Toward a New Vision of Productivity, Part 4: The Quest for Passion
A Nerd’s Tale
High school, Junior year. I admit it, I was a nerd. A whopping big one. I spent my lunch break in high school hanging out with my nerd friends in the Chemistry lab, which the teacher graciously opened to his nerdlings. We’d swap Tom Lehrer lyrics, discuss our latest D&D campaigns, or argue about whether Star Trek: The Next Generation was as good as the original. Like I said, nerds.
One day, we’re talking math. “Listen, guys,” I’m saying. “If zero divided by anything is zero, and anything divided by zero is infinity, and anything divided by itself is one, then what’s zero divided by zero?” Truly a conundrum for the ages! The physics teacher walks in – his classroom is adjacent and shares an office with the chemistry lab. He overhears us and says, “Dustin, that’s really clever. You should be a mathematician, you have a knack for it!”
Fast-forward several months. Career aptitude testing. You answer hundreds of questions and they tell you what career you should pursue. Apparently I score pretty well at math – which fact would surprise every math teacher I’ve ever had, by the way, since I never got over a “C” in math – and very well in analytical thinking, too. According to the test, I should be a mathematician. Or at least an engineer.
I’d already learned that with my awful eyesight, I was never going to be an astronaut, but I am still excited about space. Engineers design space craft! And the test said the same thing the physics teacher said – somehow, math and analytical thinking are my strong suits, so I should be an engineer. An aerospace engineer, in fact.
Between the test and the physics teacher’s random comment, I was set – the classes I would take in my last year of high school, my choice of majors, my choice of universities to apply to, my career path, everything was laid out before me in golden letters.
Three years later I would drop out of college and start drinking heavily.
What is your passion?
I read a lot of career advice books. Some because their authors or publicists send them to me to review here on Lifehack, others because I review business and contemporary culture books for Publishers Weekly. While they all offer various approaches to the problems of career-building and career-change, they almost always start with the advice to figure out what you’re passionate about.
This is a harder question than it seems. We haven’t really developed any kind of processes for determining or cultivating passions. My own experience in high school is probably shared by more people than not – we’re given a battery of tests to determine what we’re good at, under the huge assumption that what we’re good at is directly related to what we’re passionate about.
This is reinforced by teachers who, I realize now that I am one, spend so much time teaching subjects to students who are bored and disinterested that they latch onto anyone with even an inkling of interest in the topics that, as teachers, they’ve dedicated their lives to. I wasn’t cut out to be a mathematician, or even an engineer, not because I wasn’t good at math, but because I hated math – I just happened to be a good analytical thinker who one day was playing with numbers. I might have been making puns or unpacking some turn of speech (like the use of “literally”, as in “I’m literally starving to death!” when of course, you’re not literally starving to death, you’re doing the opposite of literally starving) or playing with words in some other way and my future physics teacher wouldn’t have taken any notice.
Schools are, in general, not equipped to help students cultivate passions. They’re structured around imparting a minimum body of necessary knowledge to as many students as possible, and cherry-picking students who show any aptitude for one topic or other to receive advanced instruction in those topics. Schools are, as Ken Robinson has noted, better at beating passions out of us than cultivating them
If a student is lucky, he or she graduates with some notion of a major to pursue in college – but ask around in any group of college freshman and sophomores, and you’ll find more “undecideds” than anything else. If those students are lucky, they’ll latch onto some topic in their four (or five, or six) years at college; a good number of them, though, will simply sit down with a course catalog their senior year, look over what they’ve taken, and figure out which major they’re closest to graduating in.
And a surprising number of college students graduate with no idea of what to do next. With nothing guiding them one way or another, they fall into the first decent job they find, and thus begins the grind towards death.
So they turn to one of the career guides out there – many of which are quite excellent – and somewhere in the first few chapters the author asks them what they’re passionate about – and they don’t know. How could they?
Passionless Productivity
Our productivity literature pays a great deal of lip service to the idea of a higher calling or higher purpose. In Merlin Mann’s Productive Talk podcast, a multi-part interview with David Allen, Allen repeats several times that people should constantly be asking themselves “Is this the most important thing I can be doing right now? Does this task help me fulfill my purpose here on Earth?”
Most people skip that bit in GTD, or in other productivity systems, because we honestly don’t know how to even think about the question, let alone answer it. But being productive without passion is a sure path to disappointment. Is it any wonder that so many people who pursue greater productivity find themselves burnt out and “fall off the wagon” after a few months of practice? Without passion, greater efficiency just means you end up doing more of the work you didn’t really care about in the first place.
