Always follow your passion! Really?


I just finished uploading 100 documents to a platform and assigning them to someone for review. A very operational task. It had to be done. It's definitely not something I enjoyed doing.

While I was doing this task, I was reminded of some self-help and productivity books I've read in the past. Many of them stress the important of 'doing what you are good at', 'following your passions', 'doing what you find important', etc. You should stop doing all things that don't fit into these categories.

Of course this advice is important and useful. There are many people out there that have never really thought about these things and do their work because they happen to do that work. This can easily lead to stressful situations or even a burn-out.

On the other hand, is this advice realistic? If I would follow this advice I wouldn't have done the upload work today. I would have just left it there for someone else to do. As if there is someone out there that would really like to do this task... I would have read a book or some good blogposts for instance. Aren't large parts of our work necessities that don't relate to our work passions or the deeper meaning we see in our work? I even think tasks like the document uploading are meaningful in the end. Work is hard and bumpy. It's never a straight line to a solution or deliverable. This is what makes it interesting and satisfying. So, 'follow your passions' indeed, but don't think this will go without hurdles, bumps in the road, and operational and  boring tasks.

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