“Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”
— CONFUCIUS
We have this quote up on the wall in our LinkedIn Chicago office. I love our Chicago office, but I really hate this quote.
I understand why it’s there: it’s aspirational, it’s motivating, and it’s a great, easy soundbite. What it is not, however, is accurate or helpful. I’m also very certain that it is not a direct quotation from Confucius, considering that he lived in a time that wasn’t particularly known for its thriving, flexible job market.
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Happiness Myths
This ‘quote’ is a great example of what I call happiness myths – a misleading belief that is passed down and repeated so often that we simply come to believe it over time.
Generally, these myths feel intuitive and appealing, which makes us to want to believe in their veracity. It sounds so damn great: to find that magical answer that means we will never again have to watch the clock or sit through another pointless meeting.
Because happiness is so complicated, it is very easy to latch onto myths that sound good and feel nice, a tendency that is helped along by the many cognitive biases that operate behind the scenes of our brain.
Here’s another example:
- Myth: I know what will make me happy.
- Reality: Research has found that we are actually terrible at predicting what will make us happy. This tendency is called the impact bias, where we overestimate the enduring impact that events in the future will have upon our emotions.
Happiness myths are dangerous because they directly inform the choices that we make in our lives and the way that we think about those choices, both of which are critically important to living good lives.
Happiness in a career does not come from floating down a river of ease, doing whatever feels good and easy. In fact, research tells us that happiness in a career comes from three things that take absolutely massive amounts of work: working hard to become good at something, serving others, and being connected to other people. If you’re waiting for a passion to alight upon you and change your life as a magic silver bullet, it’s time to move on.
Today, I want to poke holes in this myth to show how it might not be serving you, and then discuss what you can do instead.
. . .
MOST PEOPLE DON’T HAVE A PASSION TO PURSUE
Studies tell us that the common assumption that we all have a singular, encompassing, motivating passion inside of us, just waiting to be awakened, is untrue.
One study surveyed over 500 students about their passions. The researchers found that while 84% of people identified a passion in their lives, the vast majority – 96 percent – of those passions were for hobbies like dance, hockey and reading. Just 4% of the identified passions were related to employment or school. It is not realistic in most cases to encourage individuals to follow these hobby passions into careers; just 0.02% of hockey players make it into a viable career.
Most people do not have an overarching passion that guides their career. Telling them to ‘follow your passion’ is cruel. They have no idea where to begin, which can make people feel inadequate, ashamed, and even more confused than before your well-meaning advice hit them.
Passion comes after you put in a long slog of effort. Passion comes when you are deeply committed to something. It rarely, if ever, comes before you go out there and do something. And so the advice to “find your passion” leaves a lot of people, sitting on their couches, wondering where on earth their passion is, waiting for it to arrive, never trying anything new because they have either given up or have decided that it just hasn’t hit them yet.
Advice to ‘follow your passion’ ignores the majority of the population who do not have 1) a sense of their passion and/or b) a passion that can be career-oriented.
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FOLLOWING YOUR PASSION DOESN’T GUARANTEE HAPPINESS
Robert Vallerand is a psychologist who has made the study of passion his life’s work. Along with his colleagues, he has distinguished between two types of passion: harmonious and obsessive.
Harmonious passion is defined by engaging in activities that are freely chosen without constraints, and considered to be important and incorporated in an individual’s identity. Obsessive passion is defined by an uncontrollable urge to engage in the activity.
Harmonious passion is good for us, both from a well-being and a performance perspective. It inspires positive emotions and is correlated with states of flow, which is that state of being where you are so involved in your activity that you are completely engaged in the present moment.
Obsessive passion, on the other hand, is not good for us. It is associated with negative emotional states and a negative view of oneself, and it often creates conflict in other areas of our lives. It has been found to increase the risk of burnout.
For most of history, this dichotomy wasn’t a problem: we were generally born into our occupation, learned our craft from our parents or had work foisted upon us by our economic circumstances. Passion wasn’t even a part of the equation.
However, these days, everyone is telling us that to have a good career, we have to go find and pursue our passions, a zeitgeist that is well-meaning but has detrimental consequences. It’s putting people in a position where they believe they can’t be happy without a passion, that they’re in the wrong career if they aren’t pursuing it, and putting way too much pressure on any passions to fulfill them.
This determination to follow your passion can ultimately transform a harmonious passion into an obsessive passion, leading to an increase in negative emotions and negative self-perception.
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WORK DOESN’T EQUATE TO UNHAPPINESS
If I were to ask you where you were happiest, at work or outside of it, what would you say?
Most people would quickly say that they are of course happiest during their free time. Funnily enough, studies have found that it’s the opposite. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did a study where he pinged participants at random times throughout the day, asking them to record what they were doing and their emotional state at that moment. In analyzing this data, he found something rather surprising: people were happier at work than they were in their free time.
