I'm worried I was a downer last week.
I spent time writing about working, this idea of "make work your passion". I blew that up a little bit (especially if you followed more of my daily posts on LinkedIn), maybe I left a few people sad, depressed and disillusioned.
This post will approach things from a different way, I'll also highlight my personal challenge with the whole dream of making your work and your passion the same. From my previous post last week, I much prefer the concept of optimizing your work around your interests.
Here is the biggest part of the challenge for me when talking about work being your passion:
- 1.strong and barely controllable emotion."a man of impetuous passion"
Yes ... that's the dictionary definition, I didn't have to fall too far from the tree to find the problem. A strong and barely controllable emotion. Wow.
If you step back and think about it for a second, anything that would have that type of connection for you would be deeply personal and connected to some very unique experiences for someone. Add to this, that being in a space of intense emotion like that, you most likely would not also want to be directed, guided or have to work with predefined restrictions.
Generally, when you start to monetize something, it means that you have to start producing work (a service, a product, whatever) to meet the needs or likes of someone else; the customer is always right remember.
Secondly, charging money for something changes people's moral behaviour. People that were once appreciative of an artists free work, or a service that was being provided to them, their community, wherever becomes "corrupted" when people start paying for it. This is typically true when you start charging for options, speed of delivery or even things like late fees. Once someone is paying for something, they feel that what they pay offsets any impact to the service provider.
I suspect that most people that start working with a passion for something will soon find themselves working within a space of interest and that the high emotion they once had has been dulled and/or muted from monetizing it.
The other reality about working for passion is that it's rare, and to feel that you are failing if work <> your passion is a surefire way to feel inadequate and stuck with what you are doing.
Here is a different approach that will allow you a bit more leeway and hopefully open up your thinking as you currently explore what lies ahead.
Focusing on improvement
Studies have shown that experience and expertise play a big role in one's satisfaction with their job. As you get better and better at something, you will often find more satisfaction in your work. Here's a tip from my own personal life, sometimes it's not that you don't like the type of work that is making you feel frustrated, it's most likely that you have identified the wrong PART of what you are doing that you do like.
As your mastery improves major areas that push intrinsic motivation rise, namely autonomy, competence and a feeling of relatedness. This theory of self determination (the concept of Flow) is proven to increase one's happiness and satisfaction at work.
Focusing on value
This is another aspect of my personal life that I had adopted without even realizing the type of positive impact it can have. The effort you put on the quality of your work leads to higher levels of satisfaction. If you mail it in, if you do the bare minimum to get by, you are essentially re-enforcing to yourself that nothing matters. By focusing on your quality, on doing it the best you can, by pushing your limits, it changes the way you perceive the work.
To quote Steve Martin, "Be so good they can't ignore you".
Career Capital
The reality is the job market is well, a market. You have to have skills that help solve people's problems, or allow you to solve you own. If you aren't focused on your development, if you are not trying to learn new things and be exposed to new ways of thinking, how then can you be frustrated if you don't get that next promotion, that next big project.
Another important concept to accept and build from is this, what got you to where you are today isn't going to get you to where you want to go tomorrow.
Take a second and reread that again.
Where is it that you want to be, if even by direction. What deliberate action are you taking to build the career capital that you need to make that happen? You have to always be acquiring new and valuable skills.
Control
The more control you have over your work, the happier you will be. Be mindful when evaluating a new role or even a similar role within the same industry of field. Sometimes we think a change in structure or organization will help us, however we may find that we have less control and autonomy over our again (again, proven to impact satisfaction and intrinsic motivation).
Conversely, if you have been in the same role for a while and you are now feeling tortured by it, what has changed? Have you lost control or autonomy?
Final thoughts
I have found that if you are interested in what is happening around you, you will do better both inside and outside of work. I spend a lot of time focusing on what is new or different. What can I learn or push my understanding. I have also found that understanding what is the same has helped me also identify what is different and in turn, what I am finding interesting.
The most important part to accept is that interest will change, grow and shift over time. For some that may mean that they get a lot closer to you, maybe even develop into passions. For others it's something that had your curiosity for a time, and then faded away.
Grow with it.
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