part0021

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” —Howard Thurman

I used to love watching The Drew Carey Show in the 1990s. I can recall an especially amusing moment when Carey is sarcastically egging on his dejected, Eeyorish coworker as she is carrying on about how much she loathes her job.

Work is an easy target for funny-because-it’s-true satire of this sort. Because the reality is, many people aren’t happy with their job. A paltry 13 percent of people are truly passionate about their work. [17]

But it has been well-established—through extensive research, our own everyday experiences, and a bit of common sense—that we perform considerably better when we are lit up by the work we’re doing. When we, as civil rights leader Howard Thurman put it, have “come alive,” our output is more creative, higher quality, and more impactful. Best of all, we enjoy the process way more.

Research by Harvard Business School professor Jon M. Jachimowicz points to one contributing factor that’s creating this gap: many—if not most—of us don’t know how to go about finding and pursuing what lights us up. So we end up leaving our potential sitting on the shelf, collecting dust like a limited-edition Blu-ray of Titanic .

“Follow your passion” has become a delicious cliché in American culture, one that armchair career counselors and gurus everywhere have peddled for years. Its virtues have been littered throughout a vast sea of self-help literature. It has become the centerpiece of countless commencement addresses and keynote speeches, and one of the hackneyed platitudes posterized on the walls of corporate America.

It is no surprise, nor a crime, that this advice is dispensed so frequently. After all, it is positive and can feel very empowering. But it has become so hyperbolic that it runs the risk of going in one ear and out the other. Though it fits nicely in a tweet, its simplicity creates more questions than it answers. For example, are we supposed to have just one passion? And should we just keep searching until we have found that thing?

What if my passion is basketball, but I am 5-foot-nothing, clumsy, and have poor eyesight? Should I leave it all behind to pursue my passion for playing professional ball? Should I follow my passion for switchboard operating, or typewriter repair, even though the need for those professions went away like thirty years ago? Is my greatest passion really going to make for a lucrative career?

Despite the nuances here, which we’ll dive into and deconstruct later, the idea of following our passion—clichéd and passé as it may have become—is essential advice. Our families, workplaces, and communities need people who have come alive—especially now, given the energy crisis we’re facing in today’s knowledge economy.

British author Sir Ken Robinson, who gave one of the most watched TED talks of all time, is on a new mission to bring attention to the brutal reality facing American enterprises: far too many people are simply working for the weekend. We need to light the workforce up now more than ever if we want our businesses to realize their full potential, and if we want to solve some of the hairy social, environmental, and economic issues that threaten our future.

“An awful lot of people don’t enjoy what they do. They kind of get through the week and wait for the weekend. And there’s a lot of evidence for that; there’s been a lot of research to show there are huge levels of disengagement at work. You only have to look at other really startling figures like the growth in the sales of antidepressant drugs and levels of drop-out rate from schools. There’s massive evidence around the world of people not getting a lot from their lives and often being angry and frustrated by them. And, yet, I also meet people who absolutely love what they do, who can’t wait to get to it. If you were to say to them, “Why don’t you try something else for a while?” they really wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. They’d say, ‘Well, this isn’t what I do. This is who I am .’ ” [18]

It was Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard's early love for falconry that led him to start climbing the rock faces of California. Chouinard, born in 1938, was a leading climber in what is now known as the “Golden Age of Yosemite Climbing.” He was part of the team that first scaled the North America Wall of El Capitan without fixed ropes in 1964. The following year, he and a fellow climber made a famous ascent of El Capitan’s Muir Wall, helping to establish this style of modern rock climbing, using no advance preparation and limited climbing aids.

As climbers make their way up a rock face, they hammer flat metal spikes called pitons into crevices in the rock, to which they attach a safety rope. Early pitons were made of soft iron that molded into the crevice, making them almost impossible to remove. Chouinard didn’t like the fact that this spoiled the rock face’s natural state. So, he bought a second-hand forge and anvil and began to manufacture hardened steel pitons that could be hammered out of the rock and reused. He eked out a living selling his pitons to fellow climbers from the back of his truck and, over time, developed a successful climbing equipment business, Chouinard Equipment Ltd.

But Chouinard began to feel that even his reusable pitons were causing too much damage to the rock face, spoiling it for future climbers. He devised a new kind of aluminum chock that could be wedged into a crevice, leaving the rock undamaged. He stopped manufacturing his hardened pitons, even though they accounted for most of his company’s revenues at the time, and became a leading advocate for what he went on to call “clean climbing.” He would say that “how you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.”

Chouinard has always felt a deep love for “silent sports”—kayaking, fly-fishing, surfing, rock climbing—which bring people into close contact with nature and themselves. Born of his personal passion for the outdoors and his deep-seated belief in the importance of “using business to protect nature,” Patagonia grew into a hugely successful outdoor clothing and supplies company.

Until his retirement, Chouinard kept surfboards in the closet at Patagonia headquarters, and could often be seen dipping out for a frolic in the nearby surf with his coworkers. And still today, the company donates 1 percent of its sales or 10 percent of net profit, whichever is greater, to environmental causes that are meaningful to Chouinard and his team.