I enjoyed the recent video, and completely agree about finding passion through mastery instead of waiting for it to show up spontaneously.
But I found myself getting hung up on this sentence: “Passion is something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.”
I don’t know if that is a direct quote from Newport, and I have a lot of respect for his work, but it feels off to me. So much of what the world values is not aligned with human flourishing.
Is “putting in the hard work” to be understood here as an inherent good even if the results are not? (Though they may have value to the world if we are to use money as the only objective measure.)
I’m sure Newport intends value in terms of both improving the world and being able to support yourself, but the incentives currently in place rarely allow them to line up neatly.
Do the developers of predatory mobile games or people who trade memecoins for a living also progress toward mastery and discovering passion despite providing the world with nothing of value? What about those who devote their lives to achieving excellence in fields that are valued less or not at all? Or people working, often quite hard, in what Graeber called bullshit jobs?
I really really dislike framing this as “passion”, because of the moral judgments associated with the term. All this “if you love what you do, then you never work a day in your life” nonsense coupled with the not-so-subtly implied “…and if you aren’t doing that, then you’re living incorrectly”.
Yeah.
I read Deci’s Why We Do What We Do recently and I really like the emerging framing of autonomous motivation and controled motivation. Now, when someone says “passion”, I’m training myself to substitute the more-neutral-sounding-to-me “autonomous motivation” and I believe we mostly mean the same thing.
Autonomous motivation is something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.
Meh. I’m with you. I don’t love the “…become valuable…” part. I consider our value innate and, frankly, I don’t care much about how valuable you judge me beyond the practical and financial benefits baked into an economic system I don’t totally love either. Let’s try again.
Autonomous motivation is something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to demonstrate trade value to the world.
When you put it that way, it mostly re-articulates Patrick Lencioni’s model of motivation from The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, (now The Truth About Employee Engagement, which title change I understand but dislike): a job feels miserable when you feel incompetent and/or irrelevant and/or your work feels immeasurable. The misery manifests as a lack of motivation generally and almost certainly as a near-complete absence of autonomous motivation. (I see this a lot among software development professionals and it’s only worsening over time.)
So it makes sense that autonomous motivation follows as you improve (competence) and notice you’ve improving (measurability) at demonstrating trade value to the world (relevance, at least within the narrow context of the socially-acceptable mechanism of trading value).
I consider it a pity that folks conflate these things with moral judgments about where this motivation comes from. Many folks don’t realize that they’re perfectly free to ignore those bits and focus on the helpful part: that motivation follows action much more often than it precedes action. Any action towards a goal you care even remotely about can help a lot.
Some of them (the first group) probably do, but I imagine that most of them are “gaming the system” to extract value and consequently cheating themselves of the emotional rewards that come with acting from truly autonomous motivation.
As for the folks in the second group, I imagine there’s some number of them who act with a significant amount of autonomous motivation and another number of them who are chasing an abstract duty to excel that comes from Survival Rules they were hypnotized to follow in childhood.
The folks toiling in bullshit jobs are probably mostly people trying to survive with no clear alternative interspersed with the occasional person who has intentionally dropped out of the rat race and uses the Librarian Strategy (find a job that less stress, do it well enough to keep it, earn enough money to live decently, but find fulfillment in other parts of life). But that’s just like my opinion, man.
I like the autonomous framing a lot better too. Although I don’t think either Joan or Newport necessarily use passion in the cliché sense here either, I think there are better ways to talk about it. I’m partial to Pirsig’s focus on Quality as an organizing principle:
Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.
This focus on the attention given to process is helpful for avoiding the trap of attaching the idea of passion to specific goals or anything particular to the output. It also manages to sidestep the focus on “value” since it’s more about cultivating an internal state and how that is reflected in what you do.
also worth clarifying that Graeber’s definition of bullshit jobs has more to do with doing something you acknowledge is pointless or even harmful and struggling to deal with the psychological effect of that. It would apply less to librarians or waiters (both are providing essential services even if they are undercompensated), and more to compliance officers, corporate lawyers, or telemarketers. They’re not always doing these jobs purely out of desperation, but they may not see alternatives as significantly more beneficial to the world or themselves either. If you employ a very specific definition of work that provides value to the world rather than just what keeps capitalism functioning, most current economic activity could be classified as bullshit in one form or another. And the problem only compounds as the concept of value itself gets further abstracted.