How on earth could this be? Csikszentmihalyi argues that it is because work provides an environment that is conducive to flow, which is the state of being fully immersed in our experience. He found that watching television, a typical leisure activity, puts most adults into a state that is mildly depressed. (Note that the average American watches about five hours of television every single day).
Work doesn’t have to be a necessary evil. (And to be clear, a lot of responsibility falls upon workplaces to make positive changes in this regard, too.) It can actually be a wonderful facilitator of well-being.
When researchers looked at what makes people happy and successful at work, they identify three major components:
- Competence: being good at what you do
- Autonomy: having the control to decide what you do and how you do it
- Relatedness: being connected to other people and feeling as though you belong
I’d also add here, based upon other research, that having a purpose or meaning is essential to a flourishing career.
You’ll notice that passion is not listed. You can have an absolutely thriving career and life without having a ‘passion’.
Instead of ‘follow your passion’, the better advice is ‘find something you’re great at and constantly work to get better at it, choose how to use that strength to make the world a better place, and do it surrounded by people you like.”
It doesn’t roll off the tongue as quickly, but it is far more accurate, empowering, and actionable.
. . .
HOW TO BE HAPPY AT WORK
We all have so many gifts inside of us, and part of the journey towards a happier life is figuring out how to identify them and how to share them with others. Each of us must take up this responsibility, for no one else can do it for us. Luckily, there are some great tools you can use to help figure out what you’re great at.
Here’s where to start, the single best approach I know: figure out where your character strengths lie and how you can amplify them. Take the assessment here to start.
Ask the people around you what you’re best at and what sets you apart from others. What do you uniquely offer them? What do they think of you for? You might be surprised at what you learn.
If you’re more of a ‘learn by doing’ sort, another great option is to just go out… and try stuff! This is my favorite strategy, because it gives you immediate feedback and expands your life experience. If you have a hypothesis about a strength, design a little test and then do it! Most of the people who are deeply passionate about something did not get to be that way through a magical lightbulb moment, but because they tried stuff, they got curious, and they started to investigate the topic, which led to more interest, and more curiosity, and more investigation… It is our interaction with the outside world that provokes us into the state of interest, and we simply cannot predict what that interest is going to be; we can only be on the lookout for those tiny little whispers, and then follow them wherever they may lead.
If none of these are working, try taking a different approach that takes you outside of your own self-focused bubble: stop asking yourself what you need to be happy and start asking what others need from you. You might be surprised by how quickly the answer arises.
Finally, you can also try to make the very best of where you are. Amy Wrzesniewski, a psychologist at Yale, has spent much of her career on studying the way that people feel about their jobs regardless of what the content of the job is. She has discovered that across the population, there are three distinct orientations to work:
- A job, where you are focused on work as a source of income. These people are less likely to have a connection to their work.
- A career, where you are focused on getting the next promotion. These people are more engaged in their work as a source of achievement.
- A calling, where you find fulfillment from the work itself, because it is integral to you as a person, it is a form of self-expression, and it has a positive impact on the world. These people view work as an engaging, life-enriching, generative activity. They report higher life satisfaction, job satisfaction, identify more with their teams, have more commitment to their teams, and practice healthier group processes like communication.
Curious about whether certain jobs are better matches for callings, careers or jobs, she studied a group of college administrators who all had the same position and responsibilities. She found something surprising: these people were roughly evenly split between seeing their work as a job, as a career or as a calling. At a certain level, it doesn’t matter what the job is – instead, it matters how you think about it.
Take a look at this quote:
“I love patients, I love sick people.
I have so much to offer sick people. Because when I don’t feel good or when I have had to have surgeries, the one thing that has gotten me though has been… jokes, just being pleasant, being upbeat and having a great attitude.
And that’s what I enjoy most about being here. It’s so upbeat here… I consider it the ‘house of hope.’
And that’s what I tell all the patients and all the visitors. It’s a house of hope.”
What profession would you guess that this person has?
Most people guess that it is a doctor.
In fact, it is a hospital janitor. This person has (rightfully) chosen to see the work that they do as being essential to the healing process, the person who maintains the house of hope. We are capable of turning even the most menial of jobs into something that is deeply meaningful and fulfilling. It turns out that it is your relationship to your work that matters more than the type of work that you do.
Any job can be a calling if you choose to invest the time and energy into crafting it to fit your interests, your strengths, your purpose. (For more support, I recommend checking out the workbook that her team has put together or finding an experienced coach to help you.)
Stop stressing about finding that perfect passion that will make your life easy and meaningful at the same time. This myth is paralyzing you and keeping you stuck; to get unstuck, you need to take action: to put in the work, to develop your strengths, to make work meaningful in some way. Figure out who needs you and how you can help them. Collect feedback, try new stuff, and make the very best of where you are, right now.
Don’t wait for a passion. Don’t try to never work a day in your life. Make each day of your life one filled with work that helps others, develops your strengths, and connects you with people you like and respect. That’s a good day. Those days will make a good life.
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This post was previously published on The New Happy and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: iStock