Your Job / Profession = Your Passion, Myth or Reality?

Christin Hume photo

By

Siddhartha Rastogi

It’s 6.30 am on a bright Monday morning, your alarm rings with a series of whatsapp messages. You get out of bed, hug your kids and move straight to the shower. In 20 minutes you are at the tube station, heading to the office for a morning call at 8 am. Post call, you go to the cafeteria to have your daily dose of caffeine and you feel rejuvenated. The day passes doing calls and meetings and by the time you take a break again, you realize it’s 8 in the evening. Days and weeks pass by. But hang on, you have an upcoming holiday after a month. You had a good time with kids and family for a week, it was fun, it was relaxing but something was missing – that wildness and passion experienced when you were backpacking in your adolescent days.

Never mind… everything has a time and an age, you console yourself.

Why get colored with these useless thoughts?

Then you put these ideas in the dustbin. Life is good, although a little monotonous but that’s what it is. At the end of the year, a promotion and hefty bonus with which you can buy a solitaire for your wife that she has been seeking for years.

The good news is 80% of the people in this world hate their jobs. You are not alone. After all, people need to make a living and sustain their families, pay their mortgage. Passion may or may not provide you with food, clothing, shelter or, in some cases, even a partner.

You are better off chasing money than Passion. The more money you have, the better your chances of pursuing your passion by the time you retire or perhaps when you turn 45 or 50 years of age.

This is what an average human being thinks.

For most humans it’s binary. Either you can work and earn money or you can follow your passion and have contentment and fulfillment. But remember, more often than not earning more money gives you an instant high than slogging endlessly to cut out and fit in your passion.

Very rarely people make a living from the work they are passionate about. The interesting part is most people believe that they are passionate about a particular profession but even that profession has components which are boring, mundane and monotonous as any other job.

Let me enumerate it by using a very common example, which most will connect with.

People generally love travelling and believe they are passionate about exploring new places. Given a choice and if they can make loads of money as travel agents, they will pursue it as their profession. Good news. Travelling, seeing unknown places and meeting new people creates excitement and enthusiasm but to organize travel bookings, tickets, places of stay, cuisine, food, etc, is as boring and cumbersome as any other day job.

Let me use two more examples from the world of the arts (artists believe they only follow their dreams and are generally passionate about their work).

A painter creates an image in his or her mind if he or she is not drawing a live portrait or not taking inspiration from an existing object or human. To put that figure or picture on his or her canvas s/he needs to get the right mix of colors, brush, finger strokes, hand movement, etc. The picture which finally comes out gives him or her a high but the process of painting and multiple iterations itself is dull and tiresome.

Similarly, an actor keeps repeating the shot again and again till the director and cameraman are sure the impact of the shot which the actor is trying to portray has been captured behind the lens.

Even in the world of sports, the final match and game point is exciting and can’t be won without passion but to be there at that moment, several years of unexciting, repetitive practice have gone in.

But why do most humans feel that they have been caged and have to follow a routine of unchanging, uninteresting monotonous, repetitious tasks?

As with all answers, this one also lies in our past. Over 60,000 years ago, before farming came into practice most humans had to explore, climb or kill for food and survival. That memory stayed and anything beyond that looks boring and dull. Even 60,000 years back, there were some jobs which were boring, like the sharpening of weapons, forecasting of weather and predicting uncertainties. But those form smaller parts of the large interesting life which circled mostly around survival and hence provided constant excitement.

The interesting part is, with the growth in world population and changing technology, no job remains boring or mundane.

In this world Jobs have been bifurcated into 2 parts – people-related jobs and technology-related jobs. The third kind can be a combination of both where you interact with machines and people in varied degrees. But largely from manufacturing to agriculture to services, all sectors revolve around these categories.

Technology is constantly changing and so are humans as their expectations, experiences and nature change consistently. Thus, to survive or to get work done itself creates thrills and adventure. But along with this thrill, there is the small boring part of maintenance and repetitive work.

The Anagogic Banker says, “Individuals who constantly increase their component of thrill and adventure convert their work into Passion, the others keep looking for their passion till they die.”

Siddhartha Rastogi

Siddhartha was born to a learned middle class educated family in Semi Urban India. His father was an extremely honest man who because of his honesty had to pay the price in corporate world. Mother is a determined woman who ensured that children are being well taken care off. After a few years of birth, doctors called Siddhartha, a slow child having flat foot. He would fall more than he could walk. Determined mother ensured all therapies for her son to come out strong to fight the world. Siddhartha joined swimming when he was in 6th standard. Seeing other children of his class, he jumped in 10 feet deep pool and learnt swimming on his own, the very same day.

From that day there was no looking back. He topped his city in 12th and went to score highest in his B school exams. During his profession as banker, he became youngest branch manager of a MNC bank managing their biggest wealth branch in the country. There he found love of his life and got married. His love of his life emerged in the form of his daughter who completely changed him for good.

Siddhartha Rastogi is Director for a boutique Investment bank in India.

Siddhartha is a forward looking thinker & writer who has written a book on decision making. 8 Simple steps to effective decision making.

He writes on various social and current issues via his blog and can also be found on twitter.