Of course, some of us get lucky and find ourselves doing work that is meaningful and deeply satisfying, often by accident. That’s another common theme in career books – someone stumbles upon an innovation that becomes their career and their passion. They invent something to solve some problem they happen to encounter, they do some favor for friends and are encouraged to do it professionally, or whatever.
I have to believe that there’s a better system for the rest of us than luck, accidents, and hopeful thinking. Alas, I don’t know what it is – it took me 20 years to realize my own passion for writing. But it’s the first task in the journey toward a new vision of productivity, to figure out how to identify the kind of tasks that being really productive at would make us happiest.
Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to figure that out in your own life, and to share with us or with others how you figured it out. If you’re one of the lucky few who has already found your passion, let us know how you arrived there.
WRITER'S BIOGRAPHY
Dustin Wax
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
Tags: 
Get your own Avatars at 
Loading ...
Comments
sd says on December 30th, 2008 at 10:13 am
I found my passion a few years ago. I did it by “connecting the dots”: of all the jobs and hobbies and projects I had engaged in over the years, what did I enjoy most? What had proved the most durable? Of those activities I /didn’t/ enjoy, was that element missing? (yes)
Trouble is, my particular passion is not one that traditionally is well-regarded or well-paid. And I’m kinda passionate about financial security and the roof over my head, too. So I’ve met the passion halfway, with a job that can employ my passion in the service of an activity that’s well-paid. No one is deliriously happy. But no one is getting poorer, either.
Shanel Yang says on December 30th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Writing and teaching are my passions, too! I also love analytical thinking. (Was I a nerd in high school, too? In junior high, yes. But, by the time I got to high school, I reinvented myself, as I wrote about in “How to Be an Introvert” at http://shanelyang.com/2008/06/.....trovert/.)
I fell in love with books in elementary school and began to wish I could creative such amazingly wonderful stories to entertain, captivate, and inspire readers, forever. The immortality of books and their authors fascinated me. I wanted to believe in magic and books seemed to contain them. Everything was possible between their covers: love; horror; fantasy; and, rags-to-riches miracles! My problem was I never believed I could make a living at it. The writers I admired, I also hated for making me feel so inadequate as a writer. But, I began keeping diaries anyway. That felt safer. Nobody could criticize my stories in them. So, I was a closeted writer — through many years of stops and starts — mostly stops. Then, finally, I found out about blogging, particularly self-help blogging, and I saw that the writing was not nearly as rigorous as for fiction. So, I decided to try it last year, and I LOVE IT!!! That’s how I arrived at my passion. : )
Shanel Yang says on December 30th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Correction: That post was entitled “How to Be an Extrovert.” Freudian slip, I guess. ; )
Lorenzo A says on December 30th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Dustin, you are really making this series one of a kind!
My story is somewhat similar to yours. I graduated top of the class with a full ride scholarship to any state university here in AZ back in 2006. And just like you, I had no idea what career I wanted to pursue, so I dropped out after my first semester. I found a decent 9 to 5 that I’ve had for two years now (I started the day after a graduated from high school), and I still don’t know what my passion is. Now however, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I live long enough to see and experience as many things as I can, I’ll eventually find this “passion” of mine.
So in a sense my passion is just to ‘live’ for now. I have a crazy goal of cultivating my body and mind to live past my 145th year. So my priorities today are to keep my body and mind as healthy as possible, be financially secured, and find a way to give back because I feel that I’ve been extremely fortunate. This last objective is the most abstract out of the three though, and the one I haven’t really tried to fit in my life’s schedule. I think that with time I’ll find a way to balance all three and find my true passion.
I’m looking forward to the other parts of this great thought-provoking series!
FrugalNYC says on December 30th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Dustin, you struck a cord with this post. I think a lot of people can relate to this post. I’ve worked in the computing field for over a decade. I would say I was good at math in school. In college I decided I was not to be an engineer and dropped my dual degree program one year from completion. Several months ago I took to blogging regularly, thanks to some productivity blogs, I enjoy blogging and still do. I’m still discovering what my passions are a decade after college.
Throughout your post I can’t help but think about the always present tradeoff for all children and students – creativity vs. “productivity”. Most educational systems, especially the “successful” ones focus on science and mathematics. In a world where everyone is now taught to specialize, will anyone be able to understand it all? Will we be encouraged to and be able to see the “big picture”?
This has been a very thought provoking post. Thanks!
Avrum says on December 30th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
For those with enough ego strenght i.e. no major mental health issues, and time/money, a qualified dynamic therapist does wonders for self-exploration and unconscious self-sabotage.
