Whether you’re on your first job hunt or pondering a midcareer switch, you’re sure to be advised to follow your passion.

Don’t. 

“Here’s what nobody tells you about passion: It’s killing careers before they even start,” said Tom Rath, a former Gallup Research senior scientist and career advice author.

His anti-passion is a refreshing — if a bit jarring — message. 

Skip looking inside for your strengths and perfect passion, he said, and focus instead on how you can make work and life better for others, including your boss and your co-workers.

I sat down with Rath to discuss how his vision can help us avoid building a career so me-focused that it derails.

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Kerry Hannon: Why should people stop looking for a wake-up call about their passion before picking a career to pursue? 

Tom Rath: Everyone wants to give new grads career advice around what they’re passionate about, but there’s a huge problem from the outset, because most of us pick a college, a major, enter the workforce, and our first job, and we’ve only seen somewhere between 3% and 5% of the kind of jobs that are out there. 

New grads are often looking out of a little pinhole at what their parents did, and maybe they’ve looked into where the bigger salaries eventually might be, and there’s a big exposure gap.

Think about what “follow your passion” assumes. First, that you have some preexisting passion just waiting to be discovered, which most people don’t. Second, that this passion will remain constant throughout your life, which it won’t. And third, that passion automatically translates to fulfillment, which it almost never does. 

Passion is cotton candy gone the moment reality hits. People expect passion to carry them through difficult times, but passion typically vanishes precisely when the work gets hard.

And it’s not just a tripping point for younger workers, right?

Not at all. This “follow your passion” mantra has created an entire generation of anxious, paralyzed professionals constantly wondering if they’re in the wrong place. Every career move becomes an existential crisis, every bad day feels like proof you’re on the wrong path, and every colleague who seems happier makes you question everything. 

Meanwhile, telling someone living paycheck to paycheck to “follow their passion” isn’t just unhelpful — it’s insulting.

So what should we focus on when job-hunting?

Purpose, or doing something that means something. Purpose is what you build and create in daily moments.

It’s the demand side of the equation. It’s what people around you need, what your team needs, what your organization needs, what your community needs, what the world needs.

Then work back to look for jobs where you can serve those needs instead of jumping out into the work world and expecting that things will revolve around you. 

It doesn’t work like that. If you do some of that homework, it leads you to better answers and better careers in the long term.

How is chasing achievement and status career quicksand?

The biggest mistake that people make, especially through the middle and later stages of their careers, is to always be chasing more, no matter what. 

We incorrectly imagine that if we just double our income, we’ll be twice as happy. When in reality, that has nothing to do with doubling well-being. And it might even detract from your relationships and your time with family. Theoretically, if you’re doubling your income, you have more responsibility, you manage more people, you need to work more, and so on. 

Unfortunately, most of our actual schedules, daily time, and routines right now are not in very good alignment with the things we claim will matter in the end.

I ask myself, for instance, what’s the point of spending 30 minutes when I wake up responding to emails from people I don’t even know, when that will come at the expense of time that I could spend asking my kids good questions and having conversations. 

What is our most valuable career asset? 

Our most valuable career asset is what we can create at the intersection between what the world needs and who we are. 

Most people have decent self-awareness, and there are a lot of programs and books and tools, all kinds of stuff around it. I think we’re grossly underindexed on what the world needs and that demand side of the equation.

What are some of the keys to finding our edge in the workplace?

You find it in the context of your friends and mentors. Pay attention to the questions they ask you and the things they come to you for that they don’t go to anyone else to answer or provide. Double down and go deeper into these topics that you otherwise wouldn’t have explored. That’s listening to the need and the demand side of the equation.

How do you advise people not to derail their career?

Derailing occurs when you get in your own head too much and you’re thinking inward. Everything you can do to move your time and distribution throughout the day from too much self-orientation toward a lot more orientation toward others is the way to stay on track. Think about what you’re doing that’s good for your work team, for your clients, for your customers, for your community.

That keeps you focused outward. It keeps you focused on the positive things. Whereas when you’re just saying, “What am I getting out of this day,” you get into those negative inward spirals.

Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist and the author of 14 books, including “Retirement Bites: A Gen X Guide to Securing Your Financial Future,” “In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in the New World of Work,” and “Never Too Old to Get Rich.” Follow her on Bluesky and X. You can reach her at kerry.hannon@yahooinc.com

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