Penelope Trunk - Don't Do What You Love

When my cousin isn't trailblazing the food media space with her recipe and food cooking blog​, she sends me career and life advice. This week's tip she sent comes from female entrepreneur and career manager Penelope Trunk. Similar to Cal Newport's theory, which I've discussed extensively, Penelope Trunk believes that "doing what you love" is just about the worst career advice. 

Here's the big slam dunk:

If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you’d do even if you didn’t get paid, you’ll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money.

Read the article here or below. Thanks Amanda! 

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One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to “do what you love.”

Forget that. It’s absurd. I have been writing since before I even knew how to write – when I was a preschooler I dictated my writing to my dad. And you might not be in preschool, but if you are in touch with who you are, you are doing what you love, no matter what, because you love it.

So it’s preposterous that we need to get paid to do what we love because we do that stuff anyway. So you will say, “But look. Now you are getting paid to do what you love. You are so lucky.” But it’s not true. We are each multifaceted, multilayered, complicated people, and if you are reading this blog, you probably devote a large part of your life to learning about yourself and you know it’s a process. None us loves just one thing.

I am a writer, but I love sex more than I love writing. And I am not getting paid for sex. In fact, as you might imagine, my sex life is really tanking right now. But I don’t sit up at night thinking, should I do writing or sex? Because career decisions are not decisions about “what do I love most?” Career decisions are about what kind of life do I want to set up for myself?

So how could you possibly pick one thing you love to do? And what would be the point?

The world reveals to you all that you love by what you spend time on. Try stuff. If you like it, you’ll go back to it. I just tried Pilates last month. I didn’t want to try, but a friend said she loved the teacher, so I went. I loved it. I have taken it three times a week ever since. And it’s changed me. I stand up straighter. (I’d also have better sex, if I were having it. The Pilates world should advertise more that it improves your sex life: Totally untapped market.)

Often, the thing we should do for our career is something we would only do if we were getting a reward. If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you’d do even if you didn’t get paid, you’ll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money.

The pressure we feel to find a perfect career is insane. And, given that people are trying to find it before they are thirty, in order to avoid both a quarterlife crisis and a biological-clock crisis, the pressure is enough to push people over the edge. Which is why one of the highest risk times for depression in life is in one’s early twenties when people realize how totally impossible it is to simply “do what you love.”

Here’s some practical advice: Do not what you love; do what you are. It’s how I chose my career. I bought the book with that title – maybe my favorite career book of all time – and I took the quickie version of the Myers-Briggs test. The book gave me a list of my strengths, and a list of jobs where I would likely succeed based on those strengths.

Relationships make your life great, not jobs. But a job can ruin your life – make you feel out of control in terms of your time or your ability to accomplish goals – but no job will make your life complete. It’s a myth mostly propagated by people who tell you to do what you love. Doing what you love will make you feel fulfilled. But you don’t need to get paid for it.

A job can save your life, though. If you are lost, and lonely, and wondering how you’ll ever find your way in this world. Take a job. Any job. Because structure, and regular contact with regular people, and a method of contributing to a larger group are all things that help us recalibrate ourselves.

So if you are overwhelmed with the task of “doing what you love” you should recognize that you are totally normal, and maybe you should just forget it. Just do something that caters to your strengths. Do anything.

And if you are so overwhelmed that you feel depression coming on, consider that a job might save you. Take one. Doing work and being valued in the community is important. For better or worse, we value people with money. Earn some. Doing work you love is not so important. We value love in relationships. Make some.​

The Adjacent Possible - What it is and how it leads to innovative thinking

Famous scientist and chemist Stuart Kauffman ​defines the "adjacent possible" as all the molecular reactions directly achievable based on the combinations of existing molecules.  The things that compose our world, quite literally, depend on what already exists at hand, something Kauffman referes to in the prebiotic chemistry world as the "primordial soup". 

As a quick example, stannous fluoride (SnF2, for the record) is a first-order combination. It's created directly from the molecules found in the primordial soup. Toothpaste, however, involves a whole host of other first-order combinations  - abrasives, surfactants, antibacterial agents and of course flavorants. Layer on top other innovations such as the striped toothpaste and you can begin to see the long line of progressive movements that brought something like Crest out of a single chemical compound. 

As Johnson puts it himself, ​"the strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations." Johnson's example of the adjacent possible as it relates to cultural innovations, as opposed to chemical revelations, comes from Johannes Gutenberg, who took the older technology of the screw press, designed originally for making wine, and reconfigured it with metal type to invent the printing press.

However, Johnson is quick to point out a glaring problem - our society is set up such that walls are erected in order to preserve a company's competitive advantage. In the technology industry these walls are easy to identify - intellectual property, patents, proprietary technology, etc. ​The incongruence here is that the adjacent possible is only able to promote innovation when the comprehensive set of elements within the primordial soup are available to all. How would we be able to clean our teeth today if tin (Sn) was unable to bond with fluoride (Fl) because of a legal patent protection?

The founding assumption with these barriers is that by putting restrictions on the spread of new ideas, ​innovation will increase because of the large financial rewards. In turn, these financial incentives attract other innovators to follow suit. 

To this type of thinking, I respond with ​George Bernard Shaw's popular quote:

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

​I'm not going to say I'm the most innovative thinker. But I am saying that if I wanted to become better at devising innovative ideas (which ideally would result in innovative implementations of those ideas), then I would start by thinking about the area/industry it is that I want to affect and look at the primordial soup at hand. Along the way, I'll hope that there aren't any legal hurdles preventing me from accessing the apples. 

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​*Information in this post was taken from Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From. While you could just read my thoughts below, both the article and the book are worth the time/effort.​