Look, unless you grew up in an environment (read: parents, caregivers, etc) that encouraged/nurtured your natural talents/passion, etc., you’re going to have a tough time mustering the resources to answer: “Is this the most important thing I can be doing right now?”
Corey says on December 30th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Great post! Now I find myself in a position of discovery and reinvention at age 33. As a parent, we are the product as well as the producers of future workers. How to help kids discover their passion and avoid the years of treadmilling? Schools create factory workers, “here is what I want, everyone give it a shot and I will grade who’s is the best”
Jennifer says on December 30th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
I feel incredibly fortunate that I found my passion early, though I didn’t actually know it at the time. I became an econ major in college because I was always good at (and liked) math but didn’t see the use in a pure math degree. Econ struck me a field that let me use the math skills I liked but had the ’save the world’ policy application I wanted. But it wasn’t actually until after a few years of grad school that I discovered TEACHING econ is truly my passion. And it really is the two together – I wouldn’t love teaching another subject as much. I did go through a bit of the process of elimination (hated working for an econ consulting firm, hated the idea of pure research) but mostly, just feel fortunate that I found my way here without a lot of overt thought about it.
Now that I’m a professor, I talk to a lot of students who are considering what to major in and what to do after college. No matter what they tell me they want to do, I always ask them, “Why?” It’s amazing/sad how many of them have no idea what to say…
Ruth says on December 30th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
An option between a career that fulfills one’s passion and working at a job that sucks the life out of you, is getting a simpler, “don’t take it home with you” kind of job (such as waiting tables), and pursuing one’s passions “on the side”. I’ve known people who have done this with quite a bit of success. Sometimes, pursuing their passions “on the side” turned into a fulfilling career (an artist I know), others pursued their spiritual life with intensity and passion and were detached from the idea of “career”.
Great post.
Werner says on December 31st, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I picked it up on some kind of discussion forum and found it extremely helpful and profound:
How do you discover your real purpose in life? Here is a story I found most useful for finding my own purpose. I’m not talking about your job, your daily responsibilities, or even your long-term goals. I mean the real reason why you’re here at all — the very reason you exist.
Perhaps you’re a rather nihilistic person who doesn’t believe you have a purpose and that life has no meaning. Doesn’t matter. Not believing that you have a purpose won’t prevent you from discovering it, just as a lack of belief in gravity won’t prevent you from tripping. All that a lack of belief will do is make it take longer, so if you’re one of those people, just change the number 20 in the title of this blog entry to 40 (or 60 if you’re really stubborn). Most likely though if you don’t believe you have a purpose, then you probably won’t believe what I’m saying anyway, but even so, what’s the risk of investing an hour just in case?
Here’s a story about Bruce Lee which sets the stage for this little exercise. A master martial artist asked Bruce to teach him everything Bruce knew about martial arts. Bruce held up two cups, both filled with liquid. “The first cup,” said Bruce, “represents all of your knowledge about martial arts. The second cup represents all of my knowledge about martial arts. If you want to fill your cup with my knowledge, you must first empty your cup of your knowledge.”
If you want to discover your true purpose in life, you must first empty your mind of all the false purposes you’ve been taught (including the idea that you may have no purpose at all).
So how to discover your purpose in life? While there are many ways to do this, some of them fairly involved, here is one of the simplest that anyone can do. The more open you are to this process, and the more you expect it to work, the faster it will work for you. But not being open to it or having doubts about it or thinking it’s an entirely idiotic and meaningless waste of time won’t prevent it from working as long as you stick with it — again, it will just take longer to converge.
Here’s what to do:
Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type (I prefer the latter because it’s faster).
Write at the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”
Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.
Repeat step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your purpose !!!!
That’s it. It sounds simple but it ins’t. Don’t stop before tears are rolling down your cheek. It doesn’t matter if you’re a counselor or an engineer or a bodybuilder. To some people this exercise will make perfect sense. To others it will seem utterly stupid. Usually it takes 15-20 minutes to clear your head of all the clutter and the social conditioning about what you think your purpose in life is. The false answers will come from your mind and your memories. But when the true answer finally arrives, it will feel like it’s coming to you from a different source entirely.
The only difficult thing about this exercise is: You must stop procrastinating about it and sit down on your ass, and actually DO it. That was hard for me but I eventually did it and found it to be an extreme eye and heart opener.
Ian Breakspear says on January 6th, 2009 at 2:26 am
Thanks for a great (and quite timely for me) post Dustin.
