Poetry Sung

Please Sing At My Funeral

That's Called Strength Mothaf*ckaaaas!

Perfect

Follow a Career Passion? Let It Follow You

by Cal Newport

Published: September 29th 2012, New York Times

IN the spring of 2004, during my senior year of college, I faced a hard decision about my future career. I had a job offer from Microsoft and an acceptance letter from the computer science doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had also just handed in the manuscript for my first nonfiction book, which opened the option of becoming a full-time writer. These are three strikingly different career paths, and I had to choose which one was right for me.

For many of my peers, this decision would have been fraught with anxiety. Growing up, we were told by guidance counselors, career advice books, the news media and others to “follow our passion.” This advice assumes that we all have a pre-existing passion waiting to be discovered. If we have the courage to discover this calling and to match it to our livelihood, the thinking goes, we’ll end up happy. If we lack this courage, we’ll end up bored and unfulfilled — or, worse, in law school.

To a small group of people, this advice makes sense, because they have a clear passion. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be doctors, writers, musicians and so on, and can’t imagine being anything else.

But this philosophy puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us — and demands long deliberation. If we’re not careful, it tells us, we may end up missing our true calling. And even after we make a choice, we’re still not free from its effects. Every time our work becomes hard, we are pushed toward an existential crisis, centered on what for many is an obnoxiously unanswerable question: “Is this what I’m really meant to be doing?” This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping.

As I considered my options during my senior year of college, I knew all about this Cult of Passion and its demands. But I chose to ignore it. The alternative career philosophy that drove me is based on this simple premise: The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” offers a nice summary of this literature.)

These traits can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned. Building valuable skills is hard and takes time. For someone in a new position, the right question is not, “What is this job offering me?” but, instead, “What am I offering this job?”

RETURNING to my story, I decided after only minimal deliberation to go to M.I.T. True to my alternative career philosophy, I was confident that all three of my career options could be transformed into a source of passion, and this confidence freed me from worry about making a wrong choice. I ended up choosing M.I.T., mainly because of a slight preference for the East Coast, but I would have been equally content heading out to Microsoft’s headquarters near Seattle. Or, with the advance from my first book, I could have hunkered down in a quiet town to write.

During my initial years as a graduate student, I certainly didn’t enjoy an unshakable sense that I had found my true calling. The beginning of doctoral training can be rough. You’re not yet skilled enough to make contributions to the research literature, which can be frustrating. And at a place like M.I.T., you’re surrounded by brilliance, which can make you question whether you belong.

Had I subscribed to the “follow our passion” orthodoxy, I probably would have left during those first years, worried that I didn’t feel love for my work every day. But I knew that my sense of fulfillment would grow over time, as I became better at my job. So I worked hard, and, as my competence grew, so did my engagement.

Today, I’m a computer science professor at Georgetown University, and I love my job. The most important lesson I can draw from my experience is that this love has nothing to do with figuring out at an early age that I was meant to be a professor. There’s nothing special about my choosing this particular path. What mattered is what I did once I made my choice.

To other young people who constantly wonder if the grass might be greener on the other side of the occupational fence, I offer this advice: Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.

Hangover

If I were a poet, I would rummage in the tiny pockets of my memory for the best words to tell my story. I would seek north and south, east and west for the right words because this thing that I wanted to tell deserve not just any words, but the right words. And once I did, I would take these handful and weave them--one by one--to form a zipper, that would stretched from one end of deep memories to another of silent combustion of wordless sentiments; so that when a stranger read my story, that zipper could tear open and he or she could taste it--that animal that stretched from deep memories to wordless emotions--pristine and untainted. Alas, these words in my hands, they are not the best, nor are they right. But these few words are the only ones I have; and for now, I pray that these are enough to tell this thing I want to tell and to tell it in a manner that I can tell--a story only I can tell.

Story lets us carve our initials in the wet cement of this moment. And it does it so well because not only does it celebrate vulnerability, but it embodies vulnerability. The act of telling a story is a vulnerable act on and by itself. 

 -- Phil Kaye

Just to be able to stop and instead of catastrophizing what might happen, just say: I'm just so grateful. Because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive. 

-- Brene Brown

But I see the impossible everyday. Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold on to others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk: they hear you, they feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it. It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth: that impossible connection. ...

When I meet you, in that moment, I am not longer a part of your future, I start quickly becoming part of your past, but in that instant, I get to share your present, and you, you get to share mine, and that is the greatest present of all. So if you tell me I can do the impossible, I probably laugh at you. I don't know whether I can change the world--yet--because I don't know much about it. And I don't know much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough sometimes, I forget what century I'm in. This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here. These aren't the last words I share--but just in case I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around.

-- Hiroshima, Sarah Kay

Choose to Sprint

It's about what you want, and how you want to process that--how you go on your journey. So you can go on your journey halfway, which will manifest halfway. In life, people "Ow, they're really lucky! They're this, or they're that!" No, they're probably not really lucky. They probably just really went for it full-out.  

And, and we don't know that.  

They just keep knocking down doors, barriers and walls, and go full-out all the time to get there, to get where they wanted to be in their life. So that's all it is: if you choose to just kinda walk, or you choose to sprint.

-- Mia Michaels