What About Finding a Passion Outside a Job?

You have seen the advertisements. "A job that you look forward to a Monday!" "We are a workplace filled with passion!" "Grow together...toward the same goal!" Every job advertisement seems to beckon potential new hires with the promise of motivation to do the job. And recruiters, consultants, and each college professors seem to agree with the passion-centered outlook. They encourage individuals to seek out jobs that prioritize personal growth through enjoying the job and the relevant learning process, over salary, stability, work-life balance, and other operational knick-knacks.

Logically, putting motivation to do the job as the most essential criterion for doing a job makes quite a bit of sense. After all, without the willingness to do the job, one would not even have the desire to go through with the day-to-day, even if one has all the skills needed to get the job done well. Because every job has its ups and downs, positives and negatives, the enjoyable and the painful, an unmotivated employee can easily accentuate the "minuses" of the job in his or her mind over time, getting into a vicious cycle of "I hate this job." Retention rates suffer when employees are unmotivated.

But let's be a bit more realistic. How many people actually get to do the job they truly enjoy and get paid a living wage for it? Let's look at the "enjoy" side. To enjoy doing something, one often needs to be relaxed: working at one's own selected pace, picking and choosing the most entertaining bits, and having no pressure from bosses or clients. That is not a job. That is a hobby. Jobs pay people precisely because employees are expected to do some unpleasant things while being available for multiple consecutive hours throughout the day. They do not start and stop at will like hobbies do.

Every once in a while, though, a hobby-like job does come along. The employee has all the skills needed to do the job, the clients are not overbearing, and there is almost complete freedom in choosing the content of work. But the resulting lack of pressure often has to do with the lack of demand for and urgency to complete the tasks associated with the job. Low demand and productivity equate to lower pay in the long term, and the lack of opportunities to upskill to grow one's career into a better one in terms of financial compensation. Hobby-like jobs often mean low salaries.

Of course, it goes without saying that if possible, a worker would prefer to be paid better compensation for the same number of hours worked. And there is a minimum level of compensation that the worker would need to sustain what he or she would consider being a reasonable standard of living. Doing a job that is truly enjoyable but pays below a level that sustains a reasonable living standard simply would not cut it. So often the choice becomes having to lower the standard of living or become motivated to do jobs that one does not enjoy.

Unfortunately, the salary level of any job out there is largely outside the control of any employer or employee. The supply and demand of workers and the work they produce dictate the salary level, not the whims of the hiring manager or the negotiation skills of the recruiter or the worker. In contrast, one can learn to become more motivated to do a job that one did not originally consider enjoyable, but looking at the larger picture of how the job fits into one's overall life design. If the job is eight hours a day, then how can the other 16 hours compensate for the lack of enjoyment in the other eight?

To do that, maybe the first step is to step outside the paradigm of "we have to enjoy doing our jobs and be passionate about it." By being fixated on looking for a job that supposedly brings passion, and they seek passion in it once the job gets underway, people expend energy that they could instead use to look for passion elsewhere. Hobbies that make non-work hours exciting and salaries worth spending are probably a much better bet for finding a passion that can outlast tenure at any particular work position or company. 

So, at least for a moment, look beyond the job advertisements that scream "Passion!" Instead, look at what else is in your daily life. A beautiful spouse, an exciting city, an amicable community of friends, soothing greenery, delicious food and drinks...they are also gateways to finding passion, as much as any new job out there can be. In the blind search for a career that promises to be eternally enjoyable, do not forget to enjoy all the other things outside it. When the job's novelty wears off and motivation dips, those non-job activities are what will get one through the day.