Talking about following your passion…this is one statement almost everyone's been hearing since we were in school…just reminded of this statement again when I was going through this article on "10 Inspiring Commencement Speeches: Advice From Business's Greatest Successes":
Quite a few of those speeches talked about following your passion. Somehow I find a lot of inherent flaws in this statement, and this statement though has quite a bit of truth in it, is really specious and deceptive. Lets discuss the flaws:
- Survivorship Bias: Lets take 2 cases here: one are the type of people who don't follow their passions, second who do follow their passions. Now among those who do follow their passions, only those who get to the top get a chance to make speeches, and they would obviously be very proud of the fact that they followed their passion. Therefore they would have no qualms about making the statement that follow your passion, and those of them who actually did followed their passion and perished would never get a chance to express themselves like that. Amongst the second case of people who did not follow their passions, the one who are successful don't really talk about this thing at all (unless someone believes that if he had followed his passion, he'd have fucked up for sure), and the ones who perished again don't get a chance to make speeches!
- The second problem with this statement is the idea of one's passion itself! Once a guy from a top consulting company was making a presentation at our campus. He talked something which really made sense to me. He rubbished the above statement and said that Passion is something very temporary and transitory in nature. He loved playing badminton in high school, was extremely passionate about it, then in college he loved coding/programming, and thought he would make a career at it, and then later in life he got passionate about golf. So, if someone very early in his life finds that a particular activity is his passion and restricts himself to that, then he probably he's losing a chance to try out everything else. Because unless someone has tried everything how could he decide that a particular activity is something that he wants to do in life, and nothing else.
Its not that I'm against this statement. Infact I do believe that sooner or later one has to follow his passions, because u you can never be happy 'and/or' successful unless you do that. Reason being that you would never be able to give your best to any activity that you are not passionate about. But then I believe that trying to decide your passion, trying to find it too early, and going for it might be harmful! You might lose out on the chance to try out everything else in life. But yes there are exceptions to this: some people might be extremely extremely passionate about something since a long time, then I believe it is time to believe what the heart says and go for the thing! But for those of them who try to decide what their passion is, try to think that some activity which they like currently is their calling, after hearing to the above statement from those great men around…I believe are erring in life!
