“Passion Is Bullshit” writes Scott Adams in the excellent book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘. This is quite a contrarian statement, as many today advise to follow one’s passion to truly live a fulfilled life.
According to Scott Adams, this advice would be an illusion, fostered by the fact that successful people assign their success to passion but it is not proven that it was the origin of their success: “It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion”
Moreover, he believes that passionate people are less susceptible to be successful, because “passionate people are more likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals, and so you would expect to see more failures and more huge successes among the passionate“.
Finally, he remarks that “If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success, he might say it is passion, because that sounds like a sexy answer that is suitably humble. But after a few drinks I think he’d say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk“.
This point of view is definitely contrarian in a world where ‘follow your passion’ is a basic advice (in particular since Steve Jobs “follow your heart” famous speech in 2005), and I think it should make us think a bit about this element of popular culture.
It is true that passion only can’t be the single recipe for success. It is also important to have skills that can be sold, and sometimes people are very happy having their passion develop outside a more common salaried job.
The next time you see ‘follow you passion’ advice, stop a few minutes to think if that is reasonable when it comes to what you are really passionate about!