I wrote this when I was coming to terms with a desire to transition out of a nine year long career in Sales. I didn’t necessarily know what direction I wanted to head in next, but I’d spent 6 months learning to program while figuring things out. While researching boot camps in the Bay Area, I noticed that a highly rated one in Mountain View had a scholarship opportunity available. I filled out some forms on my background, turned in some code from a project, and wrote an essay on the prompt they provided (located below). Hands down… it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in the past few years. The program lit a fire under my butt to better understand my potential and I’ve been in love with process of acquiring new talents ever since.
What is the secret to having a successful career in today’s world economy?
In one word… passion. It doesn’t matter if you possess everything else, without passion, the longevity of your career will always be in question. You may be cringing right now, and it’s not lost on me I sound like I’m perpetuating a painful cliche from a High School Guidance Counselor…. but please allow me to elaborate.
A career is an individual’s chosen specialization of labor. Typically it’s a professional journey that spans multiple employers & roles concentrated in the same field. That particular field can have a great deal of depth but if you’re not interested in learning more about it’s specifics, none of that matters. Many people find themselves working in fields purely circumstantially but the content of their work doesn’t cater to their own curiosities. It’s to these workers my message on the importance of passion in your career is most relevant.
If your career allows you express your intellectual prowess…. If it allows for creativity through labor… there’s a good chance you’ll wake up excited to go to the office every morning. This is the ‘secret sauce’ to having a successful career. You need to be challenged, by the tasks of the position. However, you also need to willingly challenge yourself and take pleasure in expanding your knowledge. If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, learning more about a subject is rarely laborious, and always fun. Use your curiosities to fuel your worklife and you’ll never find boredom.
Ideally, you want to adopt the personality of artist when it comes to the way you embrace your career. An enlightened artist knows every brush stroke matters and is an opportunity to express their cultivated skills. Most of them aren’t even consciously aware of this part of their personality and work routine. Yet among all the greats with this ability every line of poetry, every time the chisel makes contact with the marble, every word sung before an audience… resonates full of emotion and passion. This is common denominator amongst all things separating the ordinary from the extraordinary. The 20th century French philosopher Henri Bergson may have said it best,
“We are free when our acts proceed from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and his work.”
If I were going to give a speech to a class of student’s deciding on what to study in order to have a fulfilling career, above all else I would echo the sentiment above. Do whatever you find endlessly captivating and your work will forever be your outlet instead of your toll to survive. Unfortunately, otherwise the opposite may become true. Your career may one day begin to feel like a wet blanket slowly suffocating you. It does have the potential to drown out the things you’re inspired by. More importantly, it can and will occupy the finite amount of time you have in this life. Time that could be spent finding your true calling or at least something that inspires you.
If you want to be successful professionally and have a longstanding career; my advice is simple. Pursue in this life and in study what you find most interesting, elegant and timeless. Whether that is the process of fine tuning an internal combustion engine, designing wedding dresses or creating lines of code is a question only you can answer for yourself.