Work and careers

The Trouble with Following Your Passion

Few pieces of career advice are dispensed as freely as the injunction to follow one's passion. It is offered to school-leavers and the newly redundant alike, usually by people for whom it appears to have worked. The difficulty is that it presupposes a passion already in place, waiting only to be acted upon, when for many people no such thing exists. Ask a room of twenty-year-olds what they would do if money were no object, and a sizeable proportion will confess, with some embarrassment, that they have no idea.

Consider the case of Delphine Aubry, now a respected restorer of antique clocks. At twenty-three she had no discernible interest in clocks whatsoever. [1] it not been for a chance conversation with a neighbour who needed an assistant for the summer, she might well have stayed in the insurance job she privately found tedious. What began as a temporary arrangement turned, over several years, into an absorbing vocation. Her enthusiasm, in other words, did not lead her to the work; it grew out of it. Stories like hers suggest that a sense of calling is less often the starting point of a fulfilling career than its eventual reward.