Career Fare (12.4.24)

The conundrum of passion for work.

67% of college students identify personal fulfillment as the #2 key factor in choosing a job. Having passion for your work is not a new idea. In 2005, Steve Jobs told Stanford’s graduating class that “the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work…to love what you do”.

We don’t hear much pushback on this orthodoxy. Yet, in the same survey, 76% of students declared work-life balance as their top priority. Did anyone tell them that in 1983, Jobs bragged to the press about how hard the Macintosh design team was working? They made a t-shirt to commemorate the coverage: it said “90 Hours a Week and Loving It”.

Curiously, the word passion comes from the late Latin verb “pati” which means “to suffer”. That sounds about right for a 90-hour work week! Sometime around 400 years ago, “passion” came to mean enthusiasm, desire or pleasure. But the original meaning of passion – to endure suffering – is the basis for the word “compassion”, which I decided to write about after hearing a speaker describe a purposeful life as a life lived with compassion. Not “passion”, but “compassion”.

We are conditioned, he said, to structure our lives around our desires, to seek out what makes us feel fulfilled. Yet, so few of us actually feel fulfilled. He suggested, instead, that to be truly fulfilled we must discover what touches our hearts, to learn what reaches so deep down into our soul that we are genuinely moved, and to pursue that. Doesn’t this seem right? That it is not what we find stimulating or exciting, but that which we find profound, that ultimately matters?

We sometimes treat “compassion” as interchangeable with “sympathy” – to feel what others feel, to pity their circumstances. But the Latin root “compati” involves more than merely feeling. It means “to suffer with”. “With”. Aquinas considered compassion to be both a feeling and a virtue. Like honesty, integrity or generosity, virtues guide the paths we take in life and inform the choices we make along the way. In other words, a life of compassion must be intentionally lived.

I don’t know what such a life looks like. I certainly cannot claim to have lived one. But you may know what it feels like to have your heart deeply moved by another’s suffering. If so, you are familiar with the transformation that accompanies the choice to suffer alongside someone in pain. You’ve put down things that are important to you and elevated the things that matter to them. You’ve set aside your own feelings to understand perspectives you may disagree with. You’ve learned how to diffuse hurt redirected at you, how to serve and love without appreciation or reciprocity.

We live in an angry, divisive world. But perhaps it would be less so if we put down the things we chase, set aside our feelings, and absorb – rather than reflect back – the pain of others.

I’m not saying we should all quit our day jobs.

I’m just suggesting that maybe our jobs neither define nor limit who – or what – we can be.

J