1506: The Passion Trap: How the Search for Your Life's Work is Making Your Working Life Miserable by Cal Newport

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[00:01:02] The Passion Trap – How the Search for Your Life's Work is Making Your Working Life Miserable.

[00:01:08] By Cal Newport of CalNewport.com

[00:01:11] The Priest and the Parachute

[00:01:14] It began with a joke.

[00:01:16] In 1968, Richard Bowles, an Episcopal priest from San Francisco,

[00:01:20] was in a meeting when someone complained about colleagues bailing out of a troubled organization.

[00:01:24] To remind the group to return to this topic, Bowles jotted a clever phrase on the blackboard,

[00:01:29] What color is your parachute?

[00:01:31] The line got a laugh, but as Bowles recalls in a 1999 interview with Fast Company,

[00:01:36] I had no idea it would take on all this additional meaning.

[00:01:39] Two years later, Bowles lost his job as a priest and was shuffled into an administrative position in the Episcopal Church,

[00:01:45] advising campus ministers, many of whom were also in danger of losing their jobs.

[00:01:50] Noticing a lack of good advice on the topic, Bowles self-published a 168-page guide to navigating career changes,

[00:01:57] which he handed out for free.

[00:01:59] Looking for a catchy title, he repurposed his blackboard one-liner.

[00:02:03] The initial print run was 100 copies.

[00:02:05] The premise of Bowles' guide sounds self-evident to the modern ear.

[00:02:09] Figure out what you like to do, and then find a place that needs people like you.

[00:02:13] But in 1970, this concept was a radical notion.

[00:02:17] At the time, the idea of doing a lot of pen and paper exercises in order to take control of your own career was regarded as a dilettance exercise, Bowles recalls.

[00:02:26] It was also, however, a period of extreme workplace transition as the postwar industrial economy crumbled before an ascendant knowledge work sector.

[00:02:34] Uncertain employees craved guidance, and Bowles' optimistic strategies resonated.

[00:02:39] The book that began with a 100-copy print run and a clever name has since become one of the best-selling titles of the century with over 6 million copies in print.

[00:02:48] This story is important because it emphasizes that one of the most universal and powerful ideas in modern society,

[00:02:54] that the key to workplace happiness is to follow your passion, has a surprisingly humble origin.

[00:03:00] What began as a quip jotted down on a blackboard grew into the core principle guiding our thinking about work.

[00:03:06] What color is my parachute, we now ask, confident that answering this question holds the answer to the good life.

[00:03:12] But when we recognize that this strategy is not self-evident, and in fact not even all that old, we can begin to question whether or not it's actually right.

[00:03:21] And when we do, it's dismaying what we find.

[00:03:25] The Passion Trap

[00:03:27] Let's summarize Bowles' insight as follows.

[00:03:29] The key to a fulfilling career is to first figure out what you're passionate about, and then go find a job to match.

[00:03:35] For simplicity, I'll call this the passion hypothesis.

[00:03:39] We can think of the past 40 years, the post-parachutes era, as a vast experiment testing the validity of this hypothesis.

[00:03:46] The results of this experiment, unfortunately, are not pretty.

[00:03:49] The latest Conference Board survey of U.S. job satisfaction, released earlier this year, found only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs.

[00:03:58] This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61% recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey.

[00:04:04] As Lynn Franco, the director of the board's Consumer Research Center notes, this is not just about a bad business cycle.

[00:04:11] Quote,

[00:04:12] Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend.

[00:04:20] End quote.

[00:04:21] Though many factors can account for workplace unhappiness, a major cause identified by the survey is that, quote,

[00:04:27] Quote,

[00:04:27] Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.

[00:04:30] End quote.

[00:04:31] Put another way, as we've placed more importance on the passion hypothesis, we've become less interested, and therefore more unhappy with the work we have.

[00:04:38] I call this effect the passion trap, which I define as follows.

[00:04:42] The passion trap.

[00:04:44] The more emphasis you place on finding work you love, the more unhappy you become when you don't love every minute of the work you have.

[00:04:51] I argue that the passion trap is an important contributing factor to our steadily decreasing workplace satisfaction.

[00:04:58] So far, however, my evidence for this claim is circumstantial at best, and we need to dig deeper.

[00:05:03] The young and the anxious.

[00:05:06] If the passion trap is real, recent college graduates should be the most affected.

[00:05:11] At this young age, before the demands and stability of family, their careers are more likely to define their identity.

[00:05:17] It's also the period where they feel the most control over their path and therefore also feel the most anxiety about their decisions.

[00:05:23] This predicts, therefore, that the passion trap would make young workers the most unhappy.

[00:05:28] Not surprisingly, this is exactly what the Conference Board survey finds.

