You’ve been searching for a career all wrong: don’t follow your passion

Posted on August 24, 2016 by Richard Hutton, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

It’s not a mystery that most people are unfulfilled in their career. Some brave hearts take matters in their hand and look for a career that will truly fulfil them, not just the doctor/lawyer that their parents push them to be (not that there’s something wrong with those professions in and of themselves).

I get it, I’ve been there. There was only a brief period of confusion where I, mostly blindly, followed my dad’s recommendations to become an engineer. This all remained in the realm of plans because I changed my mind long before I actually had to pick a career, fortunately.

I want to give credits for the idea of this article to Benjamin Todd’s TED talk, “To find work you love, don’t follow your passion” . As I was watching it, it was like he narrated my life up to now. Quite touching.
The prevalent advice for youngsters is to “follow your passion”, find out what you like then attempt to build a career out of it. Hopefully you will be successful and fulfilled. The problem is, it doesn’t work.

A study on Canadian students showed that 90% had their greatest passions were in sports or art. The thing is, only 3% of jobs are in these fields. Not good.

Since I was 14 I’ve been investing and studying the financial markets. When I was 17 I strongly considered a career as a stock speculator. I could envision myself making loads of money from home cleverly timing stocks. The problem is, even if I was to continue down that path and become successful, it wouldn’t have been too fulfilling. Like a broker said in the movie The Wolf Of Wall Street “we don’t create shit”. Back then I prided myself with that statement. It wasn’t my brightest moment.

So if you don’t choose your passions as starting points to finding a career, then what can you do? Let me introduce you to Tony Robins’ 6 human needs:
Certainty: the feeling of safety
Variety: the feeling of adventure and surprise
Significance: the feeling of importance
Connection and love: self explanatory
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Growth: developing yourself
Contribution: giving back to the community

Probably the worst advice you can give a child is: go to school to get good grades in order to get a safe, secure job (certainty). That’s a recipe to be miserable and poor. The passion people go one step further and pick something that they REALLY like (variety), or some people pick jobs because of the money (significance). But the insight here is that the first 4 needs just make you survive, the last 2 are what make you truly fulfilled.

Here’s the new way of picking your life’s purpose. Start with contribution, do what’s valuable. What I mean is, find a great world problem you would be interested in working on, then figure out what skills would be best to develop for that.

Here are a few of the major world problems:
global warming
terrorism
world hunger
renewable energy
wars
declining health of developed nations
huge debt of people and countries
space colonisation
high divorce rate
unfulfilled people

And these are just from the top of my head. I don’t see these as sings to how badly we’re doing. I see these as opportunities for me to grow in order to contribute to the world.

For example, just by coaching individuals, I can contribute to the solution of 4 of these problems. Will I totally change the world? I don’t know. Will I have a positive impact and be part of the solution? Definitely. Coaching I found is at the crossroads of multiple major benefits: demands me to grow by learning the best strategies for change, directly helps improve the quality of people’s lives, and because it works so well and it’s valuable, it can lead to a prosperous life financially. This is just one example.

Hopefully this gave you a new perspective on picking a career. If you found these ideas valuable, go ahead and share it with your friends. I want to have an impact on the world, and I can’t do it alone, that’s why I need you!