This Is The Worst Career Advice You Can Get
April 21, 2011 
16 Comments
One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only received but given is to “do what you love.”
Forget that. It’s absurd. I have been writing since before I even knew how to write – when I was a preschooler I dictated my writing to my dad. And you might not be in preschool, but if you are in touch with who you are, that sort of behavior continues: You do what you love no matter what, because you love it, not because you get paid to do it.
So you will say, “But look. Now you are getting paid to do what you love. You are so lucky.” But it’s not true. I mean, there are things I enjoy more, and I discover new things I love all the time. We are each multifaceted, multilayered, and complicated, and if you are reading this blog, you probably devote a large part of your life to learning about yourself. And self-discovery is a process; none us loves just one thing.
Career decisions are not decisions about what do I love most. Career decisions are about what kind of life do I want to set up for myself. After all, how could you possibly pick one thing you love to do?
The world reveals to you all that you love by what you spend time on. Try stuff. If you like it, you’ll go back to it. I recently tried Pilates. I didn’t want to try, but a friend said she loved the teacher, so I went. I loved it. I have taken it three times a week ever since, and it’s changed me.
Often, the thing we should do for our career is something we would only do if we were getting a reward. If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you’d do even if you didn’t get paid, you’ll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money.
The pressure we feel to find a perfect career is insane. And, given that people are trying to find it before they are thirty, in order to avoid both a quarter life crisis and a biological-clock crisis, the pressure is enough to push people over the edge. Which is why one of the highest risk times for depression in life is in one’s early twenties when people realize how totally impossible it is to simply “do what you love.”
Here’s some practical advice: Do not do what you love; do what you are. It’s how I chose my career. I bought the book with that title – maybe my favorite career book of all time – and I took the quickie version of the Myers-Briggs test. The book gave me a list of my strengths, and a list of jobs where I would likely succeed based on those strengths.
Relationships make your life great, not jobs. But a job can ruin your life – make you feel out of control in terms of your time or your ability to accomplish goals – but no job will make your life complete. It’s a myth mostly propagated by people who tell you to do what you love. Doing what you love will make you feel fulfilled. But you don’t need to get paid for it.
A job can save your life, though. If you are lost, and lonely, and wondering how you’ll ever find your way in this world, take a job. Any job. Because structure, and regular contact with regular people, and a method of contributing to a larger group are all things that help us recalibrate ourselves.
So if you are overwhelmed with the task of “doing what you love” you should recognize that you are totally normal, and maybe you should just forget it. Just do something that caters to your strengths. Do anything.
And if you are so overwhelmed that you feel depression coming on, consider that a job might save you. Take one. Doing work and being valued in the community is important. For better or worse, we value people with money. Earn some. Doing work you love is not so important. We value love in relationships. Make some.
This post was adapted from Penelope Trunk’s new book of career advice, which is available now. The book is a hardback, limited edition, and Penelope will sign and number each book.
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This is without a doubt one of the best pieces of advice I have read in a long time.
We do need work to feel important, to feel we are making a contribution, to make money to pay the bills. In addition, the social contact aspect is also very important for most people.
We all have our strengths and we definitely should use our strengths to add value to our life as well as the lives of others. That is what a job can do.
The trap I see people getting into is they come to the point where they think they are their job. They begin to feel trapped in their job, which they come to dislike because money no longer is the driving motivator and they no longer enjoy the satisfaction they once did.
I see too many people go to their job, come home exhausted, mainly due to stress, and sit in front of the TV or computer chatting or surfing the evening away, not feeling fulfilled at all.
You must come to a point in your life where you say, enough is enough. Turn off the TV, unplug the Internet, and spend time discovering things that you are not only good at but that you also love doing.
Take those passions and turn them into a part-time home business, using the Internet. I say Internet because it is the easiest way to get started on a budget. Your home business will give you tax breaks that your job won’t. This helps cover some of your business start-up cost.
Now, you may never be able to leave your day job and you may not want to because of the social contacts it provides.
However, now you will be doing something you love, adding value to the lives of others, and perhaps making some extra money along the way.
A bonus is that you will enjoy life more, by not wasting time in front of the TV or dong mindless things on the computer.
