Working Up a Passion for Your Work

Last week I attended my college’s Employee Recognition reception.  At this somewhat cheesy annual event, the VPs get up and announce the folks in their divisions who have stuck around for 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, and so on.  

It was a record-setting year: a colleague in my division celebrated his 50^th year at the college. An entire career — an entire adult life, in fact — spent at one job, at one institution.  Inconceivable!  I know people who quit jobs like it’s a bodily function, and whose resumes are thick as a phone book.  

But that’s not even the impressive part.  You’d think that after being at one place for so long, still grinding away in his seventies, he’d be burned out — phoning it in, cruising along, collecting a paycheck.  You’d be wrong.  In fact, he’s the most dedicated, most passionate, hardest-working guy in my division.  When I compare myself to him, I have to blush at how I fall short.

How is this possible?  It’s not supposed to be that way.  Or is it?  I have another friend, Bill, who just retired from a long career at one institution.  We goofed on him constantly in his final six months, telling him he must be spending his days taking naps and shopping for travel bargains.  But in fact, he was in the trenches to the very end, wrapping up every difficult and time-consuming project.

It brings me back to Cal Newport’s engaging and sometimes mind-blowing book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. In it, Newport draws on dozens of interviews with successful people, along with current psychological research, to answer the question of how to find work that you love.

One old saw that I’ve heard all my life is, “follow your passion.”  In the first section of the book, Newport explodes this myth.  The assumption is that we’re all born with some inherent passion, that we have to discover it, then find a job that matches it.  Hogwash, says Newport.  Steve Jobs wasn’t passionate about technology when he started.  It was a way for him to earn quick cash while he pursued his love of Zen meditation. 

Jobs did, however, develop a passion for his work, which came with time and effort.  And that’s the key.  Newport cites the work of Yale’s Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski, who explores workers’ “orientation” toward their employment.  In a study of administrative assistants, Wrzesniewski found that people who view their work as a Calling (as opposed to a Job or a Career) are more satisfied in their work than others.  They also had better health and better life satisfaction over all.   

This makes intuitive sense, but here’s the surprising part: the common factor among those who viewed their work as a Calling? Number of years on the job.  This runs exactly counter to our cultural stereotype of boredom and burnout — the shark has to keep moving forward or it dies, they say.  Moving around is the only way to move up.  But maybe we humans aren’t sharks, after all.

The pre-existing passion myth is not just flawed, it’s dangerous.  It causes us to wait around for the “right” job to show up, rather than just getting to work.  After all, ask a classroom of high school kids what they’re passionate about and you might get one or two answers, but mostly it’ll be crickets.  Doing the work, seeing its effects, connecting with people - these help us to develop passion for our work, not the other way around. 

This idea hit me right between the eyes.  (I immediately wished I’d read this danged thing before I spent a boatload of time and money on a fine arts degree.)  Luckily, Newport goes on to give some excellent tips on how to build a satisfying career, and helped me to understand how my current line of work — teaching students — has developed into a Calling over the past twenty years.  I don’t know that I’ll make it to fifty, but it’s good to see how that might not be a bad thing.