Which is the Key - Passion, or Hard Work?
The conventional and unconventional advice misses the point
I remember when I was a kid in the nineties, the common mantra was to find your passion when it came to your career. It’s still a well trodden phrase today. And then, about ten years ago Cal Newport came out with his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, where he asserted that the idea of somehow finding your passion – much like finding your soul mate, was a completely Disneyfied idea of life.
He went through numerous examples of people who loved their work despite it being in fields no one would believe inspired passion, because they become competent enough that they started liking it. This contributed to a growing chorus of people saying passion was bullshit and that it was all about getting in there and working hard.
So, which is it then?
I think both points of view are only halfway there and that only when you jam them both together does it work. If you’ve ever heard Steve Jobs in his famous college commencement speech, I think he nailed it when he said you have to be passionate about something if you want it to fulfil you, and that’s for a very specific reason:
At some point climbing the ladder, it’s going to get hard. And the only way to persevere is if you really have a passion for it.
I was reminded of this yesterday on the bouldering wall. Bouldering is a funny sport, with few like it anywhere. That’s because once you pass through the beginner levels, the only way to advance is to be willing to fail all the time. If you only climb the boulders that you’ll get on the first or second go, you simply won’t get better. What you have to do is start projecting, and that means you spend hours, days, weeks, sometimes even months on a single boulder.
Yesterday, I spent an hour working just one move on one of the new boulder sets at my gym. The sane response to this is “why would you do that? You obviously aren’t good enough to do it, try something else.” The reality is though, that it’s only when you keep throwing yourself at the same problem that you start to see the nuances of it. You move from trying your feet in different positions to finding the right one, and then it becomes micro: a shift of your weight by a centimetre further onto the toe, a slight lean of the body in a different direction, moving your fingertips by a millimetre on the hold.
Or, after your tenth, or twentieth attempt, you sit and stare at it, and realise you should actually try it this way. Guess what? That just doesn’t, nay, can’t happen for you unless you spend enough time on it.
And this is exactly what separates the best, or the people on track to the top tier, from everyone else. They’re willing to spend so much more time on one thing until they’ve extracted everything they can from it. And by spending that extra time and doing it enthusiastically, they leave everyone else in their dust.
And the main thing to note from all of this is that you aren’t going to do that unless you have a passion for it. It’s a conscious decision to go to the gym or the wall, and mentally choose to fail over and over again - and be satisfied with the tiniest pieces of improvement. I won’t even say that most people aren’t willing to do that, because from my experience and everything I’ve seen, 95+ percent of people aren’t willing to do that.
And that’s exactly where people get stuck.
If you want a top tier life in any field, it’s going to take more time, effort and reps than you’ll believe. And the only way to keep throwing yourself at that boulder, or keep doing that extra hour at work after everyone’s gone home, or keep writing when you think no one is reading, or keep pursuing anything when you can’t see progress, is to have passion for it. To be obsessed by it.
So if you’re not feeling that, then keep searching until you do. Keep looking for that thing that you either enjoy from the outset or you enjoy once you start improving and know that when the going gets tough, this is your time. It’s your time because at that point, 95% of people will default to minimal effort, but not you. No, you’re going to lean in at that point, knowing that you’re stretching that bubble and that eventually, it will pop and you’ll be on your way to the top tier of whatever field you’re pursuing.