Benjamin Todd
speaker
4,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 28 May
Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Second, this advice suggests that passion is all you need.
But if a basketball fan works with awful colleagues, receives unfair pay, or finds the tasks they're doing meaningless, they're still going to dislike their job, even if they work for the NBA.
Likewise, someone passionate about acting, but who ends up 40 and unemployed, might have some regrets.
In fact, following your passion can make it harder to secure the ingredients we'll argue are most crucial for being satisfied with your job, because the areas you're passionate about are likely to be the most competitive ones.
A survey of 500 Canadian students showed that their top passions were dance and ice hockey.
Almost 90% said their greatest passion involved either music, art or sport.
But census data collected around the same time shows that under 3% of Canadian jobs were in sport or the arts.
So even if only 1 in 10 of those students followed their passion, the majority would fail.
Moreover, even if you succeed in getting a job, researchers have found that the degree of match between your interests and your job correlates only weakly with job satisfaction.
The third problem is that telling people to focus on what they're already passionate about can make them needlessly limit their options.
If you're passionate about literature, it's easy to think that you must become a writer to have a satisfying career.
But in fact, there are probably many other jobs that could satisfy you, so long as they're fulfilling in other ways.
Moreover, our interests change over time, and more than we expect.
Think back to what you were most interested in five years ago, and you'll probably find it's pretty different from what you're interested in today.
This means your interests are not in a specially stable basis for career planning.
More perniciously, people often believe that their one true passion will be immediately obvious, leading them to eliminate options that don't feel rewarding from the get-go.
But most careers are a grind at the entry level, and you need to try things to learn what fits.
That means it's normal not to know what you're passionate about right away.
Instead, as we're going to see, passion is something you develop over time, often in entirely unexpected directions.
We've worked with hundreds of people who found exactly this.
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