Passion. Or, do what you love. Or, do what you do.

All right, now that I’ve got that birthday thing out of the way, back to finding our thing in the sweet spot. With marketable skills (snooze) and genetic talent (holy ancestral confusion) out of the way, next up: passion ~ yum, let’s do it.

If you missed the earlier posts:

•  first I introduced Jim Collins‘ theory of the hedgehog and the sweet spot;
• second I reviewed some of my own not-always-joyful employment history on the hunt for marketable skills;
• third I expressed frustration that assessment tests get it right a lot more than I care to admit (go read the insightful comments on this one); 
• fourth I attempted to combine weird knacks and strange talents into one cohesive work-worthy theme; and 
• fifth I explored a few branches of my family tree to see if I could drum up some clues about genetic talent.

So to start, there are a couple of different camps to explore when it comes to addressing the element of passion for your work.  You’ve surely heard from the “do what you love and the money will follow” crew.  There’s also a contingency that advises against adulterating your passion by making a career out of it.  Books have been written by brilliant people extolling the virtues of both sides, and I’m not pretending I can clarify the ideal approach in one blog post. It will probably take at least two.

Also, my nature is to be highly impressionable to these brilliant people. And, there’s a screwey part of my brain that can see the truth in wildly convergent opinions.  I consider it a flaw in my design.  

Seth Godin has a post with a title that broke my heart: Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love. It shakes my core, but is there a nugget of truth there? Because after all, this is Seth Godin, a bright guy with an original perspective on just about everything.  I can’t help but agree with him on some level.

His general premise is that we shouldn’t taint our art in order to monetize it.  He talks about finding a job you can commit to, and spending your free time pouring yourself into your art. He writes:

Loving what you do is almost as important as doing what you love, especially if you need to make a living at it. Go find a job you can commit to, a career or a business you can fall in love with…Do your art. But don’t wreck your art if it doesn’t lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy.

Hugh MacLeod also recommends drawing the line between your art and your work as one of the keys to creativity in his book Ignore Everybody.  He describes the two kinds of jobs that most creative people have and advises staying true to both: the sexy creative job (the one you have to do to be fully expressed), and the bill paying job.

Their advice strikes a chord with me, and I can certainly see some truth to it. But if you’re stuck in a job you hate, this is not what you want to hear.  And one noteworthy point is that neither Seth Godin nor Hugh MacLeod hates his day job: each has a bill paying job that he enjoys. Also, I wonder if these guys are differentiating between what they refer to as creative people, like traditional artists, and the rest of us? Because I believe we’re all creative, and that everything we do is an act of creation, whether we’re painting or engineering.

I think when people first hear the advice to do what you love, there’s a tendency to take a facile or oversimplified approach. This is especially true when some of your hobbies are vastly different from what you currently do to support yourself.

For example, I was a tax CPA who loved baking for birthdays and barbecues, and as I plotted corporate escape, I actually thought I should move to Paris, attend Le Cordon Bleu, and become a pastry chef. Oversimplified, not to mention a tad outlandish. However, if this career had been an ideal match for my spirit, I would have done it. Over time I realized it was just a knee-jerk reaction to reach for the polar opposite of what I was doing at the time.

This leads me to some advice I love from Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project.  Instead of suggesting that people do what they love, she talks about finding a way to do what you already do.  This might sound like the same thing, but there’s a difference.  It’s easy to get discouraged if you think simplistically about how you could ever turn something you love into a money maker.  

Read: You like going wine tasting with your friends; professional wine tasting may be a tough gig to swing. Unless your last name happens to be Gallo. And chances are you spend more time doing things other than wine tasting.  Maybe. Hopefully.  

Gretchen Rubin gives the example of working as an attorney, but spending her evenings and weekends writing books on topics that interested her.  And voila, she’s turned that hobby into a successful career: the book she wrote about her happiness project comes out this winter.

So if you’re thinking of turning something you enjoy into a career, it really helps if it’s something you already spend lots of time doing.  And if you have any hope of going out on your own, my experience is that you’ll end up “working” more than you ever did as an employee for someone else.  And the key is for that “work” to feel a lot more like play.

If you feel totally lost, and you’re drawing a blank when it comes to identifying your passions, next time I’m going to talk about a few approaches that helped me when I was stuck.  And if you have an opinion on the great debate of “do what you love” versus “keep your art and work separate,” I would love to hear it.