walley

January 26, 2011 at 9:32 pm

Very cool article, Amy! And thanks for sharing your personal freelance experience (in the comments) of “but I still hated to do work for somebody else. So I’m making products and teaching other people how to do the same. It’s much, much, much more fun.”

I’m beginning to shift over to this making-products passion as well: away from freelance graphics to just a few printed products that keep getting get re-purchased.

Reply
- Amy
  
  January 28, 2011 at 10:13 pm
  
  You’re gonna love it, Reid. It’s maddening but very fulfilling to make & sell your wares directly to people who want it!
  
  Reply
Avdi Grimm

January 26, 2011 at 10:14 pm

For the record, there is much more snuggling than poop in an average day of childrearing. At least in our household.

But the point is well taken. It’s easy to think you’re passionate about a whole business when you’re really only passionate about one specific aspect of it.

Then again, it can be surprising how much you cad learn to put up with in the service of what you care about. Is wading through contracts and tax forms my passion? No. But I’m passionate about being with and supporting my family, and if being in business for myself makes that possible, I’ll put up with the tedious bits.

After reading a particularly unicorn-and-rainbow infested find-your-passion article, I find watching an episode of Dirty Jobs to be a useful corrective. Watching guys and gals sling poo (literally!) for a living and say they are basically satisfied with their lives can remind a person that sometimes the job simply serves the deeper passions.

Reply

Sarah Bray

January 26, 2011 at 11:02 pm

Yep, yep, and triple yep. Last year when I had my most gigantic bout of burnout, I actually considered doing something completely different. Something that I “loved”. And then I realized…I used to love this. I do love this. When I’m not completely and totally stressed out from keeping up with it all.

So I sucked it up and focused on getting rid of some of the poop. And out of that I discovered that I had a different passion that I had never known about — leading people. I always thought I was an introvert, but I’m totally energized by strategically planning and implementing vision within our team. It sounds so corporate, but it is SO not for me! I’ve got big-girl pants on now.

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