“Follow your passion” has become one of the most repeated pieces of career advice. But Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford professors and the authors of ‘Designing Your Life,’ think it can send people in the wrong direction.
“It’s probably the worst advice you can give somebody,” Burnett said during a live recording of the “Prof G Podcast” with Scott Galloway released on Thursday.
The issue, he said, is that many people don’t have a single, obvious passion to follow. Citing research by fellow Stanford scholar Bill Damon, Burnett said: “Less than 20% of people have a singular identifiable passion.”
For everyone else, the message can be alienating. “Eight out of 10 people go, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,'” Burnett said. Others may have “lots of things” that interest them and no clear way to choose between them.
That can turn a supposedly inspiring instruction into a source of self-doubt. Burnett said that advising people to follow their passion can leave most people feeling: “‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.'”
Later in the conversation, Burnett offered a different way to approach uncertainty: start with curiosity and run small experiments. “Even if you’re really at the lowest of low, there’s something you’re curious about,” he said.
The pair call this approach “prototyping.” Rather than making a high-stakes, permanent career decision, people can test an interest by speaking with someone in the field, trying a project, or getting firsthand exposure to the work.
This is especially relevant for workers who feel trapped by an existing degree or career path. Burnett called the idea that people must choose the “right” major a “dysfunctional belief,” arguing that a college major is “the way you organize college,” not “the way you organize your life.”
Evans also pushed back on the idea that work must supply both income and meaning, saying that “meaning-making and money-making don’t have to be the same.”
The goal, he said, is not to discover a fixed answer to the question of purpose. “There is no figuring it out,” he said. “There’s only getting on with it.”
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