Follow your passion
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Crappy advice you find on LinkedIn™
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It is hard to put it better than Scott Galloway — see video left — but one of the good denizens of LinkedIn made a rather good point: “passion” has lost its meaning. Rather like “authenticity”.
Passion
/ˈpaʃ(ə)n/ (n.)
comes to us from the Middle English, and thence from Old French and thence from the late Latin pati ‘suffer’.
“Passion” meant, originally, to suffer and ultimately, in the Baby Jesus’ case, to die in the pursuit of something you care about. Its secondary meaning is to “allow, acquiesce, permit, submit”. To give yourself over to something. So, if you really are prepared for a life or torment, irritation, disappointment and, at the limit, extinction in the course of giving yourself to the pursuit of middle management in an international organisation by all means, follow your passion. But we think it more likely that most of you “suffer” your working life in a way which wouldn’t justify the usual Monday motivation: by accident; inadvertently, finding that, in purblinded-ly groping along in your mid-twenties without a real sense of purpose but enjoying the status and the opportunities for travel and entertainment, you have painted yourself into the coener of submitting, passionately, to the meat-grinder of multinational life because it has paid you, and conditioned you, for nothing else.