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Why you shouldn’t follow your passion blindly

Career Tips
 Photo: Courtesy

 

For the past couple of years, anyone in a position to give career advice led with the invariable ‘follow your passion’ when asked how to find happiness in your work. And then research started showing that even if you followed your passion, you could still fail but failure was a good thing.

For most of us, failure is the word that strikes fear into our hearts. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

When you live in an ecosystem where risk taking is not rewarded but could be the difference between having a roof over your head and not, then failure is an abject existence, and one to be avoided at all costs.

 But increasingly, passion has been found to be interlinked to wanting to get out of bed in the morning and excelling at what you do because of what it taps inside of us.

Trust your instincts

Call it your six sense or your gut feeling, your instincts will always tell you what to do. That continuously nagging feeling that keeps telling you there’s bigger and better out there, and that you are a part of it is right.

Once you are clear on this, execution is only half the battle. Your next big task is figuring out how to monetise your passion. The reason why the ‘follow your passion’ advice became outdated was the ‘and then what’ part.

Do your research and talk to anyone and everyone who might have some insights into your idea.

Stay open

Sometimes our paths take unexpected detours, leading us to wonder if we were wrong all along. The key is to be connected to the outcome but not to the way we get there.

For example, you could decide you want to strike out and open your business in line with your passion but in the process meet someone who has an established brand looking for someone to partner with within their organisation.

If you are fixated with running your own firm you could say no to this while it would allow you to learn within a protected environment.

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