Greenbirch

Find your passion vs transform your current career

23 posts in this topic

Thank you so much for all the replies! It was very interesting to read your thoughts on the subject. 

So, science supports the craftsman mindset, but I am also convinced by the arguments here that point out that it's not that simple. Do you believe in your skill, and does your career match your most meaningful values? These were a good point; for example, if someone who loves nature ends up using their skills in service of a company that causes great harm to the environment, that person would most likely not be very fulfilled - on the contrary. But in that example the situation could perhaps be fixed by simply changing companies. Maybe a radical example could be that even if someone became the best in the world at killing people, it would not fulfill them but make them miserable instead. 

Based on your replies I gather that for both approaches, responsibility is required: You should know yourself and build your passion. So there is no predetermined passion that makes life easy; you need to develop your skill, cultivate your passion and engage in deliberate practice. In fact, the craftsman mindset is needed for both cases.

Based on this, a career change and not transforming your current career could be a sensible option if you have a non-work passion in which you already have some skill. So someone has career capital a hobby and are wondering if they should switch careers. In this case, in addition to considering which path fits your values, the determining factor could be estimating what would happen in the long run with each choice. If you estimate that your career capital in your hobby skill will overtake your work skill career capital at some point, change is sensible because you will accumulate more career capital during your lifetime. 

Of course, as pointed out, not every hobby can be turned into something that people want to give you money for. Or so it seems. On the other hand, today, people seem to create careers out of all kinds of hobbies, as witnessed by successful YouTube channels.

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@Greenbirch cal newport also have a solution for that with hes top performer course one of it is that you find people you admire and then figure out what skill made them valuable and then get good at it. So the chance of ending up in a bad situation is probably not very likely if you do it correctly.

the people you admire could have traits that match your deepest values and then you could re create how they got them for yourself.

if someone have become great at something so can you by the methods in the top performer course. Which is based on scientific research on expertise like deliberate practice, deep work, research methods to find rarer and valuable skills to get good which should work for everyone.

but yes responsibility is required. :) 

Edited by BjarkeT

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