It’s good to have a baseline level of excitement for your job. If you hate make-up, you probably won’t last long in the beauty industry. But as long as your job is just a job, with the fact that it pays the bills mattering a little more than everything else that’s nice about it, any more passion than a general level of benevolence towards the industry can be problematic.
A colleague works on projects similar to mine. They’re more technical but equivalent. When he hands off his ideas for reviews, tension often follows. Members from other teams or even vendors we work with scrutinize his output, and it hurts. You can tell he feels offended by it. At first, I didn’t understand why.
“It’s just work,” I thought. “Why does he care so much?” Until, eventually, I realized the topic we’re covering, blockchain, is the thing he cares about. His passion for decentralized technology, the community that supports it, and innovation in the space runs deep. He is committed. Invested. And that’s why work feels personal.
This is not a bad dynamic per se. He found his people, and he gets to contribute to a bigger mission he loves. But it does create friction where pragmatism would help. Silly stuff happens in every company. Politics. Bureaucracy. Most of it, you can just let roll off your ego like raindrops off a windshield. No one will even remember tomorrow. That includes criticism. You adjust what’s essential, take what’s useful, and ignore the rest.
Of course, that’s much easier when you care a little less—which is why I’m happy I currently benefit from the separation of passion and work. Or, rather, I do two kinds of work—and one I hold a little closer to my heart than the other. I’ve believed in blockchain for almost a decade. But no one technology will be the hill I die on. That hill is this blog. My personal, more creative writing. My books, essays, and all the other writings where passion meets work in a way no one can dictate but me.
Before I started my current job, I was in the same situation as my colleague. My personal writing was my bread and butter, and that made any challenge to it much harder to stomach. I tried to become more mindful and rational there, too, over the years. But the emotional distance I’ve now seen I can have at a job may have contributed more to that effort than anything else. If I can not be fussed about all the comments and criticisms on a doc at work, why can’t I hold that same attitude when sharing the latest draft for my next book? Well, as it turns out, I can, but experiencing the former helps tremendously with the latter.
Work builds passion over time, and passion can carry you very far in an endeavor. The lines between the two are blurry. It’s not a clearly causal relationship that goes one way or the other. There is much to learn about both sides and their interaction effects—and the better you understand each of the parts, the more elegantly you’ll manage the whole.
Nik
Niklas Göke writes for dreamers, doers, and unbroken optimists. A self-taught writer with more than a decade of experience, Nik has published over 2,000 articles. His work has attracted tens of millions of readers and been featured in places like Business Insider, CNBC, Lifehacker, and many others. Nik has self-published 2 books thus far, most recently 2-Minute Pep Talks. Outside of his day job and daily blog, Nik loves reading, video games, and pizza, which he eats plenty a slice of in Munich, Germany, where he resides.