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Mike Rowe: “Never Follow Your Passion, But Always Bring It with You”
When I worked as an ACT/SAT tutor, I sometimes got to chat with my students after the lesson finished. Given the opportunity, I’d offer the following advice: 1) In choosing majors, consider both what you enjoy learning about and what someone else will pay you enough to do to make a living, and 2) Understand that these need not be the same thing. People who are particularly diligent, talented, and lucky sometimes get to be paid to follow their passions; most folks don’t and very few who do get to do so straight out of school. Moreover, is there absolutely nothing dishonorable or disappointing in using your remunerative work to finance your actual passions. That’s the point about passions, anyway: You’re interested in them even when you’re not getting paid to pursue them.
In a new Prager U video addressed to graduates, Mike Rowe made not only that point, but took it several excellent steps further:
One of my favorite passages:
On Dirty Jobs, I remember a very successful septic tank cleaner, a multi-millionaire, who told me the secret to his success:
“I looked around to see where everyone else was headed,” he said, “And then I went the opposite way. Then I got good at my work. Then I began to prosper. And then one day, I realized I was passionate about other people’s crap.”
I’ve heard that same basic story from welders, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, HVAC professionals, hundreds of other skilled tradesmen who followed opportunity—not passion—and prospered as a result.
Consider the reality of the current job market.
Right now, millions of people with degrees and diplomas are out there competing for a relatively narrow set of opportunities that polite society calls “good careers.” Meanwhile, employers are struggling to fill nearly 5.8 million jobs that nobody’s trained to do. This is the skills gap, it’s real, and its cause is actually very simple: when people follow their passion, they miss out on all kinds of opportunities they didn’t even know existed.
If you know kids who just graduated from high school or college, do them a favor and forward them this video. Few things will do them — or the country — more good than helping others find useful, remunerative work that suits their skills and abilities. And contra Senator Marco Rubio, this isn’t a choice between practicality and aspiration: It’s about, in part, giving people the means to finance their real dreams.
Published in Domestic Policy, Education
Do you think it is rare? Many folks I know seem to enjoy their work, or have a neutral attitude towards it. One hears of people feeling depressed or aimless in retirement. Shouldn’t they feel overjoyed? The whole disutility-of-work thing is overdone. Could we have an informal poll? Please comment if you like your work or not.
Speaking of work…
I loved my work, and when I knew it was time to retire, I was happy. Retirement offers so much. I feel very blessed.
We mistake enthusiasm for passion. For example, fatherhood is perhaps my most critical vocation, but there are many days when it is more a trial than a joy. Perhaps we should instead remember the Passion of Christ.
I agree. I think, too, we mistake enjoyment/fun for satisfaction. There were lots of times my job involved being too cold (or too hot), dirty, hungry and sleep-deprived. Oft times not a lot of fun or very enjoyable, but almost always satisfying.
OK, but what about the situation where you’re not blinded by enthusiasm, but beset by trial on all sides, yet you still persevere – perhaps very foolishly – because of your belief that this is what God called you to do?
It is true that once a belief in your vocation appears proved wrong, you are set completely adrift. But it’s certainly possible to not only miss out on other, more remunerative work because you believe you’ve been called by God to something not very remunerative, but also to endure quite a bit of misery in a “vocation”, simply because you believe God has called you to it.
Let’s assume we’re not talking about wimps who merely want to enjoy themselves here. Let’s assume we’re talking “vocations” that people persist in even despite suffering, potentially screwing themselves and their dependent loved ones over in the process…
I would suggest this person to prayerfully consider that if one is potentially screwing over one’s dependents, then perhaps one has been blinded by something. We are not only called to a job, but we are called to marriage, to parenthood, and so forth.
True, but is there any choice that could be made that doesn’t potentially screw over one’s dependents – I mean, other than the choice to not have dependents at all?
I think that this thought must be framed and followed through a lens of time. Were I the subject, Midge, am I asked to flail uselessly against ineffectiveness and misery for a year? Two? A decade? Or for the duration of my affiliation with the vocation?
During that time, am I moving the goals of the vocation forward and miserable? Or useless and miserable?
I think it’s acceptable to have a one-on-one with the Big Guy and say, “Hey, Father, I think I’m wasting both our time, here.”
Ha!
Dreadful as that line is, it’s scarcely worse than what appears in my high school’s 2014 yearbook:
Soon we’ll all be commonly uncommon!
Perhaps my point is more modest than I have suggested. I like my work–even love it. I teach, so I get to read, think, write, and talk for a living. I’m know I am extraordinarily lucky to have the job I have. And I discovered that I might like to be a professor late in my undergraduate career, took a few years away from academia, and then went back to graduate school confident in my path. So this really is my “passion”. But the job ain’t wonderful all of the time. Day to day it can be miserable and soul crushing. Grading wretched papers, going to innumerable pointless meetings, search committees, etc. So my point is that even in the best case, that you do find something meaningful, rewarding, etc., there will always be things that come along with the job that will remind you that it is work.
All jobs involve some drudgery, of course. Even the follow-your-passion folks understand that. Enjoying your work doesn’t mean you enjoy every second of it. But miserable and soul crushing? Perchance you have exaggerated a tad.
Well, some people are naturally cheery. Others are not. Some people, for whatever reason, do seem to struggle to not find life miserable and soul-crushing, even when they work very hard to find life otherwise. The naturally cheery may not believe these people exist – I mean, how difficult can it be to cheer oneself up, especially in America, and especially now? Nonetheless, it remains possible that not everyone is that cheery, even with the best of intentions to be that cheery.
You’re not suggesting I’m cheery, are you? That would make my wife chuckle.
Well, you seem cheery in your work – perhaps because you’re a grouch otherwise? ;-)
It’s not unheard of to have the opposite problem, either.
30 7 page poorly written and poorly argued papers on Plato’s Apology of Socrates–I put that firmly in the miserable category. And being lectured to by my hyper-ideological colleagues about diversity qualifies as soul crushing. Again, I’m not complaining, it is just part of the package.
Rather than politely suffering the lectures, I’d enjoy showing them what fools they are. Then again, I’m not in the academic world for a reason.
I sympathize. A colleague who works at NASA is perpetually frustrated by the politically correct miasma that envelops the place. He’s been in trouble with HR over his, shall we say, frankly expressed views. I wrote a this to cheer him up on NASA Diversity Day. Don’t try this at home.