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. Thus, 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, all in the name of giving yourself to the pursuit of middle management in an international organisation — if that is really what you want — by all means, follow your passion.
But is it? The JC thinks it more likely that most of his workmates came to the “suffering” that comprises their working life in not by a sense of some beatific calling writ large across the dusty sweep of the Cosmos, but rather in a way which wouldn’t justify the usual Monday motivation: by accident; inadvertently, thanks to a misadventure discovered too late to reverse a doomed voyage to oblivion. This is the dawning horror of realising what you have done; that, in groping blindly along what seemed to be a steady rail in your early adulthood, without real purpose, but enjoying the status and the opportunities for travel and entertainment it presented, you have painted yourself into the corner from which you must thereafter submit, passionately, to the meat-grinder of multinational life because it has paid you, and conditioned you, for nothing else.