Minimum Viable Passion

It’s okay to not love what you do.

At some point in the last 30 years, work switched from something you did to make enough money to eat and pay rent into something that was supposed to bring emotional and spiritual fulfillment. People don’t have a career anymore, people pursue their passion.

But the reality is that work is still work. It’s not religion. It’s not family. If you over invest your sense of self into your job, terrible things will happen. A bad day at the office is a bad day in your entire life. A missed sale, or a negative performance review, rather than becoming tools for growth, become black stains on your self worth.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t care at all what you do. But there’s a middle ground between being a soulless money mercenary and being a self-sacrificing zealot for the cause. I call this middle ground your “minimum viable passion.”

This is an important shift in how you view your job in relation to your sense of fulfillment. People, especially early in their careers, will self-flagellate about how they “should” feel about their jobs. They watch TED talks by people who love what they do, and listen with envy to their friends’ stories about “crushing it” and saving the world.* If you consider “personal passion fulfillment” as a scale from 1-10, people will obsess over the small percentage of folks who are (or appear to be) at a solid 10 and think that is “normal” or expected. In fact, this is rare.   

What’s healthier and more useful in the long run is to figure out where your 6 is, and try to get there. Then over time, you can move from a 6 to a 7 to an 8. Think of it as analogous to your salary. Of course we’d all like to make a ton of money. But if you’re making $50k per year, it’s unproductive to stare jealousy at people making a $1M and feel like there is something wrong with you for not being there already. Much more productive is to focus on what you need to do to get to $60k a year.

So how do you find your 6? In my experience, there are three useful self-evaluations you can do.

First: It helps if you have a high empathy for your company’s target customer. Your company is (hopefully) doing something that is valuable for your customers. And you should care about them and truly believe that you’re making their lives better. I had a friend who worked for a high-end ecommerce site. One day over a beer he admitted with disgust that his job was “to sell rich people shit they don’t need.” He quit shortly thereafter.  

Next: Watch your own procrastination. While everybody procrastinates sometimes, if you find yourself constantly having to battle yourself to start doing work, that’s a pretty clear signal that things aren’t going well.

Last: Is a tactic from Paul Graham. Do things that make your friends say “wow.” You have probably chosen friends that share your core values (whether or not you did this consciously is a different topic). What this means is they are a good litmus test for the passion and fulfillment you get from your job. If they don’t care what you do (or tell you they actively don’t like what you do) that’s a sign you should look for something new.

So, straight from the mouth of a random internet person you don’t know: It’s okay to not love what you do. But keep an eye on these three tests, find your minimum viable passion, and stop losing sleep over the way things “should” be.

* They will also typically ignore or not internalize the stories of dozens of people who are doing tough jobs in the name of survival. Confirmation bias is a hell of a thing.