This is the part that matters the most to me. And I think I see the work I do outside of my writing - the work that pays server costs etc - as action toward my goal of writing, even though it doesn’t directly impact that specific goal in a tangible way.
This to me has always missed the external motivator. IE - what does the work enable you to do outside the work? Tolkien was a lecturer and an academic. Madball (hardcore band) work construction. The guy from Mountain Goats is a high school teacher (from memory). You don’t have to find the passion in these things necessarily, if they’re the things that fuel the passion that gives you life.
I grew up quite poor. And my Dad was often chasing the Next Big Thing that would make us rich, so he could quit working. And of course, the next big thing never came, and he kept jumping from path to path, even gave up the stability of a life-long teaching position. I always looked at that and thought - no matter the pain of it, I want to reach for stability so I can be free when I write.
Indeed, I happen to call the strategy “The Librarian Strategy”, but I didn’t intend to label librarian as a bullshit job; I didn’t know Graeber’s definition, but I inferred it had something to do with artificial jobs that “better” systems wouldn’t even cause to be created in the first place. I don’t remember where I read about the strategy, but that author chose “librarian” as the kind of job where one doesn’t take the job home with them, although in an age where library funding is in jeopardy, it makes sense to choose a different job for this stereotype.
Several years ago, when I struggled with my career identity, I took some time to think about what my job’s purpose was. (Since I work as a freelancer, that included thinking about the purpose of my company as opposed to finding a conventional job as a full-time employee of someone else.) I decided, finally, that my job only exists for two purposes:
to provide enough cashflow for my spouse and I to die before the money runs out.
to provide a socially-acceptable way for me to do the work I care about.
And I definitely have bullshit job, even though I think I don’t always do bullshit work. Sadly, I end up doing a lot of bullshit work in the sense of “We ought not to need this”, even though I get to focus mainly on the significant part (“This actually helps people, even beyond their job”) of the bullshit work.
It’s fine. I didn’t create this economic system; I’m just trying to live in it.
Yes! A miserable job isn’t a useless job. One strategy to deal with the misery involves finding joy outside the job that compensates for the miserableness of the job. The Success Literature, which I largely disdain, has brainwashed many folk into believing that they are living “wrong” if they can’t find joy on the job. That seems to me yet one more way to keep people unhappy so that they’re more likely to buy endless distraction.
I want stability and I need novelty, so that’s fun. My mother fell victim to the collapse of automobile manufacturing and went from well-paid factory supervisor to wage-slave factory drone. She died young of a heart attack on the job. You can imagine that I resolved never to let something like that happen to me, which makes me value freedom from the job above almost everything else. It also makes me very insecure about money, no matter how much there is sitting in the bank.
But when you asked me what I want the freedom for, I had no specific idea until maybe five years ago (my late 40s). I was merely accumulating freedom out of fear and as a way to honor my mother’s memory. I told myself that it was a strategy: if I don’t know what to do, then at least I ought to collect options. Maybe it was a strategy; I can’t tell any more.
I think I’d like to write, too. Sadly, I’ve written for so long only about software development and only as a marketing tool that I have no idea what else I’d write about.
That’s completely understandable and sounds consistent with most bullshit-adjacent jobs: not necessarily harmful but definitely not essential enough to provide a sense of purpose on their own. Though the idea that any job alone can or should is another myth.
When Graeber first wrote about the idea in 2013, it was definitely presented as a structural problem rather than the fault of anyone working those jobs. But in the current economic climate, bullshit jobs are almost aspirational.
The librarian approach sounds even more ideal honestly, but you’re right that it won’t provide the kind of security needed to retire comfortably (or at all).
These questions remind me of the ikigai diagram that is often recommended for finding a balance here. I know the version that has become popular is an oversimplification of the original concept, but it does present a potentially useful approach to the problem.
Indeed. When I first used that model to describe a “dream job”, that felt a little silly and I wondered whether the wry humor would come across. I had intended it as a counterpoint to the success literature putting pressure on people to love their job. Now it seems like no exaggeration at all to call that a dream job, for exactly the reason you cite here.
Sadly, I end up doing a lot of bullshit work in the sense of “We ought not to need this”, even though I get to focus mainly on the significant part (“This actually helps people, even beyond their job”) of the bullshit work.