I was fortunate to – half accidentally – find my passion at an early age. I began training in herbal medicine and naturopathy at age 17, and have been doing it for 20 years now. I remember discovering my passion but almost being too young and immature to recognise it’s significance. The very first herbal medicine class I took inspired me in a way few things ever had. I also think a lot of this was due to my teacher – a great lecturer and person who became my mentor, employer, colleague and now close friend.
My second passion of teaching was definitely an accident, and for years I was able to blend clinical work and teaching in herbal medicine, combined with various technical consultancy roles. I loved it! Not easy, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Then I was offered the “opportunity of a lifetime”. To become a full time academic within 1 of only 2 universities in the country offering Bachelor and postgraduate degrees in naturopathy/herbal medicine.
For almost 5 years I have worked at this job, with the aim of raising the standard of education in herbal medicine, and inspiring students.
And you know what? I realised 3 months ago I really hate my job. I’d lost the passion, the dreams, the desire to jump out of bed and tackle the world, the reason for my existence. For the last 18 months it has been insidiously eating away at me, while I try to justify my sacrifice by saying “if I don’t do this, some bureaucrat who is not a herbalist will come in and stuff it up”. But the reality is I’ve become that bureaucrat.
An analysis of my average working week shows that I spend roughly 6-8hrs/week teaching, 4-6hrs/week directly related to delivering quality teaching, and 4hr/week being a clinician (seeing patients – and that is done above and beyond my full time employment at the university). That’s 16hrs doing what I want to do, what I am really good at doing, and what excites me. And yet my working week is at least 60hrs.
The rest of the time I’m a highly replaceable cog in a huge self-fulfilling bureaucratic machine. I beat my head against a brick wall doing budgets, filling out endless forms (which seem to change constantly so half the time is spent learning about how to get the correct new form, then how to complete it), manipulating inadequate or broken systems, and dealing with vested interests and academics who are so divorced from reality as to make you want to cry. All to get the change and support I need to achieve those aforementioned aims. Our program is massively understaffed, the other full time staff we do have are burnt out, morale in the School (which encompasses far more programs than just ours) is pathetic, and the system doesn’t care. Five years of doing this and nothing at the system level has changed for the better.
So this “opportunity of a lifetime”, whilst it seemed the perfect thing for me, has turned out to be far from it. A friend at the uni has said to me a few times that my logical, systematic, inquisitive and structured mind and approach to work make me an excellent academic. Indeed everything I do seems to be well received. But like your experience with maths Dustin, I have no passion for being an academic. A teacher yes, but not an academic. When told this friend my plans for the next few years (which don’t involve being a full time academic), she congratulated me. She recognised that the life she’d chosen, the life she said I was good at, was killing me. A good friend.
So, after my long-winded post (sorry everybody – it was a brain dump!), I have to agree that finding your passion and pursuing it is equally important as finding what you are good at doing. For me 2009 is going to be about positioning myself and various resources to get back to my passion and earn a great living from doing what I love.
Dustin Wax says on January 6th, 2009 at 3:19 am
Ian: I totally sympathize. As an academic myself, I have the same discussion with myself constantly — I love teaching in my classroom, but is it enough to justify the far more hours I spend supporting the handful of hours I get to work with my students? It’s especially difficult because in my discipline at least, teaching is rather looked down upon — advancement is premised primarily on research, which I have no particular talent for, or the related activity of bringing in grant money. Now, I’m not worried about the lack of status, but about the lack of support for teaching, which means that along the way I’ve stopped growing much as an academic.
Like you I’ve made a resoution (though I didn’t realize it was a resolution until a friend pointed it out to me): I want to position myself so that I teach because it’s what I love, not because it’s what I do for a living. Which means teaching less, because I simply don’t have the ability to give 160 students with 160 personalities and 160 stories the kind of attention they deserve and need.
Good luck to us both!
Garth says on January 6th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Werner, I read the entry about purpose on Steve Pavlina’s site, so maybe he deserves the credit?
Mike King says on January 13th, 2009 at 3:42 am
Truly, an inspring article and I’m happy to see another writing putting the emphasis in passion. Productivity without that leads to dissapointment as you put it is definite. Many people have done this and mastered their work, become experts, but still be searching, wanting, wishing they had more meaning in their jobs. Well, put the passion there first, and then the productivity for one, doesn’t really matter, and 2, it will happen more naturally and be more fullfilling.
Great series BTW, I’m just exploring a few articles I missed now. Its impressive and I know how much work a series is to write as I have one this month on leadership. Passion is definitely a big part of that so knowing about your self and your interests and desires is just as important.