30 5 Drawbacks to Following Your Passion
Learning Outcomes
- Apply the reading process to “5 Drawbacks to Following Your Passion.”
- Summarize the article.
- Respond to the article.
- Interview people to conduct research about how they make career decisions.
Preview the Article
Follow the steps below to preview the article “5 Drawbacks to Following Your Passion.” Ideally, you should print the article and write your responses in the margins of the printed copy. To read more about previewing, visit the chapter on previewing a reading.
- Read the title. What does it make you think about? What do you think the article is about? What questions do you have? Record your predictions and questions on the printed copy of the article next to the title.
- Visit Erin A. Cech’s website to learn more about her interests, research, and publication. Based on the content of her website, make some predictions about “5 Drawbacks to Following Your Passion.” Record them on the printed copy.
- Read the first three paragraphs. What additional predictions do you now have about the article? What additional questions do you have? Record them on the printed copy of the article.
- Scan the article and notice the headings (e.g. The passion principle) within the article. What additional thoughts or questions do these raise? Record them on the printed copy of the article.
- Scan the bolded and underlined vocabulary in the article. If there are any words that you do not know well, look them up in a print or online dictionary and write some notes about their meanings on the printed copy of the article. Keep in mind that some words have multiple meanings. For example, the phrase social networks is used in paragraph 10; however, it does not refer to networks on social media. You may need to read the sentence containing the word to understand the word’s usage.
- Based on your preview of the article, what do you think is the central point of the article? (Don’t worry if you are not sure. This is a prediction or guess – you do not have to be correct as long as you are engaging your brain.) Record your prediction on the printed copy of the article.
- Based on your preview, do you predict that the article is narrative, expository, or argumentative?
Read Interactively
Now, read the article using the guidelines from the chapter on reading interactively. As you read, follow these steps to engage with the text.
- Pause to confirm or revise your predictions and to answer the questions you posed while previewing the article. Write down those revised predictions and responses to the questions as you read. If you cannot find the answers to your questions, save them for further research and discussion.
- Pause at other points to check for understanding of what you just read. Can you explain key ideas in your own words yet? If not, reread to clarify. Ideas that come later in a text build on the previous ones. Therefore, it makes no sense to keep reading if you did not understand something or if you became distracted. Anyone can become distracted while reading, so don’t hesitate to use the strategy of rereading when necessary.
- Pay attention to any vocabulary words that are confusing. Look up the words in a dictionary if they are interfering with your understanding, or mark them to return to later.
- Record any opinions or reactions you have to the reading in the margins of the article.
- Write down any further questions that develop as you read.
5 drawbacks to following your passion
Erin A. Cech, University of Michigan
June 29, 2022
1 After earning bachelor’s degrees in engineering and sociology, I was determined to do what I love. I headed straight to graduate school to investigate the social problems that frightened and fascinated me.
2 For almost a decade, I told everyone I encountered – students, cousins, baristas at the coffee shop I frequented – that they should do the same. “Follow your passion,” I counseled. “You can figure out the employment stuff later.”
3 It wasn’t until I began to research this widely accepted career advice that I understood how problematic – and rooted in privilege – it really was.
The passion principle
4 As a sociologist who examines workforce culture and inequalities, I interviewed college students and professional workers to learn what it really meant to pursue their dreams, which I will refer to here as the passion principle. I was stunned by what I found out about this principle in the research for my book “The Trouble with Passion.”
5 I examined surveys that show the American public has held the passion principle in high regard as a career decision-making priority since the 1980s. And its popularity is even stronger among those facing pandemic-related job instability.
6 My interviews revealed that proponents of the passion principle found it compelling because they believed that following one’s passion can provide workers with both the motivation necessary to work hard and a place to find fulfillment.
7 Yet, what I found is that following one’s passion does not necessarily lead to fulfillment, but is one of the most powerful cultural forces perpetuating overwork. I also found that promoting the pursuit of one’s passion helps perpetuate social inequalities due to the fact that not everyone has the same economic resources to allow them to pursue their passion with ease. What follows are five major pitfalls of the passion principle that I discovered through my research.
1. Reinforces social inequality
8 While the passion principle is broadly popular, not everyone has the necessary resources to turn their passion into a stable, good-paying job.
9 Passion-seekers from wealthy families are better able to wait until a job in their passion comes along without worrying about student loans in the meantime. They are also better situated to take unpaid internships to get their foot in the door while their parents pay their rent or let them live at home.
10 And they often have access to parents’ social networks to help them find jobs. Surveys revealed that working-class and first-generation college graduates, regardless of their career field, are more likely than their wealthier peers to end up in low-paying unskilled jobs when they pursue their passion.
11 Colleges and universities, workplaces and career counselors who promote the “follow your passion” path for everyone, without leveling the playing field, help perpetuate socioeconomic inequalities among career aspirants.
12 Thus, those who promote the “follow your passion” path for everyone might be ignoring the fact that not everyone is equally able to find success while following that advice.
2. A threat to well-being
13 My research revealed that passion proponents see the pursuit of one’s passion as a good way to decide on a career, not only because having work in one’s passion might lead to a good job, but because it is believed to lead to a good life. To achieve this, passion-seekers invest much of their own sense of identity in their work.
14 Yet, the labor force is not structured around the goal of nurturing our authentic sense of self. Indeed, studies of laid-off workers have illustrated that those who were passionate about their work felt as though they lost a part of their identity when they lost their jobs, along with their source of income.
