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Introspection
The “Follow Your Passion” Dilemma
Even Steve Jobs Didn’t Follow His Passion
It’s a phrase we’ve all heard: follow your passion.
Steve Jobs said it in his Stanford commencement speech. But look at his actual path. He dropped out of college, took a calligraphy class on a whim, travelled to India, worked the night shift at Atari, and started Apple in a garage, selling circuit boards to hobbyists.
That is not the route of a man who had it all figured out from day one.
The myth we’ve been sold
The passion narrative goes like this: somewhere inside you, a fully formed passion waits to be discovered. Find it, and everything clicks.
It sounds great. It is also mostly wrong.
Cal Newport, the Georgetown computer science professor who wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You, studied people who genuinely love their work. Most of them didn’t begin with a clear passion. They developed one over the years, through experience and through getting good at something.
Passion comes after competence, not before.
I’ve lived this. I didn’t grow up dreaming about developer platforms or product management. I took a software job two decades ago because it…
