Debunked: Common Myths about "Following your Passions"
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The phrase “follow your passions” is thrown around a lot. It’s good advice, but it’s terribly oversimplified and has created so many untruths and myths about finding and pursuing your passions.
Today, I want to debunk the ones I hear most often…
Myth: Most people know what they’re passionate about, even if they aren’t actively working on them.
Reality: Most people (especially women) have no idea what they’re passionate about, … most likely because they aren’t passionate about anything yet. This is because passions are not just buried deep inside our soul, sitting latent, waiting to be discovered. (See next point.) The good news is, it’s never, ever, too late to develop one.
Myth: My passion is already inside me somewhere just waiting to be discovered.
Reality: Passions are half discovered and half developed. All passions start as an interest and develop into a passion when we follow our interest past the point where most people give up. Think of your friend who is a passionate musician. You think she was born passionate about music? Nope. She might have been born interested in music, but she became passionate about it by spending more time pursuing it than the rest of us cared to.
Myth: Women are simply too busy to pursue their passions. (ie: “I’m too busy with everyday life to even consider what I’m passionate about!”)
Reality: Culturally, women have been taught that their value lies in their ability to do—we meet needs, multitask with excellence, do what needs to be done, and generally just make shit happen. But along with that, women have been instilled with the idea that their interests and passion are less valuable than the stuff on their to-do list and thus they get bumped to the bottom of the list. The problem is, we have so much on our to-do list that we never get to the bottom of it. So we continue to believe the lie that our value lies in our ability to check off our to-do list and never actually explore the idea that our value might lie in who we are, not what we do.
This is also the reason so many women worry that pursuing their passions might inconvenience their family... to the point that they never even explore the possibility of it. (See next Myth)
Myth: Pursuing my passion will inconvenience my family
Reality: When you don’t pursue your passion it robs your family of truly, deeply knowing you. It robs your spouse from seeing your true self. It robs your children of their most powerful role model. (If you want them to grow up and pursue their passions, you need to show them how.) It robs the world of your voice, influence, and change-making potential. And most importantly, it robs you of truly living.
Myth: Passions only count if they are socially-minded, life-shattering, and world-changing (ie. Dr. Martin Luther King, Malala Yousafzai, or the guy who started Charity:Water.)
Reality: Passions are not always socially-minded. Some people are passionate about social issues, but others are passionate about an activity (dance, soccer, hiking, yoga, etc.), a skill (painting, writing, teaching, carpentry, sewing, etc.), or an area of expertise (architecture, calculus, biology, entrepreneurship, therapy etc.) There are passionate people in every field of industry and pursuing those passions is no less noble than working to advance some social cause. The noblest passion you can pursue is the one you’re passionate about. We need passionate people in every field… if one is missing in a field you’re interested in, maybe you’re what’s missing.
Myth: I should have one singular passion that defines me.
Reality: Your passions do not define you. Your humanity, in all its glorious mess, is what defines you. We are complex beings—very few of us have tunnel-vision about one particular thing for our entire lives. Most passionate people have a variety of interests beyond the thing they are most well-known for… it’s just far simpler for those of us on the outside sum them up in one particular thing than to acknowledge they are nuanced people. So don’t feel pressure to select something that will define you forever—that’s way too much pressure. Passions are just one part of us.
Myth: Passionate people are always glamorous and successful.
Reality: Nope. Developing your passions and deep-diving into them is often unglamorous, quiet, and thankless. It is also the most fulfilling thing you’ll ever do.
Myth: Passionate people have always been passionate about their thing.
Reality: It is an incredibly rare individual who identifies their passion at an early age and pursues it consistently over the entire course of their life. Most people do not have a singular lifelong interest because the world, the issues, and we ourselves change over time…so as passionate people learn and grow, their interests and passions often morph over the years. This is why so many passionate people have a series of false starts or some kind of dark and twisty story of how they got to where they are today.
Myth: You have to find your passion early in life in order to be truly great at it.
Reality: Nothing could be further from the truth. We can discover and develop a passion later in life and be great at them. There are so many examples of this ranging from Vera Wang to Laura Ingalls Wilder to Julia Childs and so many others. Again, it is never (ever) too late to develop your passions.
Now that we have those things cleared up… Go explore your passions in freedom and truth. We’re with you!