15 When we rely on our jobs to give us a sense of purpose, we place our identities at the mercy of the global economy.
3. Promotes exploitation
16 It’s not just well-off passion-seekers who benefit from the passion principle. Employers of passionate workers do, too. I conducted an experiment to see how potential employers would respond to job applicants who expressed different reasons for being interested in a job.
17 Not only do potential employers prefer passionate applicants over applicants who wanted the job for other reasons, but employers knowingly exploited this passion: Potential employers showed greater interest in passionate applicants in part because employers believed the applicants would work hard at their jobs without expecting an increase in pay.
4. Reinforces the culture of overwork
18 In conversations with college students and college-educated workers, I found that a substantial number were willing to sacrifice a good salary, job stability and leisure time to work in a job they love. Nearly half – or 46% – of college-educated workers I surveyed ranked interest or passion for the work as their first priority in a future job. This compared to only 21% who prioritized salary and 15% who prioritized work-family balance. Among those I interviewed, there were those who said they would willingly “eat ramen noodles every night” and “work 90 hours a week” if it meant they could follow their passion.
19 Although many professionals seek work in their area of passion precisely because they want to avoid the drudgery of working long hours doing tasks they aren’t personally committed to, passion-seeking ironically perpetuates the cultural expectations of overwork. Most passion-seekers I spoke to were willing to work long hours as long as it was work about which they were passionate.
5. Dismisses labor market inequality
20 I find that the passion principle isn’t just a guide that its followers use to make decisions about their own lives. For many, it also serves as an explanation for workforce inequality. For example, compared to those who don’t adhere to the passion principle, proponents were more likely to say women aren’t represented well in engineering because they followed their passion elsewhere, rather than acknowledging the deep structural and cultural roots of this underrepresentation. In other words, passion principle proponents tend to explain away patterns of labor market inequality as the benign result of individual passion-seeking.
Avoiding pitfalls
21 To avoid these pitfalls, people may want to base their career decisions on more than whether those decisions represent their passion. What do you need from your work in addition to a paycheck? Predictable hours? Enjoyable colleagues? Benefits? A respectful boss?
22 For those who are already employed in jobs you are passionate about, I encourage you to diversify your portfolio of the ways in which you make meaning – to nurture hobbies, activities, community service and identities that exist wholly outside of work. How can you make time to invest in these other ways to find purpose and satisfaction?
23 Another factor to consider is whether you are being fairly compensated for the extra passion-fueled efforts you contribute to your job. If you work for a company, does your manager know that you spent weekends reading books on team leadership or mentoring the newest member of your team after hours? We contribute to our own exploitation if we do uncompensated work for our job out of our passion for it.
24 My research for “The Trouble with Passion” raises sobering questions about standard approaches to mentoring and career advising. Every year, millions of high school and college graduates gear up to enter the labor force full time, and millions more reevaluate their jobs. It is vital that the friends, parents, teachers and career coaches who counsel them begin to question if advising them to pursue their passion is something that could end up doing more harm than good.
Erin A. Cech, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Reflect
After reading the article, use the following questions to reflect on the content of the article and your reading process. See the chapter about reflecting for a discussion of why this is a crucial step.
- Try to paraphrase the main idea in a sentence. This may be challenging because you have read the article only once. If you are struggling, do your best. You can refine this when you reread and summarize the article.
- Is the article primarily narrative, expository, or argumentative? What is the purpose of the article? In other words, why do you think the author wrote it?
- Which predictions were accurate, and which did you have to revise?
- As you previewed the article, you wrote questions. What questions remain unanswered after reading the article?
- What else do you want to know about the article or topic of the reading? Write down any additional questions.
- How did previewing the article help you to understand and engage with the text while reading?
- Where did you struggle to understand something in the text, and how did you work through it?
- What, if anything, could you have done differently to improve your reading process?
Summarize
Complete a summary of the article by following these steps. Make sure you have read the chapters about Reading to Summarize before proceeding with the summary.
- Reread the article and complete the Summary Notes. See Preparing to Summarize for a review of this topic and an example.
- Then, use your Summary Notes to write a one-paragraph summary of the article. See Writing a Summary for a review of this topic and an example. Make sure that you include in-text citations and the Work Cited.
- Use the self-assessment/peer review questions from Evaluating a Summary to self-assess your summary or invite a peer to provide feedback.
- Use the self-assessment or peer feedback to make changes to your summary.
Make sure you are comfortable with your summary before advancing to the response. If you misunderstand something in the article, then your response may be skewed based on that misunderstanding.
Respond
Write a response to the article by following these steps. Make sure you have read the chapters about Reading to Respond before proceeding with the summary.
- Use the Response Questions from Preparing to Respond to brainstorm possible ideas for your response. See the example in that same chapter.
- Read over your replies to the Response Questions. Choose one idea to write about in your response. Express that idea in a topic sentence. See Writing a Topic Sentence for a Response for examples. Ask a peer for feedback on your topic sentence.
- Brainstorm about possible support you could use in your response. See Generating Support for a Response for examples.
- Use your topic sentence and ideas from the list of support to write a one-paragraph response. See Writing a Response writing guidelines and examples. Make sure that you include the Work Cited and in-text citations for any quotes or specific ideas from the article.
- Use the self-assessment/peer review questions from Evaluating a Response to evaluate your response or have a peer provide feedback.
- Use the self-assessment or peer feedback to make improvements to your response.
Extend: Research and Discuss
One method of conducting research is to interview people and gain their perspectives first hand. Interview people you know who are working in established jobs or careers and those who have changed jobs or careers. Ask them how they chose their jobs or careers. Did they base their choices on passion or other factors? Are they satisfied with their decisions? Do they wish they had used other factors to make their decisions? Share your findings with your peers.