The day I got laid off from my job at Martha Stewart I was relieved. I loved the job. I really did but the relationship was over and I didn’t know how to end it and then it broke up with me. At the time I’ve been also hosting a radio show for the Martha Stewart brand on SiriusXM and then not long after that got canceled too.
On the day of my last show I got onto the elevator at the 36th floor and as it started to drop, I started to cry. Every floor took me further and further from what I had been, a magazine editor, a radio host, the person with the cool job to talk about at parties. And honestly, I had no idea what I was going to do and quite frankly no one was looking for me. So I did what anyone would do in that situation. I was making some phone calls, hey, what are you up to, that I mention I’m available. I needed to get paid to do something, right? I mean, I live in New York City. If you’re not paid to do something, you’re not going to be there very long.
With this idea that I had to know when I was supposed to do now, is to pursue this passion. It just bugged me. It always had and that’s because there’s a dangerously limiting idea at the heart of everything we believe about success and life in general. And it’s that you have one singular passion and your job is to find it and to pursue it to the exclusion of all else. And if you do that, everything will fall into place. And if you don’t you fail.
The pressure starts really young and it goes your whole life but it’s perhaps most pronounced when you’re graduating from school, right? Wow, the world at your feet, what are you going to do now? And it’s so intimidating it’s like picking a major for life. I had a hard time picking a major for four years and I changed that once if not twice. I mean it was like just intimidating. And this compelling, I mean this really forceful cultural imperative to choose your passion is stressful to me but it’s not just me. Everyone I talked to agrees with me. The woman who sold me this dress, I told her what I needed to dress for when I was talking about and she said, oh my gosh, I really need to hear this talk because I just graduate from school, my friends and I we don’t know what we’re passionate about. We don’t know what we’re supposed to do.
I’m leery of passion for a few reasons. But one of them is that passion is not a plan. It’s a feeling and feelings change. They do. You can be passionate about a person one day, at a job and then not passionate the next. We know this and yet we continue to use passion as the yardstick to judge everything by, instead of seeing passion for what it really is, the fire that ignites when you start rubbing sticks together. Anyway I was such a mess when I was in my twenties, such a mess, I was anxious and depressed and had no life to speak of. I was tempting to keep my options open and I was sitting around at night in my underwear watching Seinfeld reruns, actually I still do that, that’s not the worst thing in the world to do. Fine.
But I called my mother every night crying and I was turning away perfectly good fulltime jobs, why because I was afraid. I was sure that I would pick the wrong one and get on the wrong train headed to the wrong future. My mother begged me to please take a job, any job, you’re not going to be stuck. You’re stuck now. You don’t create your life first and then live it. You create it by living it, not agonizing about it. She’s right, she’s always right.
And so I took a full time job as an assistant at a management consulting firm where I knew nothing about nothing. Okay, zero. Except I knew I had a reason to get up in the morning, get showered, leave the house and people who are waiting for me when I got there. And I got a paycheck every two weeks and that is as good a reason to take a job as any. Did I know that — if I want to be an office administrator for the rest of my life? No, I had no idea, truly. But this idea that everything you’re supposed to do should fit into this passion vertical is unrealistic. You show me someone who washes windows for a living and I will bet you $1,000,000 if not because he has a passion for clean glass.
One of my favorite columns is a piece by Dilbert creator Scott Adams. He wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal few years ago about how he failed his way to success and one of his jobs was as a commercial loan officer. And he was taught specifically: do not loan money to someone following their passion. Now loan it to someone who wants to start a business, the more boring the better.