Do what Steve Jobs did, and not what he said.
The most memorable phase of Cal Newport’s speech – “Follow Your Passion” is Bad Advice. Do we have a pre-existing passion about anything, that letting us find out and following it? Newport tells us that the answer would be No, instead of finding one, it’s better for us to create one by our own, targeting on what you are talented, that’s relevant about your career, then go deep of it. Sometimes following passions that you cannot do well in your workplace would eventually mean nothing to you.
Like what Steve Jobs had mentioned, Follow Your Passion, is what people around the world are doing these days, however, the fact is that only a few percent of students had got jobs related to their previous passion eventually.
Cr. Sizzle
As well as, we had interested in a certain of hobbies doesn’t mean that we can do it well in our future career, for me as an example, I had a passion of drawing characters when I was a kid, but end up, what I had done was just imitating comics with a little of my own idea, that definitely won’t work and finding jobs in the future.
By the example of the environmental writer, Bill McKibben, the message Cal is trying to convey us would be, know what you are interested first, then keep going deeper, keep having practice to be a unique, a valuable person of the area you are obsessed. That’s how a passion means to us, not just finding a pre-existing one and follow it. Training in the skill that you have passion at first, then after you are working it harder and harder, the ‘amount’ of passion would also grow because of the successes you have got from it.
However, how could we evaluate this? First, set a simple daily timetable, schedule time you have to train on your passion every day, which sounds really hard to achieve for us, right? Here is an alternative one: Deal with something means difficult for you, get into things that we even don’t want to think about it. I think that’s one of the objective what this Media course want us to aim at, through the recent project, I had tried doing some ‘odd’ things on the street, like shooting things around me by keeping rotating myself, and taking videos at the center of street that full of pedestrians.
The last thing would be to learn how to keep being focused on a specific time period, and I guess it’s the reason why Brain had did a little 15-minutes focusing experiment in class, mute our phone… turn off all the social media sites, then learn to be extremely focused.
On the other hand, from the reading this week, Cal had also given us another example of being passionate, Jorden Tice, a guitar player, by executing the Craftman mindset, as the above, go deeper on what you had interest in, and keeping practicing and learning new things about it anytime, to get into the rare and valuable place of it.
The opposite one would be the Passion Mindset, that being pessimistic about jobs around you that you have no interest in other than your passion, being unhappy about these while confusing on ‘I love it or not’, ‘Should I change my career, etc. In fact that, we all known that it’s difficult on being specialise on something, and keep getting into the Passion one that keep complaining and ignore facing them.
Like Cal always said, ‘It’s time for us to start toward becoming someone so good they can’t ignore you.’, should we start demonstrate the Craftman one right now?