FIND YOUR PASSION…AND DO IT ON THE SIDE

There are so many ‘follow your passion’ messages out there today that we thought we should take the opposite view, if not for anything else but a bit of balance. In our instant-gratification society, fulfilment at work and college have become big issues. Just the other day a friend of mine narrated a story about her niece who is now doing her third degree in four years because she just cannot ‘find her calling’.
This constant rush to find our passions is leaving us all tired, we think. Though the media does a good job of reinforcing the message that all of us can find our passions and make a living at them if only we tried, it neglects to remind us that society mitigates against that happening. After all, if all of us were to find our passions, who will drive the buses? Who will clean the toilets?
Being able to make a living at one’s passion is something that very, very few of us will ever accomplish. What about the rest of us, then? Well, we should do what human beings have done for most of recorded industrial history: treat the job purely as a means to pay the bills. The very concept of getting paid to work exists because you wouldn’t work unless you got paid. If you would go to work regardless of whether you got paid or not (which you would do if you loved it), then why would your boss pay you?
So perhaps the time has come for us to stop looking at our jobs to feed our souls. Once we accept this, that a job will almost never fulfil us, then we will give the issue of balance more importance than it gets today. We will eagerly pursue our passions outside of work, and make that our priority: in short, view the job as something you have to endure to be able to enjoy your passion. An hour or two of what you truly love per day will keep you energized for the next day, and the next, and the next. That’s a much more realistic goal than to run after what you love and hope that it will also feed you.