[00:05:31] Roughly 64% of workers under 25 say that they are unhappy in their jobs, the highest levels of dissatisfaction measured for any age group over the 22-year history of the survey.

[00:05:42] To better understand why young people are so unhappy, let's turn to Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner's 2001 Ode to Youth Disaffection, Quarter Life Crisis.

[00:05:52] This book chronicles the personal testimony of dozens of unhappy 20-somethings.

[00:05:56] And as the passion trap predicts, most of the stories revolve around uncertainty regarding the search for the right job.

[00:06:03] Consider, for example, the tale of Scott, a 27-year-old from Washington, D.C.

[00:06:08] Quote,

[00:06:09] My professional situation now couldn't be more perfect, Scott reports.

[00:06:13] I chose to pursue the career I knew in my heart I was passionate about, politics.

[00:06:18] Scott succeeded in this pursuit.

[00:06:19] Though he had to start at the bottom as a volunteer campaign aide, within two short years after college graduation, he had the, quote,

[00:06:27] Capitol Hill job I dreamed of, end quote.

[00:06:30] Rationally, he should be happy with his work.

[00:06:32] He says,

[00:06:33] I love my office, my friends, even my boss.

[00:06:36] Yet he's not.

[00:06:37] It's not fulfilling, he despairs.

[00:06:40] Scott has since restarted his search for his life's work.

[00:06:42] I've committed myself to exploring other options that interest me, Scott says, but I'm having a hard time actually thinking of a career that sounds appealing.

[00:06:50] The passion hypothesis was so ingrained into Scott's psyche that even his dream job once obtained couldn't live up to the fantasy.

[00:06:58] Unhappiness followed.

[00:06:59] Story after story in quarter-life crisis follow this same script.

[00:07:03] I graduated from college wanting nothing more than the ultimate job for me, says Jill.

[00:07:08] Not surprisingly, she hasn't found it.

[00:07:10] I'm so lost about what I want to do, despairs 24-year-old Elaine, that I don't even realize what I'm sacrificing or compromising.

[00:07:18] And so on.

[00:07:19] The passion trap strikes again and again and again in these pages.

[00:07:23] This all points toward a troubling conclusion.

[00:07:25] Not only is the passion hypothesis wrong, it's also potentially dangerous, leading us into a passion trap that increases our feelings of unhappiness and uncertainty.

[00:07:35] Happiness beyond passion.

[00:07:38] These initial articles in my Rethinking Passion series have been negative.

[00:07:42] My goal was to tear down our assumptions about workplace happiness, because as long as we cling to the passion hypothesis, other factors will remain obscured in its high wattage glare.

[00:07:51] Soon, however, I'll be taking on the positive task of figuring out what does matter.

[00:07:56] I've written at length about the importance of ability and craftsmanship in developing passion for your work, but I also want to explore equally important and equally nuanced factors, such as authenticity.

[00:08:07] Why are we attracted to the stories of people living simply in beautiful surroundings?

[00:08:12] Autonomy.

[00:08:13] What's the importance of having control over when and how you work?

[00:08:16] And mission.

[00:08:17] How vital is a cause for transforming work into something meaningful?

[00:08:22] Stay tuned for this discussion to continue.

[00:08:24] And in the meantime, I welcome your own reflections on the reality, not cliches, of finding fulfilling work.

[00:08:34] You just listened to the post titled, The Passion Trap.

[00:08:37] How the search for your life's work is making your working life miserable.

[00:08:41] By Cal Newport of calnewport.com.

[00:08:44] And thank you to Cal, who like yesterday's author is super accomplished and a person that we narrate across a bunch of our shows.

[00:08:52] He's got a few really popular books.

[00:08:54] Two you may have heard of are So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work.

[00:08:58] Both of those are really highly reviewed.

[00:09:00] He completed his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College back in 2004.

[00:09:05] Got a PhD from MIT in 2009 in computer science.

[00:09:09] He was a postdoctoral associate in the MIT computer science department from 2009 to 2011.

[00:09:16] That same year, he joined Georgetown University as an assistant professor of computer science and was granted tenure in 2017.

[00:09:22] And again, he has multiple popular books that are definitely worth checking out, plus his blog, which is called Study Hacks.

[00:09:29] And last, you can check out his relatively new podcast, which is called Deep Questions.

[00:09:34] And you can find all of that at calnewport.com.

[00:09:38] But if I were you, I'd probably go check out his books first.

[00:09:42] And I think that's going to do it for today.

[00:09:44] I hope you have a happy Thursday if you're listening in real time.

[00:09:47] And thanks so much for being a subscriber.

[00:09:49] It really helps us build our numbers and keep this show going and growing.

[00:09:53] And I will see you back here tomorrow in the Friday show where your optimal life awaits.