Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2015. Jay Yarow is described as executive editor of Business Insider, and the claim that the outlet is among the most important media in the world is also from 2015.
The message “follow your dreams and passions; do what you love” has spread far too widely, when in reality it can be twisted very easily. In fact, I honestly don’t believe successful people have based their lives on this philosophy.
If we followed the “do what you love” message to the letter, most of us would be looking for a way to make money from having sex, or trying to get paid for watching football and drinking beer.
(See: What is the perfect business or job for you?)
The secret lies rather in loving what we do, or in becoming very good at whatever we are doing today. Does that mean that if I have a temporary job as a waiter (and I don’t like hospitality), I have to like waiting tables until it becomes my passion? Yes… and no.
As a teenager, I worked as a waiter. Later I started cold selling door to door. I knew those wouldn’t be jobs for life, but the truth is that both of them gave me the experience I needed to be good at what I would go on to do.
At 18 I had no idea what my passions were or what I wanted to do with my life, but one thing was clear to me: finance bored me. Ironically, for some reason the stock market ended up becoming my passion. And not only my passion: modestly speaking, I turned out to be very good at it.
I never imagined I would have a website or blog that today enjoys (modestly) a certain relevance, among other things because back then the internet as we know it didn’t even exist. And I certainly didn’t see myself advising companies or training sales forces, because at the time I was a very mediocre salesman.
So avoid devoting yourself to your passions, because it is your passions that will end up finding you, as long as you fall in love with what you do, until the “romance” comes to an end.
Do your job as well as you can. Be the best at what you do, whatever it is you do.
Jay Yarow, executive editor of Business Insider, explains that he never dreamed of running or managing a digital news outlet, but once he started working as a journalist, on the project Business Insider represented at the time, he began to fall in love with writing, reporting, creativity and, above all, the company.
Working to turn BI into a new media brand, now among the most important media outlets in the world, motivated him to get better every day, until that job became his passion.
If I had never worked in door-to-door sales, I would never have met certain people who taught me not only how to survive in that world, but how to earn absurd amounts of money using the sales techniques of the great salespeople. The same sales techniques that would later help me beat other companies in different industries.
I didn’t get good at sales because I put in the effort once I landed at a big company with good pay. I got good at sales when I landed in a crappy job where I didn’t sell a thing for months. And I got much better when, just for fun, I started reading books on neuroscience and behavioural psychology, as well as on persuasion, to apply them to sales. That led to me training large sales teams, which today is another branch of my profession that I love and that I never imagined would become a profession for me.
So, even if you don’t understand it right now, stop looking for your passions, because your passion may not exist yet. Just try to learn everything you can from what you are doing and to be the best at what you do, and that way it will be your passion that ends up finding you.
As Steve Jobs said, many things in life can only be understood in hindsight, by connecting the dots looking backwards. Only then will you understand how certain successes and failures led you, 5 or 10 years from now, to the point where you find yourself. But never stop expanding what you know today.
That’s why I love this story by Marc Chernoff, in which he explains how a series of big failures ended up leading him to tremendous success.
In the end, though, if you are unable to love what you do, and getting up to do it every day is torture, it is time to go out and look for something else to do.
See also: 17 hard life and career lessons you should learn in your twenties
Featured image: Nenad Stojković, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
