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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
One problem is that it suggests that passion is all you need.
But even if you're deeply interested in the work, if you lack the six ingredients from above, you'll still be unsatisfied.
If a basketball fan gets a job involving basketball, but works with people they hate, receives unfair pay, or finds the work meaningless, they're still going to dislike their job.
In fact, following your passion can make it harder to satisfy the six ingredients, because the areas you're passionate about are likely to be the most competitive, which makes it harder to find a good job.
And there's a bar chart here that compares students passionate about sports, arts or music, which is around 80% or more, with occupations in art, culture, recreation and sport, which seems to only be a few percent.
A second problem is that many people don't feel like they have a career-relevant passion.
Telling them to follow their passion makes them feel inadequate.
If you don't have a passion, don't worry, you can still find work you'll become passionate about.
And the third problem is that it can make people needlessly limit their options.
If you're interested in literature, it's easy to think that you must become a writer to have a satisfying career and ignore other options.
It's also easy to have the idea that your one true passion will be immediately obvious and eliminate options that aren't immediately satisfying.
But in fact, you can become passionate about new areas.
If your work helps others, you practice to get good at it, you work on engaging tasks, and you work with people you'd like, then you'll become passionate about it.
The six ingredients are all about the context of the work, not the content.
Twenty years ago, we would never have imagined being passionate about giving career advice, but here we are writing this book.
Many successful people are passionate, but often their passion developed alongside their success and took a long time to discover rather than coming first.
Steve Jobs started out passionate about Zen Buddhism.
He got into technology as a way to make some quick cash.
But as he became successful, his passion grew until he became the most famous advocate of doing what you love.
In reality, rather than having a single passion, our interests change often, and more than we expect.
Showing 1061–1080 of 4,140 · page 54 of 207
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