Is “Find your passion” really a good way to choose a course?
It’s advice that is as old as the sun: “Find your passion, and you’ll never do another day’s work in your life”.
Or when you are heading off to university “Choose a course that you are passionate about”.
I’ve heard so many university recruiters use this line, and I’m more guilty than most. I ran marketing campaigns with “Find your passion” as the main message. We even had it on the front cover of the prospectus at the University of Leicester around 15 years ago 🤦.
But, most careers advisers nowadays would say that such advice is deeply unhelpful. It creates the expectation that every young person should have found their passion. And since most of you simply haven’t found your passion while still at school, it just creates unnecessary pressure on you. Which in turn just makes you freeze; unsure of how to progress and how to choose what to do next.
However, perhaps there is something to be said for working out ways to explore your potential passions; how to find challenges, industries, and roles that might feel more like you are making a difference, and less like you are doing a job.
So how can you go about exploring what yours might be?
Let go the idea of a linear career
Firstly, you need to let go of the idea that you’ll have a single linear career, where your choice of course leads directly to your career which will progress straightforwardly from a junior role, through middle management to a senior role.
For the large majority of you, your career will look nothing like this. Your first job may have some connection with your course, but that connection might be pretty loose. And over your lifetime, you’ll likely have several careers, in different roles and possibly different industries.
That idea you have that your career can be planned in a linear way, progressing logically from start to end? You need to let it go.
Instead, recognise that finding your so-called passion will be a journey.
And more than that, you probably won’t find it at all, you’ll actually create it over time, by bringing together the things that interest you, the challenges you want to solve, and the unique perspective and skills that you alone have.
What are your interests?
A great way to start exploring is by looking at your interests, and what you might be able to do with them. By interests, I mean things you would read about, look at, listen to, watch or do, just because you want to. They could be hobbies that you are active in, things you enjoy at school, or just things on social media that would make you stop scrolling, and click.
Freelance Careers Adviser Lis Maguire recently published an incredible list of all the ways you can put interests to work, and it's brilliant.
Perhaps you are interested in football, or maybe you are simply a fan of music? Most people will think of these things as hobbies that you can’t really make a career of.
But in fact with each of these you could:
Do / play / perform it
Write it or write about it
Use it as a channel for change
Commentate on it
Predict trends
Research it
Teach it or train people in it
Support it
Make sure it is inclusive
Promote it
Sell it
Advocate for those who do it
Recruit new talent to it
Assess people involved in it
Sell merchandise of it
Interpret for people who are involved
Supply to the industry
Look after the people who do it (health & wellbeing)
Organise it
Manage or support its creation
Keep people safe in it
Cost it out
House it or host it
Capture it through art
Keep on enjoying it!
Suddenly a career in something you are interested in doesn’t seem so unlikely does it?
The above options work for a huge range of interests that you might have, and the great thing is you don’t need to know right now exactly which of the above would be the right thing for you.
You might look at the list above and circle a few of the things that sound interesting, and you might decide to strike some of them off your list.
But right now, you don’t need to make a final decision about which is right for you, instead you just need to put yourself in a position where you are learning more about your interests, and building skills that will help you turn it from an interest into a career.
Finding a course at university that enables you to learn more about your biggest interest could be a really good start to your journey.
What challenges and problems do you want to solve?
Secondly, an approach recommended by JP Michel in his new book “The World Needs You: A New Mindset for Student Career Exploration” is to consider not what job you would like to do, but what problem you see that you’d like to solve.
And just like looking at interests, you don’t need to know exactly how you want to solve it right now, you just need to put yourself in a position where you can learn more about the problem, and learn more about the people who are out there solving it.
So, for example, climate change is probably the biggest problem that humanity faces right now, but the people who have decided they want to solve it aren’t all climate change scientists.
There are, of course, scientists, engineers and computer programmers working on the challenge. But there are also politicians, campaigners, lawyers, human resource managers, accountants, marketers, teachers and consultants.
What they all have in common is that at some point in their lives, they have made it their business to learn about climate change, and they have reflected on their interests and skills in order to find a way to help address the challenge..
So is there a challenge you would be interested in helping to solve? And can you think of a useful way to learn more about it?
Is there a university course you could take, a company you could research, or an individual you can talk to who can help you work out how to explore the challenge further?
What makes you unique and different?
Finally, I’d encourage you to recognise that your uniqueness, the things that make you unusual and different from others, are likely to be the most valuable assets that you have. Nobody can compete with you at being you. So embrace this and try to work out what makes you different, special and unique.
One way to do this is to look into taking some kind of a psychometric test. There are hundreds of these out there, some freely available, and some that you pay for. Your school may even have some available for you to use through online platforms such as Unifrog.
They typically fall into two categories: aptitude tests, and personality tests.
Aptitude tests measure your abilities in different skills, such as verbal reasoning, numeracy, situational judgement, visual reasoning and so forth. For you, at this stage in your journey, they can simply be a useful way to work out where your strengths lie.
Don’t use these tests to compare yourself to others (there is quite enough of that already in the school curriculum!). Instead, use them to discover what you are best at. For example, knowing that your verbal reasoning is stronger than your numeracy can be really helpful in helping you know which potential career avenues to explore.
With personality tests, most nowadays are regarded as ‘pseudoscience’ by scientists. Even the most famous and widely used test of all, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), has been solidly debunked as having questionable validity and reliability.
But, what Myers-Briggs (and other such personality tests) can give you, is an understanding that different people look at the world in different ways. In essence, your world view, shaped by your DNA and your life experience, is different from everyone else’s.
This difference is very good news. It means that when we work together in teams, we bring different perspectives to a problem, and we can solve it more easily than we could alone.
It also means that you don’t need to be better or cleverer than anyone else in the team; you just need to bring your own unique perspective.
Knowing how you are different and unique is a great way to help you work out how you might be able to build a career in something that interests you, and how you might help solve problems and challenges that motivate you.
You can try a very simple free test, called the Buzz Quiz now. It’s a simplified version of Myers Briggs, so treat the results with extreme caution. But it is a good starting point in self-reflection and understanding that your perspective is not the same as everyone else’s.
Taking action right now
So, if you have been told to study something you are passionate about, and you have no idea what that might be, you can make a start exploring by doing these three things:
Write down the things that interest you most. Which of the 25 things in Liz Maguire’s table could you apply to these interests? Which could you see yourself doing in the future? And what could you study to learn more?
Write down any challenges that you think might be interesting to solve? Which companies and people are currently working on the problems, and what did they study? What would you need to learn about in order to become part of the solution?
Take a test to work out your own strengths and uniqueness. What makes you stand out, and how can you harness your uniqueness when working with others? Try the Buzz Quiz now.
You almost certainly won’t find your passion straight away, but you’ll have made a great start on your journey towards a career that has purpose for you.
