Finding Your Passion is the Wrong Pursuit

Recently, I came across Cal Newport's work on the Deep Life; particularly his concept of "Career Capital"

I grew up in the late 80s / early 90s, which makes me a millenial. As a millenial, the counter culture at the time was all about pursuing your passion as a career. You would hear phrases like "if you love what you do, yo will never work a single day of your life". This sounds great in theory. But,

How does one go about finding their true passion?

If you haven't found your passion, what do you do in the mean time?

Amongst my peers, i noticed that there were two types of people: the ones who knew what they were going to do as a career, and the ones who had no idea. I would categorize myself in the second bucket.

Some time later, I decided to pursue Engineering for one simple reason: I liked playing with my home computer so that must be closest to "my passion". When I say "play with the computer" I don't mean it in the "I code for fun" sense, in fact I didn't know how to code until I went to university. Looking back, pursuing engineering was just a struck of luck from the perspective of career opportunities in this field (as I later found).

My time in Engineering was not something that I found myself to be passionate about

In university, it was extremely hard to keep up and do well because of my weak background in math and coding. I would notice how easy these abstract concepts were for my peers to grasp and I would rage internally.

This was clearly not my passion, but now I was too deep (sunk cost fallacy). I had to push to the end so that my tuition and time isn't wasted, and so that I can hopefully find a job that I don't hate in the future.. If I hate it, well ... thats in the future -- let's not think about this for now.

After graduation, I stumbled onto my first job, then I switched to my second job; both as a Software Engineer. It was during my second job that I faced so many challenges and growth because the company was moving so fast, my coworkers were very smart, and I had the pressure to keep up. All this while knowing that coding wasn't my passion.

Was this going to be the rest of my adult life? Doing work that pays me, but that I'm not passionate about? I don't even know what my passion is to this date!

Then I stumbled upon Cal Newport's Idea of Career Capital and the Deep Life

The concept of Career Capital is simple.

It's not reliable to try to find your passion first, then find work that follows your passion, because most people don't know what their passion is. Passion is an idea that got sold to us without us knowing, and got programmed in the collective psyche of our generation.

Instead, what is more reliable to do is to accumulate what Cal calls "Career Capital", by doing great work in whichever area we are currently in -- by being reliable, and trustworthy (aka career capital). We can then trade this Career Capital for things that can get us a better life that deeply resonates with us. Examples of this could be, getting money to get us a nice lifestyle, becoming trustworthy at our work so that we can gain better opportunities that interests us more, etc.

This is when the lightbulb lit in my head. I deeply knew that finding your passion wasn't the answer, and know I found the validation I needed. All I need to do now is to become great at my job, accumulate Career Capital, and trade this for improvements in my life that are most meaningful to me.

The lesson of the story here is that Finding Your Passion in you Career might be a thankless pursuit; instead, focus on accumulating Career Capital and trade this to build the life that you want; the kind of life that deeply resonates with you.