The other day, a student sat in my office trying to decide on a concentration within her business degree. Essentially, what she told me was that she thought she should do Finance for the job opportunities but she really did not like math and she was currently struggling in Accounting and Economics. I pressed her a little more, and she finally admitted she really didn’t have much interest in Finance at all.
If I had quietly assigned the student to a Finance concentration, I believe I would have been setting her up for a career in which she would quickly burn out.
The advice I gave her echoed what my graduate school advisor told me that has been, for me, what keeps me going even when I’m worn thin.
Your career can be your opportunity to multiply your passion.
I tell my students that their purpose lies at the intersection of their passion and their productivity.
This is advice that I believe has been under-preached or under-heard in generations past and is a big part of why the pandemic has caused so much labor market upheaval. When a job gets tough, someone who does not find purpose in the work is not likely to stick around.
Most of us have been taught that our passions need the market– that if we want to be able to pursue the things we love, we first must find a job that will help to fund that pursuit.
What I hope for my students and for those reading this column is that we also grasp the truth that the market needs our passions.
When we teach trade, we teach that markets are most efficient when individuals specialize in production of a good or service in which they have a comparative advantage. Comparative advantage occurs when someone can produce something at a lower cost than anyone else. Costs are not always physical, dollars and cents costs. Often a cost of production is a cost in worker satisfaction. It stands to reason, then, that if two workers are alike in all physical abilities but one is more passionate about their work, the passionate employee would possess a comparative advantage and produce with the most efficiency.
The literature bears this out.
A 2018 publication in Journal of Management and Organization found that, all else held constant, an individual with an intrinsic passion for their work reports feeling more positive about their work and is less likely to be planning to quit.
And, University of Oxford published research in 2019 showing that happy workers are 13% more productive.
An interesting thing about the 2018 article is that the authors find a marked difference between harmonious passion- autonomous, internal motivation to engage in an activity- and obsessive passion- feeling internal pressure to engage. Both are internal motivations, but the employee with harmonious passion is the employee who is working with purpose (passion + productivity), and the latter is the employee who is just working (productivity without passion). And the study found that harmonious passion decreases likelihood of turnover, while obsessive passion increases it.
Employers, employees, and students alike, please re-read that last paragraph.
Employers, hire folks who are passionate about the vision you have for your firm, and give them the freedom to pursue their passions in the workplace. Your team will be productive and profitable, and you’ll have a ton of fun doing it.
Employees and students, don’t choose your path based only on where you think the “good” jobs are. A job is only good when you are satisfied in it, and you will be most satisfied when you are working squarely within the intersection of your passion and your productivity.
Your passion needs the market, and the market needs your passion.
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Dr. Melissa Trussell is a professor in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia who works with the college’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. Contact her at mtrussell@ccga.edu.
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