“Just follow your passion.”

Almost every young person has heard this. It comes from teachers, relatives, motivational speakers and established professionals. For years I took this message as the gospel truth. I no longer do.

The first problem is simple. Most young people do not have a passion. There is also no clear path of discovering it. 

At 18, I was expected to choose a course, and with it a career, based on a burning interest I was supposed to have discovered with very little career exposure. What I actually had were curiosities, some strengths and a lot of pressure. 

When “follow your passion” is the only instruction, not having one feels like a personal failure. You start to wonder what is wrong with you. The truth is that interests are rarely handed to us fully formed.

Computer scientist Cal Newport argues in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You that passion tends to follow skill rather than lead it. We get excited about things once we become competent at them and people begin to notice.

Psychologists Paul O’Keefe, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton argue that the advice to “find your passion” may undermine how interests develop. In their studies, people who saw interests as fixed and waiting to be discovered were less open to new areas, expected motivation to come easily, and lost interest faster when things got hard. If you believe your passion is a single buried treasure waiting to be found, every difficulty becomes a sign that you picked the wrong thing. You quit at the first hard stretch and go looking again.

This matches what I see around me. Many of us are not short of ambition. We are short of patience, because we have been taught that the right path should feel easy and exciting from day one.

Passion is also a luxury when work is scarce. The International Labour Organization reports that global youth unemployment reached 12.4% in 2025. For many of them, “follow your passion” is not practical advice. 

In many families, including mine, a job is not a vehicle for self-expression. It is how rent gets paid, how food is put on the table and how younger siblings stay in school. Telling someone in this position to hold out for work they love misses the reality that a stable job is often what makes room for everything else.

There is a quieter cost too. Once your passion is supposed to be your career, every hobby becomes a potential business. Writing has to become a side hustle. Comedy has to become content. Something you did just for joy now has to justify itself with income.

Sometimes the unpaid thing is the point. A hobby that does not have to make money is protected from the pressure that makes everything else feel like work.

And even when a passion does turn into income, it feels different because it becomes work: deadlines, clients and days you have to do it whether you feel like it or not.

I am not saying passion does not matter. It does. Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, put it well: passion is too important to be without, but too fickle to be guided by. Bring it with you, but do not let it be the only compass.

So here is what I would tell a younger version of myself, and anyone else standing at the same crossroads:

• Get good at something useful. Skill gives you options, and options give you freedom.
• Stay curious, and give things time. Interest often arrives after a few months of real effort, not before.
• Let your passions be allowed to stay small. Not every love needs to become a living.
• Judge a path by what you can build on it. Ask whether it teaches you something and moves you forward, not only whether it excites you today.

The best career advice I have received was never about finding the one thing I was born to do. It was about picking something reasonable, working at it honestly and paying attention to what grew.

I still love the things I loved before. I just stopped asking them to pay for my life, and oddly, I enjoy them more.