So as career advice, doing what you love may not be the most sound. However, for life advice and fulfillment advice Doing What You Love is the best advice you can receive.
Gary Gile recently posted..Why being Passionate in Your Business is Critical- and not Enough
Good article and filled with common sense. I’d like to see more of Ms. Trunks work.
In today’s environment doing what you love may not be possible. If you need a job, and many of us do, you do what you can get hired for. If anyone thinks they can hold out for what you love good luck to them.
Excellent advice. If you limit yourself only to what you love, you may miss opportunities to grow and find other things that you will also love or at least like.
I’ve made my biggest advances in life when I stepped out of my comfort zone and took a chance with something new and different. Sometimes blind faith and action lead you in a positive direction you never imagined.
I would put a different slant on the point ” Do not what you love, do what you are”. Make choices with your career that enable you to do what you love.
What is a successful career? It means different things for different people. Make choices that make you happy. If your job doesn’t tick that particular box but it pays the bills, find stuff away from the working day that does.
Insightful, thought provoking, intelligent, a great read and great advice. Thank you!
Good article…I feel that if you are productive in the job that you choose, and are part of what makes your company a success (assuming that you are getting a fair to good monitary reward from it), you will wake up everyday wanting to go to work.
I loved this piece and passed it on to my son. I think maybe there’s another pitfall for trying to build a career doing what you love. Many times, when one achieves this goal, the result actually destroys the enjoyment of the activity.
What an interesting and insightful article. I’d like to read more from this author. Her advice may not be what some people want to hear, but her pragmatic approach makes a lot of good sense.
I don’t know, being a professional metal musician is pretty much all I ever want to be; music is my everything and I would love nothing more than to go out and play and entertain a crowd whilst having fun myself as well.
I’m Jame Charles and am 40 years old..I saw your profile it was lovely ..I will love to know you more better..you can add me so we can get to know each other more better…jame.charles@yahoo.com..Also send me yours so i can add you too..
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I can’t say this is advice I would follow myself or reiterate to others. “Love” in this article is a misnomer to me – what we’re really talking about here is passion, enthusiasm, a drive to solve and create. This is exactly the qualities that makes a successful career.
“Often, the thing we should do for our career is something we would only do if we were getting a reward.”
Advice like this is dangerous. Though most business models like to claim that reward systems are THE most important way to motivate employees, it is provably false. (brilliantly discussed by Daniel Pink at Ted Talks here in the Surprising Science of Motivation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y)
NY Times Best Selling Author Josh Linkner also talks a lot about passion and creativity in business, of all things: http://www.joshlinkner.com
The absolute best example is from Randy Pausch whose Last Lecture on Achieving Dreams is the single most inspiring and practical case study in how to live, professionally and otherwise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
I cannot agree ever that we should discourage passion and creativity in life and business. There are examples too numerous to list that proove this advice to be detrimental to real happiness in general.
Stop telling people to chase dollars; start telling them to chase dreams.
I don’t see anything wrong with doing what you love. After working at a job that I hated for far longer than I should have, switching things up to do something that I actually enjoy has dramatically improved my quality of life.
I do agree with do what you are and have found considerable success in my career after aligning it with my top personal values.
Sarah Says recently posted..Choosing A Career In Welding
Agreed. ‘Love’ is different from ‘passion’ but it’s generally what is meant from the ‘do what you love’ phrase. If everyone did something that they wouldn’t do without a reward? Goodbye animation and video games. They have a high turnover rate already, but the few that stay and don’t burn out? They do it because they have passion for the medium they’re working in.
I can see this working for some people. Hobbies are not the same as careers. But not for someone that eats, breathes, and dreams about the very thing that they are passionate about.
Unquestionably, this is the best pieces of advice I have come across in a long time.
I get that it is a mistake to look for a job like we look for the perfect pair of jeans refusing to accept anything less than perfection, but I do think we need to find a way to engage our passions in the work we do. Perhaps we need simply to adjust our perspective and “Love what we do.” I have worked a number of different jobs, some more naturally suited to my passions than others but in every case I found something about the job I could be passionate about and focused my efforts there.
Lee Reed recently posted..‘Epic’ job search strategy for keeping discouragement at bay