Will you miss opportunity’s knock by chasing your passion?
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You know the old sayings: Follow your passion! Live out your dreams! Be the next Mark Zuckerberg! Be the next Miley Cyrus! (OK, maybe not the last one, but you get the picture.) Everywhere you go, people are telling you to follow your dreams and don’t do a job you don’t want to do. I’m guilty of telling people that, as well. But have we been doing ourselves a disservice by spreading this mantra? Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe seems to think so. In an old TED Talk he did that I recently came across, and a subsequent rebuttal of someone who thought he was joking when he said it, he states that following your passion is “bad advice,” and that he doesn’t think people should “limit their options to those vocations they feel passionate about.”
He may have a point in all this. He goes on to list countless very successful professionals who do some jobs that even The Most Interesting Man in the World would cringe at. Like a guy who castrates sheep for a living, or a guy who uses cow dung to make biodegradable flower pots that now sell in Walmart — it’s too late to take them back if you didn’t know. The dung is now more valuable than the milk. Or even a hog farmer who feeds his pigs scraps from Las Vegas restaurants because they have more protein than regular feed. He was offered $60 million for his farm but declined it. Maybe you can’t put a price on passion, but $60 million is $60 million.
“…just because you’re passionate about something, doesn’t mean you won’t suck at it.”
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You can even take the venerable Steve Jobs, founder of Apple. His interests at an early age were in the liberal arts and Eastern mysticism, studying Western history and dance as a college student before dropping out. Apple was founded on an opportunity for him and his buddies to make some extra money in the burgeoning computer industry. Jobs didn’t have computer expertise or a passion for computers, and enlisted the help of a friend, Steve Wozniak — who actually did have a passion in electronics — to help build the first computers that they sold to a small electronics shop. Had Jobs followed his initial passion, Apple wouldn’t exist. Now it’s the most valuable company in the world. It can be more important to spot good opportunities and find love in what you do than it is to do only what you’re passionate about.
Who’s to blame for the way things are? There has been a huge shortage of people who know how to work with their hands. A lot of guys can’t even change the oil in their cars. Rowe points the finger to Hollywood, where once upon a time, they portrayed blue-collar workers as the group of guys sitting on a steel beam of a half-completed construction project, eating manly turkey sandwiches. Now, it’s just a plumber bent over with half his butt showing. He also points to shows like American Idol that teach people to go out and try to be a singer even if you suck really bad, adding that “just because you’re passionate about something, doesn’t mean you won’t suck at it.” Whatever the cause, the challenge is real. There’s a war between wing tips and steel toes. America’s infrastructure recently received a D+ grade, and there’s a lot of opportunity on the table for the men and women who want to get their hands dirty in fixing it. Is Rowe being a dream killer, or is he spot on? Most would agree he’s spot on.
Photo Credit: Homini:)/flickr
Source: yellowhammernews
Hard to get a job or find your passion when you are being replace by robots, jobs being send overseas, or by import labor. And yes, we need to have skilled blue collar workers; however, there is an attitude by white collar workers particularly CEOs that blue collar workers are expendable, can be replace, and they don’t need a lot of skills and education to do the jobs; yet these CEO and other white collar managers complain about the lack of a skilled worker force when they don’t want one nor do they invest in the workers.