On Facebook earlier today, artist Colleen Doran posted a link to an interesting blog article that featured some comments by Mike Rowe about the “follow your passion” advice that usually gets passed around easily.
Rowe’s comments gave me some food for thought. I’ve certainly been an advocate of people pursuing the things they dream of doing. My feeling about it is that if they don’t at least try for the “dream career” they will never know if it was possible, and they would spend a lot of time regretting “things not done.” Even so, there were points in his comments that were worth considering.
I posted what follows in the comments discussion responding to Colleen’s sharing of the article.
^^^
I like that he is very pragmatic about the aspect of passion versus ability. Ability increases with training and hardwork. In the arts, yes, “talent” is important (a musician with no sense of rhythm is going to be lost, for instance), but even then it needs to be polished, honed, perfected by hard work on the basics.
When I was in the middle school age range, I drew a lot. My passion was fashion design. I really intended to go that route. But a “research a career” assignment in 9th grade opened my eyes to a few things. The key part of it was that I realized I did not have the temperament to sit at a drawing board all day, every day. I loved doing artwork, but realized I would die inside to be stuck in that kind of routine – so that also eliminated commercial art. I just wanted to do art when I *wanted* to do art (I still work at it, and am very satisfied when I *do* artwork). But it wasn’t going to be my living.
It took a long time to find what would take that place. The funny thing is that I had already started writing a fair amount. Eventually, the day came that I realized my “passion” was writing, and I trained myself hard. And I’m pleased with the work I now do. But my own projects as a writer still don’t pay my bills. So I do SEO web content writing – and I’m darned good at it, because I bring all my creative abilities and understanding of communication to the job.
I’m still “following my passion” – but I’ve also accepted the cost of that. I don’t make a lot of money. I live extremely modestly (and have even gone through a season of being officially homeless – though I’ve been fortunate in having had places to stay in that season).
What I see, when I look around at aspiring writers who want to “follow their passion” are a lot of them who are not willing to learn all the business aspects needed to make it a success. They don’t want to do the work to build their audience. They don’t want to do the work of getting themselves in front of people (which really frustrates me, because at the moment I’m stuck in rural circumstances that don’t allow for me to be doing presentations and seminars).
The work doesn’t go out and magically find its audience. You do have to do some labor in beating the bushes – and you have to learn to love that process as well as creating the works you are promoting.
Note:
The post at Yellow Hammer News is by Cliff Sims, about some observations Mike Rowe has about “follow your passion”.
