At 21, I had no passion.
I had interests. I liked computers. I liked solving problems. I liked when things worked. A burning, all-consuming sense of purpose around a specific career? Not there. And every time someone told me to "follow my passion," I felt like I'd missed something. Like everyone else operated from a script I hadn't received.
The script was the problem, not me.
The Advice That Sounds Good and Isn't
"Find your passion and you'll never work a day in your life." Careers advisors say it. Commencement speakers love it. LinkedIn is stuffed with it.
It's terrible advice.
Stanford researchers published findings showing this kind of thinking leads to narrowmindedness. People who believe passions are fixed and waiting to be found give up faster when things get hard. They adapt less well. They're less likely to build work they genuinely love over time.
Mark Cuban put it differently: "Follow your effort. No one quits anything they're good at." What you put time into... what you keep doing when it's difficult... what you find yourself thinking about on a Sunday morning... those things are more useful data than a vague sense of what you're "meant" to do.
Cal Newport, in So Good They Can't Ignore You, makes the same point from the other direction. Passion follows competence. You get good at something and then you start to love it. The sequence runs opposite to what we tell people.
You don't find the work you love and then get good at it.
You get good at something, and then you love it.
What This Advice Does to Young People
When we tell young people to find their passion, we give them a task with no clear completion criteria. They look inside themselves, see a few interests and no obvious calling, and conclude something is wrong with them.
Nothing is wrong with them. They're 21. They haven't done enough things yet to know what they're good at.
And while they're waiting to feel called, they're not building skills. They're not trying things. They're not getting the experience which would give them real choices. With recession probability running at 30-45% right now according to major economic forecasters, sitting around waiting for passion to strike is a luxury most young people don't have. They need skills. They need adaptability. They need a track record of doing things.
My Career Was a Mess. That Was the Point.
I went through the Army. Then I studied Computer Science at the University of North Texas, graduating in 1993. Then I was a research engineer at Sun Laboratories. Then founder and partner across several tech ventures. Then Lead Mobile Engineer. Then Senior Engineering Manager at a fintech company in London, leading 43 people across 7 teams. Now I'm Chief Innovation Officer at Step It Up HR, writing, speaking, hosting a podcast.
No passion led me through any of it. Curiosity did. Interest did. Effort did.
The "passion" part... the part where I genuinely love what I do... came years in. When I was deep in it and good enough to see what was worth caring about.
The messy path gave me things a passion-first approach never would have produced: a wide skill set, resilience built from working across many different environments, and the confidence of someone who has done things rather than thought carefully about what to do.
What "Getting Messy" Looks Like
Getting messy means trying things before you know whether you'll be good at them. It means taking the interesting job, not the safe-seeming one. It means building a skill set looking incoherent from the outside but making complete sense from the inside, because you went toward what interested you.
This doesn't mean being passive. Being messy about a career is not the same as drifting. You're still making choices. You're choosing based on curiosity and effort, not on a grand vision of your purpose.
Things worth trying:
Try the thing you're afraid of. Not because you'll love it. Because you'll find out. Every experience gives you information. A year doing something you hate is as valuable as a year doing something you love.
Build skills in adjacent areas. You're a developer? Learn to present. You're in marketing? Learn to read a spreadsheet properly. Every skill you add gives you more options and makes you more useful in more contexts.
Pay attention to what you stick with when it's hard. Not what you enjoy when it's easy. What you keep going back to when it's difficult and frustrating. Your competence builds there, and competence is where passion follows.
Stop waiting to feel ready. Mastery comes before love, not after. You have to do the work to care about the work.
The Pressure to Have It Figured Out
There's something cruel about asking 21-year-olds what their passion is. They haven't had enough experiences to know what they're good at. They haven't failed enough to know what they care about. They haven't tried enough things to know what keeps them going at 11pm when they're tired.
We tell them the answer is inside them, waiting to be found. When they don't find it, they don't question whether the advice was wrong. They question themselves.
Research via 80,000 Hours shows four distinct ways "follow your passion" misleads people... and one of the most damaging is this: it encourages people to look inward for an answer built outward. Passion doesn't come from self-examination. It comes from work, from skill-building, from the experience of being good at something and seeing what becomes possible because of it.
What to Say Instead
Instead of "follow your passion," try this:
"Get good at something. Then get better at it. Be curious. Try things. Pay attention to what makes you want to keep going. Build from there."
It doesn't work as a commencement speech. It won't fit on a motivational poster. But it's how careers work... including the careers of people who look like they followed their passion.
Steve Jobs didn't have a passion for typography. He took a calligraphy class at Reed College because it seemed interesting. He had no idea where it would lead. A decade later, it shaped the typography of the Macintosh. Passion wasn't leading the way. Curiosity was... along with a willingness to try something and time.
Fast Company put it well: following competence instead of passion takes the pressure off. If someone tells you to follow your passion and you don't have one, you sit there worrying for months. Following your competence gives you somewhere to start.
Your career doesn't have to be planned. It has to be pursued.
The Messy Career Is the Right Career
I've moved through engineering, management, HR, speaking, writing. People ask how I got from point A to point B. The honest answer: I didn't know where B was when I left A.
I knew what I was interested in. I worked hard at it. I moved toward whatever seemed worth doing next. The career. The whole thing.
If you know a 21-year-old panicking because they haven't found their passion, share this. If you're 40 and still waiting to feel called, this is for you too. The call isn't coming. The work is here.
Don't find your passion. Build your skills. Let the passion catch up.
