Quotes About Passion

The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that the passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there's a magic "right" job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they'll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, such as chronic job-hopping and crippling self-doubt.

The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.

build your working life around the experience of flow

flow activities.

When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.

Telling someone to "follow their passion" is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

In which I argue that control over what you do, and how you do it, is one of the most powerful traits you can acquire when creating work you love.

It's just that we don't know what that passion is. If you ask someone, they'll tell you what they think they're passionate about, but they probably have it wrong." In other words, she believes that having passion for your work is vital, but she also believes that it's a fool's errand to try to figure out in advance what work will lead to this passion.

Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love. Before

I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can't ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer.

regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you'll build a compelling career.

craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating work you love.

the message at the core of this book: Working right trumps finding the right work—it's a simple idea, but it's also incredibly subversive, as it overturns decades of folk career advice all focused on the mystical value of passion. It wrenches us away from our daydreams of an overnight transformation into instant job bliss and provides instead a more sober way toward fulfillment.

If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind. This clarity is refreshing. It tells you to stop worrying about what your job offers you, and instead worry about what you're offering the world. This mindset–which I call the craftsman mindset-allows you to sidestep the anxious questions generated by the passion hypothesis—"Who am I?", "What do I truly love?"—and instead put your head down and focus on becoming valuable.

Other interviews in the archive promote this same idea that it's hard to predict in advance what you'll eventually grow to love.

In other words, I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can't ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer.

put into our terminology, enthusiasm alone is not rare and valuable and is therefore not worth much in terms of career capital.

adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows.

The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.

a life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.

If you leave me alone for a day . . . I'll have a joyful time rotating between carpentry, weight training, writing, playing around with instruments in the music studio, making lists and executing tasks from them.

There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction, but the reductive notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them.

RULE #1 Don't Follow Your Passion

If your goal is to love what you do, I discovered, "follow you passion" can be bad advice. It's more important to become good at something rare and valuable, and then invest the career capital this generates into the type of traits that make a job great. The traits of control and mission are two good places to start.